Lord, heed not my faults!
You are known as he who sees as all equal,
At will you can take me across the ocean of existence.
Lord, heed not my faults!
You are known as he who sees as all equal,
At will you can take me across the ocean of existence.
One iron is used in worship, another in butcher’s steel;
The philosopher’s stone counts not merit or fault
But turns both to purest gold.
One is called “river”, another a “rivulet” filled with murky water;
When they merge they become of one colour and are known
As “Sursari" (Ganges), river of gods.
The soul and the Supreme are given different names,
But all is one in Sur’s Shyam.
This time, take me across, or give up your vow to be saviour!
Surdas was a 15th century blind saint, poet and musician, known for his devotional songs dedicated to Krishna. Surdas is said to have written and composed a hundred thousand songs in his magnum opus the ‘Sur Sagar’ (Ocean of Melody), out of which only about 8,000 are extant. He is considered a saint and so also known as Sant Surdas, a name which literally means the “slave of melody”.
Surdas’ poetry was a dialect of Hindi language, Brij Bhasha, until then considered to be a very plebeian language, as the prevalent literary languages were either Persian or Sanskrit. The works of Surdas immediately raised the status of Brij Bhasha from a crude language to that of a literary language of great repute.
Due to the training he received from his guru Vallabhacharya, Surdas was a proponent of the Shuddhadvaita school of Vaishnavism (also known as Pushti Marg). This philosophy is based upon the spiritual metaphor of the Radha-Krishna Rasleela (The celestial dance between Radha and Krishna). It propagates the path of Grace of God rather than of merging in Him.