Halqa Meeting of January 27, 2013. Abdul Hayy Khilwati: Rumi's Masnawi is an
unsurpassed masterpiece of Sufi literature, not only because of its ...
Halqa Meeting of January 27, 2013 Abdul Hayy Khilwati: Rumi’s Masnawi is an unsurpassed masterpiece of Sufi literature, not only because of its comprehensive elucidation of Islamic spirituality and practice, but also because of Rumi’s skill at making the most profound ideas understandable. Rumi’s own immediate ecstatic experience and gnostic insight seem to have been guiding principles in the Masnawi’s somewhat unstructured composition. Not surprisingly, some of his spiritually less informed critics have deemed the Masnawi to be chaotic and of uneven quality. Rumi frequently makes use of fables and stories, some with striking imagery, to illustrate his teachings. This has made it easier for readers to grasp and retain his teachings so as to take them to deeper and deeper levels of understanding. Let us take the example of his story of the King and the Handmaiden, the first story to be introduced in the Masnawi. The various characters in the story represent different aspects of any individual person. Starting with the characters as they appear, there is the King who represents spirit once it is embodied in this terrestrial sphere. The King has the inherent capacity for understanding both the spiritual and material worlds, but has lost the direct use of his purely spiritual faculties. He is out hunting one day when he sees the Handmaiden who represents the soul and the heart. He immediately falls in love with her and soon afterwards marries her. Shortly thereafter, his happiness is shattered when she falls ill. He offers his kingdom to anyone who can cure her. Members of his court (i.e. his own intellectual and speculative faculties) offer to cure her but they fail to do so because of pride, and they only make matters worse. Their pride arises from their being alienated from Spirit which is Divine Awareness. The King realizes their impotence and he turns to God in humble supplication. In complete surrender to God, he falls asleep and dreams of a spiritual physician who tells him that his prayers will be answered. The doctor promises to appear the following day to treat the Handmaiden. The spiritual physician, in the likeness of the image the King had seen in his dream, does arrive the next day. The King immediately feels a deep love for him (who is not other than his own essential self) and guides the physician to his worldly love, the Handmaiden, who is actually his own soul. The physician sees what the King cannot perceive, which is that the Handmaiden has become ill because she is in love with someone else. He discovers that she is secretly in love with a goldsmith in Samarqand. The goldsmith represents the world of outer form and the Handmaiden has become deeply attached to him. The Physician arranges to lure the goldsmith to the kingdom with promises of gold and fame. Once the goldsmith arrives, the Physician convinces the King to allow the Handmaiden to marry him, (not a agreeable turn of events for most of Rumi’s Muslim readers). The King agrees to this plan without a protest. As soon as the Handmaiden is joined with the goldsmith, her condition rapidly improves. At this point the King (under the physician’s guidance) has poison administered to the goldsmith and he gradually becomes fatally ill. The handmaiden becomes weaned of the goldsmith as his illness increases, making him uninteresting and unattractive. She hardly notices when he dies, and is at that point liberated from her attraction to the world of outer form.
The first thing to notice about the story is that Rumi progressively integrates all the levels of self. These are the same levels that we have been studying in Rumi’s supplication that begins, “O God, do Thou show the soul that high station...” By integrating the different aspects of ourselves, an alchemy can take place that will heal and liberate a person. The Physician, we are told, comes from the level of the true imagination. It will therefore be of help to the King who has surrendered to God. The King appears to represent the level of limited self-existence as described in the supplication. The Physician tells the Handmaiden stories to uncover what has caused her ailment. She seems to represent that existence in the world of ‘sense and color’ in the supplication that Rumi has called a ‘prison’. In Rumi’s story, the Handmaiden seems unaware of the cause of her own ailment until the Physician discovers it. Each of us has a King, the ‘self in charge’, who is unable to heal himself or herself through the usual application of the intellect and reasoning. It is only when we surrender ourselves to Spirit that a wiser aspect of the self, the Physician, will present itself. He will tell us stories in dreams as we sleep, stories that keep trying to show us the roots of those attachements which have caused our malaise. When this all becomes clear to us, the physician will supply the jazbah, poison to our attachment to the outer world of form, and those attachments, represented by the goldsmith, will wither and die. It is the full moon tonight, so I present you with a relevant poem from Book V, verse 673, of the Masnawi: The cloud has a shadow cast upon the earth; The moon has no shadow as a companion. Being selfless is to be cloudless, O seeker; Be like the disc of the moon in selflessness. When again a cloud has blown in above us, the moon’s light departs––fantasy remains. Its light is rendered dim from the cloud cover. The noble full moon seems less than a new moon. The moon appears a fantasy through clouds and dust; The body’s cloud disturbs us with its fantasies. Gaze on the moon’s grace––it too of the grace of He who said that clouds are My own enemies. The moon is independent of clouds and mists; It orbits us far above this celestial sphere.
The clouds become the enemies of our souls since they conceal the Moon from our eyes. This veil makes heaven’s damsel seem a crone; It makes the full moon less than a crescent. The Moon seated us in the lap of Glory; He said, “your enemy is also My enemy.” The cloud’s light and moisture are from this Moon; Whoever calls the cloud the moon is quite lost. When the moon’s light falls upon the cloud, the cloud’s dark aspect becomes transformed. Though appearing like the moon and wealth, it’s really the moonlight on loan to the cloud. At the Resurrection, the sun and moon are dismissed; The eye is occupied with the Source of the Radiance, for it to distinguish between what’s owned and loaned and between the perishing and the permanent abodes. The wetnurse was on loan for three or four days; O our Mother, may you take us to your breast. My feathers are a mere cloud, a coarse veil; They are graceful by the reflection of His grace. I pluck my feathers and their beauty blocking the way to see the Moon’s beauty from the Moon itself. I don’t want a wetnurse, my mother is sweeter; I am really a Moses, my wetnurse is my mother. I don’t want the Moon’s grace from an intermediary; Relating that way brought calamity to our people. Or let a cloud take the nature of the Moon so that it does not become a veil over Its Face.
It then reveals the Moon’s form through self-effacement like the physical existence of the prophets and saints. That kind of cloud is not a maker of veils and curtains; It is in spirit a shredder of veils––one of great value.
