[6] In his young age he was eager to get initiated by Self realized Sant Swami Ramanand and he succeeded in being one.

[16] A few accounts mention that Kabir, in the form of in infant, was found at Lahartara Lake by a Muslim weaver named Niru and his wife Nima, who raised him as their child.

[17] Kabir is believed to have become one of the many disciples of the Bhakti poet-saint Swami Ramananda in Varanasi, known for devotional Vaishnavism with a strong bent to monist Advaita philosophy teaching that God was inside every person and everything.

[23] Kabir's poems were in Sadhukkadi, also known as Panchmel Khichri, borrowing from various dialects including Khadi boli, Braj, Bhojpuri, and Awadhi.

[27] Where spring, the lord of seasons reigneth, there the unstruck music sounds of itself, There the streams of light flow in all directions, few are the men who can cross to that shore!

[33] Scholars state that this form of transmission, over geography and across generations bred change, interpolation and corruption of the poems.

[34] Kabir's poems can be found in a wide variety of publications and websites, but the discussion of authenticity is ongoing.

Rabindranath Tagore's English translation and compilation, Songs of Kabir, was first published in 1915 and has been a classic reprinted and circulated particularly in the West.

Mishra) has gone so far as to suggest that only six[38] of its hundred poems are authentic[39] and also raises the question of whether the translator projected theological perspectives of the early 20th century onto Kabir.

[40] The same essay adds that the presumed unauthentic poems nevertheless belong to the Bhakti movement in medieval India and may have been composed by admirers of Kabir who lived later.

[36] According to Linda Hess, "Some modern commentators have tried to present Kabir as a synthesizer of Hinduism and Islam; but the picture is a false one.

Many scholars interpret Kabir's philosophy to be questioning the need for religion, rather than attempting to propose either Hindu–Muslim unity or an independent synthesis of a new religious tradition.

[45] Kabir rejected the hypocrisy and misguided rituals evident in various religious practices of his day, including those in Islam and Hinduism.

Charlotte Vaudeville states that the philosophy of Kabir and other sants of the Bhakti movement is the seeking of the Absolute.

The notion of this Absolute is nirguna which, writes Vaudeville, is same as "the Upanishadic concept of the Brahman-Atman and the monistic Advaita interpretation of the Vedantic tradition, which denies any distinction between the soul [within a human being] and God, and urges man to recognize within himself his true divine nature".

Alternatively, states Vaudeville, the saguna prema-bhakti (tender devotion) may have been prepositioned as the journey towards self-realization of the nirguna Brahman, a universality beyond monotheism.

[51] David N. Lorenzen and Adrián Muñoz trace these ideas of God in Kabir's philosophy as nirguna Brahman to those in Adi Shankara's theories on Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, albeit with some differences.

[53] Other scholars, in contrast, state that it is unclear if Sufi ideas influenced Bhakti sants like Kabir or it was vice versa, suggesting that they probably co-developed through mutual interaction.

[5] Kabir, nevertheless, criticized practices such as killing and eating cows by Muslims, in a manner Hindus criticized those practices: We have searched the turaki Dharam (Turk's religion, Islam), these teachers throw many thunderbolts, Recklessly they display boundless pride while explaining their own aims, they kill cows.

[56] Winand Callewaert translates a poem attributed to Kabir in the warrior-ascetic Dadupanthi tradition within Hinduism, as follows:[57] Keep the slanderer near you, build him a hut in your courtyard — For, without soap or water, he will scrub your character clean.

The legends about Kabir describe him as the underdog who nevertheless is victorious in trials by a Sultan, a Brahmin, a Qazi, a merchant, a god or a goddess.

According to David Lorenzen, legends about Kabir reflect a "protest against social discrimination and economic exploitation", they present the perspective of the poor and powerless, not the rich and powerful.

Songs of Kabir were collected by Kshitimohan Sen from mendicants across India, these were then translated to English by Rabindranath Tagore.

August Kleinzahler writes about this: "It is Mehrotra who has succeeded in capturing the ferocity and improvisational energy of Kabir’s poetry".

[5] Some scholars state Kabir's ideas were one of the many influences[66][67] on Guru Nanak, who went on to found Sikhism in the fifteenth century.

[62][68][69] Harpreet Singh, quoting Hew McLeod, states, "In its earliest stage Sikhism was clearly a movement within the Hindu tradition; Nanak was raised a Hindu and eventually belonged to the Sant tradition of northern India, a movement associated with the noted poet and mystic Kabir.

The documentaries feature Indian folk singers such as Prahlad Tipanya, Mukhtiyar Ali and the Pakistani Qawwal Fareed Ayaz.

[73][74] The album No Stranger Here by Shubha Mudgal, Ursula Rucker draws heavily from Kabir's poetry.

[69] Schomer states that for Kabir, woman is "kali nagini (a black cobra), kunda naraka ka (the pit of hell), juthani jagata ki (the refuse of the world)".