Wheat & Barley

A distinguished learned man who was visiting Bahaudin Naqshband asked:

 

‘Through your character, exercises and manifest capacity for good, you are established in public, as in the hearts of your followers, as the current Master of the Age. Was it always thus with you?’

 

Bahaudin said:

 

‘No, it was not always thus.’

 

The visitor said:

 

‘The Ancients among the Sufis were frequently regarded as imitators, derided by scholars, feared by interpreters. Some of those whom the Adepts count as their most noble exemplars are registered in the books of the formally learned as undesirables or as influences not to be welcomed by the authorities. Yet if they have contributed to the knowledge and practice of the Way, they were surely visibly adepts?’

 

Bahaudin said:

 

‘Some are evidently Adepts, others are evidently nothing.’

 

‘Where then lies the essential quality of the dervish?’

 

‘It lies in his reality, not in his appearance.’

‘Have such people not qualities whereby everyone can assess them?’

 

Bahaudin answered:

 

‘Remember the tale of the wheat and the barley. At one time people planted wheat in a field. Everyone be came accustomed to seeing wheat come up, and to live on bread made from its flour. But time passed, and it was necessary to plant barley. When this came up many people, literalists as all ordinary scholars tend to be, cried out, “This is not wheat!”

 

“Yes,” said the growers of the barley, “but it is a cereal, and it is cereals which we all need.”

 

“Charlatan,” cried the literalists. Many a time, when a barley crop was raised, the clamor to drive out the cultivators was so loud and effective that they were unable to provide flour for the people. The people starved, but they thought, persuaded by their literal-minded advisors, that they were better off avoiding the crop being cultivated by the barley-people.’

 

The visitor asked:

 

‘Then what we call “Sufism” is really the cereal of your story? In that case we have been calling “wheat” or “barley” “cereals”, and have to realize that there is something more profound of which both crops are a manifestation?’

 

‘Yes,’ said the Maulana.

 

‘It would surely be more desirable if we could be given knowledge of “cereals” instead of “wheat” or “barley” under the name of “cereals”, said the enquirer.

 

‘It would surely be better if it could be done,’ said Bahaudin, ‘but the position is that most people, for their own sake and that of others, still have to work for the crop, so that they may eat. There are very few who know what cereals are. They are the people whom you call the Guides. When a man knows that people may die of starvation, he has to provide what food he can. It is only those who are not working in the fields who have time to wonder about grain. It is they, too, who have no right to do so, for they have not tasted it, nor are they working towards the production of flour for the people.’

 

‘It is bad to tell people to do things when they cannot understand why they should do it,’ said the visitor.

 

‘It is worse to explain that a certain tree is going to fall in such detail that bef9re you have finished the story your audience is crushed to death beneath it,’ responded Bahaudin.

~ by Shaykh on March 18, 2008.