Kabir's Dohas
Two-line devotional couplets attributed to the fifteenth-century Indian poet-saint Kabir.
A doha is a rhymed couplet in a fixed metre, and the dohas attributed to Kabir are among the most widely quoted verses in North India. Kabir, a weaver by trade, criticised ritualism in both Hindu and Islamic practice in plain vernacular language.
The couplets survive through several transmission streams — the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib, the Kabir Panth's Bijak, and Rajasthani manuscript collections — which differ in wording and in which verses they include.
That multiplicity is the defining scholarly fact about the corpus. "Kabir said" identifies a tradition rather than a verified utterance, and attributions vary sharply between the surviving collections.
Common mistake: quoting Rabindranath Tagore's 1915 English versions as literal translations. They are free poetic renderings made from an already secondary Bengali source.
“Couplets circulating in the Bijak, the Guru Granth Sahib, and the Rajasthani manuscript tradition, with differing wordings.”
Keep reading the glossary
Verse composed largely of aphoristic sayings, usually didactic in intent.
The classical Tamil work of 1,330 couplets, one of world literature's densest quotation sources.
A traditional saying that expresses a generally accepted truth — almost always anonymous.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers — collected wisdom of the early Christian monastic elders.