— The Persian Mystics: Jalalu'd-din Rumi (tr. F. Hadland Davis, 1907), "I Am Thine, and Thou Art Mine"
About this quote
हिन्दी में
शाश्वत जीवन अपने ही जीवन को पूरी तरह त्याग देने से मिलता है। जब ईश्वर अपने उत्कट प्रेमी के सामने प्रकट होता है, तो प्रेमी उसी में लीन हो जाता है — प्रेमी का एक बाल तक शेष नहीं रहता।
What it means
The first sentence names a price and the second withdraws the discount. Eternal life is not being offered in exchange for devotion, or discipline, or the giving up of comforts — it is priced at one’s own life entire. Then, in case abandonment had sounded like poetic overstatement, comes the measurement: not so much as a hair of the lover remains. The image exists to close a loophole, the one where a self survives the union and gets to enjoy having arrived.
This is the part the gentler, greeting-card Rumi tends to lose. Lover here is the seeker and the beloved is God, and what is described is absorption — the annihilation the Sufi poets keep returning to — not a partnership of two who remain two. Read that way the line is severe rather than sweet, and the severity is the reason it has lasted.
What it teaches you
Use it as a test on the word devotion whenever you apply it to yourself, whether to a person, a cause or a practice: ask what is still being held back and quietly accounted for — the recognition, the sense of being the one who gave, the improved version of yourself the devotion is meant to produce. The claim here is that those are exactly what gets spent, not what gets earned, and most of what we call self-surrender turns out on inspection to be a transaction the self fully expects to survive.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पंक्ति शाश्वत जीवन की क़ीमत बताती है — सुख-सुविधा या साधना नहीं, बल्कि अपना पूरा ‘मैं’। दूसरा वाक्य कोई रास्ता नहीं छोड़ता: प्रेमी का एक बाल तक शेष नहीं रहता, यानी मिलन के बाद उसका आनंद उठाने के लिए कोई अलग ‘मैं’ बचता ही नहीं। यह सूफ़ी परंपरा की उस लीनता की बात है, साथ-साथ बने रहने वाले दो प्रेमियों की नहीं — इसलिए अपनी भक्ति को परखने की कसौटी यही है कि उसमें अब भी अपने लिए क्या बचाकर रखा जा रहा है।
Where it comes from
From the selection titled I Am Thine, and Thou Art Mine 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.
