Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Suppose I truly found the One — what could I possibly say about it? And if I tried to describe it, would my words even help you?
Here is the picture instead: the whole huge banyan tree, with all its branches and roots, is folded up inside one tiny seed. In the same way, the One is tucked inside the smallest things — and yet it stretches out across the entire world. Small enough to hide in a seed, vast enough to fill everything.
This section reaches for the letter of Alah (the One, using a name from the Islamic tradition — Kabir moves freely across the names people use). The banyan-seed image is one of the oldest and loveliest in Indian thought: the mighty tree lives compressed inside a seed smaller than your fingernail. Kabir uses it for the paradox of the divine — rav rahi-o, woven into the tiniest point, yet teen lok bisthaar, spread across the three worlds. The rhetorical questions (“what can I say... what good does speaking do?”) continue the poem's humility about words while still, gently, speaking.
Can you think of something tiny that holds something enormous inside it, like a seed holds a tree?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI