Chehel Asrar 23 - Ghazal Twenty Three

  

Ghazal 23

9 couplets  |  Riaz 1991, printed p. 464

گَر نَسِیمِ وادِیِ اَسْرار خواهی تَن گُداز

gar nasīm-e vādī-ye asrār khāhī tan godāz

1a  If you want the breeze of the valley of mysteries, melt away your body;

وَر تَجَلّیِ جَمالِ یار خواهی جان بِباز

var tajallī-ye jamāl-e yār khāhī jān be-bāz

1b  if you want the beloved’s beauty to shine forth, stake your soul.

Commentary on couplet 1

The speaker addresses an aspiring seeker with two uncompromising conditions: bodily melting for the breeze of mysteries, and staking the soul for the beloved’s disclosure. The gentleness of a breeze stands against the extremity demanded of its recipient. Tajallī names a making manifest, here the shining forth of beauty, while jān includes life as well as soul and makes the second demand total. The opening gives renunciation an intensity that a mild change of attitude would not adequately convey. Within the poem’s ascetic rhetoric, body and life become the stakes of surrender; it describes no procedure for injuring them. The repeated if you want establishes the question pursued throughout: whether the seeker will accept what the professed desire entails.

تَن چُو زِنْدان اَسْت وُ جانَت بَنْدِ راهِ جانِ‌جان

tan cho zendān ast o jān-at band-e rāh-e jān-e jān

2a  The body is a prison, and your soul a shackle on the path to the Soul of souls;

جانِ‌جان گَر بایَدَت با بَنْد وُ با زِنْدان نَساز

jān-e jān gar bāyad-at bā band o bā zendān na-sāz

2b  if you seek the Soul of souls, do not settle for shackles and a prison.

Commentary on couplet 2

The body is a prison, but the soul itself is also a shackle on the way to the Soul of souls. The second image makes the demand more searching than a simple escape from bodily appetite. Even attachment to one’s inward identity may obstruct approach to the beloved who gives life its deepest meaning. Jān-e jān intensifies the language of life and intimacy; the couplet does not define a technical World Soul. Its imperative is to refuse accommodation with captivity. In the surrounding language of surrender, this can be read as relinquishing claims over both bodily comfort and spiritual possession. The promised freedom requires the seeker to question even the self that would claim to have become spiritual.

هَرچِه غَیْرِ اُوسْت دُشْمَن دان تُو اَنْدَر راهِ دُوسْت

har-che ghayr-e ū-st doshman dān to andar rāh-e dūst

3a  On the path to the Friend, count all that is other than him an enemy;

دَر حُضُورِ دُشْمَنان با دُوسْت نَتْوان گُفْت راز

dar hozūr-e doshmanān bā dūst natvān goft rāz

3b  you cannot share a secret with the Friend while enemies are present.

Commentary on couplet 3

The seeker must count everything other than the Friend as an enemy, because confidential speech cannot take place before hostile witnesses. The second half turns the first half’s comprehensive exclusion into an intimate scene: a secret shared with one trusted presence. The language demands undivided allegiance, allowing no competing object to claim the heart while it seeks that confidence. Its force belongs to the path and the encounter described, rather than identifying a group of people to be attacked or mistreated. On a spiritual reading, distractions and rival attachments become the intruders that prevent inward candor. The verse asks who or what is being admitted into attention when the seeker says he wants the Friend alone.

شِیوِهٔ رِنْدانِ اِین دَرْگاه جانْبازی بُوَد

shīve-ye rendān-e īn dargāh jān-bāzī bovad

4a  The free spirits of this threshold stake their lives;

چُون تُو اِین بازی نَداری دَر رَهِ اُو کَج مَباز

chūn to īn bāzī na-dārī dar rah-e ū kaj ma-bāz

4b  since you lack the skill for this game, do not play false on his path.

Commentary on couplet 4

The threshold’s free spirits stake their lives, and the addressed seeker is challenged to stop playing falsely at a game he has not mastered. Jān-bāzī, staking life, answers bāzī, game, and ma-bāz, do not play, so the seriousness emerges through verbal play itself. The supplied skill captures one implication of lacking this game, though the phrase can also question whether the seeker possesses its disposition. Rendān here receive their value from frank surrender, preparing the next couplet’s attack on religious display. Their freedom cannot be reduced to social respectability. The rebuke asks for honesty about commitment: presenting oneself as a participant while withholding the decisive stake would make the very performance of devotion crooked.

طاعَت وُ زُهْدِ رِیایی را بَرِین دَر قَدْر نِیسْت

tāʿat o zohd-e riyāyī rā bar-īn dar qadr nīst

5a  Ostentatious worship and asceticism have no worth at this door;

تُحْفِه‌ئی آنْجا نَیارَد کَس بِجُز سُوز وُ گُداز

tohfe-ī ānjā na-yārad kas be-joz sūz o godāz

5b  no one brings a gift there except burning and melting with love.

Commentary on couplet 5

Worship and asceticism performed for display have no value at the beloved’s door; the acceptable gift is love’s burning and melting. Riyāyī is decisive: the criticism falls on ostentation, while the second half measures the offering by inward involvement. The Darwīshiyya printed under Hamadani’s name similarly contrasts the harm of worship producing conceit with the benefit of acknowledging fault and seeking pardon.[2] An Akbarian comparison concerns a different distortion of motive: Ibn ʿArabi describes worship freed from preoccupation with reward while retaining obligatory and customary devotional acts.[3] Display and reward are distinct concerns, but both comparisons illuminate the question of motive. The melting first demanded of the body now becomes the language of a sincere gift.

پِیشِ بارانِ بَلایِ دُوسْت هَرکُو سَر نَهاد

pīsh-e bārān-e balā-ye dūst har-k-ū sar nahād

6a  Whoever bows his head beneath the Friend’s rain of affliction

بَر فَرازِ طارَمِ عُلْوی کُنَنْدَش سَرْفَراز

bar farāz-e tāram-e ʿolvī konand-ash sar-farāz

6b  will be exalted above the vault of heaven.

Commentary on couplet 6

The person who lowers his head under the Friend’s rain of affliction is raised above the heavenly vault. Sar nahād, laying down or bowing the head, turns into sar-farāz, having the head raised: the same bodily image carries surrender and honor. Rain makes affliction something that descends around the lover, while the outcome moves upward beyond the sky. The agents of this exaltation are left unnamed in the Persian, so the verse need not be expanded into a scene involving specified heavenly beings. Its assurance concerns a transformed relation to what befalls the lover. The Friend’s affliction becomes honorable through that relation; the couplet does not establish that every instance of suffering has the same meaning.

با غَمِ عِشْقَش تُو اَز لَذّاتِ جِسْمانی مَگُو

bā gham-e ʿeshq-ash to az lazzāt-e jesmānī ma-gū

7a  With the sorrow of his love, do not speak of bodily pleasures;

با وُجُودِ رَوْضِهٔ رِضْوان تُو اَز گُلْخَن مَناز

bā vojūd-e rowze-ye rezvān to az golkhan ma-nāz

7b  while paradise’s garden exists, do not boast of the bathhouse furnace.

Commentary on couplet 7

The seeker is told to stop discussing bodily pleasures beside love’s sorrow, just as one should not boast of a bathhouse furnace when paradise’s garden is available. The comparison rearranges the scale of desire through spaces of oppressive heat and flourishing delight. Ma-nāz targets boasting, exposing the smallness of what the seeker takes pride in possessing. Paradise remains a positive measure in this particular couplet; the verse does not ask the reader to despise its promise. The furnace also complicates the earlier valued burning of love: heat has no automatic spiritual meaning. Its significance changes with its object and setting. What matters is whether desire is confined to immediate gratification or opened toward a greater good.

فَیْضِ رُوحُ الْقُدُس اَگَر خواهی تُو اَنْدَر سَیْرِ جان

fayz-e rūh-ol-qodos agar khāhī to andar sayr-e jān

8a  If you want the Holy Spirit’s grace on the soul’s journey,

مَرْکَبِ حِرْص وُ هَوا را دَر پَیِ غُولان مَتاز

markab-e hers o havā rā dar pay-e ghūlān ma-tāz

8b  do not spur the mount of greed and desire after ghouls.

Commentary on couplet 8

The desired grace of the Holy Spirit is set against a rider spurring greed and desire after ghouls. Rūḥ al-qudus has Qur’anic grounding: Jesus is supported through the holy spirit in 2:87, and the phrase names the bearer of revelation in 16:102.[4] Here it lends sacred authority to the soul’s hoped-for assistance without identifying a specific revelatory event. The ghoul belongs to the lore of deceptive beings that lure travelers astray.[5] The mount gives appetite momentum, and the rider remains involved by urging it onward. Thus the obstacle is not merely an external deceiver: the seeker’s own desires make the false direction attractive. Spiritual travel requires discernment about what is moving the traveler and whom he follows.

چَتْرِ رِفْعَت بَر سَرِ کَیْوان عَلایی مِی‌زَنی

chatr-e refʿat bar sar-e Kayvān ʿAlāʾī mī-zanī

9a  O ʿAlāʾī, you will raise the canopy of eminence above Saturn

چَشْمِ هِمَّت گَر اَزِین دُونان بِه بَنْدی هَمْچُو باز

chashm-e hemmat gar az-īn dūnān be-bandī hamcho bāz

9b  if, like a falcon, you close the eye of aspiration to these lowly people. [1]

Commentary on couplet 9

ʿAlāʾī’s promised eminence exceeds Saturn if he closes aspiration’s eye to the people called dūnān, a harsh judgment of unworthiness rather than a precise economic category. Kayvān, Saturn, occupied the seventh planetary sphere in the inherited cosmological picture.[5] The canopy gives spiritual elevation a royal form. The falcon’s closed eye has a close poetic parallel in Ḥāfiẓ, where shutting the eyes to the world accompanies seeing the beloved.[6] The line specifies no particular falconry procedure. Hemmat, directed aspiration, is therefore disciplined through what it refuses to pursue. The Darwīshiyya also connects a person’s worth with the object of aspiration.[2] The closing returns the public promise of height to a demanding choice about attention.

Reading notes

[1] 9b: The printed به بندی is retained with its spacing; it is read as the verb be-bandī, “you close.”

Understanding this ghazal

This ghazal challenges a seeker who wants spiritual disclosure while retaining the comforts and claims that obstruct it. Its repeated conditions and prohibitions give the speaker the voice of an exacting instructor, until the closing signature turns that instruction toward ʿAlāʾī himself. The beloved appears as Friend, source of beauty, and Soul of souls. Desire is taken seriously enough to be tested: if the seeker wants the mysteries’ breeze, what is he prepared to relinquish? The body’s melting and the soul’s wager establish an ascetic intensity that governs the succeeding images.

The poem’s oppositions repeatedly change the value of an apparent loss. The prison and shackle must be refused; life is staked in a game whose false players are exposed; the bowed head becomes an exalted head. Burning can name the only worthy offering, yet a furnace later becomes the image of a limited pleasure. These shifts keep the imagery from functioning as a fixed code. The threshold and confidential meeting ask for undivided commitment, while the mount pursuing ghouls exposes how the seeker can help produce his own misdirection. The danger lies as much in attractive appearances as in obvious reluctance.

Sincerity gives this severity its ethical center. The Darwīshiyya transmitted under Hamadani’s name criticizes devotion that produces conceit and measures aspiration by what it seeks; those comparisons remain subject to the work’s attribution dispute.[2] The Akbarian passage cited here offers a related distinction between devotional action and a motive preoccupied with reward.[3] Its scope is limited: the ghazal expressly rejects ostentation and, elsewhere, still invokes paradise as a desirable measure. The opening’s bodily extremity and the language of enemies consequently require attention to their poetic setting. They articulate total surrender and exclusive allegiance without supplying rules for bodily injury or hostility toward other people.

In the final couplet, the movement above the sky depends upon a restriction of the gaze. The seeker does not attain height by collecting more objects of admiration; aspiration changes through refusing those judged unworthy of its attention. That closing gathers the soul’s wager, the sincere gift, and the disciplined journey into one question about what the heart continues to pursue. Its promise also leaves a tension: eminence is offered to the one asked to abandon the motives that ordinarily seek it. The poem tests spiritual ambition by requiring the seeker to relinquish the very attachments through which ambition might disguise itself as devotion.

Sources and textual notes

The supplied Persian, vocalization, transliteration, translation, numbering, bibliographical line, and reading note are preserved. The couplet commentaries and overview are editorial additions. The poem was checked against Riaz’s printed p. 464, including the spacing discussed in the supplied reading note. The prose parallels below come from a work printed under Hamadani’s name whose attribution is disputed; the Akbarian and other comparisons do not establish the poet’s intended interpretation.

2. Darwīshiyya, printed under Hamadani’s name in Muhammad Riaz, Aḥvāl o āsār o ashʿār-e Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī, second edition, Islamabad, 1991, printed pp. 490 and 497; consulted scan. Page 490 contrasts worship that produces conceit with acknowledgment of fault and seeking pardon; p. 497 relates a person’s worth to aspiration and its object. Riaz discusses attribution to Nūrbakhsh and argues for Hamadani on p. 486. These are qualified prose parallels, not an independently authenticated commentary on this ghazal. The poem itself appears on p. 464.
3. Ibn ʿArabi, Kitāb al-fanāʾ fī l-mushāhada, translated by Layla Shamash and Stephen Hirtenstein, “The Book of Annihilation in Contemplation”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 9 (1991), section “The Divine Address,” from annotation 23 through the discussion of obligatory and customary devotional acts. The comparison concerns freedom from preoccupation with reward while devotional practice continues. Reward-seeking and the ghazal’s ostentation are distinguished rather than treated as identical motives.
4. Qur’an, al-Baqara 2:87 and al-Naḥl 16:102, consulted for rūḥ al-qudus. The first associates the Holy Spirit with support given to Jesus; the second associates it with bringing revelation. These establish scriptural contexts for the phrase, without making couplet 8 a direct quotation of either verse.
5. ʿAlī Akbar Dehkhodā, Loghat-nāma, entries ghūl and Kayvān, consulted through Vājehyāb. The former records lore about a deceptive being that misleads travelers; the latter identifies Saturn and its position in the seventh sphere in the inherited cosmological account. These provide lexical and historical context for couplets 8 and 9.
6. Ḥāfiẓ, ghazal 40, couplet 7, as presented in Ganjoor’s Persian text. Closing the eyes to the world like a falcon is paired there with keeping the eye open to the beloved’s face. This is a close poetic parallel for the directed gaze in couplet 9; no claim of borrowing or of a particular falconry technique is required.

Couplet 9b — our reading note [1] resolves

چشم همت گر ازین دونان تو بربندی چو باز

 chashm-e hemmat gar az-īn dūnān to bar-bandī cho bāz

Note [1] records that we retained the printed به بندی with its odd spacing and read it as be-bandī, "you close." The leaf has no such difficulty: تو بربندی — the pronoun تو followed by the compound verb بربستن, ordinary Persian for shutting or closing something. The printed به بندی looks like exactly the kind of misdivision that produces an awkward reading, and the leaf shows what was divided.

The count is unchanged: to-bar-ban-dī-cho-bāz fills the same six positions as be-ban-dī-ham-cho-bāz. The leaf also reads چو باز against the printed همچو باز, and the two together keep the line even. Note [1] can be retired rather than rewritten.

Couplet 9a — بر زنی for می‌زنی

چتر رفعت بر سر کیوان علائی بر زنی

چتر بر زدن is the idiom for raising or pitching a canopy; می‌زدن is not. Same weight, so nothing shifts metrically, and the leaf gives the hemistich the verb its image asks for.Our translation ("you will raise the canopy") already renders it as though the verb were بر زدن.

Couplet 8b — در رهِ غولان for در پیِ غولان

مرکب حرص و هوا را در ره غولان متاز

The word carries no three dots below and reads as ر + ه. Same weight as پیِ, so this is another of the silent substitutions.

The gain is structural. With ره here, the poem sets out three roads: راه دوست in 3a, رهِ او in 4b, and رهِ غولان in 8b. The ghouls acquire a road of their own, standing against the Friend's, and the mount of greed is spurred down it. The printed در پی ("after") keeps the pursuit but loses the road, and with it the figure your commentary reaches for when it speaks of "spiritual travel" and "the false direction."

Couplet 5a — بر آن در for برین در

طاعت و زهد ریایی را بر آن در قدر نیست

A clear madda stands over the alef. Weight unchanged, but the deixis changes: on the printed reading, couplet 5's door is the same این درگاه named in 4a, and the two couplets point at one threshold. On the leaf's reading they do not.

Couplet 8a — a shorter line

فیض از روح القدس گر خواهی اندر سیر جان

Three differences from the printed text: an از stands after فیض where the printed has the izafe; گر for اگر; and no تو.  

Agreements and open questions

Couplets 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7 match the printed text, as does 4b apart from the possible چو / چون.

Open: whether 4a reads جانباز or جانبازی before the supralinear بود — the ز's tail could carry a ی — and the word under the کیوان gloss in 9a.