Immersing

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Last week, a friend asked me what I thought about this quote from the Súriy-i-Haykal (Surih of the Temple):

Aid ye your Lord, the God of Mercy, with the sword of understanding. Keener indeed is it, and more finely tempered, than the sword of utterance, were ye but to reflect upon the words of your Lord.

I replied that I understood it to mean that utterance is great, but if it’s not backed by wisdom and understanding it can be dangerous (the tongue is a smoldering fire…), or at the very least, less effective.

Out of curiosity, I then looked up the original passage. The relevant Arabic is:

انصروا ربّكم الرّحمن بسيف التّبيان انّه احدّ من البيان

What caught my eye here is that the Arabic words for “utterance” (البيان), al-bayán, and “understanding” (التّبيان), al-tibyán, come from the same root, that is, B-Y-N.

I proceeded to look up each word in my standard Arabic-English dictionary (The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic). I was already familiar with the meaning of bayán, since it is the name given to two of the principle works of the Báb. It is listed as “declaration, announcement, manifestation, explanation, elucidation, illustration, exposé”. I then looked up tibyán, and found four English equivalents: “exposition, demonstration, explanation, illustration.” I was puzzled—the terms seemed to be so similar in meaning, why would Bahá’u'lláh make such a distinction between them?

I left it at that, until a few days later I received the following in my inbox from the bahai-readings@bcca.org mailing list, this one from the Lawḥ-i-Síyyid-i-Mihdíy-i-Dahájí:

O My Name! The Day-Star of utterance, shining resplendent from the dayspring of divine Revelation, hath so illumined the Scrolls and Tablets that the kingdom of utterance and the exalted dominion of understanding vibrate with joy and ecstasy and shine forth with the splendour of His light, yet the generality of mankind comprehend not.

Tablets of Baha’u’llah Revealed After the Kitab-i-Aqdas, pp. 198-199

Of course, I wanted to see if the same terms were used in this tablet, which was revealed partly in Arabic and partly in Persian. Sure enough, the phrase translated as “the kingdom of utterance and the exalted dominion of understanding” is ملکوت بيان وجبروت تبيان (malakút-i-bayán va jabarút-i-tibyán).

I then decided to turn to other resources in an attempt to shed more light on the difference between bayán and tibyán. I was delighted to find a more than satisfactory answer in an amazing 3000+ page Arabic-English lexicon published in 1863 that is now available online (see the Resources list in the sidebar):

This insight makes an even stronger connection between the original verse from the Súriy-i-Haykal and the following from Gleanings, which sprang to my mind the instant I read it:

Whoso ariseth among you to teach the Cause of his Lord, let him, before all else, teach his own self, that his speech may attract the hearts of them that hear him. Unless he teacheth his own self, the words of his mouth will not influence the heart of the seeker.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 277