Empty me out of myself

   بِسْمِ اللّهِ الرَّحْمـَنِ الرَّحِيمِ

یا رَبّ! دِلِ پاک و جانِ آگاهم دِه

 

آهِ شَب و گِریهٔ سَحَرگاهم دِه

 

دَر راهِ خُود اَوَّل زِ خُودَم  بی‌خود کُن

 

بی‌خود چُو شُدَم زِ خُود بِخود راهم دِه

 

Meaning: 

Lord, give me a pure heart and an awakened soul.

Give me the sigh of the night and the tears of dawn.

On Your path, first take me out of myself;

and when I am emptied of myself, then show me the road back to You.

Language:

Persian/Farsi

Transliteration:

Yā Rabb! Del-e pāk o jān-e āgāham deh

Āh-e shab o girya-ye saḥargāham deh

Dar rāh-e khod avval ze khodam bī-khod kun

Bī-khod chu shudam ze khod be-khod rāham deh

There is a whole manajat in this video, beginning with these verses:

Origins:

This quatrain is commonly transmitted in the Munājāt  collections of prayers attributed to Khwāja ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī of Herat. A caution about the textual history is useful here: Anṣārī was above all a teacher and preacher, much of what survives from him came through dictation and disciples’ notes, and collections of his invocations circulated in more than one form. Even with that caution, the Munājāt associated with his name became widely known and deeply influential, and later writers describe them as beautiful, intensely personal prayers. 

Brief Explanation:

This little prayer is very compact, but it contains a whole path. It begins with two inward gifts: purity of heart and wakefulness of soul. Then it asks for two outward signs of that inward life: the sigh in the night and the tear at dawn. In other words, Anṣārī is not asking merely to feel something religious. He is asking for a heart so alive to God that the night becomes remembrance and the dawn becomes tenderness.

To my ear, the sharpest line is the third: “On Your path, first take me out of myself.” That is the center of the poem. The real obstruction is not first the world, nor even suffering. It is the self that keeps placing itself between the seeker and God. So the prayer does not begin with lofty stations. It begins with cleansing, wakefulness, brokenness, and only then the undoing of self-regard.

The last line is the deepest of all. In discussions of Anṣārī’s thought, the language of going out of the self is tied to the discovery of the deeper Self in the heart. So when the speaker asks to be emptied of himself and then shown the road, the line can be heard as more than simple negation. It is a passage from the false, noisy ego to the truth God discloses. That is what keeps the prayer from becoming cold asceticism. It is intimate because it is severe. 

Devotional Use:

That is why the piece has stayed alive in personal devotion. It is short, direct, and ascetic without being cold. It is easy to carry in memory, easy to recite alone, and deep enough to reopen at different stages of the path. Like the best munājāt, it does not perform piety. It speaks from need.