Concept

In Jami's Section 77 of the Haft Awrang, the Madman of Balkh weeps bitterly over every corpse in his city. When a counselor reproaches him for squandering his tears on strangers, the madman laughs and reveals that he weeps not out of grief for the dead but for himself: each death he witnesses is a rehearsal and reminder of his own inevitable dying. Every fallen life prompts him to mourn his own eventual fall.

The tale reframes mourning away from attachment to others and toward a sustained meditation on one's own mortality. Weeping becomes an inward spiritual discipline rather than sentimental grief, aligning with the wider Persian Sufi motif of the wise madman whose apparently irrational sorrow encodes a lesson about death, self-knowledge, and readiness for the divine.