the corner of devotion

Saadi in the rose garden, from a Mughal manuscript of the Gulistan, c. 1645

[Image source: Wikipedia.]

I heard a padshah giving orders to kill a prisoner. The helpless
fellow began to insult the king on that occasion of despair, with
the tongue he had, and to use foul expressions according to the
saying:

Who washes his hands of life
Says whatever he has in his heart.

When a man is in despair his tongue becomes long and he is like a
vanquished cat assailing a dog.

In time of need, when flight is no more possible,
The hand grasps the point of the sharp sword.

When the king asked what he was saying, a good-natured vezierr replied, 'My lord, he says: Those who bridle their anger and forgive men:  for Allah loveth the beneficent.' The king, moved with pity, forebore taking his life but another
vezier, the antagonist of the former, said: 'Men of our rank ought to speak nothing but the truth in the presence of padshahs. This
fellow has insulted the king and spoken unbecomingly.' The king, being displeased with these words, said: 'That lie was more acceptable to me than this truth thou hast uttered because the former proceeded from
a conciliatory disposition and the latter from malignity; and wise men have said: "A falsehood resulting in conciliation is better than a truth producing trouble."'

He whom the shah follows in what he says,
It is a pity if he speaks anything but what is good.

The following inscription was upon the portico of the hall of
Feridun:

O brother, the world remains with no one.
Bind the heart to the Creator, it is enough.
Rely not upon possessions and this world
Because it has cherished many like thee and slain them.
When the pure soul is about to depart,
What boots it if one dies on a throne or on the ground?

[Sourced from PoemHunter. Unknown translation of the first story in the Gulistan (The Flower Garden or Rose Garden).]



The Story of How Tukla was Rebuked by a Devotee

Tukla, king of Persia, once visited a devotee and said, "Fruitless have been my years. None but the beggar carries riches from the world when earthly dignities are past. Hence, would I now sit in the corner of devotion that I might usefully employ the few short days that yet remain to me."

The devotee was angered at these words.

"Enough!" he cried. "Religion consists alone in the service of the people; it finds no place in the prayer-beads, or prayer-rug, or tattered garment. Be a king in sovereignty and a devotee in purity of morals. Action, not words, is demanded by religion, for words without action are void of substance."

----

A story illustrative of doing good to the evil

A woman said to her husband, "Do not again buy bread from the baker in this street. make thy purchases in the market, for this man shows wheat and sells barley, and he has no customers but a swarm of flies."

"O, light of my life," the husband answered, "pay no heed to his trickery. In the hope of our custom has he settled in this place, and not humane would it be to deprive him of his profits."

Follow the path of the righteous, and, if thou stand upon thy feet, stretch out thy hand to them that are fallen.



[Source: Iran Chamber Society, the Bostan of Saadi , a complete (I think) anonymous translation of Saadi's Bostan or Bustan (The Orchard).]

Saadi, or Sa'di, or Saadi of Shiraz (1210 - c.1291 AD).  (Capital of Fars province, in the southern part of modern-day Iran.)
"Saadi" was his pen name. His real name was Abū-Muhammad Muslih al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī.

Saadi's writing was first translated into a western language by the orientalist André du Ryer in 1634. He became well-known in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. Voltaire was so fervent an admirer that he was sometimes nicknamed Saadi by his friends. (Voltaire may have intended the fictional "Sadi" who writes the Dedication to Zadig to be the historical Saadi, though the date he gives is outside Saadi's lifetime (AH 837 = about 1433-1434 AD).)

I came to Saadi via Balzac, talking about Félix's "flower symphonies" in The Lily of the Valley:

She would ever return to them, and feast upon them, she would answer all the thoughts I had placed in them when, in order to accept them she raised her head from her tapestry frame, with: "Good Heavens, how beautiful that is!" You will understand this delicious correspondence from a detailed account of a bouquet, as after a fragment of poetry you would understand Saadi.   (p. 145)

Balzac mentions Saadi at least once more, in The Girl with the Golden Eyes.

She was an Oriental poem, in which shone the sun that Saadi, that Hafiz, have set in their pulsing strophes. Only, neither the rhythm of Saadi, nor that of Pindar, could have expressed the ecstasy—full of confusion and stupefaction—which seized the delicious girl when the error in which an iron hand had caused her to live was at an end.

Balzac's expressions seem to imply acquaintance with Saadi's lyric poetry. Perhaps he was exaggerating, or perhaps French is better served than English in this respect. Saadi wrote four books of ghazals, but I haven't tracked down any translations. *

Wikipedia lists some other western Saadi fans in that orientalist era: Hegel, Pushkin, La Fontaine, Benjamin Franklin, Emerson.  (Post written, rather appropriately, while listening to Rameau's Les Indes Galantes !)

Another Saadi fan was the reclusive English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892 - 1988). The nocturne Gulistān (1940), a piano piece of around 30 minutes, is one of his most admired works. 

*

* However, The Delphi Press Collected Works of Saadi (Kindle only) is irresistible at £1.49: it contains the Bustan (composed in epic metre, translated into prose by A. Hart Edwards for the Wisdom of the East series in 1911), Pand Namah (The Scroll of Wisdom, a short collection of moral poems, translated into verse lines with no particular meter by Arthur N. Wollaston, Wisdom of the East, 1906) and Gulistan (prose translated into prose by James Ross, probably around the same date).