The Reed Flute Seller
Short story about the hole that makes the music.
A young man came to the flute seller in the market wanting the one with the most beautiful sound, whatever it cost.
"For whom?" the old man asked, not looking up.
He hesitated. The honest answer was: for a woman who had married someone else three weeks ago, and he did not yet know what he wanted the music to do about that.
The old man took down a flute from the wall. "This grew two years in the water where it was born, in a bed of others just like it." He turned it over in his hands. "Then it was cut away from that water, and it will never go back to it, not for one day. After that it's hollowed out from the inside. Then it's burned — here, and here — until there's a hole wherever the fire touched it."
The young man looked at the row of small black-rimmed holes running down its length.
"And that is what sings," said the old man. "Not the wood. A reed with no holes in it is just a stick. Watertight. Undamaged. Completely silent."
The young man lifted it and played four notes, badly, his fingers unsure of the holes. Something in the fourth note made the back of his neck go cold.
Don't spend the winter trying to become watertight again. The openings are what sing.
Rumi, Masnavi, Book I, opening lines (the song of the reed)
The Masnavi opens with the reed's lament for the reed bed it was cut from — one of the most famous passages in Persian literature. The market, the flute seller and the young man are Ohananda's own; no wording here is presented as Rumi's.
Rumi begins his great poem with a reed flute crying for the bed it was cut from, and says plainly that this cry is the whole subject of the book that follows.
The Sufi claim is not that suffering is good. It is that separation creates longing, and longing moves a person toward what they love. Hence the strange consolation: the holes are not the damage that ruined the instrument. Mechanically, they are the entire reason there is any music at all.
Questions & answers
+What is the message of "The Reed Flute Seller"?
Don't spend the winter trying to become watertight again. The openings are what sing. Rumi begins his great poem with a reed flute crying for the bed it was cut from, and says plainly that this cry is the whole subject of the book that follows. The Sufi claim is not that suffering is good. It is that separation creates longing, and longing moves a person toward what they love. Hence the strange consolation: the holes are not the damage that ruined the instrument. Mechanically, they are the entire reason there is any music at all.
+Is this a true story?
The Masnavi opens with the reed's lament for the reed bed it was cut from — one of the most famous passages in Persian literature. The market, the flute seller and the young man are Ohananda's own; no wording here is presented as Rumi's.
+Which wisdom tradition inspired this story?
Sufism — Rumi, Masnavi, Book I, opening lines (the song of the reed). The path of the lover.
What has been hollowed out in you — and what sound has come through since?
