Songs of Kabir · 67 of 100

LXVI: The Yogi dyes his garments, instead of dyeing his mind in the colours…

LXVI I. 20. man na rangâye

THE Yogi dyes his garments, instead of dyeing his mind in the colours of love: p. 110 He sits within the temple of the Lord, leaving Brahma to worship a stone. He pierces holes in his ears, he has a great beard and matted locks, he looks like a goat: He goes forth into the wilderness, killing all his desires, and turns himself into an eunuch: He shaves his head and dyes his garments; he reads the Gîtâ and becomes a mighty talker. Kabîr says: "You are going to the doors of death, bound hand and foot!"

Insight · 2

"The Yogi dyes his garments, instead of dyeing his mind in the colours of love." One of Kabir's fiercest anti-religious polemics. He spares nobody — the Yogi in his ochre robes, the Gita-quoting talker, the goat-bearded ascetic. The phrase "turns himself into an eunuch" is the cruelest specific. All this external apparatus goes on while the man is walking to the doors of death bound hand and foot. The critique is of spiritual performance. The color that matters is the color inside, not the cloth.Matthew 23:27 on whitewashed tombs as parallel.

Making himself a eunuch is the specific reference to the Naga sannyasi tradition — mendicants who took vows of celibacy so extreme some underwent physical mutilation. Kabir's critique is not of chastity per se but of the spectacular deformation of the body in service of a spiritual identity. Paul, who also wrote about eunuchs in a figurative key in Matthew 19:12, is not impressed by the equivalent. What Kabir is after is the interior castration of desire, which needs no outer proof. Anyone with a great beard and matted locks is still bound hand and foot if the inside hasn't changed.Matthew 19:12; Briggs on the Naga sannyasi lineage.