— The Persian Mystics: Jalalu'd-din Rumi (tr. F. Hadland Davis, 1907), "Behold the Water of Waters"
About this quote
हिन्दी में
समुद्र और चीज़ है, उसका झाग और; झाग को छोड़ दो, और अपनी आँखों से समुद्र को देखो।
What it means
The instruction is about where the eyes point, and it is oddly practical. Foam is never called false here — it is the same water, thrown up by the same sea. It is simply the part that is loud, temporary and on top. Neglect is the strong word: not look past, but decline to attend to.
The second half is what quotation usually drops. Regard the sea with your eyes — the larger thing is not hidden, not behind a veil, not reachable only by some further technique. It is already in view and losing the competition for attention. Taken as a statement that the world is illusion, the line says less than it does; taken as an instruction about proportion, it says something you can act on this afternoon.
What it teaches you
Apply it to whatever churns hourly — a news cycle, a group chat, the state of your own mood — and ask which part of what you are watching will still exist next month. The line also predicts why this is hard: the foam is where the movement is, and the eye follows movement, so the correction has to be made deliberately rather than waited for.
अर्थ और सीख
रूमी कहते हैं कि झाग झूठा नहीं है — वह उसी समुद्र का पानी है — पर वह ऊपर का, शोर करता, पल भर का हिस्सा है। असली बात दूसरी पंक्ति में है: समुद्र छिपा नहीं है, सामने ही है, बस नज़र झाग पर अटकी है। सीख यह कि जो हर घंटे हिलता-डुलता है उसी पर ध्यान मत टिकाइए; पूछिए कि इसमें से अगले महीने तक क्या बचा रहेगा।
Where it comes from
From the selection titled Behold the Water of Waters 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.
