— The Persian Mystics: Jalalu'd-din Rumi (tr. F. Hadland Davis, 1907), "Destroy Not Earthly Beauty"
About this quote
हिन्दी में
तेरे अपने मूर्ख विचारों के ही पंजे हैं जो द्वेष से तेरी शांत आत्मा का चेहरा नोच डालते हैं।
What it means
Every noun in the line places the injury. The claws belong to your own thoughts, not to circumstances; the thoughts are called foolish rather than wicked; and they act in spite, with malice, as though something in a person works against its own peace. What gets torn is a face — the part that shows.
The premise underneath is what makes it worth keeping: the soul is described as already quiet. Rumi is not prescribing calm as a state to be attained but treating it as the resting condition that thought keeps scratching at. That is a different claim from the familiar one that we must work our way toward peace. Here peace is simply what remains once the clawing stops.
What it teaches you
In a bad hour, separate what happened from what you have been saying about it to yourself — the rehearsed conversation, the imagined verdict of other people, the fifth replay of the same scene. This line says the event may have caused a loss but the ongoing wound is being administered by you, and putting the claws inside lets you find the particular sentence doing the scratching and stop repeating it. That is not a denial that real harm exists; it is a refusal to add to it.
अर्थ और सीख
रूमी चोट का ठिकाना बहुत सटीक बताते हैं: पंजे हालात के नहीं, आपके अपने मूर्ख विचारों के हैं, और वे मानो द्वेष से आपकी शांत आत्मा का चेहरा नोचते हैं। ग़ौर करें कि आत्मा को पहले से ‘शांत’ कहा गया है — शांति कमानी नहीं है, नोचना बंद करना है। सबक़: जो हुआ उसे उस बात से अलग करें जो आप उसके बारे में बार-बार ख़ुद से कह रहे हैं; असली घाव अक्सर उसी दोहराव से गहरा होता है।
Where it comes from
From the selection titled Destroy Not Earthly Beauty in Rumi’s Masnavi.
Jalalu’d-din Rumi (1207–1273) composed the Masnavi — some 25,000 couplets of stories and teaching — in Konya, in present-day Turkey, after the loss of his teacher Shams of Tabriz. This passage follows the public-domain selections published in The Persian Mystics (1907); the selection title is cited with this quote.
