Daisaku Ikeda’s written works often cite the thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941), the great Indian humanist and internationalist who made his mark as a writer in all literary forms, and also as a songwriter. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. A close friend of Gandhi, he urged us to overcome fear-based tribalism. This poem is from his collection Gitanjali. Read an essay on Tagore by Amartya Sen.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Inclusive of but not confined to the art form of poetry itself, the poetic mind has been defined by Ikeda as “that which fuses the pulse of the human heart with the rhythm of nature and the universe” as well as “the source of human imagination and creativity.”