77 Teachings of the Sufi Masters

Timeless Wisdom from Rumi, Shams of Tabriz, Ibn Arabi and the Seven Great Voices of Sufism

Seven Sufi masters. Eleven turns of the wheel. Seventy-seven teachings that ask something of you before you turn the page.

Rumi. Shams of Tabriz. Ibn Arabi. Al-Hallaj. Hasan al-Basri. Yunus Emre. Haji Bektash Veli. Six centuries and four languages separate the first from the last. One was executed for a single sentence. One wept for fifty years. One was a celebrated scholar who abandoned his books. One was a farmer who carried wood down a mountain for forty years to earn back a conversation that had lasted a minute.

They speak here in a fixed order, and that order turns eleven times — through the crack, the longing, the mirror, the turning, the wound, the remembrance, the surrender, the fire, the emptying, the knowing, and the return. The wheel comes back to the same place and is never at the same height.

This is not a quote collection. Every teaching is traced to a source, and where a saying is transmitted by tradition rather than documented by history, the book says so on the page. Every teaching carries a real event from the master's life — Rumi searching Damascus for a man he would never find, Ibn Arabi watching Averroes carried to his grave balanced against his own books, al-Hallaj praying for his executioners, Yunus lying down in a doorway so an old man would have to step on him.

And every teaching ends with one thing to do today.

Written for the reader who found these words somewhere in the quiet hours — a video playing while you could not sleep, or while you drove, or while you sat somewhere you did not want to be.

Read slowly. One a day is faster than this book wants to be read.