A section from the journey

The Bauls of Bengal

We end this journey of tongues in Bengal, with the Bauls, the wandering minstrels of the inner path. They own little and belong to no fixed church. They walk from village to village, singing, and they look for God in a surprising place, not in temple or mosque or scripture, but within the human being itself, in what they call the man of the heart. They draw from both Hindu and Muslim wells, and they refuse the divisions of birth and creed. The poet Rabindranath Tagore loved their songs.

Our journey through the tongues has one last stop, and it is among the most haunting. We come to Bengal, in the east, and to the singers called the Bauls.

Picture one of them on a dusty village road. He wears a robe of patched cloth, many colours sewn together. He carries a simple one-stringed lute and perhaps a small drum. He owns almost nothing. He belongs to no fixed temple and no settled church. He walks, and he sings, and the singing is his whole life.

And what does he sing about? Here is the surprising heart of the Bauls. They do not look for God in a temple of stone, or a mosque, or even in a holy book. They look for the divine in the strangest and nearest place of all, inside the human being itself.

They have a tender name for the One they seek. They call it the man of the heart, the hidden beloved who dwells within each person. The body itself, they sing, is the temple. Why search the whole world, the Baul asks, for what is already living within you? It is the same question Kabir asked in the north, sung now in a Bengali voice on a country road.

The Bauls drink from two wells at once. They take from Hindu devotion, the love of Krishna and the inner path, and they take from the Muslim mystics, the Sufis, who also sought God within and sang of divine love. And like so many saints we have met, they simply step over the walls of birth and creed. To a Baul, such walls only hide the man of the heart. Their songs are earthy and sweet and full of riddles, easy to hum and hard to forget.

These wandering singers were so beautiful that the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore loved them, gathered their songs, and let their spirit flow into his own work. We will meet Tagore much later, in the modern age. For now, simply let the Baul stand for one last truth of this whole era. Devotion need not be grand or settled. It can be a free and wandering thing, with the open road for a temple and the human heart for a shrine.

The Bauls sing that the One we seek already lives within us, the man of the heart. Sit quietly for a breath and turn your attention inward, not searching, just resting there. What do you notice when you stop looking outside for a moment?