The Lion and the Hare

The Enemy in the Well

The lion saw himself in the well, and in his fury he did not know himself at that moment from the enemy.He regarded his own reflexion as his enemy: necessarily he drew a sword against himself.Oh, many an iniquity that you see in others is your own nature (reflected) in them, O reader!In them shone forth all that you are in your hypocrisy and iniquity and insolence.You are that (evil-doer), and you are striking those blows at yourself: ’tis yourself you are cursing at that moment.You do not see clearly the evil in yourself, else you would hate yourself with (all) your soul.You are assaulting yourself, O simpleton, like the lion who made a rush at himself.When you reach the bottom of your own nature, then you will know that that vileness was from yourself.At the bottom (of the well) it became manifest to the lion that he who seemed to him to be another was (really) his own image.Whoever tears out the teeth of a poor wretch is doing what the falsely-seeing lion did.O you who see the bad reflexion on the face of your uncle, it is not your uncle that is bad, it is you: do not run away from yourself!The Faithful are mirrors to one another: this saying is related from the Prophet.

Masnavi I.1317–1328 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926

First attested

1278The text is Masnavi I.1317–1328. The oldest dated copy Nicholson used is the Konya manuscript, his G, "dated 677 a.h." — 1278, five years after Rūmī's death — which he judged in April 1930 "the most authoritative text of the Mathnawí". He translated Book I in 1926, before adopting G, and his 1930 volume lists in an appendix where G differs from that text. It records one reading of G inside this passage, at I.1321: "you are weaving a curse upon yourself at that moment" in the second half of the verse. Book I carries no date of its own; Book II opens by dating its own start to A.H. 662 (1263–64), after a delay, so Book I was finished by then.

A hare leads a tyrant lion to a well; the lion attacks his own reflection, and Rūmī turns it on the reader.

Masnavi I.900–1389. Beasts harassed by a lion agree to send him a daily ration, one of them each day as the lot falls, after a long debate on trust in God against exertion in which the lion cites the Prophet: "While trusting in God bind the knee of thy camel" (I.913). When the lot comes round to the hare he dawdles, tells the lion that another lion seized his companion on the road, and leads him to a well. The lion sees "the image of a lion with a plump hare at his side" (I.1306) and springs in. The lines here, I.1317–1328, replay the leap and turn it on the reader, ending on the Prophet's saying that "The Faithful are mirrors to one another". The hare runs back to the rejoicing beasts and gives the credit to God, and the tale closes on Rūmī's commentary on the Tradition of the "greater Jihad", ending "the (true) lion is he that breaks (conquers) himself" (I.1389).