An ant hurries along a threshing floor
with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks
of wheat, not knowing the abundance
all around. It thinks one grain
is all there is to love. 

So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.
This body, one path, or one teacher.
Look wider and farther. 

The essence of every human being can see,
and what that essence-eye takes in,
the being becomes. Saturn. Solomon!

The ocean pours through a jar,
and you might say it swims inside
the fish! This mystery gives peace to
your longing and makes the road home home.

                                             Jalaluddin Rumi 

The essence of spirit had been pondered and portrayed by Rumi, a well-known Persian poet born in 1207, through his compositions, and in one of his poems I just read, “The Road Home,” he reminds me of an old Buddhist story my junior aunt told in my childhood. 

“The Road Home” illustrates with three different kinds of life to imply the bodies that spirits are held, which are an ant, we humans, and a fish. In the first stanza, the poet describes the ant, which cares only about a small piece of grain in its hands without knowing how abundant its surrounding is, as a hardworking but ignorant spirit. In the second stanza, the life moves to us humans; similar to the ant, most of us care only about what materials we already have and we are struggling for although we humans care about something else, such as careers and knowledge, as well. In the third stanza, the poet thinks what we are doing for our owning is of no help for finding the real essence of the spirits, and he suggests that we view and think more widely and wisely as the god Saturn and the king Solomon do. In the final stanza, he advises us to forget about the size and shape of our bodies by scheming the fish and the ocean as the body and spirit respectively. The ocean, infinite as we see, could be thought as small as a little water mass flowing in a jar or even smaller as a current swimming in the body of a fish, like the existence of the unlimited spirit. If we are wise enough to realize the truth of life, which, as the poem inspires me, is not the bubble wealth of our bodies but the genuine essence of our spirits we should search for, we definitely shall have peaceful journeys before our spirits reach the home of eternity.

The story that junior aunt told me is somewhat relevant to this poem; only in Buddhism, each spirit has to experience a series of lives to find its genuine essence before it gets home and becomes a Buddha of eternity. In my aunt’s story, there had been two spirits, which were hostile to each other, presented simultaneously as different lives: a monk vs. an earthworm, a pig vs. a butcher, a robber vs. a merchant, and an emperor vs. his betrayer general, respectively, and they travelled a series of killing-and-revenging journeys before they became Buddha of eternity. In his last life, the emperor was extremely frightened, confused, and angry to find he was going to be killed by the general he had been caressing; all of a sudden, his intelligence was activated by seeing through all of his and the general’s previous lives in his mind; immediately, he found it was nothing more worthy he be betrayed by the general, and the unfairness he was facing was actually fair. He then closed eyes with a released peaceful heart and got ready to die. At the moment his head fell apart from his body, his spirit sublimated to be a Buddha.

The morals of Rumi's poem and junior aunt's Buddhist story reveal, as I realize, that our spirits are not permanently confined to but temporarily residing in our bodies, and we won't be able to feel peaceful and get to the home of eternity before we are wise enough. That's the truth of lives.