Teachings in the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

¶ … Teachings in "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran

The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran is a book published in 1923 that discusses the different aspects of life and how these important elements will help an individual to lead a right path to good living. The book is divided into different stories, which are actually philosophical discourses about the elements of life. These elements includes love, joy and sorrow, friendship, freedom, and other important concepts man needed to understand or know through Gibran's thoughts. This paper will analyze some of these stories with commentaries about the author's message about the topic.

The story of "Love" speaks of selfish love, which has been the primary or general thought that religion and philosophy has taught mankind. However, Gibran evokes truth in his own description of love, especially when equated with pain: "...when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you..." In this story, Gibran illustrates how love cannot exist without pain or sorrow; his story shows how man must cope with the reality that with love comes the possibility of a 'pending' sorrow or pain. The story "Children," meanwhile, speaks of the role that parents have in shaping the values of their children not for their (the parents) sake, but for the children. Gibran, through the protagonist/teacher in the story, shows how Children are treated as thinking individuals despite their youth; they therefore deserve to be treated with equal respect as with other people.

Joy and Sorrow" is similar to the importance of love as Gibran tells his readers. Like love and pain, joy and sorrow are "inseparable," wherein one cannot exist or come into being without the other. However, despite the inevitability of sorrow arising from joy, "Joy and Sorrow" tell the people how sorrow is essential for the achievement of joy. Thus, when an individual learns to cope very well with sorrow, it goes without saying that he/she is also able to bear the 'coming' of joy very well, too. "Freedom" is an important part of the book where the concept of freedom is best expressed by Gibran as one's endurance in encountering life's struggles and hardships. This thought is, at first glance, not exactly synonymous to the idea of freedom, but when put in the proper perspective that freedom is one of the products of sorrow (hardship and suffering), which links it to the human experience. Thus, freedom is not an independent agent, but rather a dependent agent to life's sorrows.