The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam by Omar Khayyam

Author:Omar Khayyam [Cole, Juan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780755600540
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

How long will I obsess about what I have or what I don’t?

Or whether I’ll spend a life of joy or not?

So pour me a bold Shiraz, since no one knows

if I’ll get to exhale this breath that I am drawing in.37

This is secular poetry in the sense that there is nothing prayerful or otherworldly about its recommendation of resignation to not knowing our fate (will we be happy or not, prosperous or not?). It advises wine intoxication as a way of calming down about these anxieties, and notes that no one is even assured of living past mid-breath. There is no sense of supernatural transcendence here, and no counsel save for acceptance and this-worldly inebriation. Gaykhatu was reputed to be a great drinker and carouser, and at the same time a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism. His lamas gave him the name Rinchen Dorje at an investiture ceremony.38 The themes in this poem, of the impermanence (Skr. anitya) of human life and the desirability of detachment from anxieties (Skr. duhkha) over owning things, are common Buddhist sentiments, although the recommended solution is not. Gaykhatu combined in himself the two themes in the poem, of Buddhist belief in the impermanence of the things of this world and the consolations of wine. While these subjects were hundreds of years old by then in Arabic and Persian poetry, the atmosphere of Gaykhatu’s reign may have led to their being written down and shared in manuscript.

Even after many Mongols gradually converted to Islam around the turn of the fourteenth century, they retained for some time a Buddhist sensibility. Some of their mothers or cousins held out longer than others, and conversions are in any case always incomplete. Ghazan Khan (r. 1295–1304) was among the converts. But it is recorded that in 1304 he gave a eulogy speech at the funeral for his late wife Karamun Khatun at which he said:

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