Wisdom and heart spring’s essence, thus eternal;
Your clever reasoning hides like a cheat,
Seek one whose intellect’s divine, complete;
Through his, your intellect may end up whole,
That intellect restrains your carnal soul.
Here’s the interpretation put in brief:
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Pure breaths, like spring, breathe life in every leaf.
Don’t close your ears to what the saints report,
Soft words or harsh, for they’re your faith’s support,
Embrace with joy warm words and cold as well
Till you escape from fickleness and hell—
They’re both life’s spring, the source of all that’s good,
Knowledge, sincerity, and servanthood,
Because the spirit’s garden lives through Him
The heart’s sea’s filled with pearls up to the brim;
A wise man’s heart is filled with endless grief
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If his heart’s garden misses just one leaf.
Aisha asks the Prophet, ‘What was the inner meaning of today’s rain?’
Aisha then asked, ‘Dear Prophet, please convey
To me the wisdom of the rain today:
Was this the cleansing rain of clemency
Or wrathful justice from divinity,
A gift of kindness from the pure spring breeze,
Or one of harmful autumn’s qualities?’
He said, ‘This was to heal the misery
Which has afflicted Adam’s progeny:
If Man were to remain inside that fire
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The rate of loss and ruin would soar higher,
The world would be destroyed at once no doubt,
Cupidity in men thus driven out.’
The pillar of this world is heedlessness,
This world sees as a curse pure thoughtfulness:
It comes from that realm, when it dominates
This world is brought low by what it dictates;
This wisdom’s sunshine, greed is icy cold,
Wisdom’s fresh water, this world’s foul and old,
From that world gentle sprinklings always pour
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So lust and envy here shall live no more,
If such rains that are hidden should increase
Both vice and virtue in this world would cease.
This topic has no limit, let’s return
The outcome of the harpist’s tale to learn:
The remainder of the story of the old harpist and the explanation of it
That man through whom the world was filled with sound,
From whose voice grew such visions that astound,
So bird-like hearts would fly in ecstasy
While souls, perplexed, would lose stability,
As time passed, aged—his falcon soul grown weak,
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More like a finch that scrapes dirt with its beak,
His back became as hunched as jugs of wine,
His eyebrows hung down like a trailing vine,
His lovely, soul-expanding voice had turned
Into an ugly, worthless noise men shunned:
What once made Venus green with jealousy
Resembled now a mule’s bray tragically!
Has any fine thing not turned foul before?
Has any rooftop not become a floor?
Only the voices of saints from the past
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Whose breath provides the Last Day’s trumpet blast,*
A soul which makes our hearts drunk in an instant,
A non-existent which makes us existent,
The loveliness in every voice and thought,
The joy which inner revelation brought.
When he grew old and weak that man looked dead,
He needed loans just for a loaf of bread:
‘You’ve granted me long life, Lord, whom I serve,
And countless blessings which I don’t deserve,
For seventy years although I sinned each day
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You never would withhold grace from my way,
Without means I’m your guest, so hear my song:
I play for God’s sake, to whom I belong.’
He picked his harp up, sought God on his own,
Crying inside the graveyard all alone:
‘I seek from God the cost of just one string,
He’ll kindly take the counterfeits I bring!’
When he had played a long time and thus wept,
With harp as pillow, grave as bed, he slept;
His spirit fled the prison of his breast,
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Abandoning the harp now for its quest:
Free from the body and this world of pain
Into the simple world, the soul’s domain;
His soul sang of what he’d now come upon:
‘If I could only stay here from now on!
I’d love to stay in vernal realms instead,
Inside this mystic plain and tulip bed—
I’d crawl there now without a head or feet,
Without a lip or teeth its sweets I’d eat,
With thoughts free of affliction from the brain
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I’d joke with those up there in heaven’s plain,
Up there, with eyes closed, a whole world I’d view,
Without a hand I’d pick some roses too;
Like birds which in a sea of honey sink,
Job’s fount which cleanses and serves as a drink: *
It cleansed Job from his head down to his toes,
Like dawn’s first light, from all his earthly woes.’
If this book matched the sky’s expansiveness
It still could not contain a drop of this!
The earth and sky’s vast space has sliced my heart
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With feelings of confinement, locked apart;
That dream world which I’ve seen with my own eye,
Through its expansiveness spurs me to fly—
If that world and its gate were manifest
Then few would stay here for a moment’s rest.
Then the command came: ‘Don’t be greedy—no!
Now that the thorn’s come out, step forward—go!’
The harpist’s spirit lingered, reticent,
Clung tightly to the Most Beneficent.
While he was asleep a voice told Omar: ‘Give this much gold from the treasury to that man who is sleeping in the graveyard’
Omar was then made drowsy for God’s sake
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Until he could no longer stay awake,
He felt amazed, and said, ‘This is no game—
It comes from the unseen, it serves an aim.’
He lay down, slept and had a dream so clear
That God’s own voice Omar’s soul then could hear;
That voice is the sole source of every sound,
All noise is just its echo going round,
Each Nubian, Persian, Arab, Turk, and Kurd
Without their ears this wondrous voice has heard—
So what if Turks and Tajiks understood—
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That voice is heard as well by stone and wood!
Each moment ‘Am I not your lord?’* we hear
And essences and accidents appear,
Though all don’t cry out ‘Yes!’ still their emergence
Is like a ‘Yes!’ sprung forth from non-existence.
I said that stone and wood can understand,
This tale will illustrate this, and expand:
The complaint of the moaning pillar when a pulpit was made for the Prophet because the congregation had grown and they had said, ‘We can’t see your blest face when you’re preaching.’ The Prophet and his companions hear the pillar’s complaint, and the Prophet converses with it plainly
A pillar, cut off from the Prophet, moaned,
Just like
a living being, and it groaned;
He asked it, ‘What are you reacting to?’
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‘My soul bleeds now that it’s cut off from you:
I was your firm support, but you’ve moved on—
Do pulpits have a post to lean upon?’
‘Do you want to be made a palm instead,
So everyone can pick your dates?’ he said,
‘Or that God should make you a cypress tree,
So you’ll stay fresh and moist eternally?’
The pillar said, ‘I want what lasts forever’—
Don’t you behave worse than this piece of timber!
He buried then that pillar so it may
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Be resurrected on the Final Day.
Those men whom God has called, as you should know,
Involvement with this world choose to forgo:
Whoever gets work straight from God will find
Admission there, and leave his job behind,
But those who’ve not had gifts from realms unknown
Will not believe inanimates can moan:
He says, ‘Yes!’ though inside he scoffs at it,
So you won’t say that he’s a hypocrite;
Unless informed about His order, ‘Be!’*
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They would reject my discourse totally;
A thousand men who just obey what’s told
Were filled with doubt when one new thought took hold,
Their skills in logic, proofs, and imitation
Are based upon their false imagination.
That wretched Satan sows doubt in each mind,
In order to trip up the ones who’re blind;
The legs of theorists are made of wood;
A wooden leg’s unstable, it’s no good.
The Pole of each age* is a visionary—
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Mountains feel dizzy at his constancy,
While blind men need a stick to walk around,
To stop them tumbling over on the ground,
That horseman through whom armies won their fight—
Who is this man? The one who has true sight;
Though with a stick the blind can walk with ease,
Seeing through help received from visionaries,
If there were no kings of the mystic kind,
As stiff as corpses you would see the blind:
Sowing and reaping blind men cannot do,
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Nor trade, nor building, as is plain to you.
If He had not shown mercy to your heart
Your staff of reason would have split apart—
What is this staff? Proofs and analogies.
Who gave it? That Most Glorious One who sees;
The staff’s become a weapon for your hate,
So break it into bits, you blind ingrate!
He gave this staff that you might benefit,
In anger has He struck you once with it?
Blind people, what’s kept you preoccupied?
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Look for an intermediary, a guide!
Don’t disobey! He gave the staff to you!
Remember just what Adam was put through!
The miracles of Moses and Mohammad*:
A stick became a snake, a pillar muttered,
The pillar moaned, the stick turned to a snake:
They strike five times a day* for their faith’s sake.
But if this truth were comprehensible
We wouldn’t need a single miracle—
That which is grasped by your intelligence
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Does not need miracles as evidence.
Consider this path—it’s irrational,
And yet to wise men it’s acceptable,
While demons, fearing Adam, chose to flee
To far off islands, filled with jealousy:
Likewise when prophets’ miracles appear
The sceptics hide their heads in sand through fear
So they can act like Muslims in deceit,
Without you knowing that they only cheat;
They rub on silver, fake insignias
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To make seem real their worthless replicas,
They falsely speak of laws, God’s unity
Like loaves which hide within impurity.
Philosophers don’t dare to breathe a word
Because true faith will show them they’re absurd:
Their hands and feet do what their spirits say,
Since they’re inanimate and must obey—
Although they spread doubts and they falsify,
Against them their own limbs still testify.
The manifestation of a miracle of the Prophet through the speech of gravel in the hand of Abu Jahl, as it bears witness to the truth of Mohammad’s status
While holding gravel Abu Jahl came near
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The Masnavi, Book One: Bk. 1 (Oxford World's Classics) Page 24
