Songs of Kabir by Rabindranath Tagore, 1st ed.

Songs of Kabir, Rabindranath Tagore. First Macmillan edition, New York. January 1915. Extensive introduction by Evelyn Underhill. Good condition overall. Cloth cover with possible silverfish damage at top and wear to edges, corners, and spine. Discoloration on back cover. Tanned end papers and pages, no markings. Mirrored stains at the top gutter of two sets of pages.

Paramahansa Yogananda mentions in Autobiography of a Yogi that Babaji has stated he initiated Kabir, a famous medieval master, into Kriya Yoga. In Songs of Kabir (also titled One Hundred Poerms of Kabir), Rabindranath Tagore translated these short poems with the assistance of Evelyn Underwood, who also wrote the introduction and was the author of Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness(1911).

Sri Gyanamata, one of the foremost disciples of Paramahansa Yogananda, quoted the last lines of two poems from Tagore’s translation in one of her letters to her guru (pages 158-59): “Kabir says: ‘Verily he has no fear, who has such a Guru to lead him to the shelter of safety!'” (XXII in this volume) and “Kabir says: ‘It is the Spirit of the quest which helps; I am the slave of this Spirit of the quest'” (III). And on page 216 of God Alone, by Sri Gyanamata, she included in a letter to her guru the entire words of the poem (XXVII) that ends with “The Guru is great beyond words, and great is the good fortune of the disciple.” She adds a comment about this poem: “This is the true expression of my heart, but if I were to try to explain or talk about it, I would spoil it.”