Toward a True Kinship of Faiths by Dalai Lama

Author:Dalai Lama [Lama, Dalai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59024-4
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2010-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Contemplative Practice

One of the most uplifting spiritual teachers in the Islamic tradition, who also happened to be an extraordinary poet and to whose writings I have been exposed, is Jelaluddin Rumi (1207–1273), who was known as Mevlana, an Afghan native who wrote in Persian and lived most of his life in Konya, Turkey. As with the writings of John of the Cross in the Christian tradition, Rumi’s ecstatic poems are similar in tone, in spiritual depth, and in immediacy of experience to nyamgur, the experiential songs of religious poets in my own Tibetan tradition. For example, the reciprocity of love in Rumi becomes a model for the relationship of spiritual master and pupil, as in the Guru-disciple model of Tibetan Buddhism.

In particular, Rumi wrote a book of poems in honor of his friend and teacher Shams of Tabriz. This reminds me of the yearning of the meditator for his absent master in many examples of Tibetan experiential songs. For instance, I think of this beautiful poem by Milarepa, writing in the eleventh century CE about his master, Marpa:

To see my father guru’s face and hear his voice

Transforms this beggar’s grief into a mystic’s revelation.

Recalling my teacher’s exemplary life,

Reverence dawns deep in my heart.

(SONGS OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE, THUPTEN JINPA AND JAS ELSNER, SHAMBHALA, 2000)

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