The Masnavi, Book I (Rumi) · 1 of 37 · tr. E.H. Whinfield
PROLOGUE-a
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 ho 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,l 'Tis the ferment of love that possesses the wine.
The flute is the confidant of all unhappy lovers; Yea, 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 labor 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!
2 But all who are not fishes are soon tired of water; And they who lack daily bread find the day very long; So the "Raw" comprehend not the state of the "Ripe;" 3 Therefore it behoves me to shorten my discourse.
Arise, O son!
burst thy bonds and be free!
How long wilt thou be captive to silver and gold?
Though thou pour the ocean into thy pitcher, It can hold no more than one day's store.
The pitcher of the desire of the covetous never fills, The oyster-shell fills not with pearls till it is content; Only he whose garment is rent by the violence of love Is wholly pure from covetousness and sin.
Hail to thee, then, O LOVE, sweet madness!
Thou who healest all our infirmities!
Who art the physician of our pride and self-conceit!
Who art our Plato and our Galen!
Love exalts our earthly bodies to heaven, And makes the very hills to dance with joy!
O Iover, 'twas love that gave life to Mount Sinai, 4 When "it quaked, and Moses fell down in a swoon." Did my Beloved only touch me with his lips, I too, like the flute, would burst out in melody.
But he who is parted from them that speak his tongue, Though he possess a hundred voices, is perforce dumb.
When the rose has faded and the garden is withered, The song of the nightingale is no longer to be heard.
The BELOVED is all in all, the lover only veils Him; 5 The BELOVED is all that lives, the lover a dead thing.
When the lover feels no longer LOVE's quickening, He becomes like a bird who has lost its wings.
Alas!
How can I retain my senses about me, When the BELOVED shows not the light of His countenance?
LOVE desires that this secret should be revealed, For if a mirror reflects not, of what use is it?
John of the Cross's stage of contemplative purgation: a felt absence and aridity of God that strips the soul of attachments to its own consolations en route to deeper union.
The passage describes days of labor, sorrow, and anguish when the Beloved's countenance is not shown.
Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.
The call to 'burst thy bonds' and be free from silver and gold signifies radical letting-go.
Ecstatic, non-rational receptivity to the divine figured as drunkenness — Plato's symposium wine, Rumi's sukr, Eckhart's 'sober drunkenness'; the passive/receptive metaphor for divine encounter, distinct from divine_madness's active possessing rapture.
References to 'wine', 'ferment', and 'madness' evoke the metaphor of divine drunkenness.
Ecstatic irrational rapture — Plato's mania, Bruno's furore — by which the soul transcends ordinary reason and attains direct contact with divine reality; madness reframed as higher knowledge.
Love is explicitly hailed as 'sweet madness' that heals infirmities and exalts the body.
Sufi self-effacement in God — the via by which the lover is unmade as a separate ego and recovered as God's act; specifies the practice/event rather than mystical_union's resulting state.
The lover is described as a 'dead thing' and the garment rent by love implies ego dissolution.
Bruno's eroici furori — a passionate, ennobling spiritual ardor that drives the soul toward divine wisdom; distinguished from base or animal passions by its orientation to infinite truth.
The 'violence of love' and 'sweet madness' align with the concept of ennobling spiritual ardor.
Eckhart's radical reading of Matthew 5:3 — the saint as one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing, having emptied even the will and the self with which to receive God; distinct from renunciation_of_wealth (material poverty).
Purity is achieved only when the garment is rent by love and one is free from covetousness.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
The opening metaphor of the reed flute torn from its osier bed defines the condition of exile.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
Love is said to 'exalt our earthly bodies to heaven', indicating transformation into a divine state.