TAGORE
AND KHALIL GIBRAN
It was while reading Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet that
I discovered that his views about the nature of God were similar to those of
Tagore.
Khalil Gibran the Labanese-American poet was
born on 6th January 1883 in Lebanon. He passed away on 10th April 1931 in
New York .
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali
poet. He was born on 7th May 1861 at Calcutta (now Kolkata) and
passed away in the same city on 7th August 1941. He was awarded
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
As Khalil Gibran is best known for
his mystical writings in The Prophet, so is Tagore known for his spiritual
lyrics in Gitanjali.
The Irish writer and mystical poet A.E.
George Russell (1867-1935) observes: “I do not think the East has spoken with so
beautiful a voice since the Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore as in The
Prophet of Khalil Gibran. “
In his September 1912 ‘Introduction ” to Gitanjali, Irish
poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) records the following statement of an
Indian traveller: “ Every morning at three ---- I know, for I have seen it, he
(Tagore) sits immovable in contemplation, and for two hours does not awake from
his reverie upon the Nature of God. “
Given below are the two concordant versions,
one by Tagore and the other by Gibran, about the nature of God.
.
TAGORE
TO A PRIEST
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost
thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open
thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and
where the path-maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him
come down on the dusty soil!
Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master
himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us
all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and
incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet
him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.
KHALIL
GIBRAN TO A PRIEST
Is not religion all deeds and all reflections?
And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever
springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?
Who can separate his faith from his
actions, or his belief from his occupations? Who can spread his hours before him
saying, “Tis for God and this for myself; this for my soul and this other for
my body”?
All your hours are wings that beat through
space from self to self. He who wears his morality but as his best garment were
better naked. The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his
song-bird in a cage. The freest song comes not through bars and
wires.
And he to whom worshipping is a window to open but also to shut,
has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.
Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever
you enter into it take with you your all. Take the plough and the forge and the
mallet and the lute. The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in reverie you cannot rise above
your achievement nor fall lower than your failures. And take with you all men:
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower
than their despair.
And if you would know God, be not
therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him
playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see
Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and
descending in rain.
You shall see Him smiling in
flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
**********
24th
March 2021 G.
R. KANWAL
No comments:
Post a Comment