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THE GREAT DELIGHT
"Cloud Gallants" and "Flower Maidens," while Persia was singing the songs of Omar, Nizami, and the Sufi poets. A line of Hafiz might be taken as the motto of the movement: "Love's slave am I and from both worlds free.” 107 From the castles of Portugal to those of Japan, the civilized world, for some five centuries, resounded to this song; and the echoes are still to be heard in the cloisters of Tibet. The basic Indian doctrine-the doctrine of transcendental monism, which merges opposite principles in timeless union-finds no more striking symbolization anywhere than in the lamasery cult of the icon of the holy bliss (mahāsukha) of the united couple.
107 Hafiz, Ghazel ("Odes") 455.
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