Chapter Two, On Courage: The Preferred Doctrine

Our companions teach: a man who throws himself into a dreadful affair and enters into fighting and quarreling with another cannot escape one of two outcomes. Either he defeats his enemy and kills him, or the reverse. If he kills his enemy, he carries the blood of an innocent on his neck, and the punishment for that will surely follow him, in this world and the next; and if the enemy wins, then hell is that man's appointed road. How could a wise person launch into an act whose two possible ends are both like this? What clearer proof do you need than this: wherever there is a wedding, a concert, or a gathering full of food, sweets, robes of honor, and gold, they summon the entertainers, the buffoons, the harpists, and the jesters. But wherever arrows and spears must be taken to the flesh, they puff up some fool with, 'You are a man, a champion, a breaker of armies, a hero of the arena,' and set him in front of the blades, so that once that wretch is killed in battle, the idlers and clowns of the town can mock him and say: I cannot bear to take arrows, axes, or spears; food, wine, and a musician suit me just fine. And when a champion is killed on the battlefield, the loafers and clowns watch from a distance and say to one another, 'Long live the master's soul, live as an idler and live long.' A prudent man should, on the day of battle, take as his rule the words of the champions of Khorasan, who say: 'Let the brave men leap into the field; we will leap into the hayloft.' Naturally most heroes and champions have made this couplet the seal on their ring: 'A well-timed retreat is a victory.' Happy the champion whose daily bread is this. They tell of a young man from Isfahan who, in a wilderness, was set upon by a Mongol who attacked him. Out of sheer cleverness the youth pleaded, 'Master, for God's sake, sodomize me but don't kill me,' meaning: take me but spare my life. The Mongol took pity and did as he asked. By the blessing of this stratagem the young man escaped death; they say he lived another thirty years afterward with a good name. What a lucky young man! It seems this proverb was coined for him: The young who are wise and willing to learn deserve to sit above the old. Friends! Treasure the way of life and the custom of these great ones. Pity our poor fathers, who spent a lifetime in error and never grasped these truths.