Holy Ma'navi, The (Masnavi) Versed English Edition

Excerpt

HEARKEN to the reed flute, how it complains, lamenting its banishment from its home: "Ever since they tore me from my osier bed, my plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears. I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs, and to express the pangs of my yearning for my home. He who abides far away from his home is ever longing for the day he shall return.

My wailing is heard in every throng, in concert with them that rejoice and them that weep. Each interprets my notes in harmony with his own feelings, but not one fathoms the secrets of my heart. My secrets are not alien from my plaintive notes, yet they are not manifest to the sensual eye and ear. Body is not veiled from soul, neither soul from body, yet no man hath ever seen a soul." This plaint of the flute is fire, not mere air. Let him who lacks this fire be accounted dead!

'Tis the fire of love that inspires the flute, 'tis the ferment of love that possesses the wine. The flute is the confidant of all unhappy lovers; yes, its strains lay bare my inmost secrets. Who hath seen a poison and an antidote like the flute? Who hath seen a sympathetic consoler like the flute? The flute tells the tale of love's bloodstained path, it recounts the story of Majnun's love toils. None is privy to these feelings save one distracted, as ear inclines to the whispers of the tongue. Through grief my days are as labour and sorrow, my days move on, hand in hand with anguish. Yet, though my days vanish thus, 'tis no matter, do thou abide, O incomparable pure one!

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The right use of forms.

That my outward form may not mislead you,
Digest my sweet advice before copying me.

Many are they who have been captured by form,
Who aimed at form, and found Allah.

After all, soul is linked to body,
Though it in nowise resembles the body.

The power of the light of the eye is mated with fat,
The light of the heart is hidden in a drop of blood.

Joy harbors in the kidneys and pain in the liver,
The lamp of reason in the brains of the head;
Smell in the nostrils and speech in the tongue,
Concupiscence in the flesh and courage in the heart.

These connections are not without a why and a how,
But reason is at a loss to understand the how.

Universal Soul had connection with Partial Soul,
Which thence conceived a pearl and retained it in its bosom.

From that connection, like Mary,
Soul became pregnant of a fair Messiah;
Not that Messiah who walked upon earth and water,
But that Messiah who is higher than space.

Next, as Soul became pregnant by the Soul of souls,
So by the former Soul did the world become pregnant;
Then the World brought forth another world,
And of this last are brought forth other worlds.

Should I reckon them in my speech till the last day
I should fail to tell the total of these resurrections.