Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there
This quatrain locates the goal of the path not in winning a moral argument but in a shared ground that opinions about right and wrong never reach.
The verse comes from Rumi's Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, the vast collection of lyric poetry composed in a state of ecstatic love for his spiritual companion Shams-e Tabrizi, and it survives in the West chiefly through Coleman Barks's widely read English rendering. Rumi is not dismissing ethics but pointing past it: "wrongdoing and rightdoing" are the categories the calculating mind uses to judge, and judgment by nature separates people into positions to defend. The field is the space of union where that defensive, comparing self has quieted enough for two people, or the soul and God, simply to meet without agenda. It is one of Rumi's clearest statements that the destination of Sufi practice is relational and experiential — a meeting — rather than a correct doctrine to arrive at.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.
Barks's popular translations, though not literal renderings from Persian, are the version through which most English readers encounter this quatrain.
Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi