The Perennial Wisdom of Javidan Khirad

Javidan Khirad of Miskawayh, Edward Henry Palmer (T) · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 22 pages

The Javidan Khirad, first translated into English in 1869 by Edward Henry Palmer, Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, published in The Student and Intellectual Observer of Science, Literature and Art, Vol. II pages 168–80, as “The Javidan Khirad; or, the Proverbial Philosophy of Ancient Persia.” Twenty-two pages, with introductory notes by the series editor and an abstract at the front. The frontispiece is Surge by Cinnamon Cooney; further illustrations are Arthur von Ferraris's Blind Man at the Mosque and a detail of Gustav Bauernfeind's Gate of the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Munich 1890.

The series editor's introduction establishes what kind of book this is: a didactic work on moral philosophy, transmitted as the proverbial philosophy of ancient Persia. The substance of the file is the second part, the precepts of King Hosheng to his son — described as leaves from the Javidan Khirad, being the testamentary advice of Hosheng of the Peshdadian dynasty to his heir. The form is the one that recurs across this section in several traditions at once: short numbered counsels on conduct, addressed by a father to a son who will have to govern, and therefore practical rather than speculative. Placing it beside the Hierocles fragments on parents and wedlock elsewhere in the library, the rules of Judge, and the fifty-four precepts of the Theologia Germanica held in this same batch, shows how much of the collection consists of exactly this kind of writing — instruction meant to be applied rather than argued over, gathered from traditions with no historical connection to one another.

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