Original content

English translation

For a time this Masnavi was delayed; a respite was needed until blood became milk. Until your fortune bears a new child, blood does not become sweet milk, O good listener. When Diya al-Haqq Husam al-Din turned the reins back from the height of heaven, since he had gone to the ascension of realities, without his spring the buds had remained unopened. When he returned from the sea to the shore, the harp of the Masnavi's poetry came back into tune. The Masnavi, which was the polisher of spirits: his return was its day of reopening. The opening date of this passion and profit was the year 662. A nightingale went from here and returned; it returned to hunt these meanings. May the king's forearm be the dwelling of this falcon; may this door be open to creation forever. The bane of this door is vain desire and lust; otherwise here is sherbet upon sherbet. Close this mouth so that you may see plainly: the throat and mouth are the blindfold of that world. O mouth, you are the very mouth of hell; O world of yours, you are like a barzakh. Eternal light beside the low world, pure milk beside streams of blood: when you step into it carelessly, your milk becomes blood through mixture. Adam took one step in the taste of the lower self; separation from the chief seat of Paradise became a collar on his neck. Angels fled from him as from a demon; for a few loaves he shed tears. Though the sin he had committed was a single hair, that hair had grown in both eyes. Adam was the eye of the ancient light; a hair in the eye is a mighty mountain. Had Adam consulted in that matter, he would not, in remorse, have offered an excuse. For when one intellect is paired with another intellect, it prevents bad action and bad speech. When one lower self becomes the friend of another lower self, the partial intellect becomes idle and useless. When you become hopeless from loneliness, under the shade of a sun-like friend you become radiant. Go quickly and seek a godly friend; when you have done that, God will be your friend. Whoever has fixed his gaze in retreat has in the end learned that too from a friend. Retreat must be from strangers, not from the friend; the fur coat is for winter, not spring. Intellect with another intellect becomes twofold; light increases and the road becomes visible. The lower self with another lower self laughs together; darkness increases and the road is hidden. The friend is your eye, O hunter; keep him clean of straw and chaff. Beware: do not raise dust with the broom of the tongue; do not bring chaff as a road-gift for the eye. Since the believer is the mirror of the believer, his face is safe from pollution. The friend is a mirror for the soul in sorrow; O soul, do not breathe on the mirror's face, lest it cover its face because of your breath. You must hold your breath at every moment. Even earth is not less than this: when earth found an earthy friend, from spring it found a hundred thousand lights. A tree that is paired with a friend blossoms from head to foot in pleasant air. In autumn, when it saw a contrary friend, it drew its face and head under a cover. It said: A bad friend is calamity and disorder; when he comes, my path is to sleep. So let me sleep and be among the People of the Cave, better than Decius, that prisoner of greed. Their wakefulness was spent on Decius; their sleep was the capital of honor. Sleep is wakefulness when it is with knowledge; woe to the wakefulness that sits with the ignorant. When crows pitched their tents in Bahman, nightingales hid and fell silent. For without the rose-garden the nightingale is silent; the absence of the sun kills wakefulness. O sun, you leave this garden so that you may illumine what is under the earth. The sun of gnosis has no migration; its rising-place is nothing but soul and intellect. Especially the sun of perfection, for that is a mystery: day and night its work is illumination. Come to the rising-place of the sun, if you are Alexander; after that, wherever you go, you will fare beautifully. After that, wherever you go becomes an east; easts will fall in love with your west. Your bat-sense runs toward the west; your sense that scatters pearls runs toward the east. The road of sense is the road of asses, O rider; be ashamed to crowd the asses. There are five senses besides these five senses: those are like red gold, and these senses like copper. In that market where the worthy are gathered, how would they buy the copper sense as the gold sense? The bodily sense eats the food of darkness; the soul's sense grazes from a sun. O you who have carried the baggage of the senses toward the unseen, bring your hand out from your breast like Moses. O you whose attributes are the sun of gnosis, while the sun of the sphere is bound to a single attribute: at times you become sun, at times sea, at times Mount Qaf, at times the Anqa. In your essence you are neither this nor that, O you beyond imaginations and beyond more than more. The spirit is with knowledge and is friend to intellect; what has spirit to do with Arabic and Turkish? Because of you, O formless one with so many forms, both the anthropomorphist and the monotheist are bewildered. At times you make the anthropomorphist a monotheist; at times forms waylay the monotheist. At times, in drunkenness, Abu al-Hasan says to you: O young in age, O moist-bodied one. At times he demolishes his own form; he does that for the beloved's transcendence. The eye of sense has the doctrine of i'tizal; the eye of intellect is Sunni in union. The people of i'tizal are enslaved to sense; from error they present themselves as Sunni. Whoever has gone beyond sense is Sunni; the people of insight have the eye of intellect as a fine-footed guide. If animal sense had seen the King, then ox and ass would have seen God. If you had no other sense besides animal sense from the outer air, when would the children of Adam have been honored? When would they have become intimate through the shared sense? Your saying 'formless' or 'formed' is invalid unless you go out from form. 'Formless' or 'formed' is before the one who is all kernel and has come out of the husk. If you are blind, there is no blame upon the blind; otherwise go, for patience is the key to relief. The medicine of patience for the veils of the eye both burns and produces expansion of the breast. When the mirror of the heart becomes clear and pure, you see forms beyond water and earth. You see both the form and the Painter, the carpet of fortune and also the carpet-spreader. When the image of my friend came like Abraham the Friend, its form was an idol and its meaning an idol-breaker. Thanks be to God that when he appeared, in his image the soul saw its own image. The dust of your threshold was seducing my heart; dust on anyone who would turn away from your dust. I said: If I am beautiful, I accept this from him; if not, he himself has laughed at me, ugly-faced. The remedy is that I look at myself; otherwise, if he laughs at me, how would I know myself? He is beautiful and loves beauty; when would a young man choose a decrepit old woman? Beauty attracts beauty; read over this: good women are for good men. In the world each thing attracts something like itself; warmth drew warmth, cold drew cold. The portion of falsehood attracts the false; the abiding ones are happy with the abiding. Fiery ones attract fiery ones; luminous ones seek luminous ones. When you closed your eye, your soul was not torn away; the eye has no patience away from the window's light. When you closed your eye, distress seized you; when did the eye's light blossom from the window's light? Your distress was the attraction of the eye's light, so that it might quickly join the light of day. If distress seizes you with open eyes, know that you have closed the eye of the heart: open it. Recognize that as the demand of the two eyes of the heart, which seek measureless radiance. Since separation from those two unstable lights brought you distress and you opened your eyes, then separation from those two lasting lights brings distress; guard it well. Since he calls me, let me look: am I worthy of attraction, or ugly in form? If a subtle one follows an ugly one, it is mockery that he makes of him. When shall I see my own face, wondrously, to know what color I am, like day or like night? I sought the image of my soul greatly; my image appeared from no one. I said: What, then, is a mirror for, so that each person may know what and who he is? The iron mirror is for skins; the mirror of the soul's countenance is beyond price. The mirror of the soul is nothing but the face of the friend, the face of the friend who is from that realm. I said: O heart, seek the universal mirror; go to the sea, for the task is not done by a brook. Through this seeking, the servant reached your lane; Mary's pain drew her to the palm tree. When your eye became my heart's seeing, the unseen heart became drowned in vision. I saw you as the universal mirror forever; in your eye I saw my own image. I said: At last I have found myself; in his two eyes I found a clear path. My illusion said: Beware, that is your imagination; distinguish your essence from your imagination. My image called out from your eye: I am you and you are me in union. For in this luminous, unfading eye, when can imagination find a path among realities? If in the two eyes of someone other than me you see your image, know that as imagination and reject it. For it draws in the kohl of nonbeing and drinks wine from Satan's image. Their eyes are houses of imagination and nonbeing; inevitably they see nonexistent things as existent. Since my eye has received kohl from the Lord of Majesty, it is a house of being, not a house of imagination. As long as one hair of you remains before the eye, in your imagination a gem will seem like jade. You will know jade from jewel only when you make a complete crossing beyond your imagination. Hear a story, O jewel-knower, so that you may know direct vision from analogy.