Devotion, equality and religious practice

When a sign stands in for a life

Imagine a volunteer wearing a badge that says “Care for everyone.” Asked why she has refused a visitor a meal, she points to the badge. The badge announces a commitment; whether she has kept it is a separate question, and it needs a different kind of evidence.

How does a sign relate to the commitment it expresses? A practice can express a commitment, help someone develop it or become a substitute for living it. How can criticism tell these apart?

The previous lesson followed changes within Confucian argument. We now return to North India and Punjab, moving back in time from seventeenth-century Japan to devotional voices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They ask how one approaches the divine and how devotion should shape a life.

Devotion has more than one history

Bhakti means devotion: a committed, loving relation to the divine. Lesson 37 showed how Rāmānuja joined devotion with interpretation and reasoning, but the word also describes many different poetic and religious traditions. It does not name one school with one doctrine.

Kabir, a fifteenth-century North Indian poet associated with Varanasi, challenges the claims made for religious learning and observance. His poems have come down to us in different collections. The one we read comes from the Bijak, a collection treasured in the Kabir Panth, a community of his followers. Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh translate it, so we meet Kabir through a received collection and an English translation. [1]

Guru Nanak (1469–1539) shaped the beginnings of the Sikh community in Punjab, and his hymns belong to a distinct teaching and communal history. Making similar criticisms does not turn Kabir and Nanak into representatives of a single blended religion. [4]

Kabir: can saying food end hunger?

The poem opens by attacking the claims of pandits, learned religious scholars. What would follow, it asks, if merely saying Ram brought liberation, freedom from bondage and repeated death? Then saying food would banish hunger, and saying money would make people rich. These absurd results bring a familiar distinction into a religious dispute: producing a word does not automatically produce what it names. [1]

A parrot sharpens the point. It can make the same sound as a person calling on God and understand nothing, so correct sound alone cannot distinguish the bird’s performance from devotion informed by understanding.

Kabir’s Ram here names the divine beyond the particular story of Rama and Sita. Yet the poem does not conclude that devotion is pointless. It ends by urging the worship of Ram, and that ending matters: the speaker still seeks liberation through devotion, even as he challenges a claim made for it. Empty speech can keep a person from the very freedom they seek. [1]

What the criticism establishes

The comparison with food and money challenges a claim of automatic success. Someone defending recitation could still argue that it trains attention, sustains remembrance or belongs to a relationship that changes the speaker. They would need to explain that connection, though; counting repetitions would not supply it.

This is our reconstruction of the challenge, not a complete account of Kabir’s teaching, and it leaves room to ask how devotion involves understanding rather than mechanical repetition. The poem itself, after all, uses memorable words to change its hearer’s understanding. Reading it as an attack on every use of sacred language would obscure what it is doing.

Nanak: what makes a thread sacred?

In the Guru Granth Sahib, the first salok associated with pauri 15 of Asa Ki Var addresses the janeu, the sacred thread used in an initiation ceremony. A salok is a short verse, and a pauri a stanza. The salok imagines a thread spun from qualities: compassion as the cotton, contentment as the thread, self-restraint as the knots and truthful conduct as the twist. Such a thread would endure when a material one breaks or burns. [2]

The commentary of the Sikh Research Institute (SikhRI) places the ceremony among boys of the three upper castes. Caste here concerns inherited social rank and the privileges attached to it. The second salok asks what power a thread can have when its wearer remains deceitful or abusive. The criticism moves attention from possessing an authorized sign to the life of the person who wears it, and its alternative is open to people the ceremony excluded. [2]

Praise and a shared practice

The third salok keeps devotion at the center. It connects honor with accepting Nam, the divine Name, and makes praise the thread that endures. SikhRI’s commentary connects Nam with recognizing the divine and living by that recognition, which involves more than pronouncing a label. So we should not turn the salok into an argument that ordinary kindness makes devotion unnecessary. [2]

For Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib is authoritative as Guru, and reading and singing its hymns are central communal practices. It includes voices beyond the Sikh Gurus, Kabir’s among them. Inclusion gives those voices a place in Sikh scripture, but it does not make every collection of Kabir’s poetry identical to it: our Bijak poem and Nanak’s saloks keep different textual settings. [3]

Equality as a task for a community

Consider langar, the communal meal offered in Sikh places of gathering, or gurdwaras. Sharing food and sitting together make equality something people practice, and preparing and serving the meal is work too. The Pluralism Project’s account describes the practice as a challenge to caste restrictions on eating together. A religious form can give a commitment practical expression. [4]

That does not establish that every community always realized equality. Recall the distinction from lesson 1: a normative claim concerns what ought to happen, a factual claim what does happen. A teaching can give people a standard by which to criticize their own community, but showing what a community historically achieved would require evidence about who actually ate together, served, held authority or faced exclusion. The selected poems alone cannot settle those questions.

Try an exhibition label

Imagine a museum team proposing this label: “Kabir and Nanak showed that shared religious practices are worthless. Their followers therefore formed one tradition and abolished social inequality.” Another curator suggests displaying a photograph of people sharing a meal as proof of the last claim.

Repair the label, using one specific feature of each selected text. Then explain what the photograph could show and what it could not establish. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

Every claim in the label goes beyond the texts. Kabir challenges the idea that saying a name guarantees liberation, yet his poem still calls for devotion; Nanak asks for a thread made of qualities such as compassion and truthful conduct, and keeps praise and Nam. Neither passage shows that every shared practice is worthless, and a common question does not erase different texts and communities. A photograph may document people eating together on one occasion; it cannot show that inequality vanished everywhere, or from every part of their lives. A stronger label would describe how particular practices can be judged by the commitments they express.

Looking back: understanding and practice

This module has asked how thinkers revise the accounts of experience and self they inherit, and what those revisions mean for study, conduct and religious practice. Across its lessons, inherited teachings became starting points for new arguments. Vasubandhu questioned what appearances establish, and Fazang examined how distinct things form a whole. Tibetan commentators disagreed about what emptiness denies, and Vedānta interpreters about what the self is. Confucian debates about knowing and feeling, and devotional criticisms of empty observance, asked how understanding changes a life.

Two concepts help bring these conversations together. In Dōgen’s fan encounter, practice-realization means that practice expresses awakening rather than merely producing something to possess. In Rāmānuja’s account, bhakti, sustained loving remembrance of the divine, is the form that liberating knowledge takes. Both give practice a role that a repeated sentence cannot fill. Their accounts of reality still differ, though: Rāmānuja affirms a real self dependent on brahman, ultimate reality, and Dōgen’s fan does nothing to establish that Vedānta claim. Comparing the two makes the difference visible without merging these traditions into one doctrine.

One question stays open, and neither concept settles it: does understanding a duty ensure that we act on it? Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming disagree about how knowing and acting belong together, and even feeling the force of a duty may fall short of doing it. As you weigh the question, remember what kind of evidence we have for Wang’s side: the Wang–Xu Ai exchange in Columbia’s handout is a short translated selection with no individual translator named. We can examine its argument without treating it as Wang’s complete account.

An optional checkpoint: the reading circle

Imagine a reading circle that drafts this guide: “Dōgen and Rāmānuja say understanding happens inside us; practice is only its outer packaging. Wang Yangming and Guru Nanak correct them: a kind deed is all that liberation means.”

Use practice-realization and bhakti to repair the first sentence, and explain what the second misses about Wang and Nanak. Then leave one question open and name a limit of the evidence. The case is optional: you can leave it unanswered and still complete the lesson.

Read a checkpoint response

The first sentence gets both thinkers wrong. Dōgen’s fan challenges the inference that awakening makes practice dispensable, and Rāmānuja’s loving remembrance gives devotion a place within liberating knowledge, so neither selected account makes practice mere packaging. That resemblance does not settle their different claims about self and reality.

The second sentence flattens Wang and Nanak. Wang questions whether a merely acknowledged duty counts as genuine knowing; he does not declare every kindly impulse sufficient. Nanak’s thread joins compassion and truthful conduct with Nam and praise, and removing the divine relation would lose part of his teaching. These are comparisons we have made, not evidence that Wang and Nanak were replying to Dōgen or Rāmānuja, and they do not give Buddhist awakening, Vedānta liberation, Confucian cultivation and Sikh devotion one meaning. Whether moral understanding ensures action remains open. The short English Wang exchange supports examining one particular reply; it cannot settle how to interpret his whole work or show how his followers behaved.

Carry this forward

Ask what a religious criticism calls empty, what it seeks to preserve and what evidence would show a changed life. The next module opens with Can a society explain its own changes?, in which Ibn Khaldun asks how solidarity helps establish political power and how that power can change the relationships that support it.

Sources and limits

[1] Kabir, “The Pandits’ Pedantries Are Lies,” in The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Hinduism, edited by Wendy Doniger, Jack Miles general editor, W. W. Norton, first edition, 2015, p. 403, for the poem on the claims of pandits. The translation is credited to Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh, and the anthology identifies its Kabir selections as coming from the Shabda section of the Bijak.

The complete supplied poem, its introduction and note, and the introductions on pp. 397–399 were read, and five page images were checked, including the poem and the translator attribution. The publisher’s book listing supplies metadata, not free access to the passage.

The poem’s fire comparison follows a different logic from its food examples; the editor offers a possible explanation, not a settled one. The lesson does not adopt the anthology’s precise dates for Kabir, its lineage stories or its broad judgments about his politics. No whole anthology, original translation volume or original-language text was read.

[2] Guru Nanak, Asa Ki Var, pauri 15, associated salok 1, salok 2 and salok 3, The Guru Granth Sahib Project, Sikh Research Institute, English web edition, accessed 17 September 2026, for the thread saloks and their commentary.

All three literal translations and commentaries were read, with the interpretive transcreations for saloks 1 and 3, their displayed notes and the composition’s introduction. The final number in each URL is a display-item number, not the salok number.

The project’s methodology distinguishes translation from interpretive transcreation. Its team page identifies Jaswant Singh as a Gurbani translator/transcreator and Jagtej Singh as an English translator, with Jasleen Kaur as an English transcreator/commentary writer. These are project credits, not individual signatures on each passage. In the first salok’s commentary, the literal rendering “continence” is explained as control of the senses. The remaining salok and pauri, the historical works cited and the original languages were not independently studied.

[3] Harvard University, The Pluralism Project, “The Sikh Scripture” and “The Guru Granth Sahib”, for the scripture’s place in Sikh practice; the complete main prose of both was read. For Kabir’s inclusion, the attribution of Thiti (Kabir Ji) in SikhRI’s catalog was also checked; that composition was not read. These are introductory accounts and a catalog check, not a study of the entire canon.

[4] The Pluralism Project, “Guru Nanak”, “Guru Nanak’s Message” and “Langar: The Communal Meal”, for Guru Nanak and for langar; the complete main prose of each was read, but not the linked audio or underlying works. Later biographical stories are not treated here as independently verified events. The meal account supplies a concrete communal practice, not a comprehensive history of social equality.

The badge case, the exhibition exercise and the explanatory comparison are original teaching material. No independent specialist review, learner testing or measured reading time was completed.

The optional checkpoint reuses the selected evidence cited in lesson 35, lesson 37 and lesson 38, alongside this lesson’s Nanak passages; the reading-circle case and its comparison are also original teaching material. No new primary reading or original-language comparison was made for the checkpoint, and the earlier limits on translation and interpretation still apply.