188 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XII, 



and these quatrains are as much born of the spirit of that age, 

 as the creation of any individual mind. So I think that no great 

 harm will be done if they are allowed to remain, till that search 

 is' carried out, as the work of Abu Sa'id, enjoying whatever 

 measure of authority may be due to the names of these two 

 zealous gentlemen of Shiraz and Jilan. 



I am fully conscious that the two collections which we 

 owe to their efforts, are of doubtful value 1 ; that in parti- 

 cular the MS. copy of Qadiri, from which the bulk of the 

 present collection is taken, has but a slender claim to be re- 

 garded as genuine. But although the unknown original of this 

 copy may have been a recent and valueless document, there is 

 a possibility that it may have been an old and authentic MS.; 

 and this much, at least, may be said in their favour, that a 

 goodly proportion of the quatrains found in each of these two 

 texts are supported by the authority of the only two MSS. 



wJT^ l e ^ n0W ' a9 wel1 as b y several reliable tadhkiras. 

 Whether that fact justifies my presenting the remainder as new 



quatrains of Abu Sa'id, I must leave it to others to decide. 



It will be allowed, I think, that they are not unworthy of the 



honour of being numbered among the works of the Shaikh. 



2. On the. Life and Writings of Abu Sa'id. 



t q^u Sa'id's place in Persian literature and in the history 

 of butusm— the theosophy of Islam-can only be touched upon 

 lightly here. He was, we know, the first great poet to use the 

 quatrain ; and he was among the first to express his religion 

 and philosophy in that symbolical language which is so charac- 

 teristic of the Persian mystics. But he is . as Daremsteter savs, 



more poet than philosopher." He is silent upon most of the 

 problems which vexed the great sages, such as the mystery of 

 pain and evil, the nature of the soul, and the much-disputed 

 question of free will and determinism . Nevertheless in some of 

 the essentials of the classic Sufiism of Jalal-ud-din Rumi or 

 J ami, in his view of the universe— which he regarded as a mass 

 of phenomena, illusory, transitory as the waves of the sea, and 

 like them ever being renewed-in his conception of a religion 



a flu ° f t A tFUe relationshi P between lover and Beloved, 

 and of the Sufi s path to << Union," he anticipates to a remark- 

 able extent the language and ideas of those masters. 2 



ihe facts of his life may be briefly told. He was born in 



Eth6 hiv! a !!f a "Z?l >er ?r the °l uatrai ™ collected and publfched by Dr. 



the ,92 ! Em* P tt? & tL 0i faCt n ° betfcer ««*lentials ; as many as 65 out of 

 the 92 being jxtracted from anonymous anthologies and memoirs. 



inadeauAtrfvT£ « 1?*™ made in the notes to illustrate, however 

 quatZns ihhir^l° f . theS f pamllels - But [t muat be added that the 



Sa'id ekher as ^ ° n ^° n °* by "^ mean * contain the ^ of AMl 

 but a smalT p art P ° r P hlloSo P her ' of his philosophy, indeed.it gives 



