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Main Index
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a big wall inside the palace. And unless the painting is complete, nobody is allowed to come in. The first man to see it complete will be the emperor.
The conditions were accepted. It took him almost six years. The emperor was getting old, but he had promised not to interfere. He kept his word. After six years, the painter came and told the emperor, "You can come."
The painter took the emperor into the room. The emperor could not believe it. It really looked real. There were tall trees and a small winding foot path in the painting. The emperor asked, "Where does this path go?"
The painter said, "You can walk on it...."
And believe it or not -- I don't believe it, but it is so lovable -- the painter entered with the emperor to show him the path and they have not returned.
If you try to think of it as a historical, factual thing you will miss the whole point. It is a parable. And it is absolutely true -- not factual.
The real painter dissolves himself into his painting, and the real poet disappears into his poetry. But that kind of creativity is of the mystic -- and because the mystic disappears in his creativity, he has no time even to sign his painting, or his poetry. The poets can do that, because for a moment the window opens, they see the beyond, and the window closes.
Kahlil Gibran has written almost thirty books. THE PROPHET, which we are going to discuss, is his first book; the remaining are rubbish. This is a strange phenomenon -- what happened to the man? When he wrote this, he was just young -- twenty-one years of age. One would have thought that now more and more would be coming. And he tried hard; for his whole life he was writing but nothing came even close to the beauty and the truth of THE PROPHET. Perhaps the window never opened again.
A poet is accidentally mystic. It is just by accident... a breeze comes, you cannot produce it. And because he became world famous -- this is one book which must have been translated in almost all the languages of the world -- he tried hard to do something better, and that's where he failed. It is unfortunate that he never came across a man who could have told
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