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born as mysteriously as a child is born, or a bird or a rose flower. They come to us, they are gifts.
So first we will enter into the mysterious birth of this great book THE HADIQA: The Garden. The story is tremendously beautiful.
The Sultan of Ghazna, Bahramshab, was moving with his great army towards India on a journey of conquest. Hakim Sanai, his famous court-poet, was also with him, accompanying him on the journey of this conquest. They came alongside a great garden, a walled garden.
That is the meaning of FIRDAUS: the walled garden. And from FIRDAUS comes the English word `paradise'.
They were in a hurry; with a great army the Sultan was moving to conquer India. He had no time. But something mysterious happened and he had to stop; there was no way to avoid it.
The sound of singing coming from the garden caught the Sultan's attention. He was a lover of music, but he had never heard something like this. He had great musicians in his court and great singers and dancers, but nothing to be compared with this. The sound of singing and the music and the dance -- he had only heard it from outside, but he had to order the army to stop.
It was so ecstatic. The very sound of the dance and the music and the singing was psychedelic, as if wine was pouring into him: the Sultan became drunk. The phenomenon appeared not to be of this world. Something of the beyond was certainly in it: something of the sky trying to reach the earth, something from the unknown trying to commune with the known. He had to stop to listen to it.
There was ecstasy in it -- so sweet and yet so painful, it was heart-rending. He wanted to move, he was in a hurry; he had to reach India soon, this was the right time to conquer the enemy. But there was no way. There was such strong, strange, irresistible magnetism in the sound that in spite of himself he had to go into the garden.
It was Lai-Khur, a great Sufi mystic, but known to the masses only as a drunkard and a madman. Lai-Khur is one of the greatest names in the whole history of the world. Not much is known about him; such people don't leave many footprints behind them. Except for this story,
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