|
Poetry
Chaikhana
|
|
|
|
About Hakim SanaiTimeline (1044? - 1150?) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
English version by Original Language |
No tongue can tell Your secret
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
No tongue can tell Your secret
for the measure of the word obscures Your nature. But the gift of the ear is that it hears what the tongue cannot tell.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Recently I've been reading Sanai's Hadiqatu'l Haqiqat or The Walled Garden of Truth -- a real pleasure! Like this verse: It has an elegant subtlety, and trimmed with a thin edge of wit. Here Sanai is playing with the mystic's dilemma of words.
"No tongue can tell Your secret / for the measure of the word obscures Your nature." The direct encounter with the Divine can't truly be put into words. Words are a creation of the limited mind, powerful, certainly, but limited. Words, even when masterfully wielded, can only described limited aspects of limited reality. Words imply a fracturing of reality into countless objects, an impassible duality of observer and observed, describer and described. How can words properly convey the undivided Wholeness?
(There is really no 'encounter' the way I just phrased it, because that implies two separates meeting, when there is really only the profound recognition of unity. Words fail the Wholeness.)
Seeing this limitation, some teachers construct complex frameworks of descriptions. Some hint and suggest and riddle. Some fall silent. What is said and what is left unsaid... a fascinating game. But it is only the encounter (which is not really an encounter) that conveys the truth of all this.
The "tongue cannot tell" these things properly. "But the gift of the ear / is that it hears" anyway. That is, when we truly and openly listen, an inner whisper begins to draw the awareness beyond the descriptions, the suggestions, the silences. And suddenly there we stand, outside of all words and concepts that obscure while they define. There we stand, witnessing, participating in the living Wholeness that is the divine nature of undivided Reality.
I like the game of words, perhaps too much. But it is time for my tongue to stop trying and let the ear enjoy its gift...
|
|
| Please support the Poetry Chaikhana, as well as the authors and publishers of sacred poetry, by purchasing some of the recommended books through the links on this site. Thank you! |
Ivan
M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright ©
2002 - 2008 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or
publishers.
