Hidden Word, Arabic 1: A Pure, Kindly and Radiant Heart

The Hidden Words is a small book of mystical aphorisms revealed by Bahá'u'lláh in Baghdád around 1858, in the years between His return from Sulaymáníyyih and His declaration in the Garden of Riḍván. The book is divided into 71 utterances in Arabic and 82 in Persian. Bahá'u'lláh describes the volume in His own preamble as the inner essence of what was revealed to the Prophets of old, clothed in the garment of brevity, that human souls might fulfil the covenant of God.

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The very first Hidden Word in Arabic sets the entire spiritual key in which the whole book is composed. It is addressed, like nearly all the Arabic Hidden Words, to *the son of spirit* — the human soul considered in its essential, eternal nature, before any of the accidents of station or wealth or knowledge. The counsel is brief.

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> O SON OF SPIRIT! My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, > kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty > ancient, imperishable and everlasting.

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The three adjectives — pure, kindly, radiant — are not interchangeable. *Pure* describes the heart's relationship with itself: free from the corrosive admixture of self-deception, hidden envy, hidden grievance. *Kindly* describes the heart's relationship with others: instinctively well-wishing, instinctively slow to judge. *Radiant* describes the heart's relationship with God: lit from within, casting back the light it has received.

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The reward Bahá'u'lláh names is striking. He does not promise the pure-hearted a future paradise. He says that *thine* — the soul addressed — shall already possess *a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting.* The verbs are present tense. The heart that is purified is, in its very purification, sovereign. Nothing in the world's transactions can give such a heart what it does not already have, and nothing can take from it what it already possesses.

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This first Hidden Word stands at the gate of the entire collection. The reader who passes through it is asked to read the rest in light of its single demand.

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