Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
When someone we love is gone, all the words like 'mother,' 'father,' 'family' can't hold them here.
The body is like a clay pot — once it breaks, it can't be kept, however much we love the person.
Kabir looks honestly at the mystery of death — something children think about too. He asks the hard questions plainly: whose mother, whose father, whose wife? — meaning, when someone dies, all our loving words and relationships, real and precious as they are, cannot keep the person's body here. The pitcher of the body breaks (his recurring clay-pot image) and cannot be mended. It sounds stark, but Kabir isn't being cold; he's being honest about something everyone eventually meets, so that we treasure people while they're here and don't put off love. The bonds are real and beautiful — and precisely because the lamp doesn't burn forever, the time to love is now.
How does remembering that time is precious change how you treat the people you love?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI