English
First Chapter on Wisdom: The Chosen Creed
When the great and clever hairsplitters, whose noble presence now graces the earth, reflected on the perfecting of the human soul and its origin and its return, and set before their eyes the traditions and opinions of the elders of the past, they arrived at a complete denial of these beliefs. They declare: 'It has been revealed to us that the rational soul has no independent reality; its survival depends on the survival of the body, and its perishing is bound to the perishing of the flesh.' And they say: 'What the prophets claimed, that the soul has perfection and imperfection, that after parting from the body it subsists on its own and will endure, is impossible, and resurrection is a false notion. Life is nothing but the balanced composition of the body. Once the body disintegrates, that person becomes forever nothing and void. What is spoken of as the pleasures of heaven and the torments of hell can exist in this very world, as the poet said:
Whoever has been given, has been given it right here;
and whoever has nothing, they have been promised it for tomorrow.
So they are entirely free of concern for resurrection, punishment, torment, nearness, distance, favor, wrath, perfection, and deficiency. The result of this belief is that they spend the whole of their lives chasing appetites and reaching pleasures, saying:
You who are the product of the four elements and the seven planets,
and are forever tormented by those seven and four,
drink wine, for I have told you a thousand times:
there is no coming back; once you are gone, you are gone.
And most of them inscribe this quatrain on the little coffins over their fathers' graves:
Beyond this vaulted sky there is no hall or corridor;
there is no mind or discernment except in me and you.
The nothingness that imagination has taken to be a something,
drop that fancy gladly, for there is no such something there.
And it is because of this belief that shedding people's blood, seizing their wealth, and violating their honor seem trivial and worthless to such a person:
To him a single sip of wine, red as fire,
is dearer than the blood of a hundred brothers.
Truly, what fortunate great men! What stayed hidden from others for thousands of years, despite all the purifying of intellect and soul, was revealed to them without the slightest effort.