Rumi Quote on Love: The Field Beyond Right and Wrong

Quote

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." — Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi), from the Divan-i Shams, trans. Coleman Barks

Author

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273) was a Persian poet, jurist, and Sufi mystic, born in Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan) and buried in Konya (in present-day Turkey), where he founded the Mevlevi order, known in the West as the whirling dervishes. His major works — the Masnavi, called the Qur'an in Persian, and the Divan-i Shams, the collection of lyric poems addressed to his master Shams of Tabriz — constitute one of the greatest bodies of mystical poetry ever written. In the contemporary world he is one of the best-selling poets in the United States, read largely through Coleman Barks's free translations.

Source

The passage comes from the poems of Rumi's Divan-i Shams, as rendered into English by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi (HarperCollins, 1995). Readers should note that Barks's work is a free translation and adaptation rather than a literal scholarly rendering, and that this famous formulation — "out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field" — is best understood as a modern English version of the poem's meaning rather than a word-for-word translation of a single Persian line.

Context

Rumi wrote the poems of the Divan-i Shams after the life-transforming encounter with Shams of Tabriz, the wandering dervish who became his spiritual master and then disappeared. The poetry of the Divan is the poetry of union: the self dissolved into love, the lover and the beloved no longer distinguishable. The field beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing belongs to this context. It is not a repudiation of the moral law — Rumi was himself a jurist and a teacher of the law — but an account of the experience toward which the spiritual path moves: a state in which the self is so absorbed in love that it no longer measures itself by its own righteousness. In Sufi terms, the field is the station of the soul that has passed beyond the ego's need to justify itself, the place where the lover is met not as a judge but as a beloved.

Meaning

The image of the field expresses the Sufi vision of love as a mode of being beyond judgment. The ego lives in the categories of wrongdoing and rightdoing: it is forever measuring, accusing, defending, and comparing. Love, in Rumi's vision, is the movement into a different space — "a field" — where these categories no longer govern. The invitation "I'll meet you there" is addressed to every reader: the field is not an exclusive mystical elite but a place where anyone can meet. Two points must be made to prevent misunderstanding. First, the field is not a place of license: it is the ground from which genuine morality grows, because the person who has stopped defending their own righteousness is free to see and serve the other. Second, the field is not an argument for abandoning discernment: Rumi's ethics, like the Sufi tradition generally, is thoroughly embedded in the practice of the law and the cultivation of virtue — the field is the fruit of that practice, not its abolition. The quote endures because it names a real human possibility: the experience of being met, and meeting another, beyond the need to be right.

Related Wisdom

The field beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing belongs to the philosophical exploration of love at its deepest level — love as a mode of being, not merely a feeling. It connects the Sufi tradition to the wider question of connection between persons, and to the experience of beauty as that which draws the self beyond itself. The invitation to meet beyond judgment also resonates with the ethics of compassion: the capacity to stand with another without first assessing their merits is close to what the traditions call unconditional love. And as a work of Islamic mysticism, the passage is a reminder that the literature of love is among the supreme achievements of the Islamic tradition.