Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, A Book of verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise now.
"How sweet is mortal Sovranty!"- think some:
Others - "how blest the Paradise to come!"
Ah - take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest
Oh the brave music of a distant Drum.
'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves and mates and slays.
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Right or Left as strikes the player goes;
And He that toss'd Thee down into the Field
He know about it all - He knows - HE knows!
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Listen again. One evening at the Close
Of Ramazan, ere the better Moon arose,
In that old Potter Shop I stood alone
With the clay Population round in Rows.
And, strange to tell, among that Earthern Lot
Some could articulate, while others not;
And suddenly one more impatient cried -
"Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?"
Then said another - "Surely not in vain
My substance from the common
Earth was ta'en,
That He who subtly wrought me into Shape
Should stamp me back
to common Earth again."
"Why," said another, "Some there are who tell
Of one who threatens he will toss to Hell
The luckless Pots he marr'd in making-Pish!
He's a Good Fellow, and 't will all be well."
Then another with a long-drawn Sigh,
"My Clay with long oblivion is gone dry:
But fill me with the old familiar Juice
Methinks I might recover by- and - by!"
Excerpt from the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam
Omar Khyyam lived in Persia from 1050-1123. Khyyam means tentmaker and this was probably his father's trade.
Omar was part of a trio of gifted students who vowed to help each other if any of them did well in life. One became the Sultan's Vizier and, through him, the ruler gave Omar an income which enabled him to dedicate himself to a life of learning.
Apart from the Rubaiyat (collection of verses,) he produced a work on algebra, some astrological tables, a work on the reform of the Muslim calender and a treatise on Sufi mysticism. The rest of his work is lost.
The Rubaiyat laughs, with dry humour, at the human condition, playfully examining the relationship between Creator and creation, the eternal and transient.
Khyyam dramatises this relationship through the metaphor of a potter and his pots.
In a crazy fantasy, Omar imagines himself in a potter's shop where some of the pots begin to talk. Each pot is like a different kind of person, musing about his time-bound nature. Suddenly, a more "impatient" pot cries: "Who is the Potter, pray, and who the pot?"
The Potter is the Creator and the pot, like a human being, a part of creation, but, one peevish pot touches on a critical question: Who is the Creator and who the created? What is the relationship between God and man?
The Rubaiyat reaches beyond duality. This Sufi idea of non-duality is similar to the Advaita (non-duality) school of Hinduism, as taught by Ramana Maharshi. If there is one, there is no other.
This is not just an intellectual understanding; it is felt and lived, outside the boundaries of language and concepts. When we go beyond the polarities of male and female, day and night, winter and summer, a new mode of existence is born, or rather, remembered and one can simply BE.
Yet, unlike Advaita, the Rubaiyat (and Sufis in general) retain an element of duality between God and man through words such as "Thou" which imply another. So, man and God are neither two nor one. It is a paradox, reaching beyond logic. The mind cannot grasp a paradox and becomes tired so one drops into the heart. This is a Sufi practice, precipitated by reading the poem.
Omar is not the first Sufi to confuse and confound the intellectual mind in order to awaken the heart.
The pots confront their own mortality, speaking of death. One pot questions the purpose of his life in the face of death: "Surely not in vain/ My substance from the common/ Earth was ta'en." The implied question is audacious: Why does death exist?
Like a person (according to the creation story of the Koran or the Bible) a pot is made from earth and returns to earth. This particular pot is not happy with his condition, dismayed by the possibility that his brief life may have no purpose.
Another pot restores faith in God, whom he calls a "good fellow!" The bathos jolts us into a fresh way of looking. By using this irreverant colloquial tone to speak of the Ultimate, Khayyam juxtaposes the mundane and the sublime, grounding spiritual insight in concrete images such as pots and wine.
One pot which has gone dry with "oblivion" or forgetfulness, thirsts for the "old, familiar juice" which may help him to recover. This juice has a double meaning. On the concrete level it is water and on the metaphorical level, it is the wine of divine grace, a metaphor often used in Sufi poetry.
In other words, the pot, like some of us, is experiencing spiritual thirst. All the pots feel rather helpless and fatalistic. They do not speak of free will. They know they have no control over their destiny for they are in the Potter's hands.
A similar theme runs through the "Chequer-board" stanza. Here the metaphor for life is a chess board with white and black squares, symbolising day and night (we are back in the realm of duality.) Destiny plays with men as chess pieces. We are the pawns, the kings and queens, playing out our human dramas before death:
'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with men for pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves and mates and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.
It is God who lays us back in the closet (the coffin) but Omar does not name Him, leaving the reader to fill in the unspoken gap.
The next metaphor for life reinforces the point. The ball cannot say yes or no (ie a person has no free will) for he is in the hands of the Player (God). In other words, we do not know much about this life, nor do we have control over it. God is the one who 'knows':
"And He that tossed Thee down into the Field
He knows about it all-He knows-HE knows!"
These lines are about surrender, which is central to the Sufi path and also to the Muslim tradition. Osho speaks about Sufism and surrender:
"...Sufism insists on surrender. Surrender and be possesed by God. Do not try to posses God, don't try to grab God...Many seekers move with this tremendous ego: that they have to search, their ego is at stake. But they will never find. You can find God only when you have disappeared. When the seeker is no more, suddenly only God is left."
(p. 250, "Sufis; The People of the Path")
The next stanza is also about surrender. God is dramatized as a moving finger writing on a page. Omar warns us that we cannot "cancel half a Line." There is nothing we can do to erase the past. It is a traditional model of karma from which there is no escape.
So what to do? Khayyam gives a surprizing answer: "take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest." In other words we are asked to seize the day, don't miss the moment for this moment is everything.
Khyyam lies under a tree with a flask of wine, a book of poetry and "Thou." For him, this is "Paradise." The wine is a metaphor for God's grace and the mysterious "other" is here. God is present, singing in the wilderness and the wilderness - wild, untamed nature - is enough. What more do we need?
While Khayyam's rather shocking and witty poem is filled with banal images of wine and indulgence, it points in the direction of surrender and faith. It looks like a perverse poem placing sensual pleasures above the intellect but it is actually about the Beloved.
Khayyam favours wine over the intellect, not because he is an alcoholic (in the context of Muslim culture this image is all the more rebellious and shocking as the Koran forbids alcohol) but because he is a Sufi, living from the heart and not the head, communing with his Creator, with whom he is mysteriously and intimately linked in a relationship which is neither dual nor non-dual.
God is the player, the potter, the writer and we are the chess pieces, the pots, the characters. Speaking from a different era and culture, Shakespeare expresses a similar idea through the words of a disillusioned Macbeth:
"Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
(Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5)
Macbeth is dismayed by this insight into the human drama but Khyyam is not. Khyyam teases the reader with a humourous undertone, a mock severity. At the same time, he undercuts the harshness of transcience with the beauty of the moment. Yes, the body dies and there is nothing we can do about it but here in this very moment is union. Here and now we can find fulfillment, peace, eternity. Here and now we can find paradise: the "Wilderness" and "Thou," the mysterious "other" to whom we belong.
While Khayyam is constantly reminding us about death, the Rubaiyat is really about how to live. Understanding the transience of form, we can recognise our aliveness before it's too late.
The warning is clear: don't postpone the bliss of communion or block it with intellect. Now is the moment for surrender, for union. As Rumi, perhaps the most famous Sufi poet, says in one of his poems, don't stand outside the door, wondering. Just open the door and enter. If not now, when? The moment has arrived.