The Chickpea to the Cook
The Cook Was Boiled First
Masnavi III.4159–4164 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1930Look at a chickpea in the pot, how it leaps up when it is subjected to the fire.At the time of its being boiled, the chickpea comes up continually to the top of the pot and raises a hundred cries,Saying, “Why are you setting the fire on me? Since you bought (and approved) me, how are you turning me upside down?”The housewife goes on hitting it with the ladle. “No!” says she: “boil nicely and don't jump away from one who makes the fire.I do not boil you because you are hateful to me: nay, 'tis that you may get taste and savour,So that you may become nutriment and mingle with the (vital) spirit: this affliction of yours is not on account of (your) being despised.”
- First attested
- 1278The text is Mathnawī III.4159–4208. No autograph survives. The oldest witness is the Qoniya manuscript, dated 677 A.H. — 1278, five years after Rūmī died — which Nicholson designated G and judged “the most authoritative text of the Mathnawi”; he wrote in April 1930 that his edition “from Book III, v. 2836, to the end of Book IV is founded on that ancient and admirable MS.”, so the whole of this story falls in the stretch he edited from the oldest copy, and his notes on it cite G against Fa, K and WM line by line. Rūmī dictated the poem at Konya across roughly the last decade of his life: Lewis places Book I about 1262 and Book II about 1264, with Books III to VI following before his death on 17 December 1273. Every English phrase quoted here is Nicholson's, from his translation of Books III and IV, published in 1930.
- Claimed
- the 1260sasserted by Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, for the sequence and dating of the six books — Book I from about 1262, Book II resumed about 1264, Books III to VI before Rūmī's death in 1273. Book III carries no internal date, and no manuscript survives from Rūmī's lifetime.
The pot only consoles because of a ladder Rūmī set out 258 lines earlier at Mathnawī III.3901–3906; the story closes not on a denial of reincarnation but on a warning against stumbling over deep sayings, which Nicholson's 1940 commentary reads as aimed at the heresy of tanāsukh.
A chickpea leaps from the pot and the housewife beats it back — Nicholson read her as master, it as disciple.
Mathnawī III.4159–4208, dictated at Konya in the years before Rūmī's death in 1273. A chickpea leaps from the pot and the kadbānū — Nicholson's “housewife” — hits it with the ladle, then answers it. She boils it not from contempt but so that it may get “taste and savour”, become nutriment and “mingle with the (vital) spirit”; its water-drinking in the garden was for the sake of this fire. Nicholson's commentary reads her as the murshid, the chickpea as the murīd, the fire as riyāḍat. At III.4203–4206 she adds that she too was earth once, and boiled twice, before she became a teacher. The argument runs on a ladder set out 258 lines earlier at III.3901–3906; Nicholson's note reads the caveat closing the story, at III.4209, as aimed at the heresy of tanāsukh.
Light
The objection is given words and then answered. The chickpea gets a hundred cries and a real grievance — you bought me, why turn me upside down — and the one holding the ladle claims no exemption, having been earth, and boiled, herself.
Shadow
It consoles the one in the pot and becomes another thing in the hand holding the ladle: at III.4174 the housewife casts herself as Abraham with the knife, and the Arabic quoted at III.4186 is Ḥallāj's, who was executed in 922.
