Did Rumi really say “What you seek is seeking you”?

The version you’ve probably seen

“What you seek is seeking you.”

Not in those words in Nicholson’s translation of Books I–II, Redhouse’s of Book I (1881), or Whinfield’s abridgement of all six books, and we couldn’t find where the line started. The nearest thing in the Masnavi is this couplet about water and the thirsty.

In plain words

Rumi is describing love as something that runs both ways. The line just before says that whoever seems to be the lover is also the one loved; then the image: the thirsty go looking for water, and water, in its way, is looking for the thirsty. Read on a lonely night, it doesn’t promise that someone is on the way. It says that longing, by its nature, is one half of a pair.

Sit with this line → A few quiet exchanges about what it stirs in you.

Worth knowing

In the Masnavi the Beloved is God. The next line begins “Inasmuch as He is (thy) lover”, with Nicholson’s capital H, and the passage is about the soul and the divine. Many popular English versions of Rumi leave that out, which turns a religious poem into a general one. Nicholson’s parentheses mark words he added to make the Persian readable in English.

The story behind it

Rumi began the Masnavi at the urging of his disciple Husam al-Din, writing in Persian in Konya, in today’s Turkey; it runs to some 26,000 couplets in six books. He died there in 1273. Most English readers know him through Coleman Barks’s versions, which were made not from the Persian but by reworking earlier English translations, among them Nicholson’s.