M2:170 — پیشتر از نقش جان پذرفته‌اند / پیشتر از بحر درها سفته‌اند

This verse continues a passage praising the spiritual station of the perfected guides, or Pīrs. Rumi uses a series of powerful, paradoxical images to describe their pre-eternal reality, placing their spiritual existence before the creation of the physical world itself.

The first line, "Before the soul was stamped with form, they had received it," draws on the Sufi and Neoplatonic idea that the soul exists in a pure, unmanifested state before being joined to a physical body. The Pīrs, Rumi claims, were connected to this essential reality of the soul (jān) even before it took on the "imprint" (naqsh) of individual, embodied existence. Their knowledge is not of this world, but from the world of pure spirit.

The second line intensifies the paradox: "Before the sea existed, they had strung its pearls." The sea is a constant symbol in Rumi for the divine reality or the world of meaning, and pearls are the precious truths and insights found within it. To say the Pīrs possessed the pearls before the sea itself existed is to say they had direct access to the ultimate fruits of divine knowledge before the very medium of that knowledge was created. It is a poetic way of stating that their being is rooted in God's eternal attributes, not in the contingent, created universe.