September 27, 2026

Read Yourself First

You have read thousands of books, but you have never read your own self.

Sultan Bahu was a seventeenth-century Punjabi Sufi saint of the Qadiri order who lived through the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, in an age when scholarly credentials and formal madrasa training were the mark of a respected man. He himself had little formal schooling, having reached his spiritual insight through direct devotion under his teacher rather than through books, and his short couplets, called Abyat, were meant to be sung by ordinary people rather than debated by scholars. This line was his challenge to the learned men of his day who could quote endless texts yet remained anxious, easily offended, and unsettled by the smallest turn of fortune. For Sultan Bahu, equanimity was not a reward for accumulated knowledge but the fruit of knowing one's own heart, since only the person who has read himself can meet praise and blame, gain and loss, with the same steady face.