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 Ghandi, 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.