The best known story about Kabir concerns his death. Hindus and Muslims are said to have arrived to claim the body, one side to burn it and the other to bury it, and to have quarrelled until the shroud was lifted and there were only flowers underneath, which they divided. It is the tidiest possible legend about a man who spent his life telling both communities they had missed the point, and it says more about how he was received than about what happened.
The textual situation is genuinely difficult. Verses attributed to him survive in three main streams: a substantial body admitted into the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib in the early seventeenth century, the Bijak preserved by the Kabir Panth in the east, and Rajasthani manuscript collections in the west. They do not agree, in wording, in content or in temper, and the corpus grew for centuries as poets composed in his voice, which was normal practice. Any statement about what Kabir actually said has to be made against that.
There is a final irony worth recording. A sect formed around him, the Kabir Panth, with lineages, a scripture, initiation and temples, doing all the things he attacked, and it has preserved his verses for five hundred years. Without institutions of the kind he despised, considerably less of him would have survived.