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Tales of the Dervishes (Compass)

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Stories that will shake your assumptions and strict belief in the established, conventional, trusted and safe relationship between cause and effect. These stories, if nothing else, open your mind to a different way of thinking. By doing that, it awakens parts of your brain that normally stay dormant. A fresh look at everyday occurrences, unquestioned practices and established thought-processes. It has an invigorating value. You don't have to 'believe' anything the author says: he is not selling anything, not even ideas. Just read and observe what happens to yourself, since these stories are about you.

I first read TALES OF THE DERVISHES thirty years ago, and I've been re-reading them ever since. My daughter preferred these ancient stories to the standard Western fairy tales at bedtime, asking me to read them to her over and over again, which delighted me because I too found them spellbinding. It's easy to understand why they've endured a thousand years because they are perhaps the most beautiful and intriguing examples of the storytelling art that I've ever encountered.

Most books that deal with metaphysics or consciousness are written by people who like to tell others what they have found. We get an individual interpretation magnified and glorified. There seems to be quite a market for such books, which I suppose must mean there is a taste for them. Tales of the Dervishes, a book which contains Teaching Stories from Sufi Masters, is very short on interpretation of Reality, or descriptions of Reality, or categorizations of Reality, and very long on the means to develope one's own perception and understanding. In these pages we find animals and Kings, beggars and fools, a princess, the water of life and many other familar characters and subjects. Watching themes develope and characters interact is like watching a map of human experience slowly develop. What emerges is that you have just been shown yourself.

I found "Tales of the Dervishes" by accident in a New York City bookstore. What caught my eye was the very striking red-on-white geometric design on its cover. I read the first story (about some fish) but didn't really understand it, so I went on to the second story, called "The Food of Paradise":

"Yunus, the son of Adam, decided one day not only to cast his life in the balance of fate, but to seek the means and reason of the provision of goods for man.

"`I am', he said to himself, `a man. As such I get a portion of the world's goods, every day. This portion comes to me by my own efforts, coupled with the efforts of others. By simplifying this process, I shall find the means by which sustenance comes to mankind, and learn something about how and why. I shall therefore adopt the religious way, which exhorts man to rely on almighty God for his sustenance. Rather than live in the world of confusion, where food and other things come apparently through society, I shall throw myself on the direct support of the Power that rules over all. The beggar depends upon intermediaries: charitable men and women who are subject to secondary impulses. They give goods or money because they have been trained to do so. I shall accept no indirect contribution.'

"So saying, he walked into the countryside, throwing himself upon the support of invisible forces with the same resolution with which he had accepted the support of visible ones when he had been a teacher in a school."

I was completely rapt. The situation was so striking, the question so basic, and the tale so direct and unmistakable in its intent, and told with such benevolence and good humor, that I gladly gave up the money I'd been saving for a good meal somewhere, in order to find out what happened to Yunus, son of Adam. I caught the bus, found a seat, and started again from the beginning, reading every sentence twice....

What are these tales? You'll enjoy the skill of the storyteller and the beautiful, unselfconscious English of the translator. The plots can be simple or intricate, surprising, contradictory, tragic or wildly funny. The characters are ordinary people with a typical mixture of strengths and weaknesses, together with wise fools, kings, mule-drivers, bakers, students, sages, married couples, tyrants, beautiful princesses and terrible ogres; the stories evoke a kind of fairy-tale realism which is used with skill and to great effect.

But the tales aren't content to just amuse, but work subtly and in almost inexplicable ways to uncover and dislodge hidden prejudice and deepen the understanding. They won't all speak to you equally, some you'll puzzle over for a lifetime--I bought that book-store copy nearly forty years ago--but then there are the three or four or half dozen which speak to you directly and seem to have been written for you and no one else.

"Tales of the Dervishes" is a remarkable book. I recommend it highly.

The more I read these tales, the more I realize that they they do more than simply point the limitations of certain ways of thinking. They also point to alternative ways of approaching life and the experiences offered during a lifetime. Each time I read it, the book offers me new insights, always helping me move to fresh realizations. I cannot overemphasize how these tales have enabled me to focus and orient my mind so as to make it more receptive. The stories in this collection are thus not only enjoyable reads, they are valuable instruments as well. I strongly recommend this book.

After 10+ years of reading the stories in this book, I still come away with a different level of understanding of each story with each passing year. A master storyteller, Idries Shah's writing reaches right into the very thought processes that make you who you think you are and then snaps you into remembering who you really are on Earth and beyond. Like an onion, the stories all have multiple layers. Only with time do they reveal themselves. Good for the beginner as well as the most advanced --

I have just reread Idries Shah's Tales of the Dervishes. The 82 tales from Sufi teaching of the last thousand years include current material. Shah calls it "work material". These vivid and vital accounts are communications, really. They invite the reader to experience the challenge and mystery of Sufi lore and teaching. I was surprised to find that after ten years, I still remember nearly every tale: the feel of the words and drama as well as details of action. The characters, though often odd and unlikely also seem oddly familiar. Their escapades stimulate emotional as well as intellectual involvement. The outcomes seem at once impossible and inevitable. We are reading about ourselves here: the lucky time when we got it right and all the missed opportunities.
After each tale Shah gives historical notes and useful comments.
Excerpt.
STRIKE ON THIS SPOT
Dhun-Nun the Egyptian explained graphically in a parable how he extracted knowledge concealed in Pharaonic inscriptions.

There was a statue with pointing finger, upon which was inscribed: 'Strike on this spot for treasure.' Its origin was unknown, but generations of people had hammered the place marked by the sign. Because it was made of the hardest stone, little impression was made on it, and the meaning remained cryptic.
Dhun-Nun, wrapped in contemplation of the statue, one day exactly at midday observed that the shadow of the pointing finger, unnoticed for centuries, followed a line in the paving beneath the statue.
Marking the place he obtained the necessary instruments and prised up by chisel-blows the flagstone, which proved to be the trapdoor in the roof of a subterranean cave which contained strange articles of a workmanship which enabled him to deduce the science of their manufacture, long since lost and hence to acquire the treasures and those of a more formal kind which accompanied them.

One of many wonderful books by this author. Takes the form of short stories from a third of a page to 4 pages. I hesitate to describe it further than that because it might limit the potential readers expectation to something less than it is. However, I value Shah's books as the single most important source of knowledge I have come across.

My favorite stories in this wonderful anthology are: "The Dervish and the Grammarian" and "Three Pieces of Advise." In the former a dervish is trying to help a grammarian who is stuck. The grammarian gets hung up on correcting the dervish's grammar. Finally, the dervish gives up. The latter I came across previously in Ellen Frankel's Jewish folktales. The dervish version is a bit more explicit, or pedantic: A bird offers to give a man three pieces of valuable advice in exchange for its freedom: "Do not regret the loss of anything no matter how valuable it was" and "Never believe anything contrary to common sense without proof." The bird then informs the man that it contains a large jewel that the man will not be getting. The bird then tells the man that he has already wasted the wisdom by believing that such a small bird could contain a huge jewel and by lammenting its loss.

With each new projection of the Sufi impulse, the current exponent collects and organizes materials from the wealth accumulated during the over thousand years of works that are relavant the the current time and targeted people. It is cusomary for the potential students to study and become familiar with them so that the multiple embedded meanings may be later reveiled. This is the real, authentic, material, much of it available in the West for the first time. Since the point of these stories is function, a judgement based upon appearances, likes or dislikes, is of little value. It is far less important if a wrench is chrome or black than if it is properly designed and constructed so that it does its job.