Kabir was a saintly person born in Varanasi, India, in the 14th century. I remember reading a few of his rhyming two line couplets filled with sagely advice in my Hindi textbook in high school. Recently, I came across a rendering of his couplets in musical form on YouTube.
Below is my translation of two of his two line dohas in plain English.
1.Consuming books in this ‘mua’ world, nobody becomes a pundit (scholar),
A person who realizes the meaning of the two and half letter word Prem (devotional love) is a true pundit!
2. So what if you consider yourself big, like the tall tree of ‘khajoor’,
That kind of tree gives no shade to the weary traveler and the fruit is very high beyond his reach.
