Religion Is Not Jihad Poem by Prabir Gayen

Religion Is Not Jihad
(Form and Formless- Song of oneness)
(One Light, many names — one Sea, many waves,
One Heart that blooms through all,
Rama, Buddha, Jesus — all One Silence calls.)
Prabir Kumar Gayen
I
If a falsehood be spoken a thousand times,
Echoed by a thousand tongues,
It begins to bloom like a poison-flower,
Deadly, dazzling, dangerous.
Truth is beyond the lips of man;
It cannot be said—only realised,
Not taught—but awakened from within.
II
When a lie gathers the chorus of a crowd,
It robes itself as religion.
But Religion is not dogma,
It is religiousness:
The breath of Buddha,
The smile of Krishna,
The silence of Mahavir,
The song of Nanak, Kabir, and Mira.
It is transmitted through Silence,
And blossoms only through Love.
III
Religion is not Jihad.
It knows not hatred,
It burns not with the fever of division.
It is the eternal play,
Becoming form, returning to formless grace,
Like night and day,
Two faces of the same Mystery.
IV
You are form,
This fragile image of dust;
You are formless,
Infinite, invisible, serene.
Life is the pilgrimage
From form to formless,
From name to the Nameless.
With form, life dances;
Without form, it rests in luminous void.
V
From Krishna to Krishna-Consciousness,
The universe spirals in ecstatic motion,
Energy whirling in Shiva's cosmic dance.
Shiva—the formless, vast, unborn,
The eternal witness beyond creation.
There is no God as ruler or controller,
There is only vast Consciousness,
Silent, eternal, unbound.
VI
No soul may reach the Source
Without honouring the form it wears.
How shall the formless worship the formless?
How shall the wordless utter the Word?
You must begin from You,
The shore from which you dive
Into the sea of the Infinite.

To despise form is to despise thyself.
Without body, no prayer;
Without mind, no meditation.
Form is the gate;
Formless is the Garden.
Food is form,
Life is its unseen flame.
Can one despise bread
And still drink the wine of Being?
VII
The Divine plays His cosmic game
Through myriad forms,
No form, no life.
The One becomes many,
The many return to One.
He is light and darkness and beyond both.

All religions are rivers
Flowing through diverse names,
Yet seeking the same Ocean.
Religion is not blindness,
Not the fever of one-sided faith,
It is the widening of the heart
Till it touches the Infinite Sky.
VIII
Religion is not Jihad,
Not blood for heaven,
Not sin for paradise.
It is merging with the boundless Space,
Becoming One with the Vast Oneness.
A false creed repeated by thousands
Turns true and tyrannous,
Dragging the world to ruin.
IX
True Religion is not revolution,
It is involution,
The turning inward,
The flowering from small mind
To vast Consciousness,
From being one
To Being All.
Like rivers losing their names in the sea,
Religion dissolves into Bliss.
X
It does not kill,
It does not hate,
It does not barter death for heaven's lust.
It accepts all as they are,
With reverence, with tenderness,
With the whisper of Love.

It dives deep into the heart
And proclaims: Tattvamasi!
Thou art That,
The One, the All, the Eternal.

Religion is not Jihad,
It is Love, Silence,
And the boundless Becoming
Of the Formless through Form.
@prabir Gayen
16 October/2025/3: 00 PM.