India, June 28 -- Kabir's timeless message challenges humanity's endless search for truth in places where it never truly existed.

A pilgrimage that disappoints is rarely blamed for being a pilgrimage. It is blamed for being the wrong one, and the disappointed traveller sets off for the next shrine with the same hope intact, undiminished by the failure of the last. A guru who cannot deliver is replaced, not abandoned as a category. The search survives every one of its own failures, because the failures are always assigned to the destination and never to the act of searching itself. Something in this arrangement protects the search from ever having to answer for itself.

Five centuries ago, a weaver in Varanasi cut straight through that ar...