Poetry Chaikhana Blog

An Exquisite Truth
by Hsu Yun

This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
Is like asking to borrow string
when you’ve got a good strong rope.
Every Dharma is known in the heart.
After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

— from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger

/ Image by Alain Bonnardeaux /

I like what that opening statement says:

This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.

Whether we’re talking about inspired reformers or shining examples of enlightenment, our instinct is to elevate great souls as unique phenomena. We assume they are somehow other than us. But the liberating and challenging truth is that saints are the same as everyone else. The only difference, if we want to call it a difference, is that they don’t cloak their nature as most of us have learned to do. We all have that same steady glow within us. A saint is simply someone who doesn’t damp it down.

Understood this way, the spiritual journey is not one of crushing effort to acquire virtues, to build wisdom, and to learn love. We already have all of that in abundance. The only work necessary is to let go of the assumptions that keep our true nature hidden.

Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

I think these are the lines I respond to most. I don’t know about you, but I spent so much of my life as a teenager and young adult feeling disappointed with where I found myself in the world. I wanted something profound, adventurous, bursting with meaning. Instead, I had a very ordinary lower middle-class American upbringing. I sabotaged my college education and decided to search for something deeper. Most of that search was a painful flailing about, but it did bring me adventures, both internal and external. I lived on Maui for several years. I lived high up in the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been homeless. I’ve had friends in wheelchairs, friends with wealth. I’ve known hippies and bikers and techies and farmers.

While all of that makes for good stories, that ache for something extraordinary just fell away the moment I first settled into a sense of spiritual opening. With that dawning of peace, I also found rest… and a profound sense of self-acceptance. It wasn’t that I had somehow changed into someone new and extraordinary. Instead, I felt profoundly myself for the first time, profoundly my ordinary self. And I can’t describe how blissful that recognition of ordinariness is. I no longer felt the constant need to struggle after the extraordinary; the simple and the plain stood revealed as a stunning work of art filling every day.

These lines by Hsu Yun about “fate’s illusions” remind me of how I spent the first three decades of my life struggling against my circumstances to find a fate with meaning, only to discover that the struggle was unnecessary. All I had to do was open my eyes. In every corner of the world, in every life, great and humble, the entire mystery of life and death can be found.

After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.

Recommended Books: Hsu Yun

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology)	A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry	A Pictoral Biography of the Venerable Master Hsu Yun	Empty Cloud: The Autobiography of Chinese Zen Master, Hsu Yun

Hsu Yun China (1839 – 1959) Timeline Buddhist : Zen / Chan

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Love everyone and everything
with the last ounce of your being.
Love all until you are shattered
by love
and only love remains.

A ghost in the mirror is the mind
by P’ang Yun (Layman P’ang)

English version by Ivan M. Granger

A ghost in the mirror is the mind:
Not there, yet not unreal.
When the mind is as it is,
      the world too simply is.
Grasping neither reality nor emptiness,
you are neither holy nor wise,
just an ordinary man done with his work.

/ Image by Peter Schulz /

When the mind is as it is,
      the world too simply is.

This is such a lovely statement that seems to feed so naturally into a serene state, but it is also saying something very powerful that overturns our common assumptions.

Most often we imagine that if our lives and society and the world as a whole would just settle down, then perhaps we could experience peace. And so we turn all of our efforts outward, trying to force a sense of peace in the world. That doesn’t usually work so well, does it?

It can get to the point that turning inward, prayer, meditation can feel like a betrayal, as if we are abandoning the outer world to chaos, while we selfishly seek a separate sense of peace.

But the strange truth is that we don’t create a peaceful environment and then experience peace. The reality is the reverse. We discover peace within, and only then can begin to build it outwardly. More surprising still is that we come to see that the “world” outside of ourselves as but a reflection of our own inner state. When we discover peace within, the world comes naturally to rest as well. Does that mean problems in the world disappear? No. But we recognize the peace that underlies even those problems, and we begin to see new ways to coax that peace to the surface. At peace, in peace, we invite peace.

Grasping neither reality nor emptiness,

just an ordinary man done with his work.

We no longer feel the need to do something to validate our existence; we undeniably are. No work remains to be done. One may still be active in the world, but there is no “work” behind it, simply the dance of stillness, presence, and flow. Observers may disagree, but you understand that all that seemed important about your identity has trickled away, and you have become unremarkable, purely as you are — an ordinary fellow, alive in this extraordinary world.

Recommended Books: P’ang Yun (Layman P’ang)

This Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World	The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry	Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition	The Sayings of Layman P’ang: A Zen Classic

P’ang Yun (Layman P’ang) China (740? – 808) Timeline Buddhist : Zen / Chan

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Be unsatisfied
with secondhand ideas about God.

To the utterly at-one with Siva
by Devara Dasimayya

English version by A. K. Ramanujan

To the utterly at-one with Siva
there’s no dawn,
no new moon,
no noonday,
nor equinoxes,
nor sunsets,
nor full moons;

O Ramanatha.

— from Speaking of Siva, by A K Ramanujan

/ Image by whologwhy /

To the utterly at-one with Siva…

That line stops me in my tracks each time I read it. Do you have the same reaction?

there’s no dawn,
no new moon,
no noonday…

Time and the phenomenal experiences that move through time are seen as glimmerings on the surface of the immense, still sea of the Eternal. Days and seasons, action and reaction exist only for the unsettled ego-self. For the true Self, which is “utterly at-one with Siva,” there is only Siva, there is only the Eternal. Dawn and sunset, new moon and full moon, time and motion, all of these are simply Siva’s ornaments fluctuating in timelessness.

This is another way of saying there is no separation in Reality. The new moon pours into the full moon, the glow of dawn naturally builds to noon’s blaze and fills the sunset with its sleepy glory. They are not separate objects or events, but a single continuity witnessed from different perspectives. They are one. They are shifting glimmerings upon the surface of the Eternal.

Truly realizing this, we recognize that wherever we are is the holiest place in the universe: right here, right now. There is no fundamental difference or distance between the ground under our feet and the most sacred pilgrimage spot. They are the same, part of the same continuity of existence. Your “front yard / is the true Benares.”

===

Ask yourself:
Are you one who seeks
or one who finds?

A few days ago I pulled a copy of my book Gathering Silence from the bookshelf and I have begun reading it again.

Regardless of belief,
everyone is agnostic
until gnosis.

Maybe saying I have been reading it is not the right description, since it isn’t a book meant to be read page after page front to back. Rather, I have been finding quiet moments to open to a random page and then reading the sayings that come up.

Love and compassion are effortless.
The soul is exhausted by its effort
to stop the natural outpouring
of the living heart.

While The Longing in Between, with it’s collection of poems and commentaries and personal stories, has always been my best selling book, Gathering Silence, with its short poetic statements and lovely collages by Rashani Réa, is among the more overlooked of my publications. Yet, for me, this is one of my strongest works. It sings to me somehow.

Enough deals and half-measures!
Hand everything over
to that divine ember
burning in your chest!

Each time I leaf through its pages, I have the strange experience of not always recognizing the author.

How can you settle into yourself
without
self-acceptance?

I regularly find myself thrown into deep contemplation by the words I find within its pages and wonder who wrote them.

What the heart recognizes
as liberation,
the ego sees
as theft.

I like to think Gathering Silence finds its audience in its own time.

We don’t take the final step.
It takes us.

Have a beautiful day!

Recommended Books: Devara Dasimayya

Speaking of Siva

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Don’t try to control life.
Witness it.

Every Shaped Thing
by Ivan M. Granger

Sighing,
every shaped thing
turns
heavenward.

I can only
point
up.”

— from Real Thirst: Poetry of the Spiritual Journey, by Ivan M. Granger

/ Image by Anne Nygard /

It has been a while since I featured one of my own poems. I have been thinking again about wealth and desire and accumulation, and this poem returned to me.

I wrote this poem when I lived on Maui years ago. I had just finished a meditation and stepped outside to gaze at the forest of eucalyptus trees. Slowly looking around, I saw how everything is reaching, turning, pointing heavenward. The material world, when objectified can become a confusing tangle of solidity, separation, and objects of desire, but in that moment, with my mind at rest and my eyes clear, the world danced before me, filled with a golden light. And I saw that while the world hides the Eternal, at the same time it ardently reveals it.

In that pure moment it was clear to me that everything is giddy with its own inner light. Consciously or unconsciously, everything is always orienting itself toward the light from which it draws its own life. All of creation — every person, every thing, even every idea, “every shaped thing” — is just a reflection of the divine radiance present everywhere.

That beauty, that luminosity is both the snare and the key for us as souls active within the material world.

Whenever we desire a thing… or person or experience, we artificially deify it. The desire and mental fixation becomes a form of worship. We may tell ourselves, “I want this, I want that,” but what we unknowingly crave is not the thing itself, it is that spark of the Eternal glimpsed within it. The desired object becomes a “gilded god” — false in the sense that it is not truly the wholeness we seek; but also, like an “idol” or icon, when approached sincerely and openly, it embodies something essential for us: it points to the Divine which it reflects.

The frustrating truth is that no individual can ever gather enough objects of desire to satisfy desire. Every time we acquire that desired object or experience — a new job, a new lover, money, an ice cream sundae — there is a fleeting sense of satisfaction… and then it is gone. Within minutes we are once again feeling desire and looking for the next object to hang that desire on. We’re looking for the next thing that sparkles. But it is not the object we actually seek, it is that shine. And that shine is the spark of the Divine.

When we learn to see in gold the glimmer of the sun, then we see that everything shines — everything! — ourselves included. It is not possessing that object or experience that we desire, it is that we ache to recognize and participate in that glow. And everything glows. Recognizing this is when the heart is truly satisfied and comes to rest.

Recommended Books: Ivan M. Granger

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology)	This Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World	Real Thirst: Poetry of the Spiritual Journey	For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics	Diamond Cutters: Visionary Poets in America, Britain & Oceania
More Books >>

Ivan M. Granger US (1969 – ) Secular or Eclectic Yoga / Hindu : Advaita / Non-Dualist

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Religion is not a fixed collection
of beliefs and rituals.
Religion, properly understood,
is a living technology
for experiencing God.

No use fretting over gold, beauty or fame;
by Loy Ching-Yuen

English version by Thomas Cleary

No use fretting over gold, beauty or fame;
Nurturing these, how can we calm
Our fluttering heart?
Non attachment brings deep truth,
And a truthful nature brings immortality.
Empty your heart,
Sit quietly on a mat.
In meditation we become one with All;
Tao billows like the vapors
In a mountain valley,
And its supernatural power wafts into our soul.

/ Image by Jan Canty /

A reminder to us all from a modern Taoist master to keep our life priorities straight. I like this poem’s calm clarity.

Fretting over “gold, beauty or fame…” What does that get us? Even if we succeed and attain wealth or attention, it is tainted by the ingrained habit of fretting. The satisfaction we hoped for slips away almost immediately. And each of those things will inevitably shift and recede in the cycles of time anyway — and we know it, so acquisition is tainted by the fear of loss. Having poured so much life energy into their pursuit, there is no peace or enjoyment, just a “fluttering heart.”

No use fretting over gold, beauty or fame;
Nurturing these, how can we calm
Our fluttering heart?

The human soul recoils from loss. The sticky self, having grown attached to the objects of its desires, views their loss as a loss of some part of itself. Because of attachment, each loss is perceived as a death. Yet this is a fluid world, a world of comings and goings. To the self that endlessly identifies with external things, it is a world of a thousand small deaths. Amidst the constant fear of death, the truth of one’s eternal nature is lost.

Empty your heart,
Sit quietly on a mat.
In meditation we become one with All

The solution, Loy Ching-Yuen reminds us, is in non-attachment:

Non attachment brings deep truth,
And a truthful nature brings immortality.

Non-attachment here does not necessarily mean renunciation, becoming a monk or living in a mountain cave somewhere. Non-attachment means non-identification. A person, an experience, or an object may be important, and is therefore to be cherished. But our fundamental identity remains settled within the heart. External movements do not tug at our sense of self. We can witness reality as it is from the supreme security of our true nature.

Loss and death have no claim on us. This is Loy Ching-Yuen’s immortality.

And it is naturally so. It doesn’t even require work on our part. We must simply, quietly watch the process happen.

Tao billows like the vapors
In a mountain valley,
And its supernatural power wafts into our soul.

Recommended Books: Loy Ching-Yuen

The Essential Mystics: Selections from the World’s Great Wisdom Traditions	The Book of the Heart: Embracing the Tao	The Supreme Way: Inner Teachings of the Southern Mountain Tao

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Compassion
isn’t so much a virtue
as it is a form of
self-awareness.

The Way It Is
by Lynn Ungar

One morning you might wake up
to realize that the knot in your stomach
had loosened itself and slipped away,
and that the pit of unfilled longing in your heart
had gradually, and without your really noticing,
been filled in — patched like a pothole, not quite
the same as it was, but good enough.

And in that moment it might occur to you
that your life, though not the way
you planned it, and maybe not even entirely
the way you wanted it, is nonetheless —
persistently, abundantly, miraculously —
exactly what it is.

— from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Edited by Phyllis Cole-Dai / Edited by Ruby R. Wilson

/ Image by Dmitry Ganin /

I love this poem. It speaks from a place of gentle awareness of one’s self and one’s life.

One morning you might wake up
to realize that the knot in your stomach
had loosened itself and slipped away…

I think there is a tendency toward self dissatisfaction, something feels wrong, incomplete, imperfect. This is especially true for those of us who see ourselves on a spiritual journey. Perhaps we even use that feeling as motivation on our spiritual journey. It can be needed fuel.

But the years teach us that that feeling becomes a trap, a form of self-cruelty. Our lives can feel like a series of disappointments. Worse, we see ourselves as failures. And no amount of religious or spiritual practice seems to fix that feeling.

The thing is, there is no perfect “fix” for the feeling. Yes, the way we live in the world, the way we cultivate our inner awareness, these help, but they don’t fully untangle that Gordion knot. You know what does? Restful, non-reactive, non-judgmental self-awareness. Pausing from all our efforts and just noticing who we are, what we are, what our lives are.

When we do that, a surprising thing happens: We begin to see an underlying wholeness, even when there is no obvious reason for it to be there.

And in that moment it might occur to you
that your life, though not the way
you planned it, and maybe not even entirely
the way you wanted it, is nonetheless —
persistently, abundantly, miraculously —
exactly what it is.

All the anxieties and harsh judgments we have held in our bodies just somehow dissipate. All the mental projections of what we wanted but didn’t get or what we got but didn’t want, drop like a shadow screen before our eyes and we see things simply as they are. It may not fit the grand heroic story we have held in the mind for so long, but what is actually there is telling its own story, a story of fullness.

Let’s pay attention to that story. Let it bring healing.

=

I know there are terrible tragedies unfolding in the world right now. Find some quiet moments — and radiate love into the world. Don’t try to mentally solve the world’s problems in that moment. Don’t react or tighten up in anger. Just radiate love.

Don’t even “radiate” love, since that might imply that you are pushing love out from some limited personal reservoir. The love is there, already, and in abundance. Allow it through. Step aside in your quiet moments and let the love flood through you into the the parched world. See what magic it can accomplish.

Sending love to you all!

Recommended Books: Lynn Ungar

Bread and Other Miracles	Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems	Blessing the Bread: Meditations

Lynn Ungar US (Contemporary) Christian Secular or Eclectic

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Anything that is beyond question
should immediately be questioned.

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
by Rainer Maria Rilke

English version by Stephen Mitchell

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

— from Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

/ Image by Ben Fredericson /

This is a poem I have featured before, but I found myself reading it this morning and decided that it was a good one to share with you again…

and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

Isn’t that a magical line? In the second verse Rilke is really saying something of deep insight about about what real power is:

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world…

The “power” he is talking about is obviously not power over, not the domination of the warlord or the predator. Following on his first verse, we can read power as the power of the “Lord, in all Things.” It is the power of life itself, awareness, presence. Rilke’s use of the word “power,” makes us question the assumptions of common language: Perhaps this gentle presence is real power, rather than the fleeting assertion of force and fear.

This real power plays a game in the world of things. It expresses its power through submission, rather than control. Like water, it yields and so finds its destination. It allows, and so fulfills its purpose. It is supremely humble, and so is humbly present everywhere, in all things, without prejudice or rejection. It rises from the lowest to the highest, vivifying everything it touches–

groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

This power flowing through us and all our “fellow creatures” binds us all with the same life. You’ll notice, it is not even our life at all. Rilke says “your life,” the Lord’s life. It is something we participate in, a current we ride as it flows through us and the world, but it is not our own. Rilke is hinting at a larger vision in which there is only one Life flowing through a million “Things.”

Hildegard von Bingen, the great medieval mystic, called this the viriditas or greening power of God.

Too much of our relationship with the natural world is built on ideas of separation and domination. Such foolishness can only ever harm us. When we see clearly, we see as Rilke does that we are part of the same shared Life. To harm the natural world is to rebel against God. Is that language too religiously loaded? Reread Rilke’s poem, and then think about it.

Recommended Books: Rainer Maria Rilke

The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry	Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke	The Soul is Here for its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures	Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God	In Praise of Mortality: Rilke’s Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus
More Books >>

Rainer Maria Rilke Germany (1875 – 1926) Timeline Secular or Eclectic

More poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke

Real words
are born in silence

Every Day as Wide as a Field
by Naomi Shihab Nye

1

And there were so many more poems to read!
Countless friends to listen to.
We didn’t have to be in the same room—
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing…
Hope was always the thing!
What else did we give each other
from such distances?
Breath of syllables,
sing to me from your balcony
please! Befriend me
in the deep space.
When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.

/ Image by Tito Rollis /

A poem today by the wonderful Palestinian-American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye.

Standing outside
staring at a tree
gentles our eyes

Aren’t those wonderful opening lines?

I encourage you to say the lines out loud. Standing. Staring. That alliteration, with the “st-st.” And a secondary level of alliteration with the use of the “t” sound in nearly every word of these first few lines. We can play with the lines on our tongue. St-anding. St-aring. Out-side. T-ree. Gent-les.

And then we remember to pay attention to the words, what they are saying.

She gives us permission to pause and gaze at a tree. It “gentles” our eyes. That line works on two levels. Looking at the tree makes our gaze and, more generally, our awareness gentler — somehow kinder to the world and to ourselves, at ease, at peace. But it also suggests that contemplating a tree tames the eyesight and, by extension, the mind. Do we let the eyes go wild and slice up reality into parcels that the erratic mind can then choose to latch onto or ignore? By resting with a patient green neighbor, we train the mind to cease its evasions and grasping, taming it to encounter the present moment.

Minds stretching

beyond the field
become
their own skies

We expand. The world around us opens.

Words can become windows. A poem a doorway.

Look through a word
swing that sentence
wide open

We just have to quiet down, so we can notice which phrases want to open for us — then we step through.

Kneeling outside
to find
sturdy green

glistening blossoms
under the breeze
that carries us silently

The second section of the poem seems to step back and give is a broader sense of what she is saying:

And there were so many more poems to read!
Countless friends to listen to.

Poetry. Friends. Poems as friends. Friends speaking to us through poetry, through space, through time.

Coming together, a shared community which invites us to join in. When we feel disconnected, words of wisdom, words of kindness, words of vision reconnect us.

Hope is the thing …
Hope was always the thing!

Shared hopes. Or, when hope eludes us, shared fears. The whole human experience. Sharing allows us to recognize ourselves in each other. Seeing deeply into another, we come to know ourselves more fully.

That’s where real transformation happens. When we allow ourselves to slip into the awareness of our shared being, as a good poem invites us to do, doors open in us.

When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.

=

A reminder to myself: Ivan, challenge yourself to connect with and protect vulnerable outsiders in your community. Learn to balance inner peace with a fiery voice and firm action. Raise good trouble. Upset the people you have to. Kindle a kind heart.

More poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye

Be fully present.
Be totally naked.
Let the energy flow.
Feel everything.
Accept yourself completely.

What Was
by Ala al-Dawla Simnani

English version by David and Sabrineh Fideler

Once I was here,
but now “I” am not:

If I have any body —
If I have any soul —
then, without question,
      it could only be you.

— from Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, Translated by David Fideler / Translated by Sabrineh Fideler

/ Image by Imad Alassiry /

With the headlines filled with war and mass traumas, the playing out of the death urge on the global stage, it is often difficult to select a poem for the Poetry Chaikhana. Certainly there are many great poems on war and death, but those have general not been the focus of the of the Poetry Chaikhana. I tend to highlight poems of individual mystical awakening, that flash of insight, the flood of bliss, the overwhelming sense of wholeness and harmony. Should we even try to make room for such poems in a time of upheaval and fear?

I think the answer is that our spiritual journey must incorporate the fullness of this human experience, even war, even injustice. This doesn’t mean that we accept what is cruel or harmful or increases suffering, but we cannot pretend that it is not playing out in the moment. We can do our best to see it honestly for what it is, why it is there, and begin to nurture mature and patient remedies — first within ourselves and individuals, then allowing ourselves to become medicine for the wider world. Be distrusting of solutions that are quick or external. Balance is always found at the center point, within. This is true for societies and cultures as much as for individuals.

Today I feature a poem not of war but of spiritual selflessness by a Persian Sufi poet, that is by a poet from Iran.

Once I was here,
but now “I” am not

Do you feel it? That sense of “I” and “me” how thin and intangible they are when you really look?

We spend most of our life energy asserting that this thing, this “me” is IMPORTANT. The problem is that that “me” is not real. The more we look for it, the more it retreats. When we finally corner it, it simply fades away, dispelled like a trick of light. What are we left with?

There is a self, but it is not a limited or selfish self. To some it borders on blasphemy to call this real Self a self at all, implying some personal possession of something so all-inclusive. Some prefer to call this center of being not “me,” but You — the Friend, the ever-present Beloved. While the “me” struts and shouts and grabs, it cannot make of itself a real and lasting thing. But that You remains, always there, waiting patiently for the braggart self to tire of its own voice and step aside.

In the way of your love,
nothing was left —
neither body nor soul.

Everything we thought we owned, everything we ascribed to that “me,” even the body itself, they all cease to be limited objects of the mind when the me itself is recognized as unreal. Body, self– these are seen, not as things that “I” am or possess, but as part of a fluid continuum of the greater You. Everything stops being things, and is, instead, a grand embodiment of the Eternal.

If I have any body —
If I have any soul —
then, without question,
      it could only be you.

Have a beautiful day enrobed in the Beloved.

Recommended Books: Ala al-Dawla Simnani

Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition	The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ‘Ala’ Ad-Dawla As-Simnani

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