Nasrudin is the person who is aware of his origin from the eternal and thus has access to original wisdom and on the other hand feels himself to be part of this nature with all its faults and weaknesses.
The Nasrudin anecdotes have a deeper level. We laugh at them, at the foolishness and simplicity of others, until we realise that we are also laughing at our own foolishness.
‘How old are you, Mulla?’
‘Forty.’
‘But you said the same when I asked you two years ago.’
‘Yes, because I always stand by what I have said.’
Just a joke? In the Western world we would probably see it that way. It’s very different, however, in the Orient and especially in Sufism. There, such tales are very often used as teaching stories.
A particularly popular figure of such legends is Mulla Nasrudin. He appears throughout the Arab, Persian and Central Asian world and almost every Muslim between Marrakesh and Beijing knows his anecdotes.
On the cover of the booklet Die fabelhaften Heldentaten des weisen Narren Mulla Nasrudin (The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin) by Idries Shah, one reads:
‘Master of smiling wisdom and the most endearing roguish figure in world literature. Humorous and enigmatic stories about the most beautiful follies of the great master of concealed spirituality, which with a wink hold up a mirror to the reader – and thus open his eyes to the essentials.’ [i]
In the story above, we discover a person who is trapped in the past and unable to react to the present. He misses the truth of the moment because he cannot free himself from old points of view that have long been outdated.
All Nasrudin anecdotes have this deeper level. We laugh at them, at the foolishness and simplicity of others, until we realise that we are also laughing at our own foolishness.
If at this point we can react with cheerfulness it is at least a sign that we are able to look at ourselves with some distance. We no longer take ourselves quite so seriously, but admit to making mistakes, to not being perfect.
A person who is full of ambition to pursue their egocentric goals usually has no sense of humour. They have to respond with anger and resistance when someone holds up a mirror to them.
For the Sufis, the donkey symbolises the stubborn ego that wants to assert its own will and often does not do what its master wants it to do. However, it does not make sense to kill this ego, because we need it to exist in this world.
A beautiful story makes this clear:
Mulla Nasrudin tells his neighbour that he is in the process of getting his donkey to stop eating. ‘Just imagine what you can save by doing that. I will soon be a rich man.’
After a few days, he meets his neighbour on the street again.
‘And, Mulla? Have you stopped your donkey from eating yet?’
‘Oh, I was so unlucky’, he replied, ‘just when it had got the hang of it, it died.’
There are hundreds of donkey stories by Mulla Nasrudin, in which many of the peculiarities of our ego become wonderfully visible.
I would like to tell one more:
Mulla Nasrudin rides his donkey with his face to its rump.
The villagers watch him in amazement. ‘But Mulla, why are you riding the wrong way round on your donkey?’ they ask curiously.
Mulla Nasrudin replies: ‘You’re wrong! I’m riding the right way round. The donkey is just going in the wrong direction.’
If we look at this story from the point of view of what has been said, we see that – contrary to appearance – it is our ego that is travelling the wrong way. Our inner spirit being, the mullah, the master, always looks in the right direction.
That is why the spiritual pilgrim will often display paradoxical behaviour, which others will answer with incomprehension and suspicion.
For this reason a dervish is always regarded as a fool. But he does not care what others think of him. He does what the spirit tells him to do at any given moment, no matter how absurd it may seem on the surface.
The story of Nasrudin as a beggar makes this clear:
On market days Nasrudin often stood at the door of the mosque to beg. But whenever people offered him a choice of two pieces of money – one larger and one smaller – he
he took the smaller one.
When the people had observed this for a while, they said to him: ‘Mulla, why don’t you take the big coin? Then you’ll earn twice as much in less time.’
‘That may be true,’ said Nasrudin, ‘but if I take the bigger one every time, people will stop giving me anything. They actually want to prove that I’m crazier than them. And then I wouldn’t have any money at all.’
The thought processes and motivations of an aspirant on the spiritual path are inscrutable and incomprehensible to those focussed on the material world. Thus a dervish often takes on the role of the unenlightened in order to present a truth even more impressively.
There is a beautiful anecdote that questions the superficial belief in cause and effect:
One day when the mulla walked through a narrow alley a man fell from a roof – right on his head. The man was unhurt, but Nasrudin had to be taken to hospital.
‘What lesson do you learn from this incident, Master?’ a disciple asked him.
‘Beware of believing in the inevitable, even if cause and effect seem unavoidable. And
beware of theoretical questions like: if a man falls off a roof, will he break his neck?
He fell – but my neck is broken.”[ii]
Why do I like these Nasrudin stories so well?
Nasrudin looks at his own and the mistakes of others with humour. He doesn’t want to change anything, he is only interested in self-knowledge. He can look at events from a certain distance and deals with them playfully. This opens up opportunities for further development that were not noticed before because the view was too one-sided. Nothing has to be – everything can be.
Nasrudin has no feelings of guilt about his stupidity and doesn’t blame anyone. He does not try to hide anything, but openly shows his ignorance to the world. It amuses him when he discovers behaviour in himself and others that seems completely crazy to him.
Nasrudin is the person who is aware of his origin from the eternal and thus has access to original wisdom and on the other hand feels himself to be part of this nature with all its faults and weaknesses. With the eyes of eternity, he can look down with a smile on the imperfection and foolishness of this material world and bear it lovingly.
He can accept everything and wants to avoid nothing. Joy and suffering are equally important to him. He is no longer slave to his ego with all its demands and needs and no longer takes it quite so seriously.
In this way, he rises above the seriousness of life into the joyfulness and love of God’s children, who know they are safe in the stream of life.
[i] Idries Shah, Die fabelhaften Heldentaten des weisen Narren Mulla Nasrudin (The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin), Herder Publ. House, 2013
[ii] From: Idries Shah, Die Sufis (The Sufis), Eugen Diederichs Publ. House, 1982
All other stories are taken from Idries Shah, Die fabelhaften Heldentaten des weisen Narren Mulla Nasrudin (The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin)
