Rumi The Big Red Book Read online

  Rumi:

  The Big Red Book

  The Great Masterpiece Celebrating

  Mystical Love and Friendship

  Odes and Quatrains from The Shams

  The Collected Translations of

  Coleman Barks

  Based on the work of John Moyne, Nevit Ergin,

  A. J. Arberry, and Reynold Nicholson

  This book is for all those who

  love what Rumi and Shams love.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part I - Odes (Ghazals)

  Chapter 1 - Al-Fattah, The Opener

  Chapter 2 - Al-Jami, The Gatherer

  Chapter 3 - Al-Batin, The Hidden

  Chapter 4 - Al-Khabir, The Aware, The Knowing

  Chapter 5 - Al-Bari, The Maker from Nothing

  Chapter 6 - Al-Hayy, The Living

  Chapter 7 - Al-Haqq, The Truth

  Chapter 8 - As-Salaam, Peace

  Chapter 9 - Ar-Rahim, The Compassionate

  Chapter 10 - An-Nur, Light

  Chapter 11 - Ash-Shakur, The Grateful

  Chapter 12 - Al-Latif, The Subtle, The Intricate

  Chapter 13 - Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

  Chapter 14 - Osho

  Chapter 15 - Ramana Maharshi

  Chapter 16 - Dissolving the Concept of “God”

  Chapter 17 - Playing

  Chapter 18 - Shams Tabriz: The Friend

  Chapter 19 - Tenderness Toward Existence

  Chapter 20 - As-Sabur, The Patient

  Chapter 21 - Ar-Rahman, The Kind

  Chapter 22 - Al-Mutakabbir, The Majesty

  Chapter 23 - As-Sami, The Hearing

  Chapter 24 - Al-Basir, The Seeing

  Chapter 25 - Al-Wadud, The Loving

  Chapter 26 - Everything and Everyone Else

  Chapter 27 - The Name That Cannot Be Spoken or Written

  Part II - Quatrains (Rubai)

  Chapter 28 - Taurus: The Bull

  Chapter 29 - Ursa Major: The Great Bear, the Big Dipper

  Chapter 30 - Corona Borealis: The Northern Crown

  Chapter 31 - Libra: The Scales

  Chapter 32 - Gemini: The Twins, Castor and Pollux

  Chapter 33 - Cancer: The Crab

  Chapter 34 - Cassiopeia: The Queen

  Chapter 35 - Virgo: The Virgin

  Chapter 36 - Orion: The Hunter

  Chapter 37 - Leo: The Lion

  Chapter 38 - The Milky Way: Our Home Address Seen from the Side

  Chapter 39 - Bijou: The Black Hole

  Chapter 40 - Columba: Noah’s Dove

  Chapter 41 - Draco: The Dragon

  Chapter 42 - Capricorn: The Sea Goat

  Chapter 43 - Hercules: The Hero

  Chapter 44 - Pegasus: The Winged Horse

  Chapter 45 - Lepus: The Hare

  Chapter 46 - Canis Major: The Great Dog

  Chapter 47 - Boötes: The Herdsman

  Chapter 48 - Aries: The Ram

  Chapter 49 - Delphinus: The Dolphin

  Chapter 50 - Cetus: The Sea Monster, or Kraken

  Chapter 51 - Andromeda: The Chained Queen

  Chapter 52 - Scorpio: The Scorpion

  Chapter 53 - Sagittarius: The Archer

  Chapter 54 - Pisces: The Fish

  Notes

  Note on These Translations

  Index of Familiar First Lines

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Coleman Barks

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  RUMI’s LIFE

  Jelaluddin Rumi was born near the city of Balkh in what is now Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire, on September 30, 1207. He descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics. When Rumi was still a young man, his family left Balkh ahead of the invading armies of Genghis Khan, who was extending his empire westward, eventually all the way to the Adriatic. It is said that Rumi’s father, Bahauddin, loaded ninety camels with just books for the journey. Theirs was a profoundly learned lineage.

  Rumi and his family went to Damascus and on to Nishapur, where the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar recognized the teenage boy as a great spirit. He is reported to have said, as he saw Bahauddin walking toward him with Rumi a little behind, “Here comes a sea, followed by an ocean.” To honor this insight he gave Rumi a copy of his wonderful Ilahinama (The Book of God).

  The family eventually settled in Konya, now in south-central Turkey, where Bahauddin resumed his role as head of the medrese, the dervish learning community. Rumi was still in his twenties several years later when his father died and he became head of the medrese. He gained a wide reputation as a devout scholar, and his school reportedly numbered over ten thousand students. Broadly speaking, the work of Rumi’s community was to open the individual and the collective heart. Its members used music and poetry and movement. They sat in silence. They listened to discourses. Stories, jokes, meditation—everything was used. They fasted and they feasted. (The cook Ahim Baaz was a very important figure in Rumi’s community. You can visit his tomb in Konya today.) The members of Rumi’s community walked together. They worked in the garden and the orchard. They observed animal behavior very carefully; it was a kind of scripture they read for signs.

  This was not a renunciate group. Everyone had a family and a line of useful work; they were masons, grocers, weavers, hatmakers, carpenters, tailors, and bookbinders. Everyone was deeply engaged. These were affirmative, ecstatic makers. Some call them Sufis. I like to say they were living the way of the heart.

  A few years after Bahauddin’s death in 1231, Burhan Mahaqqiq, a hermit meditator in the remote mountain region north and east of Konya, returned and found that his teacher, Rumi’s father, had died. He decided to devote the rest of his life to training his teacher’s son. For nine years he led Rumi on many, sometimes three consecutive, forty-day fasts (chillas). Rumi became a joyful adept in this mystical tradition.

  Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, saved 147 of his father’s personal letters, so, amazingly, we have a somewhat accurate sense of what his daily life was like eight centuries ago. He was deeply involved in the details of community life. In one letter he begs a man to put off, for fifteen days, collecting the money he is owed by another man. In another he asks a wealthy nobleman to help a student out with a small loan. Someone’s relatives had moved into the hut of a devout old woman, and he tries to solve the situation. Sudden lines of poetry are scattered throughout the practical business contained in the letters. His life was grounded in daily necessities and in the ecstatic simultaneously.

  In the late fall of 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a fierce man-God, or God-man. Shams had wandered through the Near East in search of a soul friend on his level. Shams was sometimes lost in mystical awareness for three or four days. He took work as a mason to balance his visionary bewilderment with hard physical labor. When he was paid, he contrived to slip his wages into another worker’s jacket before he left. He never stayed anywhere long. Whenever students began to gather around him, as they inevitably did, he excused himself for a drink of water, wrapped his black cloak around himself, and was gone. Because of this restless searching, he was known as Parinda, or the Flier or Bird. He prayed that God’s hidden favorite be revealed to him, so that he could learn more about the mysteries of divine love. An inner voice came, What will you give in return?

  “My head,” said Shams.

  The one you seek is Jelaluddin of Konya, son of Bahauddin of Balkh.

  Shams arrived in Konya on November 29, 1244. He took lodging at the caravanserai of the sugar merchants, pretending to be a successful seller of sugar
. But all he had in his room was a broken water pot, a ragged mat, and a headrest of unbaked clay. One day, as Shams sat at the gate, Rumi came by riding a donkey, surrounded by students. Shams rose and took the bridle.

  “Money changer of the current coins of esoteric significance, knower of the names of the Lord, tell me. Who is greater, Muhammad or Bestami?”1

  “Muhammad is incomparable among the saints and prophets.”

  “Then how is it he said, ‘We have not known You as You should be known,’ while Bestami cried out, ‘How great is my glory!’ ”

  Rumi fainted when he heard the depth of the question and fell to the ground. When he revived, he answered, “For Muhammad the mystery is always unfolding, while Bestami takes one gulp and is satisfied.”

  The two tottered off together. They spent weeks and months at a time together in the mystical conversation known as sohbet.

  Another version of their meeting is: One day Rumi was teaching by a fountain in a small square in Konya. Books were open on the fountain’s ledge. Shams walked quickly through the students and pushed the books into the water.

  “Who are you and what are you doing?” Rumi asked.

  “You must now live what you have been reading about.”

  Rumi turned to the books in the fountain, one of them his father’s precious spiritual diary, the Maarif.

  Shams said, “We can retrieve them. They will be as dry as they ever were.” He lifted out the Maarif to show him. Dry.

  “Leave them,” said Rumi.

  With that relinquishment of books and borrowed awareness, Rumi’s real life began, and his real poetry too. “What I had thought of before as God,” Rumi said, “I met today in a human being.”

  The meeting with Shams was the central event in Rumi’s life. They were together in Konya for about three and a half years. Twice during that time the jealousy of Rumi’s disciples drove Shams away, and twice Rumi sent his son Sultan Velad to bring him back. What happened next is the subject of extensive debate among scholars. Shams either left on his own, disappearing without a trace, as he had evidently threatened several times to do, or was killed by a group of the jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. The latter is the version that has come down in the oral tradition among the Mevlevi dervishes, the order begun by Sultan Velad.

  In this version Shams came to Sultan Velad in a dream after he had been killed and told him the circumstances of the murder. The son then kept that painful information from Rumi. He let him go out on long searches for Shams, to Damascus and elsewhere. The situation became a kind of reverse analogue for the Joseph story, in which Joseph’s brothers pretend that the beloved one is dead, telling Jacob, the father, that he has been killed by a wolf. Here Rumi is not told that the beloved one has been killed by a group of his students, one of them his son. Both stories involve the central figure living for years under a misconception about the person dearest to them. The Joseph story, of course, resolves beautifully when Joseph, through his dream-interpreting skills, comes to be in charge of the granaries of Egypt and then later reunites with his family.

  Rumi is reunited with Shams in the poetry, and in his inmost core. Perhaps a conventional religious community cannot contain the wild originality of a Shams Tabriz until it becomes embodied in someone like Rumi, who can be a bridge between wild gnostic experience and more traditional belief. This mysterious event comes on one of Rumi’s journeys in search of Shams. Suddenly, walking a Damascus street, Rumi feels that he is their friendship, that he no longer needs to look for Shams. Whatever miracle they were together, he is now in himself. Call off the search.

  Rumi translator and biographer Franklin Lewis has done formidable research, and he sees the story differently.2 He feels that Shams was not murdered, that he left on his own, perhaps so that Rumi’s soul growth could move to another level. It is true that Shams was a mystic who demanded movement, always more, of whatever came, always more blessings, more ecstatic praise. It must have been strenuous to have been around Shams, almost impossible for some. Shams once said that if you could lift up the Kaaba and take it out of the world, you would then see that what we all had been praying to, five times a day, was the divine glory in each other. That notion is difficult to place in a conventional theology. It must have been unacceptable to a segment of Rumi’s community to have had their beloved teacher totally absorbed in the company of such a wild man. So Franklin Lewis thinks that Shams disappeared on his own and that his tomb is elsewhere, not in Konya, maybe out on the road toward Tabriz, in the town of Khuy. A minaret there is called by his name. Nothing is certain. Shams shall remain elusive.

  I tend to believe that the jealous murder of Shams Tabriz actually happened. One thing is sure. With the disappearance of Shams, whether by violence or his own choice, Rumi’s poetry went deeper. The core of longing became more radiant and vital, reflecting the depth of the communion that was the majestic friendship between Rumi and Shams.

  Rumi had two wives. The first, Gowher Khatun, by whom he had two sons, Ala al-Din and Sultan Velad, died in 1242. Then he married Kira Khatun, by whom he had a son, Mozaffer, and a daughter, Malika. There is a wonderful hagiographic story about Kira Khatun. One day she peered through a slit in the door into the room where Rumi and Shams were sitting in sohbet (mystical conversation). She saw one of the walls open and six majestic beings enter. The strangers bowed and laid flowers at Rumi’s feet, although it was the middle of winter. They remained until the time for dawn prayers, which they motioned for Shams to lead. He excused himself, and Rumi performed the duties. When prayers were over, the six left through the wall. Rumi came from the chamber and, seeing his wife in the hall, gave her the flowers, saying, “Some visitors brought these for you.”

  The next day she sent her servant to the perfumers’ market with a few leaves and blossoms from the bouquet. The perfumers were baffled, unable to identify the flowers, until a spice trader from India recognized them as flowers that grew only in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The servant went back with this astonishing news, and just as he was telling it, Rumi came in and told her to take good care of the flowers, because Indian saints had brought them from the paradise that human beings had lost. As long as Kira Khatun lived (she died nineteen years after Rumi), the flowers stayed fresh and fragrant, and just a single leaf applied to a diseased eye or other injured part brought instantaneous healing.

  Rumi is known in the popular mind, of course, as the first whirling dervish. Shams seems to have taught him this form of physical and auditory meditation, sema. It was called deep listening, and it was said that whatever one was striving for would increase in sema. Rumi sometimes composed poetry while turning. He gives several reasons for putting music and poetry and movement together in his soul-growth work. In one of his Discourses he says:

  Responding to the prayers of the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, God made the Romans a major recipient of his mercy and Roman Anatolia the most beautiful of all landscapes. The people here, though, could not receive such grace. They had little taste for the inner life or the unseen world. For that reason I was attracted away from Khorasan (Persia), so that my children in this community could change the Roman copper to gold. They themselves would become the philosopher stones which cause this alchemy. But since Roman Anatolia was not ready for the gifts I had to give, I devised poetry, with music, to entrance the inhabitants toward spiritual truth. The people who live in this region are very blessed, lively and curious and fond of art, but as a sick child must be coaxed with sweetening to take medicine, they must be persuaded with poetry to acquire a longing for the soul.

  Many stories have come down to us, through the hagiographic sources, about Rumi and children, about Rumi and beggars, the rejected of society, and especially about Rumi and animals. He was very in tune with the animal mind, much like an indigenous shaman. Every year Rumi went to a place near Konya where there were hot springs. Near a large lake music festivals were arranged, and Rumi gave discourses. One day the ducks that live on the lak
e were so vociferous that no one could hear the talk. Rumi yelled at them, “Either you give this discourse, or let me!” Complete silence. And during the remaining weeks he was there, no duck made a noise. When it came time for him to return to Konya, he went to the edge of the lake and gave the ducks permission to quack as much as they wanted, whereupon duck chatter resumed.

  Here’s another story I love. Some butchers purchased a heifer and were leading her to be slaughtered. Suddenly she broke free and ran. They shouted at her, but that just made her more crazed. No one could get near her. Rumi was walking the same road with his disciples some distance behind. When the heifer saw him, she trotted over and stood beside him very still as though communing with his spirit. He rubbed and patted her neck. When the butchers came to claim their property, he pleaded for her life. His students joined in the discussion. Rumi used the situation: “If a simple animal, being led to its death, can take such lovely refuge with me, how much more beautiful must it be when a human being puts heart and soul in the care of God?” The entire group, dervishes and butchers alike, found such joy in these words that they began to play music, and dancing and spontaneous poetry continued into the night.