Masnavi-i-Manavi (Rumi)
Jalal ad-Din Rumi's six-book Persian poem of mystical love — ~26,000 couplets composed 1258–1273. The central text of the Mevlevi (whirling dervish) order. E.H. Whinfield's 1898 abridged verse translation.
Source context· Persian stream · Ancient Persian cultural impulse
- Stream
- Persian
- Cultural impulse
- Ancient Persian (2nd post-Atlantean cultural age)
- Composed
- c. 1273 CE
- Written down
- Greco-Latin (4th post-Atlantean cultural age) manuscript epoch
- 1The Masnavi Book I — Book I — Listen to the reed — the great prelude
Opens the Masnavi with the most famous passage in Persian literature — the song of the reed (Bishnaw īn nay): Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separations. The reed cut from the reed-bed becomes the figure of the soul cut from its divine source. The frame for the entire 25,000-couplet didactic-mystical epic.
18,650 words - 2The Masnavi Book II — Book II — the perils and disciplines of the path
Book II returns to the Masnavi form after the great prelude. The dangers of the spiritual path: false teachers, self-deception, the nafs (lower self) disguising itself as the higher. The tales gather around the discipline by which the seeker distinguishes truth from imitation.
15,574 words - 3The Masnavi Book III — Book III — the depths of the soul; ecstatic intoxication
The exploration of the soul's depths. The famous tales of the elephant in the dark room (each describing only the part they touched), of Solomon and the hoopoe, of Bahlul. The relation of sukr (intoxication) and ṣaḥw (sobriety) in the Sufi path.
18,752 words - 4The Masnavi Book IV — Book IV — Love's secret; the wisdom-tales
The middle book of the cycle. Stories of the lover's secret kept and broken; of the prince and the beggar; of the slave-girl in love. The Sufi doctrine of love as the supreme path — the 'ishq (impassioned love) that surpasses even the higher reasoning of the ḥakīm.
15,676 words - 5The Masnavi Book V — Book V — fanā and baqā — annihilation and subsistence
The Sufi doctrine of fanā' (passing-away of the self) and baqā' (subsisting in God). Tales that illustrate the moments of fanā' — the lover dissolved in the Beloved — and the corresponding state of baqā' in which the dissolved one returns to ordinary life now living in God.
18,054 words - 6The Masnavi Book VI — Book VI — the closing book; the tales of the King and the Three Princes
The closing book of the Masnavi. The long Three Princes tale of the king who would not let his sons see the perilous castle until they were of age; their disobedience; their corresponding adventures and disciplines. Rumi's death interrupted the book's completion — its final couplet is famously unresolved.
17,576 words
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