Does the honey make you forget the well, and everything else?

بِسْمِ اللّهِ الرَّحْمـَنِ الرَّحِيمِ

 

كُلُّ نَفْسٍۢ ذَآئِقَةُ ٱلْمَوْتِ ۗ 

وَإِنَّمَا تُوَفَّوْنَ أُجُورَكُمْ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَـٰمَةِ ۖ

 فَمَن زُحْزِحَ عَنِ ٱلنَّارِ وَأُدْخِلَ ٱلْجَنَّةَ فَقَدْ فَازَ ۗ 

وَمَا ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَآ إِلَّا مَتَـٰعُ ٱلْغُرُورِ

Kullu nafsin zaaa’iqatul mawt; wa innamaa tuwaffawna ujoorakum Yawmal Qiyaamah; faman zuhziha ‘anin Naari wa udkhilal Jannata faqad faaz; wa mal hayaatud dunyaaa illaa mataa’ul ghuroor.

Al-Imran 3:185 — Every soul will taste death. And you will only receive your full reward on the Day of Judgment. Whoever is spared from the Fire and admitted into Paradise has indeed triumphed, whereas the life of this world is no more than the delusion of enjoyment. (Quran.com)

There is an old story, known in many traditions, of a man who was walking through the wilderness.

Perhaps he was travelling.

Perhaps he was searching for something.

Perhaps, like most of us, he was simply passing through life without fully knowing how dangerous the terrain really was.

Suddenly, a fierce elephant began to chase him. The man ran in terror. He had no weapon, no shelter, no friend nearby, and no time for careful deliberation. In his panic, he saw an empty well. Beside it grew a tree, and from the tree a root hung down into the well.

So he grabbed the root and lowered himself inside.

For a moment, he must have felt relief.

The elephant was above him, but it could not reach him.

But then he looked down.

At the bottom of the well was a poisonous dragon, waiting with its mouth open.

Around the sides of the well were poisonous snakes.

Then he looked again at the root by which he was hanging. Two mice, one black and one white, were gnawing at it. They did not rush. They did not need to rush. They only had to continue doing what they were doing, and sooner or later the root would break.

Above him was danger.

Below him was danger.

Around him was danger.

Even the thing that held him was disappearing.

Then, from the tree above, a few drops of honey began to fall.

One drop landed near his mouth.

He tasted it.

It was sweet.

Then another drop came.

And another.

For a brief moment, the man forgot the elephant, the dragon, the snakes, the mice, the height, the well, and the fragility of the root.

He tasted the honey and became absorbed in its sweetness.

What a strange image.

And yet, what an accurate image.

This story is often called The Man in the Well. Its provenance is usually traced to an Indian-Buddhist moral parable, preserved in Buddhist textual and visual traditions, and later carried through Persian, Islamic, Christian, and other literary worlds. It is also connected, in its Persian and Sufi afterlife, with Rumi, though the details change from one telling to another. Sometimes the animal is an elephant. Sometimes it is a lion. Sometimes the sweetness is honey. In one Rumi-linked version, it is manna. The outer details shift, but the moral throughline remains.

And what is that moral?

That man is us.

The elephant represents impermanence — the inescapable movement of time, change, decline, and ajal approaching.

The root is life.

The snakes are the vulnerabilities of the body.

The dragon represents death itself — or, in an Islamic framing, the final threshold into death, grave, barzakh, and accountability.

The mice are day and night constantly gnawing and making us closer and closer to death.

And the honey is the sweetness of dunya when it becomes a veil.

This does not mean that honey is evil.

That is not the point.

Food is not evil.

Beauty is not evil.

Family is not evil.

Work is not evil.

Wealth is not evil.

Rest, laughter, friendship, clothing, houses, gardens, books, and the ordinary pleasures of life are not evil in themselves. Islam does not ask us to despise the gifts of Allah. It asks us to place them in their proper size.

The mistake of the man in the well was not that he tasted something sweet.

His mistake was that the sweetness caused him to forget where he was.

That is the subtle danger of dunya. It does not always come to us as a manifest sin. Sometimes it comes as a small pleasure, a little comfort, a moment of praise, a bit of influence, a new possession, a notification, a title, a grudge that feels satisfying, a public victory, a private indulgence, or the warm honey of being admired.

The nafs does not always ask for disbelief.

Sometimes it asks only for one more drop.

And then another.

And then another.

Until a person becomes spiritually disoriented.

He is still hanging in the well, but he speaks as though he owns the earth.

He is still being pursued by death, but he behaves as though death is a rumour.

He is still watching day and night consume his life, but he says, “Let me just enjoy this little sweetness first.”

This is why the Qur’an’s wording is so piercing:

وَمَا ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَآ إِلَّا مَتَـٰعُ ٱلْغُرُورِ

The life of this world is no more than the delusion of enjoyment.

Not enjoyment only.

The delusion of enjoyment.

Because the danger is not the honey itself, but the false meaning we give to it. We begin to think that sweetness is safety. We begin to confuse pleasure with success. We begin to treat a passing taste as though it were a permanent dwelling.

Rumi helps us here with great acuity. In the Mathnawi, he says in meaning that the world is not merely cloth, silver, measure, and women; the world is to be heedless of Allah. He also gives the image of water and the ship: water beneath the ship carries it, but water inside the ship destroys it.

That is a crucial distinction.

Dunya under your feet may become a means.

Dunya inside your heart becomes a flood.

A person may have wealth and not be owned by it.

A person may have status and remain humble.

A person may have knowledge and not become intoxicated by it.

A person may have beauty around him and still remember the One who made beauty.

But when the honey enters the heart as attachment, when it becomes the telos of life, when it becomes the reason we wake and the object we chase and the thing for which we neglect prayer, character, service, family, justice, truth, and accountability, then the honey has done its work.

It has not saved us from the well.

It has made us comfortable inside it.

There is a lesson here for all of us.

Many people are careful about obvious dangers. They do not want to lose money. They do not want to lose reputation. They do not want to lose an opportunity. They do not want to lose comfort.

But fewer people are careful about losing their spiritual attunement.

Fewer people ask: Is this pleasure making me more grateful or more heedless?

Is this success making me more generous or more arrogant?

Is this knowledge making me more humble or more argumentative?

Is this work serving my akhirah, or has my akhirah quietly become an adjunct to my work?

Is this relationship bringing me closer to Allah, or am I using the language of love to justify disobedience?

Is this public good truly for Allah, or am I merely eating the honey of influence, reach, approval, and applause?

These are not easy questions.

They require discernment.

They require a kind of moral acuity that is increasingly rare, because modern life is almost an engineered hive of honey. It keeps dripping. It gives us sweetness in small, quick, repeatable doses. It gives us entertainment without reflection, opinion without wisdom, speed without depth, information without transformation, and connection without true companionship.

And the mice keep gnawing.

Day and night.

Night and day.

The root does not become stronger because we ignore it.

The dragon does not disappear because we refuse to look down.

The elephant does not stop pursuing us because we have found something sweet to taste.

This is why remembrance of death is not pessimism. It is not morbidity. It is not a rejection of life. It is a restoration of proportion. It places the honey back into its proper meaning.

When a believer remembers death, he does not become useless. He becomes more truthful.

He eats, but with gratitude.

He earns, but with conscience.

He studies, but with humility.

He teaches, but with responsibility.

He enjoys, but with restraint.

He loves, but with fidelity.

He serves, but without turning service into self-worship.

He receives the world as a trust, not as an idol.

The real tragedy in the story is not that the man was in danger. Every human being is in danger. Every soul will taste death. The tragedy is that he allowed a little sweetness to make him forget the reality of his condition.

How many of us are doing the same?

We may not be hanging from a root in a well, but we are hanging from something just as fragile.

Health.

Youth.

Employment.

Family stability.

Public respect.

Political order.

Physical strength.

Mental clarity.

Time.

Any of these can weaken. Any of these can be gnawed by the black and white mice of day and night. Any of these can disappear sooner than we imagine.

So the question is not whether we should ever taste honey.

The question is whether the honey makes us forget Allah.

If it does, then even a small sweetness has become dangerous.

If it does not, then even the sweetness can become dhikr, gratitude, and lawful joy.

May Allah make us people of discernment. May He allow us to enjoy what is halal without becoming enslaved by it. May He protect us from the nafs that asks only for one more drop while the root of life is being consumed. May He make the remembrance of death a source of wisdom, not despair. May He make this world remain beneath our feet and not inside our hearts. And when our root finally breaks, may He admit us into His mercy, forgiveness, and pleasure. Ameen.

A brief source note: This retelling draws on the old parable known as The Man in the Well. In the Chinese Buddhist Fo shuo piyu jing, translated by Yijing, the story includes the elephant, empty well, black and white mice, poisonous snakes, poisonous dragon, and five drops of honey; the text itself interprets these as symbols of impermanence, birth-and-death, day and night, the body, sensual desire, old age, illness, and death. (Wikisource) Scholar Monika Zin summarizes the tale as originating in India, “in all probability” in Buddhist bearing, and traces its later travels through Persian and other traditions. She also notes the Rumi/Rückert connection, where the Rumi-linked version uses manna rather than honey. (Academia) The Rumi connection above is also anchored in the Mathnawi’s moral definition of dunya as heedlessness of God, not merely material objects, and in his image of water inside or beneath the ship. (ganjoor.net)