According to one version, Kabir was born to an unwed mother in Varanasi, by a seedless conception and delivered through the palm of her hand, who then abandoned him in a basket floating in a pond.Baby Kabir was picked up and then raised by a Muslim family However, modern scholarship has abandoned these legends for lack of historical evidence, and Kabir is widely accepted to have been born and brought up in a family of Muslim weavers.According to the Indologist Wendy Doniger, Kabir was born into a Muslim family and various birth legends attempt to 'drag Kabir back over the line from Muslim to Hindu'

Many legends, inconsistent in their details, exist about his birth family and early life.

The years of Kabir's birth and death are unclear. Some historians favor 1398–1448 as the period Kabir lived, while others favor 1440–1518. Kabir Bijak was compiled and written down for the first time in the 17th century.Scholars state that this form of transmission, over geography and across generations bred change, interpolation and corruption of the poems. Furthermore, whole songs were creatively fabricated and new couplets inserted by unknown authors and attributed to Kabir, not because of dishonesty but out of respect for him and the creative exuberance of anonymous oral tradition found in Indian literary works. Scholars have sought to establish poetry that truly came from Kabir and its historicity value. Kabir's poems were verbally composed in the 15th century and transmitted viva voce through the 17th century. Literary works with compositions attributed to Kabir include Kabir Bijak, Kabir Parachai, Sakhi Granth, Adi Granth (Sikh), and Kabir Granthawali (Rajasthan). However, except for Adi Granth, significantly different versions of these texts exist and it is unclear which one is more original for example, Kabir Bijak exists in two major recensions. The most in depth scholarly analysis of various versions and translations are credited to Charlotte Vaudeville, the 20th century French scholar on Kabir. The latter term means 'witness', implying the poems to be evidence of the Truth. These include songs and couplets, called variously dohe, śalokā (Sanskrit: ślokā), or sākhī (Sanskrit: sākṣī). Kabir and his followers named his verbally composed poems of wisdom as 'bāņīs' (utterances). Kabir, II.57, Translated by Rabindranath Tagore

Kabir ke dohe