Sant Ravidas birth anniversary 2019: 10 facts about the mystical poet

It is the great saint and mystical poet Ravidas’ birth anniversary today. According to the Hindu calendar, the saint’s birthday is observed on Magh Purnima – full moon day in the month of Magh. He was one of the most popular poets of the Bhakti movement and his teachings can inspire us to lead a simple and happy life. He was not at all attached to worldly desires and led an extremely simple life. A new religious movement formed around him and a temple was built in his hometown Varanasi around the 19th and 20th centuries. His egalitarian teachings made him a figure of veneration and pride among people of all castes.

Here are 10 facts about Sant Ravidas:

• Ravidas was a mystic and poet of 15^th century medieval India.
• He was one of the most renowned saints of the North Indian bhakti movement.
• Ravidas was born in Varanasi.
• His poems and songs often revolved around the low-social position.
• While objecting to the notion that caste plays a fundamental role in an individual’s relationship to God, Ravidas contrasted his own lowliness to the exalted place of the divine.
• God, he said, was finer than he, as silk was to a worm, and more fragrant than he, as sandalwood was to the stinking castor oil plant.
• In relation to God, all persons, no matter what their castes, are “untouchables,” and “A family that has a true follower of the Lord is neither high caste nor low caste, lordly nor poor.”
• Such high were Ravidas’s charisma and thoughts that even Brahmans were said to have bowed before him.
• Some 40 of the poems attributed to Ravidas were included in the Adi Granth, the sacred scripture of Sikhism
• It is generally accepted that Ravidas met Guru Nanak.