Original content

English translation

A poet, hoping for benefit, came to the door of Ma'n ibn Za'ida. He remained there for several days but gained no audience. He begged the gardener: 'When Ma'n enters the garden and sits by the water, let me know!' When that moment came, the gardener informed him. He wrote this verse on a plank of wood and set it upon the water:

'By the generosity of Ma'n — O Ma'n, I have a need; and I have no intercessor to Ma'n but you.'

When it reached Ma'n, he ordered that it be taken up; and when he read it, he summoned the poet and gave him ten purses of gold, and placed that piece of wood beneath his own carpet.

On the second day he brought that wood out from under his carpet, read it, summoned the poet, and gave him another hundred thousand dirhams; and on the third day he did likewise. The poet grew afraid that Ma'n might regret and reclaim what he had given, so he fled.

When on the fourth day Ma'n again brought out that piece of wood and summoned the poet but did not find him, he declared: 'It was within my capacity for generosity to bestow upon him so much that not a single dinar or dirham would remain in my treasury — but he had not the endurance for it.'

Who is the man of true generosity? He who, when a petitioner brings to his door as much hope as the heart can hold, opens the hand of beneficence and bestows so much that it exceeds even the compass of the petitioner's own aspiration.