Scholars approach the dating of the compositions in the Kabir Bijak with a recognition that what survives is the product of a long oral and textual journey. The poems circulated orally for generations before being written down, and the earliest surviving manuscripts appear centuries after Kabir’s lifetime. As a result, the Bijak is understood less as a single, fixed book from a particular year and more as a layered anthology that gradually took shape. Within this layered structure, a core of verses is generally associated with Kabir’s own period, while other materials are seen as later accretions from the broader Kabir Panth and related traditions.

The most sustained efforts at dating rely on linguistic and dialect analysis. Scholars examine the early modern Eastern Hindi of the Bijak—colored by Avadhi, Bhojpuri, and related speech forms—and compare its grammar, vocabulary, and phonology with other dated north Indian texts. Verses that preserve older, less Sanskritized language and fewer technical sectarian terms are often treated as closer to Kabir’s time, while those with more Persian or Arabic loanwords, standardized bhakti idioms, or developed doctrinal jargon are generally regarded as later. This method does not yield precise years, but it does allow for a relative chronology within the corpus.

Attention is also given to the internal stratification of the Bijak and to its relationship with other Kabir traditions. The short, aphoristic sayings and sharp, anti-ritual songs—especially in sections such as the sakhi and some sabda—are frequently viewed as the oldest stratum. By contrast, longer, more systematized teaching compositions, and those that reflect more elaborated nirgun-bhakti vocabulary or institutional concerns, tend to be placed in a later phase. When a verse or close variant appears in multiple, independent early sources—most notably in other Kabir collections and in Sikh scripture—scholars are more inclined to see it as reaching back toward Kabir’s historical voice.

Manuscript history and material study provide another, more external frame for dating. The oldest known Bijak manuscripts, with their colophons and scribal notes, offer “no-later-than” limits for certain compositions and show how verses were added, dropped, or rearranged over time. Comparison of these manuscripts suggests stages of growth stretching over several generations, even as the core associated with Kabir’s fifteenth‑century milieu remains discernible. Alongside this, scholars read the poems for historical and cultural allusions—social practices, religious groups, or institutional forms—that seem to reflect later developments, and they use such clues to situate particular layers in the broader sweep of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

Taken together, these methods—linguistic analysis, internal stratification, comparative study with other Kabir corpora, and close attention to manuscript evidence—do not produce exact dates for individual poems, but they do sketch a textured historical horizon. The Bijak thus appears as a living record of Kabir’s voice refracted through time: a core of compositions rooted in the late fifteenth century, surrounded by later reflections, interpretations, and expansions that arose as his words moved through communities, lineages, and changing religious landscapes.