Let’s begin with the version of the anecdote told about Aesop himself, as found in the Roman poet Phaedrus:

Once when Aesop happened to be the only slave in his master’s household, he was ordered to prepare dinner earlier than usual. He thus had to visit a few houses looking for fire, until at last he found a place where he could light his lamp. Since his search had taken him out of his way along a winding path, he decided to shorten his journey on the way back and go straight through the forum. There amidst the crowds a talkative fellow shouted at him, “Aesop, what’s with the lamp in the middle of the day?” “I’m just looking to see if I can find a real man,” said Aesop, as he quickly made his way back home.

Phaedrus’s story gives a practical reason why Aesop was carrying a lighted lamp during the daytime: the fire had gone out at his house, and he needed to relight it. The person in the forum, however, thinks that Aesop is being a fool, carrying around a lamp when it is perfectly light outside. Aesop, however, manages to make the man look like a fool: it may be broad daylight, but men worthy of the name are so hard to find that he needs a lamp to look for them.

This story about Aesop as a “wise fool” is based on an even older story about the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, who rejected human society, lived inside a tub, and ate nothing but onions. The oldest version of the story consists of a single sentence: “Having lighted a candle in the day time, Diogenes said, ‘I am looking for a man.’” Unlike Aesop, Diogenes plays the fool on purpose. The Cynic philosopher carries the lamp around in broad daylight precisely in order to provoke people, so that he can then turn around and insult them. This public performance in which the audience itself becomes the butt of the joke thus encapsulates the provocativeness of Cynic philosophy itself.

Over time, however, this anecdote has lost all its sharp edges. In preparing this article, I asked ten people if they knew the story about the philosopher and his lamp. To my amazement, every single person knew the story! Yet when I asked about the meaning of the story, each person told me that the man with the lamp was looking for “an honest man” and he needed the lamp because honesty is so hard to find in the world. This modern version of the story still expresses a social critique, but the philosopher is no longer a “wise fool” and he no longer insults his audience.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we just don’t think much about lamps these days! Take the popular saying “to burn daylight.” Nowadays the phrase means “to waste time,” as if the limited number of hours in the day were fuel in a gas tank about to run dry. Originally, however, “to burn daylight” meant to act foolishly, as Diogenes and Aesop did, by burning precious lamp oil when there was no need to do so, “burning (a lamp during) daylight.” No less a writer than Shakespeare shows us that this was the original meaning of the phrase: “Come, we burn daylight, ho! […] We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day”  (Romeo and Juliet). Both Diogenes and Aesop were foolishly “burning daylight” when they carried their lighted lamps into the marketplace, but in the end they proved themselves to be “wise fools” after all, getting the last laugh by insulting their detractors.

When we turn to this story in Rumi’s Mathnawi, however, the man with the lamp does not get the last laugh. Instead, Rumi provides the story with an entirely new message of divine transcendence which is unprecedented in the Greco-Roman tradition. The story begins straightforwardly enough:

A person was going about in a bazaar in the daytime with a candle, his heart full of love and ardor. A busybody said to him, “Hey, what are you seeking beside every shop? Hey, why are you going about in search of something with a lamp in bright daylight? What is the joke?” He replied, “I am searching everywhere for a man who is alive with the life inspired by that Divine Breath. Is there a man in existence?”

As Rumi proceeds, however, the busybody in the marketplace turns out not the butt of the joke after all. Instead, he turns out to be the true sage, preaching a Sufi sermon to the man with the lamp:

“Consider well! You regard the branch; you are unaware of the root: we are the branch, the ordinances of the Divine decree are the root. […] Since thou hast seen the revolution of the millstone, come now, see also the water of the river. Thou hast seen the dust rise into the air: amidst the dust see the wind. Thou seest the kettles of thought boiling: look with intelligence on the fire, too.”

For Rumi, to insult the world for its failings, as Aesop and Diogenes do, is no real accomplishment. To look upon the reality of this world is to see only the branch but not the root, which is God; to see the millstone of the world’s daily activities is to miss the motion of the river, which is God; to see the dust of our daily confusion swirling about us is to miss the wind, which is God. Finally, to focus only on the boiling kettles of human thought is to overlook the essential fire, which is God.

To invoke the humanistic and religious themes which Randy has used as a schema for examining mythological storytelling, we can see that once again in this little story of the philosopher and his lamp that there is a humanistic approach one can take, or a religious one. In the humanistic approach, the philosopher is an agent of social criticism, launching a sharply pointed barb at the self-satisfied bluster of human society, where the question of God simply does not arise. In the religious interpretation, however, the question of God is used to trump the social criticism, obviating it entirely in order to take the light-bearer down a new and unseen path. When Rumi appropriated the Aesop’s fable about “the lion’s share,” he turned the fox’s sharp social critique of the lion into an acknowledgment of the transcendent power of God. We see the same process at work here in Rumi’s use of the story of the philosopher’s lamp, where God is the fire that lights the mind of the philosopher, a flame far greater than any earthly lamp.

References

• Gibbs, Laura. Aesop’s Fables. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. (Full text of this fable is available online.)
• Nicholson, Reynold A. (editor and translator). The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi. 1926 (reprinted 1990); The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi: Commentary. 1937 (reprinted 1985).

By the time Rumi was composing his massive poem, the Mathnawi, Aesop’s fables had already been circulating throughout the Mediterranean world for two thousand years. The fables were not seen as distinctively Greek, but had been adopted wholeheartedly by Arabic and Persian storytellers, such as Rumi. Like other Sufi teachers, Rumi made use of these secular stories side by side with religious parables and legends in order to reveal esoteric doctrines to his followers.

To give you an example of how Rumi appropriates an Aesop’s fable for mystical religious teaching, let us take Rumi’s version of the famous fable of the “lion’s share.” First, let’s start with a traditional Greek version of the fable, which features a lion who goes hunting with a donkey and a fox:

A lion and a donkey and a fox joined as partners, promising to go hunting together. They made a big catch, and the lion ordered the donkey to divide it among them. Making three equal portions, the donkey asked him to choose, but the lion was infuriated, feasted upon the donkey and then ordered the fox to make the division. The fox put everything into one pile, leaving just a tiny bit for herself, and told the lion to choose. When the lion asked her how she learned to apportion things in this way, the fox replied: “From the donkey’s misfortune.” (Chambry #209)

This Greek story is a typical Aesop’s fable: witty, vicious, and wise. It certainly does not seem to contain profound revelations about the right relations of God and man, but this is precisely what Rumi discovers in the story. As soon as Rumi identifies the lion not with secular authority but with absolute divine authority, the way to a mystical understanding of the fable becomes clear.

Here is how Rumi begins his version: “Melt away your existence, as copper in the elixir, in the being of Him who fosters existence. You have fastened both your hands tight on ‘I’ and ‘we’: all this ruin is caused by dualism.” In the Aesopic tradition, you often find a moralizing preface to the telling of a fable, so it is not unusual to find a moral stated at the beginning of a fable like this. What is unusual is the profoundly religious theme that Rumi wants to illustrate with this fable: somehow the story of the lion and his hunting companions is going to turn into a lesson about the annihilation of dualism and unity with God.

Just as in Aesop, the three animals — in Rumi’s version, a lion, a wolf, and a fox — go hunting together, and when it is time to divide the spoils, the wolf and the fox foolishly expect that the lion will share with them, not realizing just whom they are dealing with. There they are, in the presence of God, and they do not even recognize him. The lion, in fact, finds it a bit embarrassing to consort with these limited beings: “A moon like this is disgraced by the stars: it is amongst the stars for generosity’s sake,” as Rumi explains. “The spirit has now become the body’s fellow-traveller.” For Rumi, the animals’ hunting expedition is a metaphor for the human condition itself, in which the spirit (the lion) is shackled to the body, trapped in this corporeal partnership.

The lion then orders the wolf to divide the spoils. The wolf divides the spoils into three parts, one for each of the partners in the hunt. Outraged, the lion tears off the wolf’s head, just as the lion tore the donkey to pieces in the Aesop’s fable. Yet, unlike the lion in Aesop who simply munches on the donkey in silence, the lion offers an explanation of his actions: “Since the sight of me did not transport thee out of thyself, a spirit like this must needs die miserably.” To die thus at the claws of the lion is actually a blessing for the wolf: “Since thou wert not passing away from thyself in my presence, ’twas an act of grace to behead thee.”

Then, just as in the Aesop’s fable, the lion turns to the fox and orders him to divide up the spoil. The fox does not save even a morsel for himself in this version of the story; he gives everything to the lion. Again as in Aesop, the lion asks the fox where he learned to divide the spoils in this way, and the fox replies: “O king of the world, I learned it from the fate of the wolf.”

But this is not the end of the story. In Rumi’s version, the lion then gives the whole of the spoils to the fox, and  speaks these words of blessing: “Inasmuch as thou hast become pledge to love of me, pick up all of it and take it and depart. O fox, since thou hast become entirely mine, how should I hurt thee when thou hast become myself?” The fox then thanks the lion for giving him the privilege of having gone second, after the wolf; otherwise, he would surely have met the same fate as the wolf. This allows Rumi to conclude that we are lucky to be living now, with the examples of past generations to guide us: “So that we have heard of the chastisements which God inflicted upon the past generations in the preceding time, that we, like the fox may keep better watch over ourselves from considering the fate of those ancient wolves.”

Rumi has thus taken a traditional Aesop’s fable and turned it into a meditation on oneness with God and obedience to divine authority. This approach exemplifies what Randy has called the “religious theme” in myths and legends about the confrontation between the human and the divine.  Rumi’s fox worships at the feet of the lion, addressing him with the words “O king of the world,” and is duly rewarded for this devotion. In Aesop, on the other hand, there is a much more strongly humanistic theme: after seeing what happened to the would-be rebel who defied the lion, the fox concedes the lion’s share, but the words she speaks are not words of worship. Instead, the fox uses her wit to provide a sly critique of the lion, even if she cannot challenge his authority directly. If you were to use just one word to characterize the attitude of Aesop’s fox, it would have to be “cynical.” In my next article, I’ll consider the archetypal Cynic philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, and the famous legend of “Diogenes and his lamp.” This, too, is a story that shows up both in Aesop’s fables and in the mystical poetry of Rumi, providing us with another opportunity to consider the shifting fortunes of the religious and humanistic themes in the Greek and Muslim traditions.

References

• Chambry, Emile (editor). Fables / Esope. 1926. (The full Greek text of this fable is available online, along with an English version, at Aesopica.net.)
• Nicholson, Reynold A. (editor and translator). The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi. 1926 (reprinted 1990); The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi: Commentary. 1937 (reprinted 1985). The fable of the lion is found in Book I, beginning at line 3009.