The Masnavi, Book I (Rumi) · 3 of 37 · tr. E.H. Whinfield
STORY I-a
The Prince and the Handmaid.
A prince, while engaged on a hunting excursion, espied a fair maiden, and by promises of gold induced her to accompany him.
After a time she fell sick, and the prince had her tended by divers physicians.
As, however, they all omitted to say, "God willing,1 we will cure her," their treatment was of no avail.
So the prince offered prayer, and in answer thereto a physician was sent from heaven.
He at once condemned his predecessors' view of the case, and by a very skilful diagnosis, discovered that the real cause of the maiden's illness was her love for a certain goldsmith of Samarcand.
In accordance with the physician's advice, the prince sent to Samarcand and fetched the goldsmith, and married him to the lovesick maiden, and for six months the pair lived together in the utmost harmony and happiness.
At the end of that period the physician, by divine command, gave the goldsmith a poisonous draught, which caused his strength and beauty to decay, and he then lost favour with the maiden, and she was reunited to the king.
This Divine command was precisely similar to God's command to Abraham to slay his son Ishmael, and to the act of the angel in slaying the servant of Moses,2 and is therefore beyond human criticism.
Description of Love.
A true lover is proved such by his pain of heart; No sickness is there like sickness of heart.
The lover's ailment is different from all ailments; Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries.
A lover may hanker after this love or that love, But at the last he is drawn to the KING of love.
However much we describe and explain love, When we fall in love we are ashamed of our words.
Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear, But love unexplained is clearer.
When pen hasted to write, On reaching the subject of love it split in twain.
When the discourse touched on the matter of love, Pen was broken and paper torn.
In explaining it Reason sticks fast, as an ass in mire; Naught but Love itself can explain love and lovers!
None but the sun can display the sun, If you would see it displayed, turn not away from it.
Shadows, indeed, may indicate the sun's presence, But only the sun displays the light of life.
Shadows induce slumber, like evening talks, But when the sun arises the "moon is split asunder." 3 In the world there is naught so wondrous as the sun, But the Sun of the soul sets not and has no yesterday.
Though the material sun is unique and single, We can conceive similar suns like to it.
But the Sun of the soul, beyond this firmament, No like thereof is seen in concrete or abstract.4 Where is there room in conception for His essence, So that similitudes of HIM should be conceivable?
Shamsu-'d-Din of Tabriz importunes Jalalu-'d-Din to compose the Masnavi.
The sun (Shams) of Tabriz is a perfect light, A sun, yea, one of the beams of God!
When the praise was heard of the "Sun of Tabriz," The sun of the fourth heaven bowed its head.
Now that I have mentioned his name, it is but right To set forth some indications of his beneficence.
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
Love is described as an 'astrolabe of God's mysteries,' implying a mapping between human experience and divine reality.
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 maiden must lose favor with the goldsmith (worldly attachment) to be reunited with the King.
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.
Reason is depicted as failing ('sticks fast') before the reality of Love, which transcends rational explanation.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
God actively intervenes by sending a heavenly physician and commanding events according to divine will.
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 death of the goldsmith represents the annihilation of worldly attachment necessary for reunion with the Divine.
Diotima's staged ascent from love of beautiful bodies → beautiful souls → beautiful pursuits → beautiful knowledge → Beauty itself; the canonical scala amoris that grounds Plotinus's On the Beautiful and Bruno's Eroici Furori — distinct from generic spiritual_ascent in that eros is the specific motive force.
The text describes a progression from hankering after particular loves to being drawn to the King of Love.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
The human soul is presented as a mirror reflecting the divine Sun, linking the inner self to cosmic reality.
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 maiden's sickness is caused by her separation from her true love, mirroring the soul's 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.
Shams is described as a 'beam of God,' suggesting the human can participate in divine light.