Sanai on Love ...
Twelfth century Persian poet Hakim Sanai is credited with writing the first Persian mystical epic of Sufism, The Enclosed Garden of Truth (حدیقه الحقیقه و شریعه الطریقه). He was a major influence upon Rumi. Here we take a brief tour of the garden in search of Sanai's vision of love.
While Kabir’s path of love deepens our understanding of selflessness and invites us to remember God’s infinite consciousness devoid of “me” and “mine,” Sanai’s path of love advocates a gradual inner purification of the heart through which sedimented views are cleansed and removed. These impurities are obstacles that hinder mystical union.
For Sanai, only through the removal of all dust (i.e., pride, lust, greed, and other sensual passions) lying hidden within our hearts can one expand the limited mind to limitless awareness.
Embodiment
“The highroad by which thy spirit and prayers can travel towards God lies in the polishing of the mirror of the heart” (15) writes Sanai. Here the trope of the highroad stands for an ascent to God, a higher plane of embodiment that is accessible to us to the extent we cultivate to remove the dust of defilements.
Just as a mirror when stained by dust obscures the reflected image, so the limitless self (Allah, for Sanai) is obscured by its sensual contaminants. For Sanai, when the heart is wholly purged of sensual passions, then the brightness of God can be reflected and embodied.
You can better see thy image
In the mirror of thy heart than in thy clay.
Break loose from the chain you have fettered thyself with,
for you will be free when you have got clear from thy clay.
Since clay is dark and heart is bright,
Thy clay is a dustbin and thy heart a rose-garden (17).
In this image, we see the heart likened to a rose-garden and clay a dustbin. Clay stands for any of the heart's contaminants, those impurities that harden around us and weigh us down. Meanwhile, the dynamic of turning away one’s attention from the world to the inner awareness of God signifies that as we slowly empty ourselves of rubbish, sunlight begins to shine through our inner landscape of extravagant gardens, in whose lushness we become alive.
The brightness of God refers to the deeper dynamic dimension of love, our inner being. Clearing the muck and mud of our egocentric habits is a direct way to reclaim embodiment and connection to our inner awareness, for Sanai.
Purification
In the context of Sanai's poetry, purification is undertaken in order transcend our limitations, shifting the practitioner from a narrow framework in which they pursue the immediate gratification of sense pleasures to a panoramic perspective. In peering through a myopic lens, we limit ourselves to the realm of the finite. Our lives in this mode are characterized by duality and filled with dissatisfaction, always seeking something to fill the void. Yet when the seeker recognizes creator (Allah) and creation are one, her perspective widens immensely:
Then when the soul sets forth from the gate,
The old heart becomes new from there on.
His form escapes from the bonds of nature,
The heart gives back its charge to the spirit. (24)
This recognition of unity dissolves body boundaries between self and others. When there is no separation, awakening stirs within us, like the final moments of a dream as it dissolves in the early morning. With our limitations transcended, we are returned to an embodied, non-dual, panoramic awareness that was with us since time immemorial, only obscured by choices of our own making.
Fabrication of Duality
Like Kabir's protest against dualism, feeling that the individual self must be shattered in order to transcend dualistic notions, Sanai similarly asserts that duality is an obstacle on the path of love.
In the face of his belief in the Unity, There exists for him no old or new; All is naught, naught; He alone is. (86)
Sanai thus reflects that God, Allah himself, is beyond dual concepts and notions. Non-dual awareness entails the vulnerability of living with an open heart and risk of having our precious cherished ego bubble burst. To burst the bubble, all notions of self and others and all relativity must be transcended until there is no existence except God, who is undifferentiated and whole.
Cutting through duality, Sanai further urges that we need to cast our conditioned existence into the unconditioned.
O seeker of the shell of the pearl of 'unless',
lay down clothing and life on the shore of 'Not.' (30)
Here, the imagery of clothing conveys our use of garments to hide our limitless self (Allah). In fact, these garments are fabrications, in more ways than one. They are fabrics that are measured, cut, and stitched together to create a finished product in the form of a garment. Just like the fabrics, the faculty of mind, the intellect, stitches together separate names and forms to conceive the world in terms of fixed measurements. The mind has a tendency to fabricate constructs, which in turn cover over our limitless self.
Likewise, Sanai uses clothing symbolically to represent a particular form that we often wear and with which we identify. Such robes disguise our true self. Indeed, we mistakenly hold onto our garments as a false refuge in which to hide. By laying down the clothing and life on the “shore of ‘Not,’” we begin the process of undressing that which lies hidden and disguised.
Our Original Home
We find in Sanai's poetry a liberating narrative, one that depicts the process of inward purification and outward embodiment of the divine, re-inhabiting the abode of God, our original home.
Sanai implores us to turn inward, understand our innate union with God, and lay ourselves bare. As with Kabir's use of the term "God," Sanai can be similarly read as imploring a reconnection with our innate purity, free of the contaminants and clothing in which we dress and thereby disguise it. In mystic fashion, "God" for Sanai is the infinite, not some being separate from us, commanding us from above. Rather, this force implores us from within.
We're curious what you may find worthwhile about Sanai's poetry, either from what we've shared or any other works of his you've encountered. Please feel free to join the conversation in the comments below. Best wishes.
Hakim Sanai’s The Enclosed Garden of Truth. Trans. M.J. Stephenson. Hastings, East Sussex, 2016.
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