The Faqir and the Hidden Treasure
He Drew the Bow Too Hard
Masnavi VI · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887God is “what is nearer to you than your neck-vein,”You have cast the arrow of speculation afar off.O you, who have made ready your bow and arrows,The game is close to you, and you shoot too far off.The further a man shoots, the further off he is,And the more removed from the treasure he seeks.The philosopher kills himself with thinking,Tell him that his back is turned to that treasure;Tell him that the more he runs to and fro,The further he is removed from his heart’s desire.The Almighty says, “Make efforts in our ways,”Not “Make efforts away from us,” O restless one.Like Canaan, who went away, from shame to follow Noah,Up to the top of that lofty mountain,The more he sought safety on that mountain,The further was he removed from the safe asylum.So this Faqir, in search of that hidden treasure,Day after day drew his bow stronger and stronger;And the harder he drew his bow,The further was he from the seat of that treasure.
- First attested
- 1278Masnavi VI.2353–2362 in Nicholson's numbering, from the story of the faqir and the treasure-scroll that Rūmī returns to at VI.1834 and resolves at VI.2347–2375. No autograph survives. The earliest complete manuscript, the Konya copy, was finished in December 1278, five years after Rūmī's death; Nicholson judged the Qoniya MS., dated 677 A.H., the most authoritative text of the poem, and his printed text from Book III, v. 2836 onward follows it. The English quoted here rests on something later: Whinfield made his translation from the Bulaq edition of 1268 A.H., keying his section pages to the Lucknow edition of 1282 A.H., and it is quoted from the London printing of 1887 (Trübner & Co.).
- Claimed
- the 1270sasserted by Nicholson, in the Introduction to his translation of Books V and VI (dated Cambridge, 19 April 1933), places both books in the years when Rūmī was nearing seventy; Whinfield gives Rūmī's dates as born at Balkh in 604 A.H. (1207) and died at Qonia in 672 A.H. (1273), and Book VI breaks off unfinished. The 1270s decade is this entry's reading of those two statements: no manuscript from Rūmī's lifetime survives to date the book.
The scroll never told him to shoot far. The voice at VI.2348–2352 points out that it said only to put an arrow to the bow; drawing with full strength was his own addition. The king's strongbow archers, given the same scroll, found nothing either: strength was the obstacle, not the means.
Masnavi VI.1948–1975 (the king's search) and VI.2347–2352 (the voice), in Nicholson's numbering, checked at masnavi.net and paraphrased; Whinfield 1887, Book VI, Story VI, pp. 298–299 and 302–303.
A scroll tells a poor man to shoot an arrow and dig where it lands; the harder he draws, the more he misses.
Masnavi Book VI, from VI.1834 in Nicholson's numbering, where Rūmī's heading returns to the faqir who wanted his bread without labour. A voice in a dream sends him to a stationer's papers, Whinfield's scribe's house, for a scroll: by a domed shrine, face the qibla, put an arrow to the bow, dig where it falls. The king hears of it, sets strong archers shooting, finds nothing and gives the scroll back (VI.1948–1975); the faqir fails too and turns to prayer. At VI.2347 a voice tells him he was bidden only to put the arrow to the bow, not to draw it hard. The lines here, VI.2353–2362, rest on the Qurʾān's nearer-than-the-neck-vein (50:16) and on striving in God's ways (29:69), and on Noah's son, whom the poem calls Canaan, fleeing to the mountain (11:43). The Three Travellers follows at VI.2376.
Light
One physical image carries the whole argument: the harder the bow is drawn, the farther the arrow falls from the treasure. Effort is not dismissed, “Make efforts in our ways”, only turned from reach to nearness.
Shadow
Its target is “the philosopher”, and a few lines on Whinfield's Rūmī bids the reader “Quit cleverness, and consort with simple-mindedness!” — a counsel easily bent into contempt for learning, though the poem aims it at cleverness used as a snare for ambition.
