Rumi

The teaching

Taught from his own words, above all the Masnavi, with the Divan of Shams and the Discourses.

Within the faith

Rumi teaches as a Muslim master of the Sufi path. The Masnavi calls itself, in its own preface, the roots of the roots of the roots of the religion, and its six books are woven from the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet, which it quotes on almost every page. The reed's lament with which it opens, and the turning of the dervishes who follow him, are taught on The Sufis and on Prayer in motion. His teaching itself is given in stories, and the stories are the way to learn it.

Love explains itself

Love is the heart of it. Love, he says, is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God: whether it is a love of this world or of the other, in the end it leads there. Reason, when it tries to explain love, lies down like a donkey in the mud; love alone explains love and the lover. And the proof of the sun is the sun itself: whoever wants a proof should not turn his face away from it.

The elephant in the dark

Some Indians brought an elephant to a town and kept it in a dark house, and the people went in to feel it, since no one could see it. One touched the trunk and said it was like a water pipe; one the ear, and said it was like a fan; one the leg, and said a pillar; one the back, and said a throne. Each described the part his hand had met, and they quarrelled.

If each had carried a candle, Rumi says, their words would have agreed. The eye of the senses is only the palm of a hand and cannot take in the whole, and the quarrels of those who are sure come from touching in the dark.

Moses and the shepherd

Moses heard a shepherd praying: where are you, Lord, that I may serve you, sew your shoes and comb your hair, wash your clothes and bring you milk? Moses rebuked him for blasphemy, and the shepherd tore his clothes and went off into the desert. Then God reproached Moses: you were sent to unite, not to sever. I have given each people its own way and its own words of worship; I look not at the tongue and the words but at the heart and its state.

Moses ran after the shepherd to tell him to pray as he liked, and found that he had already gone beyond words. Sincere love counts for more than correct speech, and the one who corrects another must take care not to wound.

Who is at the door?

A man knocked at his friend's door. Who is there? asked the friend. It is I, he answered. Go away, said the friend; there is no place at this table for one who is raw. The man went away and wandered for a year in the fire of separation until he was cooked; then he came back and knocked again. Who is there? It is you, he answered. Then come in, said the friend, since you are I: there is no room in this house for two. The self that says I stands between the lover and the Beloved, and love burns it away.

The chickpea in the pot

A chickpea in the boiling pot leaps up to the rim and cries out: why are you burning me? The woman cooking it strikes it down with the ladle and answers: I boil you not because I hate you but so that you may gain taste and savour and become food, and mingle with the life of a living being. When you were green in the garden, you drank the rain for this.

Suffering, in his teaching, is the cooking by which a soul ripens. The soul that understands this bears it as the chickpea learns to bear the fire, trusting the hand that holds the ladle.

I died as a mineral

Die before you die, says a saying he loves: let the self die now, and death holds no terror. He shows it as a ladder. I died as a mineral and became a plant, he says; I died as a plant and rose to be an animal; I died as an animal and became a man. Why should I fear? When was I ever less by dying? Once more I shall die as a man, to soar with the angels, and then pass beyond even the angel into what no mind can picture.

The polishers

He retells the contest of painters, setting the Chinese against the Greeks. The Chinese asked for a hundred colours and painted their wall; the Greeks asked for nothing and polished theirs; when the curtain between them was drawn, the Chinese painting shone on the Greek wall more beautiful than itself. The Greeks are the Sufis, he says: without study, books or learning, they have polished their breasts clean of greed, avarice and hatred, so that the forms of every heaven are reflected there. Al-Ghazali tells the same story with the painters the other way round.

The one task

In the Discourses he puts it plainly. There is one thing in this world that must never be forgotten. Forget everything else and remember that, and there is no cause to worry; remember everything else and forget that, and nothing has been done. It is as if a king sent you to a country on one particular task, and you did a hundred other things there but not that one.

The task is the trust that the Qur'an says was offered to the heavens, the earth and the mountains, which refused to bear it, and which the human being took up. To spend the self on anything less is like using a sword of priceless steel as a butcher's knife, or a golden bowl to boil turnips.