The Chinese and the Greek Painters

The Wall That Became a Mirror

The Chinese requested the King to give them a hundred colours: the King opened his treasury that they might receive that (which they sought).Every morning, by (his) bounty, the colours were dispensed from the treasury to the Chinese.The Greeks said, “No tints and colours are proper for our work, (nothing is needed) except to remove the rust.”They shut the door and went on burnishing: they became clear and pure like the sky.There is a way from many-colouredness to colourlessness: colour is like the clouds, and colourlessness is a moon.Whatsoever light and splendour you see in the clouds, know that it comes from the stars and the moon and the sun.When the Chinese had finished their work, they were beating drums for joy.The King entered and saw the pictures there: that (sight), as he encountered it, was robbing him of his wits.After that, he came towards the Greeks: they removed the intervening curtain.The reflexion of those (Chinese) pictures and works (of art) struck upon these walls which had been made pure (from stain).All that he had seen there (in the Chinese room) seemed more beautiful here: ’twas snatching the eye from the socket.The Greeks, O father, are the Ṣúfís: (they are) without (independent of) study and books and erudition,But they have burnished their breasts (and made them) pure from greed and cupidity and avarice and hatreds.That purity of the mirror is, beyond doubt, the heart which receives images innumerable.

Masnavi I.3472–3485 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926

First attested

1278No autograph survives. The oldest witness is the Qoniya manuscript (G), “transcribed in A.H. 677-A.D. 1278”. Nicholson's 1926 translation of Book I was not made from it, and his 1930 Appendix lists where G differs. Within the lines quoted here it differs five times: at v. 3472 it omits “that they might receive that (which they sought)”; at v. 3474 it reads “pictures” for “colours”; at v. 3479 it omits “as he encountered it” and reads “of his wits and understanding”; at v. 3480 the Greeks “drew up” the curtain; and at v. 3485 it reads “is the attribute of the heart, (which) receives the infinite form”. The verse is given as Nicholson printed it in 1926.

The Chinese paint a room in a hundred colours; the Greeks only polish theirs, and it mirrors the paintings.

Mathnawī I.3467–3485. A Sultan tests which are the better artists, the Chinese or the Greeks. The Chinese take one room and draw a hundred colours from the royal treasury; the Greeks, in the room facing theirs, use no colour and only burnish the walls until they are “clear and pure like the sky”. When the curtain between the rooms is removed, the Chinese pictures, reflected on the burnished walls, seem more beautiful there than where they were painted. Rūmī glosses the Greeks as the Ṣūfīs, who have polished their breasts free of greed and hatred, and the mirror as the heart that “receives images innumerable”. He introduces the tale at I.3466 as “a parable of the hidden knowledge”, and at I.3497 says the Ṣūfīs have let go grammar and jurisprudence for self-effacement and poverty. Whinfield's 1887 abridgement retells it in prose as Story XIV.