The Sant Dariya Sahib of Bihar Dharamdasi Kabir Panth Connection, by James Bean
If one is acquainted with the writings of Sant Dariya Sahib one will soon notice that they are completely Dharamdasi oriented and permeated with the Anurag Sagar/Kabir/Dharam Das tradition. For instance, the Beas publication, Dariya Sahib - Saint of Bihar, is essentially a sequel to the Anurag Sagar. From what they taught, it's obvious that for Dariya Sahib and his guru, named in his writings as Sat Saheb, were heavily influenced by the Dharam Das Kabir Panth. They also believed "Sant Dharam Das was the true successor of Kabir", a uniquely Dharamdasi view of succession not shared by followers of other Kabir Panth sects. Scholars such as Daniel Gold have mentioned that the Dariya Sahib sect in Bihar resembles the Dharamdasi Kabir Panth in how it's organized. The Dariya Panth sees itself as the continuation of the Dharam Das Kabir Panth, even teaching that Dariya Sahib was the reincarnation of Kabir come again to reset Sant Mat during this Kali Yuga age, portraying the latter Dharamdasi line of gurus as having gone off course getting caught up in rituals and Hinduization or corruption with few people getting initiated into the path of the Sound Current having inner experiences. A familiar story about a sangat only lasting for a few generations and then dying out or morphing into something else like a new world religion or Hindu panth, in any case, becoming a shell or husk of its former self.
"...Dariya panthis, who, seeing Dariya as an incarnation of Kabir, can take their lineage as the real Kabir Panth." (The Sants - Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, page 326)
"Dariya Sahab is considered the second incarnation of Kabir Sahab." (Dariya Sagar):
https://archive.org/details/DaryaSagarBiharWaleKeChuneHueShabda1931BelvederePressAllahabad/page/n3/mode/2up?q=%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%B0
Sant Dariya Sahib website:
https://theholysound.com/sant-dariya-saheb-bihar/teachings.html
"Dr. Dharmendra Brahmachari Shastri who published a research paper on the Sant for his Doctor of Philosophy thesis called, Sant Dariya KABIR of Bihar. In one of the books Dariya claimed himself to be Saint Kabir in his previous birth. The list of books and the number of verses and total number of lines in each book are given below":
https://theholysound.com/sant-dariya-saheb-bihar/books.html
"... During the later stages of Sant tradition, figures have arisen who have spoken out against the established panths as providing little access to the true Sant teaching, which is perceived as leading to inner experience. Soamiji was one. Tulsi Sahib, his predecessor, argues sharply with panthi characters in his Ghat Ramayana. 45 Earlier, in Bihar, Dariya Sahib was taken as an incarnation of Kabir, come again to spread the true teaching on seeing the degeneration of his panth." 46
Footnote 46: "46. P. Chaturvedi, Uttari Bharat ki sant parampara (Allahabad: Leader Press, 1972), p. 660 gives an account of the way in which Dariya took himself as 'non separate from Kabir.' Dariya-panthi publications speak of him simply as 'Kabir's other avatar'". See introductory page to Dariya vachanamst, a periodical published from the Dariya Ashram, Kashi." (The Sants, page 325)
"Those souls who remain in obedience
to these successors,
Shall cross the Ocean of the world.
How long will this line of succession continue?
Kindly relate it to us in your own words, asks Fakkar Das.
Listen mindfully, O Fakkar Das,
I explain this to you, says Dariya:
As long as the discipline of the Sound Current
is preserved unadulterated,
The line of succession will truly continue.
But when it is mixed with outer rituals
and display of external garbs,
My Sound Current will part company.
My Divine essence will depart,
And the souls will go into the mouth of Kal.
I shall then come to this world,
And shall proclaim the teaching
of the Sound Current again."
(excerpted from a hymn of Dariya, page 183, Dariya Sahib - Saint of Bihar: https://scienceofthesoul.org/books-EN-023-0.html )
One won't find much Kabir Sound Current mysticism with the Kabir Chaura Panth but you sure will if you explore the writings of the Dharam Das Panth and writings of Dariya of Bihar. As of late I've started exploring the Kabir Sagar volumes using AI interfaces such as Gemini and Grok. Volume One of the Kabir Sagar is the Anurag Sagar (Ocean of Love)!
https://archive.org/details/giTY_kabir-sagar-complete-11-volumes-khemraj/page/n127/mode/2up
"This connection between Dharamdasis and Radhasoamis, to which the Anurag Sagar has led us, is confirmed by another set of writings venerated by Radhasoami leaders but little known outside of Radhasoami and Dharamdasi circles: the poetry of Dariya Sahib. Dariya Sahib was an eighteenth-century poet who lived in a Dharamdasi region of Bihar and referred to both Kabir and Dharam Das as his predecessors. Like the author of the Anurag Sagar, he viewed Kabir as a divine and mystical force and enumerated aspects of the ascending realms of consciousness in a manner remarkably similar to what one sees in Swami Shiv Dayal’s Sar Bachan." (Mark Juergensmeyer, Radhasoami Reality, first edition, 1991, pages 26-29)
Antecedents of Radhasoami and Tulsi Sahib of Hathras
Below are some references from various sources to the Sant tradition most directly related to Radhasoami, modern-day Sant Mat. As Mark Juergensmeyer has said, "This esoteric teaching of Tulsi Sahib had its antecedents."
In decades gone by there have been some rather valuable discussions about the origins of Sant Mat, the most likely guru lineage of the path based upon the clues we can observe in the teachings of Swami Ji Maharaj, Tulsi Sahib of Hathras, and earlier Sant literature. As previous presentations have suggested, the evidence points to Sant Dariya Sahib of Bihar as being the most likely guru of Tulsi Sahib. Dariya Sahib of Bihar is the one contemporary guru actually named by Tulsi Sahib in his writings and hymns.
"Among the saints whom Tulsi Sahib himself singles out in Ghat Ramayan as Satgurus (true masters) are Bu-Ali Qalandar, Jalaluddin Rumi, Kabir Sahib, Dadu Dayal, Rai Das Ji, Dariya Sahib (who may have been Tulsi Sahib's own Guru), Guru Nanak, Surdas Ji, Nabha Das Ji, Mansur, Mirabai, Sarmad and Shams-e Tabrizi." (Tulsi Sahib - Saint of Hathras, 2017 edition, Puri, Sethi, Dr. T.R. Shangari, page xiii)
Tulsi was born in 1763 and passed on in 1843. He would have been in his teens when Dariya Sahib of Bihar was still alive — old enough to have perhaps received initiation from Dariya Sahib of Bihar or one of his representatives, in other words. Dariya was a towering figure occupying some of that space in history between the time of Kabir and that of Sant Tulsi Sahib of Hathras. Dariya passed on when Tulsi was around seventeen years of age. Dariya Sahib appointed several Saints to be his spiritual successors: Fakkar Das, Basti Das, Sant Tika Das, and, Sant Guna Das, also contemporaries with Tulsi Sahib, who likely spent some time in Bihar. Bihar was, and remains, home-base of the Satsang of Sant Dariya Sahib.
“He [Tulsi Sahib] has freely used words of Braj, Avadhi, Rajasthani (Marwari), Gujrati, Punjabi and Maithili, which leads one to conclude that, like many other Saints, he must have traveled widely in V.P., Rajasthan, Gujrat, Punjab and Bihar.” (J.R. Puri, and V.K. Sethi, Tulsi Sahib, Saint of Hathras, 1981, page 19)
If Tulsi hadn’t received initiation directly from Dariya by the age of seventeen, the references to Dariya Sahib in Tulsi’s writings still make sense if he received initiation from one of Dariya’s immediate successors, which is another possibility. Anyone initiated by those successors would likely have much reverence for Dariya Sahib as being the “great master” of Sant Mat during those days.
Tulsi's own references to Dariya are the foundation for the Dariya Sahib connection, but there are other observations one can make. For instance the sangats that used the Five Names (Panch Naam) prior to Tulsi Sahib of Hathras are associated with the Dariya/Dharam Das/Kabir line of gurus.
Below are excerpts from Daniel Gold and Mark Juergensmeyer. And at the bottom I conclude with a hymn of Dariya Sahib embedded in the Kabir/Phool Das chapter of Tulsi Sahib's book, the Ghat Ramayan.
"Far to the west of Ayodhya, at Hathras, near Agra, a sant named Tulsi Sahib recognized himself as the reincarnation of Tulsi Das, who sang the praises of Ram in the great Hindi version of the epic Ramayana. Though Tulsi Sahib’s commonly known Ramayana is highly conducive to the ceremonial worship of Lord Ram, Tulsi Sahib in his present incarnation took the heritage of the Hindi sants as an alternative to Hindu ritual worship. In a book called the Inner Ramayana he elaborates at length on the idea of sant tradition. Arguing one by one with the proponents of established Indian religions, Tulsi Sahib demonstrates the superiority of sant mat, “the teaching of the sants.” Through followers of the Radhasoami movement, who inherit a direct spiritual legacy from Tulsi Sahib, the idea of sant mat has become familiar to circles of devotees in the West today.
"It was Tulsi Sahib, living into the nineteenth century, who finally produced a learned exposition of sant mat; yet sants had long before seen themselves as constituting some sort of spiritual brotherhood. Just how far the early sants saw themselves within a distinct tradition and in what ways their perceptions,of commonality in fact reflected shared practice are by no means settled questions. Some sants appear as notoriously idiosyncratic individuals, and movements bearing sants’ names have developed in highly diverse ways. But the ideal of the sant is lauded in verse, later Hindi sants refer to earlier ones, and Kabir, the first great figure in the Hindi tradition, mentions earlier Marathi predecessors. By the seventeenth century, great sectarian compilations—which include verses in sant style from figures beyond the immediate lineage—testify to ideas of a larger tradition of sants, if imprecisely understood and realized from diverse perspectives. By the end of the nineteenth century Radhasoami groups were formulating ideas of sant tradition that fit nicely into their own theologies." (Daniel Gold, Comprehending the Guru, 1988, pages 15-16)
"The idea of sant mat, propagated by Tulsi Sahib at the end of the eighteenth century, was taken up by the nineteenth-century progenitor of Radhasoami lineage, known as Soamiji. At both Agra and Beas, sant mat is understood to represent a practical formulation of an older sant tradition." (Daniel Gold, Comprehending the Guru, page 78)
"This esoteric teaching of Tulsi Sahib had its antecedents. His best known work, Ghat Ramayana (which purports to be the essence, or ghat, of the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana), is a dialogue between Tulsi Sahib and Phul Das, a follower of Dharam Das, who was in turn one of the best known disciples of Kabir. In it references are made to an even earlier dialogue, one between Kabir and Dharam Das. This dialogue is contained in a document entitled Anurag Sagar (The Sea of Love), which the Ghat Ramayana resembles in style and content and which may be regarded as its precursor. Several Radhasoami masters have acknowledged its relevance for their teachings and have urged their followers to read it.40
Footnote 40: "Sawan Singh, for instance, refers to the Anurag Sagar in Philosophy of the Masters (Beas: Radhasoami Satsang, Beas, 1977), vol. 4, p. 67; and one of Sawan Singh’s disciples says that the master advocated that the book be studied diligently" (Rai Saheb Munshi Ram, With the Three Masters [Beas: Radhasoami Satsang, Beas, 1967], vol. 2, p. 187).
"The main ideas of the Anurag Sagar are those we have described as esoteric santism, but particular attention is paid to the remarkable power of a salvific sound that can be transmitted only to appropriate persons, and only through initiation. Behind the Anurag Sagar lies an elaborate mythology about a cosmic conflict between the forces of darkness and the forces of good. As in Tulsi Sahib’s writing, the former is Kal, and Kabir himself embodies the latter. A particularly dramatic scene has Kabir meeting Kal in combat at the top of the causal plane. According to the Anurag Sagar, the public, historical Kabir was only a momentary revelation, a brief glimpse of a much more important reality: a cosmic Kabir-force that originated before creation, entered into human history briefly as Kabir, and is still accessible in the form of a pure sound that resonates through the cosmos and provides liberation from the evil grip of time and mortality.
"Although few of these mythological details survive as such within Radhasoami teachings, the grand role that Kabir plays within Radhasoami thought and its view of history is indisputable; one of the Radhasoami masters, for instance, claimed to have recognized Benares on seeing it for the first time because he had been there as Kabir in a previous birth. The general framework of the myth is to be found in Radhasoami notions of the evilness of time (Kal), the creation of religion by Kal as part of a sinister plot, and the saving power of a cosmic guru—incarnate in a living spiritual master—that penetrates Kal’s kingdom by a force of light and sound, rescues souls, and guides them toward ascending vistas of reality.
"The Anurag Sagar would seem to point to Kabir as the source of esoteric santism. The problem with this conclusion, however, is that although the Anurag Sagar is said to have been written by Kabir, its style and content suggest an authorship sometime in the eighteenth or even nineteenth century—several centuries after Kabir’s death. Moreover, the ideas of esoteric santism contained in the Anurag Sagar are rejected by many of the people who today consider themselves the direct followers of Kabir, the Kabirpanthis.
"There is one present-day branch of Kabirpanthis, however, for which these ideas are not at all extreme: the Dharamdasis. The Anurag Sagar is indeed one of their principal texts..."
"Dharamdasi teachings about the cosmic realms are quite similar to Radhasoami’s; like the Beas branch it gives the panch nam (five names) as one of its mantras at the time of initiation..."
"This connection between Dharamdasis and Radhasoamis, to which the Anurag Sagar has led us, is confirmed by another set of writings venerated by Radhasoami leaders but little known outside of Radhasoami and Dharamdasi circles: the poetry of Dariya Sahib. Dariya Sahib was an eighteenth-century poet who lived in a Dharamdasi region of Bihar and referred to both Kabir and Dharam Das as his predecessors. Like the author of the Anurag Sagar, he viewed Kabir as a divine and mystical force and enumerated aspects of the ascending realms of consciousness in a manner remarkably similar to what one sees in Swami Shiv Dayal’s Sar Bachan." (Mark Juergensmeyer, Radhasoami Reality, first edition, 1991, pages 26-29)
Shabd of Dariya Saheb quoted in the Ghat Ramayan by Sant Tulsi Sahib, in the section devoted to the Anurag Sagar and his Dialogue with Phool Das of the Kabir sect:
Gateway to the August Darbar of the Lord has opened to me.
Lightning flashes and darts forth like a fast current, illuminating like a shooting star.
The veil of clouds over the moon is removed and the dense darkness vanishes.
When love and yearning are engendered in Surat, it beholds the moon-lit courtyard.
Surat moves about happily in the firmament and opens the gate to Bank-nal.
Like a spider moving along the thread drawn out of itself,
Surat, ascending on the bow, rises up like a current.
On meeting the Beloved, Surat merges in Him the way a stream merges in river.
I have seen the Form which, indeed, is formless and beyond all description.
It is boundless, having neither beginning nor end.
Dariya Shaeb says that when his mind became humble and meek,
he was able to cross the ocean of existence.
(Param Sant Tulsi Sahib, S.D. Maheshwari, page 125)
Also see: The Case for Sant Tulsi Sahib’s Guru Being Sant Dariya Sahib of Bihar — Sant Mat History Revisited, By James Bean:
https://medium.com/sant-mat-meditation-and-spirituality/the-case-for-sant-tulsi-sahibs-guru-being-sant-dariya-sahib-of-bihar-sant-mat-history-revisited-08fc892e737e
And: Sant Tulsi Sahib’s Spiritual Master Was Sant Dariya Sahib of Bihar, by James Bean:
https://santmatradhasoami.blogspot.com/2024/05/sant-tulsi-sahibs-spiritual-master-was.html
