A guest is an easily recognized symbol of spiritual presence in Eastern mystical story, koan, and poetry and being a good host is considered a sacred duty. Welcoming, showing kindness, and demonstrating hospitality to strangers is paramount in many cultures. Actually, how one treats a guest – ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’ (guest is God) – is a foundational and universal theme in stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to the Bible to Greco-Roman tales, the Odyssey, to Sir Gawain, Shakespeare, and the Grimm brothers.
Sometimes, a god decides to test someone’s temperament and attitude by disguising themself as a poor traveller or an animal and delivers boons or severe punishments based on the character’s response. Sometimes, accepting an unknown person into the community is a matter of survival when provisions are low, workers are few, and the environment is harsh. And sometimes, culture dictates that the visitor be fed and clothed, but circumstances or intuition do not agree. Bad outcomes can occur either way, but generally, it is consistent with religious thought and spiritual practice that guests be brought into the warmth, rested, cared for, and even revered.
We often meet Rumi’s wanderers in his poems, drunk and sober, embraced and reviled; itinerant beggars and mysterious strangers are sprinkled throughout Zen writing; and here, Kabir, a 15thC Indian mystic, uses ‘guest’, referencing the spiritual essence, the centre, the natural self, the innermost vibration of any being. Please ponder the relevance of the following poem from wherever you sit firmly in your body, in your world, today.
The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.
The blue sky opens out further and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.
I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!
Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word “reason” you already feel miles away.
How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.
– Kabir
(English version by Robert Bly)