Page:One Hundred Poems Kabir (1915).djvu/12

xii to establish in thought. Rāmānanda appears to have accepted him, and though Mohammedan legends speak of the famous Sūfī Pīr, Takkī of Jhansī, as Kabīr’s master in later life, the Hindu saint is the only human teacher to whom in his songs he acknowledges indebtedness.

The little that we know of Kabīr’s life contradicts many current ideas concerning the Oriental mystic. Of the stages of discipline through which he passed, the manner in which his spiritual genius developed, wc arc completely ignorant. He seems to have remained for years the disciple of Rāmānanda, joining in the theological and philosophical arguments which his master held with all the great Mullahs and Brāhmans of his day; and to this source we may perhaps trace his acquaintance with the terms of Hindu and Sūfī philosophy.