The Chinese and Greek Painters

About The Chinese and Greek Painters

The Chinese and Greek Painters is a short parable from Book I of the Masnavi-yi Ma'navi, appearing around line 3467 in Nicholson's edition. In Rumi's telling, a king sets two groups of artists in competition. One group claims superior skill; the other answers only that they will show what they can do. The king assigns each group one wall of a large hall and hangs a curtain between them so neither can see the other's work.

The first group paints with every pigment and technique their tradition knows. Flowers, birds, figures, intricate arabesques — their wall becomes a masterpiece of accumulated craft. The second group asks for no paint at all. They spend the whole time polishing their wall. When the curtain is drawn back, the polished wall reflects the painted wall across from it — and reflects it more vividly than the original, because the reflection has a clarity the pigment cannot match. The king declares the polishers' side the winner.

Rumi names the two groups directly: the painters are Rumiyan (Greeks, from Rum — the Byzantine lands) and the polishers are Chiniyan (Chinese). The cultural attribution does not turn on accurate ethnography. It turns on the teaching Rumi wants to carry. In the medieval Persian literary imagination, Chinese craftsmanship represented subtle interior artistry, while Greek skill represented explicit exterior form. The parable uses this contrast the way another teaching might use north and south — as a device, not a claim.

This story sits in a longer discussion of knowledge in the Masnavi. Rumi has just finished contrasting two kinds of knowing: knowledge that is acquired (from books, teachers, memorization) and knowledge that is received (from the polished heart that reflects what is). He tells the parable of the painters to show what the second kind of knowing looks like as a practice. The Greeks stand for the scholar who gathers. The Chinese stand for the Sufi who polishes.

The parable carries, in a single image, the entire technology of the Sufi path. The work is not addition. The work is removal. What obscures the mirror is not the absence of paint — it is the presence of rust, dust, the residue of self-regard. Polish is the whole curriculum. The image the king wanted to see was already there. The painters added; the polishers revealed.

Later Sufi manuals treated this story as a foundational teaching, and it entered the popular Persian and Turkish imagination wherever the Mevlevi and other Sufi orders spread. Its influence reaches into contemporary contemplative traditions that never knew Rumi directly, because the image is archetypal — the heart as a mirror, and the practice as polishing — and it belongs to every tradition that has asked how a finite person comes to reflect an infinite source.

Original Text

Translation

The Greeks said, 'We are the more skilful artists,'
the Chinese said, 'The power and excellence belong to us.'

'I will put you to the test,' said the King,
'in respect of this claim, (to see) which of you is true in your pretension.'

The Chinese and the Greeks began to debate:
the Greeks retired from the argument.

The Chinese said, 'Hand over to us a particular room,
and (let there be) one for you.'

There were two rooms with door facing door:
the Chinese took one, the Greeks the other.

The Chinese requested the King to give them a hundred colours:
so that eminent one opened his treasury.

Every morning, by (his) bounty, the colours were
dispensed from the treasury to the Chinese.

The Greeks said, 'No tints and colours are proper for our work:
nothing is required except to remove the rust.'

They shut the door and went on burnishing:
they became clear and pure like the sky.

There is a way from many-colouredness to colourlessness:
colour is like the clouds, and colourlessness is a moon.

Whatsoever light and splendour you see in the clouds,
know that it comes from the stars and the moon and the sun.

When the Chinese had finished their work,
they were beating drums for joy.

The King entered and saw the pictures there:
that (sight), as he encountered it, was robbing him of his wits.

After that, he came towards the Greeks:
they removed the intervening curtain,

That the reflexion of those (Chinese) pictures and works
might strike upon these walls which had been made pure.

All that he had seen there (in the Chinese room) was more beautiful here:
'twas snatching the eye from its socket.

The Greeks, O father, are the Sufis:
(they are) without study and books and erudition,

But they have burnished their breasts (and made them) pure from greed and cupidity and avarice and hatreds:
that purity of the mirror is, beyond doubt, the heart,

Which receives images innumerable.
The reflexion of every image shines forth from the heart of the pure,

Without (the need of) colour or any material (thing).
They behold the form of the Unseen and the Invisible.

Commentary

Read the parable slowly. The first move is not aesthetic — it is competitive. Two groups stand before a king and claim superior skill. The king does not argue; he sets up a test. Already the frame carries a teaching. The Beloved does not adjudicate between your theories of the path. The Beloved builds a room where you practice and then walks in to see.

The Greeks ask for pigments. A hundred colours. Every morning from the king's treasury. They paint. This is the path of acquisition. It is not wrong. It produces something beautiful. Rumi does not say the Greeks' wall was ugly. He says the king was stunned by it — the painted wall truly was a masterpiece. The critique is not of study, of scripture, of tradition, of craft. Rumi himself was a scholar's scholar, son of a theologian, teacher of Islamic law, memorizer of the Qur'an. He is not dismissing the Greeks. He is saying the Greeks' work is not the final work.

The Chinese ask for no paint. They ask only for a door. They close the door. And then the line that is the whole teaching: dar faru bastand va sayqal mi-zadand — 'they shut the door and went on burnishing.' For as long as the Greeks painted, the Chinese polished. The word sayqal in Persian means the burnishing of metal mirrors, which were made of polished steel or bronze in Rumi's time, and which required constant rubbing with cloth and fine abrasive to keep them reflective. A mirror left unattended dulls. Rust forms. The image clouds. The technology of the heart is the same technology.

When the curtain is drawn, the polished wall catches the painted wall — and shows it more brightly. Rumi says the reflection was snatching the eye from its socket. This is not just the claim that mirrors are better than pigment. It is the claim that what gets reflected in a pure mirror is more radiant than what gets produced by effort. The image on the Chinese wall was not a smaller, derivative version of the Greek painting. It was the Greek painting, plus the clarity of the medium. Pigment obscures itself. A mirror does not.

Then Rumi makes the interpretation explicit. This is unusual in the Masnavi — he often leaves parables to work on the reader without commentary — but here he names the figures. The Greeks, he says, are the Sufis. They have no books, no study, no erudition; and yet the images of the Unseen arise on the clarified surface of their hearts, more vividly than any scholar could paint them. The distinction is not Islam versus something else. The Greek scholars in the parable are Muslim scholars. The Sufis are also Muslim. Both are inside the same revelation. The difference is in what they do with it. One memorizes; one polishes. One gathers; one removes.

What is being removed? Rumi tells us: greed, cupidity, avarice, hatreds. The technical Sufi word for these is akhlaq al-dhamima — the blameworthy traits. The nafs accumulates them as a mirror accumulates tarnish. They do not come from outside. They grow from the surface itself, from the metal's own oxidation, from the ego's habit of wanting, grasping, defending, comparing. The polish is not applied paint. It is the removal of what the mirror produces against itself.

The practical form of polishing in the Sufi tradition is dhikr — remembrance of God. The repetition of divine names, the awareness that turns from contents of consciousness back toward the consciousness in which contents appear. It is also muraqaba — watchful silent sitting. And khalwat — retreat. And tawba — the turning away from what dulls. None of these produce an image. They are all forms of rubbing, in the sense the parable uses. They make the surface more transparent to what is already there.

Notice what Rumi does not say. He does not say the heart manufactures the divine. He does not say the mirror is the source of the light. The mirror reflects. What it reflects comes from outside it. A polished heart does not generate truth; it receives it. This is the difference between contemplative traditions that stop at the mirror — the self becomes beautiful, the self becomes clear — and the Sufi teaching, which treats the mirror as a means. The purpose of polishing is to reflect. The purpose of reflection is to know what is reflected. And what is reflected, in Rumi's theology, is the divine. Fasabbaha bi hamdi rabbika — glorify your Lord with praise. Praise is another word for clear reflection.

There is an implicit warning in the parable that is easy to miss. The Greeks work hard. Their wall is a genuine achievement. Many seekers spend whole lives as Greeks — acquiring concepts, mastering terminology, producing increasingly refined paintings of the spiritual life. The work is real and the beauty is real. But the parable says the king prefers the polished wall. This is not sentimentalism. It is a structural claim: at some point, the work of adding has to give way to the work of removing, or the mirror will never be seen for what it is.

In the Satyori framing of responsibility and capacity, this is the move from doing-more to being-more. Doing-more stacks technique. Being-more clears the self. Both have their season. Anyone who has spent time in real spiritual practice will recognize the transition: a moment when you realize the next advance is not going to come from another book, another workshop, another concept. It is going to come from sitting with what you already know until you can see through it. That sitting — if it is genuine — is polishing. It is not passive. It is not empty. It is the hardest work.

The reader may notice a temptation the parable itself warns against. It is possible to hear this story and make a new acquisition out of it — to collect the idea of polishing the way the Greeks collected pigments. The parable then becomes another bright piece of paint on the wall. To avoid this, Rumi structures the teaching as a practice, not a concept. Close the door. Burnish. Keep burnishing. If you find yourself explaining the parable to others instead of applying it to yourself, the Greeks have won your afternoon.

The image carries across traditions because the technology is real. The Hesychasts of Mount Athos spoke of the prayer of the heart as a purification of the nous — the same polishing, different dialect. The Zen tradition uses the mirror metaphor directly, most famously in Huineng's Platform Sutra, where the dispute between the gradualist and sudden-enlightenment schools turns on exactly this image. The Advaita tradition speaks of chitta shuddhi, purification of the mind-stuff, as the prerequisite for recognizing the self. The Gospel says blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The mechanism is the same everywhere there are honest mystics. Rumi simply gave it its most memorable picture.

One closing note on the reversal readers sometimes want to make. Modern readers occasionally flip the parable and assign the Chinese role to themselves by default — we are the polishers, the scholarly traditions are the Greeks, we have found the better path. This is exactly the mistake the Greeks in the parable make at the opening. They claim superiority. Rumi does not assign the roles by group identity; he assigns them by what each group does in practice. A scholar who polishes his heart is a Sufi. A self-declared Sufi who accumulates techniques and titles is a Greek. The parable is a mirror too. Hold it up and see which side of the hall you are standing in this afternoon.

Themes

Polishing versus painting. The central image of the parable, and the most portable teaching in the whole Masnavi. Spiritual work is the removal of what obscures, not the accumulation of what impresses. The heart is already a mirror; the practice is keeping it clean. Every Sufi technique — dhikr, muraqaba, khalwat, tawba — is a form of polishing in this sense.

Acquired versus received knowledge. Rumi is drawing a classic Sufi distinction between 'ilm al-yaqin (knowledge of certainty, from reports and reasoning) and 'ayn al-yaqin (the eye of certainty, direct seeing). The Greeks have the first. The Chinese receive the second. Both are real; the second requires the first has been completed and then surpassed.

Reflection and tawhid. The polished heart reflects what is. What is, for Rumi, is always ultimately the divine. The parable is a picture of tawhid — unity — in practice: when the self stops generating its own image, only the Real remains to be seen. The mirror is not the light. The mirror shows the light because it has gotten out of the way.

The blameworthy traits (akhlaq al-dhamima). Rumi names what must be removed: greed, cupidity, avarice, hatreds. In Sufi ethics, these are not bad habits to break; they are oxidation on the surface of the heart. They form from the metal itself. Polishing is the discipline of catching and clearing them as they arise.

The seeming modesty of the Chinese. They make no claim at the start. They ask only for a door. This understated opening — real authority without self-promotion — is the Sufi signature. The Greeks argue for their skill. The polishers simply begin.

Cross-tradition mirror imagery. The mirror-heart appears in Hesychasm (the nous purified), Zen (Huineng's dust-free mirror), Advaita (chitta shuddhi), and Christian mysticism (the pure in heart see God). This theme connects to Sufism, fana, and the general doctrine of dhikr as heart-polishing.

Significance

The Chinese and Greek Painters is among the most anthologized passages in the Masnavi and has been called the clearest pedagogical parable in Rumi's entire corpus. Nicholson noted that the story crystallizes, in a single image, the theory of knowledge that runs through all six books. Annemarie Schimmel treated the passage as Rumi's definitive statement on the relationship between scholarship and mysticism in Islamic thought. William Chittick, in his studies of Ibn Arabi and Rumi, points to this parable when explaining the Sufi distinction between knowledge about God and knowledge of God.

Its influence on later Persian and Turkish literature is enormous. The image of the polished heart as a mirror recurs throughout Ottoman Sufi poetry, in the Chishti poets of South Asia, and in Jami, Attar, and Shabistari. The Mevlevi order, which Rumi's son Sultan Veled organized after his father's death, took the parable as a foundational teaching text and its framing shaped the way novices were introduced to the discipline of dhikr.

In modern contemplative literature outside the Islamic world, the story has been cited by Christian contemplatives (including Thomas Merton, who wrote on Sufi sources), by the Advaita teacher Ramana Maharshi's interpreters, and by Zen commentators who found in it a close analogue to the mirror-polishing debate of the Platform Sutra. The parable travels well because its image does not require its framing. Anyone who has sat in silence long enough to notice the clutter on the surface of the mind recognizes what Rumi is talking about.

The line dar faru bastand va sayqal mi-zadand — 'they shut the door and went on burnishing' — has become proverbial in Persian. It is quoted to describe any person who withdraws from showy effort to do quiet essential work. The parable's presence in the Masnavi's first book, and its placement in a discussion of the two kinds of knowing, gives it the weight of a definition: this is what Rumi thinks a Sufi is, under the name.

Connections

The Mirror and the Nous (Hesychasm). The Christian contemplatives of Mount Athos developed the prayer of the heart (Jesus Prayer) as a way of purifying the nous, the eye of the heart, until it can reflect the uncreated light. Saint Gregory Palamas, Evagrius Ponticus, and the Philokalic tradition describe exactly the polishing Rumi describes, in a different technical vocabulary. The correspondence is not metaphor; it is two independent developments of the same contemplative discovery.

Huineng and the Mirror (Zen). The Platform Sutra records a famous competition between two disciples of the Fifth Patriarch. Shenxiu writes that the body is a Bodhi tree and the mind a bright mirror stand, which must be wiped clean constantly. Huineng answers that there is no tree and no mirror stand — no-thing from the start — and receives the robe. The Rumi parable and the Platform Sutra parable appear to contradict each other at first, but they are addressing different stages. Rumi is teaching the path; Huineng is teaching the view that arrives when the path has done its work. Both are true at their levels.

Chitta Shuddhi (Advaita and Yoga). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali define yoga as chitta-vritti-nirodhah — the stilling of the modifications of the mind-stuff. Sankara's Advaita names the purification of the mind as the prerequisite for recognizing the self that is already the Brahman. The Sufi polish of the heart and the Vedantic clearing of chitta are structurally the same operation, with Ayurveda's supporting work on the physical vehicle as a parallel discipline in the Indian tradition.

Purity of Heart and the Beatitude. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God — Matthew 5:8. Jesus uses the same causal logic as Rumi: purity is the condition; vision is the consequence. The Desert Fathers built an entire ascetical theology on this verse, using terms (apatheia, stillness, detachment) that track the Sufi vocabulary closely.

Confession and the Clearing of Oxidation. Across traditions, the specific work of catching and clearing the blameworthy traits takes the form of daily self-examination (the Jesuit examen), Tibetan preliminary practices (ngondro), the Jewish teshuvah of the days of awe, and Sufi muhasaba (accounting of the self). These are the practical polishing disciplines. They are not optional in any serious tradition.

BEGIN and the Capacity to Receive. In the Satyori 9 Levels, BEGIN is the first step of clearing what blocks presence. The Chinese painters' work is the archetype of BEGIN's practice: not learning more, but removing what keeps the already-present from registering. The parable maps directly onto the Satyori principle that capacity is not built by addition but by subtraction of distortion.

The Samskaras and the Heart's Rust. In Vedic psychology, samskaras are the impressions that accumulate on the subtle body and bias perception. Rumi's rust, Patanjali's klesha, and the Christian desert's logismoi are the same phenomenon named three ways. The mirror-polishing technology exists because every contemplative tradition noticed that the problem is not the absence of truth but the oxidation of the instrument that would see it.

Rumi's Teaching on Sama and Inner Reflection. The whirling practice of the Mevlevi order, which developed after Rumi's death from the ecstatic turning he himself engaged in, has sometimes been misread as performance. In the frame of this parable, sama is another form of polishing — the body's continuous turning wears away the self's claim to a fixed posture from which to watch. The dervish becomes a spinning mirror. The still point in the turn is the reflective surface. What is seen there is not the dervish.

The Witness and the Observed. In traditions of inquiry like Ramana Maharshi's atma vichara (self-inquiry), the move is to turn attention back on the one who is attending. Eventually, the attender discovers there is no separate attender — only awareness reflecting what arises in it. The polished mirror in Rumi's parable is this same discovery, approached through devotional practice rather than inquiry. Both paths end at the same clarity.

Further Reading

The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi by Reynold A. Nicholson (Cambridge, 1925-1940, 8 volumes) — The scholarly standard. Book I contains the parable at lines 3467ff in Volume II of the translation. Public domain.

The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick (SUNY Press, 1983) — The single best thematic introduction to Rumi's Sufi doctrine. Chittick discusses this parable in his chapter on knowledge and unveiling.

The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi by Annemarie Schimmel (SUNY Press, 1993) — Schimmel's life's work on Rumi. Treats the painters parable as Rumi's definitive statement on scholarship and mysticism.

Rumi: Past and Present, East and West by Franklin D. Lewis (Oneworld, 2000) — The authoritative biography and literary history. Contextualizes the Masnavi in Rumi's life and the Konya milieu.

Mystical Dimensions of Islam by Annemarie Schimmel (University of North Carolina Press, 1975) — The standard survey of Sufism in English. Places the mirror-polishing doctrine in the wider Sufi tradition.

Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi by Fatemeh Keshavarz (University of South Carolina Press, 1998) — A Persian-language scholar's close reading of Rumi's poetics. Especially good on the Masnavi's use of teaching parables.