From K. D. Sethna to Father John Martin
25.4.82
Your extremely friendly letter and the enclosed fine-feeling'd articles of Bede Griffiths have been lying in front of me for quite a time. Now at last I have sufficient leisure to give them the lengthy consideration they deserve.
Let me at the very start tell you that I remember our meeting in the Ashram with great warmth and also that I have never wavered in my general admiration for Bede Griffiths ever since I came across a pamphlet of his on Hinduism and Christianity. Recently I went through his Return to the Centre, marking several passages of keen insight which go beyond the conventional and traditional in common Christianity and make a living contact with the basic truths of all mystical experience. Orthodox Roman Catholicism might get shocked on finding grounds to suspect what may be called "panpsychism" or even "pantheism" - but actually these "heresies" appear not in their European form which can be taken to exclude or negate the transcendent Divine but in their Indian version in which, as far back as the Rigveda, the Seers perceived about the Supreme Purusha (Person) that "one quarter of him is here on earth, three quarters are above in heaven". In these matters as well as in many others one would not be wrong to term Griffiths an Aurobindonian Christian.
How indeed can he be essentially anything else when his book contains the truest and greatest compliment ever paid to Sri Aurobindo by any Roman Catholic? Perhaps he is the only Roman Catholic interpreter - except for Abbé Monchanin and Beatrice Bruteau - who gives Sri Aurobindo his due. Compared to him, writers like Father Feys, for all their show of intellectual acumen, are plausible frauds in the end. What,
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for instance, can be more false than the assertion that Sri Aurobindo is all for an impersonal Brahman and gives no importance to the Personal Divine and man's relationship with Him of love and service? Self-surrender to the Divine Mother is the whole heart of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. He1 has emphatically declared it as something "simple and familiar" that the entire reason of his Yoga has always been "that to follow after the Impersonal only brings inner experience, or at the most mukti [=liberation]. Without the action of the integral Divine there is no change of the whole nature. If it were not so, the Mother would not be here and I would not be here if a realisation of the Impersonal were sufficient". So memorable is Griffith's passage on Sri Aurobindo that I should like to cull it for you from his book:
"In his philosophy there is a wonderful synthesis, based on the Vedanta, of ancient and modern thought. In him the values of being and becoming, of Spirit and matter, of the One and the many, of the eternal and the temporal, of the universal and the individual, of the personal God and the absolute Godhead, are integrated in a vision of the whole, which has never been surpassed in depth and comprehensiveness. In the integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo the values of matter and life and human consciousness and the experience of a personal God are not lost in the ultimate Reality, the divine Sachchidananda. Matter and life and consciousness in man are seen to be evolving towards the divine life and the divine consciousness, in which they are not annihilated but fulfilled." (p. 137)
The Supramental Physical and the Body of the Resurrection
Just after these words Griffiths writes:
"This is the goal of a Christian Yoga. Body and soul are to be transfigured by the divine life and to participate in the divine consciousness. There is a descent of the Spirit into matter and a corresponding ascent, by which matter is transformed by the indwelling power of the Spirit and the
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body is transfigured..." (pp. 137-8)
I can understand Griffiths's seeing a general analogue of Aurobindonianism in Christianity, but what he says here applies to every via mystica, especially the Sufi kind, which is a blend of Vedanta and Vaishnavism. The comparison can bear uniquely on Christianity if Griffiths's next paragraph can hold true. He continues:
"For a Christian this has already taken place in the resurrection of Christ. In his body matter has already been transformed, so as to become a spiritual body, which is the medium of the divine life..." {Ibid.)
In the address delivered at the International Transpersonal Conference held in Bombay from the 14th till the 20th February this year, Griffiths touches on the theme again and, referring to Sri Aurobindo, says:
"He conceived that...the Supermind descends not only into the soul or psychic consciousness but also into the body or physical consciousness. In fact, it is well known that he and the Mother, who accompanied him in all his work, were both attempting to transform the body, so that it would not be subject to death. Their attempt was not successful, but it corresponds to a deep human instinct, which urges us to seek for an immortal body, a diamond body, as it has been called in Buddhist tradition..."
"In the Christian belief the body of Jesus in the resurrection underwent precisely this transformation..."
Surely, Griffiths must know that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were aware of all that had happened or been sought for in spiritual human history. They knew their Bible very well and never hesitated to point out in it legends or symbols, visions or intuitions having some link or other with their own spiritual quest just as they noted doctrinal or experiential affinities elsewhere to their integral Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation. If they were trying to repeat in their bodies and hoping to achieve in those of their followers what had taken place in Jesus, why did they not ever give a hint of it? It should be clear to us that
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there were radical differences between the Aurobindonian transformation and what the Resurrection of Jesus could be.
First of all, Jesus died before he was "raised". Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother thought of a post-mortem transformation.
Secondly, the Resurrection, whether as actualised in Jesus or as potential for his followers, was never conceived in terms of a crowning evolution. There was no question of an aeonic development of earth-history by an evolutionary process starting with matter, passing through vital and mental stages and culminating in a supramental race. Nor was there any question of a prolonged Yoga, a concentrated and accelerated evolution by a mystical growth over self-dedicated years, moving gradually through what Sri Aurobindo has named psychicisation and spiritualisation, which would cover all that the via mystica attempted to compass in the past, and then progressing towards supramentalisation which, according to Sri Aurobindo, was mostly something new though, since the Divine Supermind is at the back of all earth-history in however concealed a form, there has always been a striving not only after an illuminated mind, a love-suffused heart, an ultra-capable life-force but also after a body of radiant health, free from the encroachment of tempus edax, "time the devourer". The resurrection implies no practice of sustained mysticism: St. Paul tells the Christians of his day that it would happen to them and to him "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (I Corinthians 15:52) - a sheer sudden miracle with merely a faith in Jesus and an ordinary religious piety as its antecedent or its conditio sine qua non.
Thirdly, the Resurrection is promised solely at the end of time. No one doing the Christian Yoga gained or even hoped to gain by his inner development a body such as is attributed to the risen Christ. I don't understand what Griffiths means in his book (p. 139) by writing: "The body of the Virgin Mary is said to have been transformed in the same way, and doubtless there are other saints and Yogis of whom this is
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true." I have not come across a reference to the Virgin Mary's body in the Gospels or in the Epistles of St. Paul. Indeed, St. Paul does not refer even to the virginal conception of Jesus by Mary, which one or two verses in the infancy accounts in a couple of books (Matthew and Luke) out of the twenty-seven comprising the New Testament state or suggest. Actually, St. Paul, whose Epistles are the earliest Christian documents, simply speaks of Jesus as having been "made of a woman, made under the law" (Galatians 4:4) or, as the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible phrases it, "born of a woman, born a subject of the Law".2 St. Paul's two expressions are invariably associated everywhere else in the Bible with natural humanity. To him the birth of Jesus was like that of any other man. But, even granting that there is scriptural authority for something extraordinary happening to Mary's body, how can it be compared to that of the resurrected Christ when Griffiths compares it also to those of "other saints and Yogis"? Has any saint or Yogi obtained a body comparable to "the body of Chirst, which is no longer limited by space and time" (p. 138)? On a certain instance in Griffiths's mind I shall touch a little later. Here I shall express my opinion that it would be a mistake of Christian thought to ascribe a Christlike resurrectionist body to any person before the end of time. For, the transformed body, which Griffiths mentions, is necessarily eschatological. The transformation à la Sri Aurobindo was envisaged as a goal to be reached in the present age, as Griffiths himself admits when he alludes to the lack of success in the efforts of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to accomplish here and now a transformation of the body by the Supermind's descent into the physical no less than the psychic consciousness. The objective of the Christian Yoga is poles apart from that of the Aurobindonian.
Fourthly and lastly, Christ's resurrected body is not an example of transformation that has stayed on the earth. It is reported to have appeared and disappeared, a mysterious visitant acting occasionally as grossly physical and occasionally as subtly substantial, and never in any case meaning to
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be a permanent part of terrestrial life in the course of history. It was not intended to be an achievement by a revolutionary evolution, as it were, which would serve as the beginning of a race of Supermen carrying to perfection both the inner and the outer existence, the individual and the collective being, in the immediate or near future. The physical transformation, divinisation, supramentalisation at which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aimed has no anticipatory parallel in the resurrected body which Matthew, Luke and John and the author of the Acts picture Christ as possessing.
Ramalingam's "Golden Body" and the Supramental Physical
In addition, quite relevantly in the Griffiths-context, I may deny any presaging likeness to the Aurobindonian goal in the body of light which the songs of the nineteenth century's South-Indian saint Ramalingam describe. Griffiths has written an Introduction to a full-length biography and interpretation of Ramalingam by G. Vanmikanathan,3 who argues that the Saint's celebration of a "golden body", won by him and enjoying deathless life or immortality, is an inner experience consequent on the soul's union with the Supreme and its liberation thereby from our doomed physical existence. Griffiths demurs to such a gloss which harks back simply to the famous Upanishadic passage "from the unreal to the Real, from the darkness to the Light, from death to Immortality". Part of his comment4 on Ramalingam's spirituality runs: "This idea of an immortal body is found in Taoist mysticism and in the concept of a 'diamond body' in Tibetan mysticism as also in the 'spiritual body' of St. Paul and Christian tradition. Mr. Vanmikanathan seems to diminish the significance of this state of deathlessness by reducing it to the state of the delivered soul freed from the body in videha mukti."
No doubt, Vanmikanathan's terms are too general. But the shade of the Vedantic liberation cannot be washed away
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from a cry like Ramalingam's
Oh men of the delusive world!
It is not fair to perish in this world of ignorance.
Come along to live the great deathless life.
Come here and settle down in the status
Of (a member) of the purposeful Pure Blissful True Creed!5
or from a proclamation by Ramalingam like:
The talk of the adepts and the Jeewan-mukthas is about me.
What have I to do any more in this reviling world?
All the miseries of birth and death have vanished from today!6
What can legitimately be said by Griffiths is that the Vedantic mukti is not all in all in Ramalingam. Then his objection would be both correct and salutary. However, he errs in taking the Saint too literally. He overlooks the fact that Ramalingam speaks of "the primeval Civam", who is "transcendental Brahman",7 having a "golden body" and of Ramalingam "embracing" it and, as a result of that "moment" of "union", becoming "transformed into the form of eternal bliss .that is Civam".8 Here is indeed something ignored by Vanmikanathan, a sense of another state of corporeality than the gross and no bare infinite of illumination. And yet to suggest a change of the gross body into a golden one is to overshoot the mark: all that can be read is a subtle occult form of light experienced within the gross and felt as infiltrating it: Shiva's "golden body", his "form of eternal bliss", is then realised as the devotee's own inner body-sense - possibly leading now and again to some extraordinary functioning in the natural organism.
This is no exclusive or utterly new realisation of Ramalingam's. Manikavachakar, 3rd century AD, sings also of two bodies, a beatific imperishable one replacing in awareness the ordinary mortal sheath. In his Thiruvachakam, a book to
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which Ramalingam was much attached,9 Manikavachakar10 records:
The Superb One...
that effulgent Being
Who, for my sake, coming today,
Without any effort on my part,
did away with the body which spells ruin...
and abode in me;...
He made for me a body which yields ecstasy...
This is precisely Ramalingam's "form of eternal bliss", about which he has further chanted:
My Lord comes to give me a blissful form...
The Great Effulgence of Grace
Who has transcended the Fourth State is coming
To give me a form of bliss..."
I have gained the boon of the mortal body
turning into a golden body!12
I hugged the golden form,
which he pressed on me,
and rejoiced!...13
I am experiencing the great Fourth State,
I have joined the Universal True Path,
And, gaining the embrace of my Husband...
I have become His form;
I live, delighting in it...14
Mysticism of a high order is before us, joining up, as Griffiths15 remarks, with "that kind of bridal mysticism, which is so well known in Tamil Nadu and which has its parallels in both Islamic and Christian mysticism". But no question arises here of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother intended by a supramental divinisation of the actual physical substance and shape. The Taoist "immortal body" and the Tibetan "diamond body" are also inner subtle realities which, it is hoped, will produce a marvellous exterior effect
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at some future period of the Divine Manifestation, like the Resurrection looked forward to by St. Paul as the taking on of a "spiritual body". Nowhere is any evidence of an already established lasting transfiguration of the gross physical.
The very description we have of Ramalingam's person by a long-standing eye-witness is enough to disprove the claim on his behalf. Vanmikanathan16 informs us: "Photography had come to India in the life-time of our Swamikal, but no photograph of him is available to us. It is said that attempts to photograph him always ended in failure. Nor do we have any portrait of the Swamikal. What we have today and what appears now in Books and periodicals is a modern artist's impression of the Swamikal, a product of the imagination based on certain accounts of the appearance of the Swamikal and on certain of his poems. Fortunately, we have on record a vivid description... by one of his contemporaries, Sri Velayutha Muthaliyar of Tholuvoor, a disciple of the Swamikal."
As Vanmikanathan17 records, Muthaliyar was a disciple for a quarter century and survived Ramalingam. From intimate knowledge he18 writes: "In personal appearance, Ramalingam was a moderately tall, spare man - so spare, indeed, as to virtually appear a skeleton - yet withal a strong man, erect in stature, and walking very rapidly; with a face of a clear brown complexion, a straight nose, very large fiery eyes, and with a look of constant sorrow on his face. Towards the end, he let his hair grow long; and what is rather unusual with Yogis, he wore shoes." Then Muthaliyar goes on to speak of Ramalingam's abstemious habits and his abnormal capacity to fast for long periods. But not the slightest hint of a material body of golden light is here.
Even if we go along with Griffiths about Ramalingam, what do we reach? He19 writes: "Ramalingam's mysticism does not involve the loss of the body in the final state of liberation but its transfiguration.... It is filled with the divine life and becomes a spiritual body no longer conditioned by the present laws of matter, but transfigured in the divine
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light. The story of his own passing that he simply disappeared, whether it is literally true or not, is surely of deep symbolic value in this respect." The last sentence is my cue for an Aurobindonian comment.
In one of his letters Sri Aurobindo20 observes: "Whatever may have happened to Chaitanya or Ramalingam, whatever physical transformation they may have gone through is quite irrelevant to the aim of the supramentalisation of the body. Their new body was either a non-physical or subtle physical body not adapted for life on the earth. If it were not so, they would not have disappeared..." Another letter21 says: "The idea of a transformation of the body occurs in different traditions, but I have never been quite sure that it meant the change in this very matter. There was a yogi some time ago in this region who taught it, but he hoped when the change was complete, to disappear in light. The Vaishnavas speak of a divine body which will replace this one when there is the complete siddhi [=spiritual perfection]; but, again, is this a divine physical or supraphysical body?" A body of light perpetually present amongst men has not been known so far: one that does not stay on the earth to mark a novel evolutionary turn in physical existence is certainly not the sort Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had in view as the grand finale of their all-harmonising, all-fulfilling Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo does not refuse to see some approach or other in the past to his ideal. But he is explicit about the basic divergence even where an apparent similarity may be discerned. He22 speaks of "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature - not by imposing siddhis [=abnormal faculties] on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supra-mental being in a new evolution". And he continues: "I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life - like the Sannyasi who could take any poison without harm, but he died of a poison after all when he forgot to observe the conditions of
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the siddhi. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supramental physical." Again, Sri Aurobindo23 points out: "...the endeavour towards this achievement is not new and some yogis have achieved it, I believe - but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by yogasiddhi - not a dharma [=inherent law] of the nature." The Aurobindonian supramentalisation has to be an intrinsic permanent state of the body by the junction of the descending free Supermind from above the mental plane with the Supermind evoked from matter where, according to Sri Aurobindo, it lies involved. Both the spiritual vision and the spiritual dynamics of his Integral Yoga differ from those recognisable in past "saints and Yogis".
We may pause a little over Sri Aurobindo's words: "this achievement" - and then the following "some yogis have achieved it, I believe". His meaning is not quite clear. What "this achievement" signifies is most probably "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature" spoken of in the other letter, as a result of "siddhis" imposed by "mental or vital occult power". The term "transformation" can cover many Yogic changes. A supramental transformation by means of "siddhis" is not likely to be intended. But, even if it is, how does it bear on the case of Ramalingam?
His case is of particular relevance because not only did Sri Aurobindo and the Mother show special interest in him at one time but also because the Mother on two occasions made a remark on what Ramalingam had named "Grace-Light" or, as Vanmikanathan puts it, "Effulgence of Grace". On July 12, 1970 she greatly appreciated the term and the experience it stood for, which corresponded to one of her own experiences. She was even reported as equating the Grace-Light to the supramental consciousness and as saying that a number of individuals, known or unknown, are likely to have brought this consciousness to the earth throughout the ages but that now instead of an individual possibility Sri Aurobindo
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and she were working to establish it as a collective possibility, as a terrestrial fact and a possibility for all. On July 22 the topic was raised once more. She was pointedly asked whether the Grace-Light and the Supramental Light were one and the same thing and whether she had meant that Ramalingam had already worked out the individual supra-mentalisation rather than that this was specifically her endeavour and Sri Aurobindo's. She replied: "It is a pity, but you make me say what I have not said. Thus I have nothing to answer to your conclusions which are unfounded." Asked if she had really implied Ramalingam to have been directly in contact with the Supramental, her reaction was: "Why not?... I have the feeling that men have big scissors and always want to cut off bits of the Lord!"* However, she categorically countered the earlier report which had equated the Supramental Light with the Grace-Light. She declared: "The Grace-Light is not the Supramental Light but one aspect of it, rather one activity of the Supramental."24
The last statement is a decisive clarification. Face to face with it we should be absolutely illogical if we attributed to Ramalingam a supramentalised body. How can just a single aspect or activity of the multifarious Supermind, which is not only light but also consciousness, force, bliss and whose light even is not confined to being "Grace-Light", be claimed to have accomplished so radical and extreme a phenomenon as the total supramentalisation of the body - a most difficult task which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who were in possession of the entire Supermind in their inner consciousness and had suffused with it even their subtle forms, considered nobody to have done and which they were themselves still seeking to do?
With the help of Grace-Light Ramalingam must have had a remarkable result in his subtle form, as compared to most other Yogis of the past, but even there the supramentalisation could be no more than partial. As for the physical body, the
* Letter to the author by Satprem after an interview with the Mother.
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consequences are bound to have been still less - certainly the powerful sense of a rare glory outflowing from the inner self and yet as certainly falling short of any appreciable physical supramentalisation, no matter what unusual capacities it may have brought about. The question whether by means of them Ramalingam, as Griffiths words it, "simply disappeared" cannot be settled. Griffiths, for one, is not sure that the story "is literally true".
Have we any sign of the Mother's attitude here? Her outlook can be gauged from a talk in January I960.25 The problem was put to her: "I have read that the bodies of some saints, after their death, have disappeared and become flowers or just vanished into the sky. Can such a thing happen?" The Mother replied: "Everything is possible, it could have happened, but I do not believe it did. We cannot always believe what is said in books. Nor is there a necessary connection between such a phenomenon and sainthood." Then the Mother affirmed that some "mediums", who are often people of very low character, perform dematerialisation and rematerialisation under the strictest scientific control. So such phenomena do genuinely occur in rare instances. After this, the Mother returns to the point originally raised and concludes: "In connection with great or holy men all sorts of stories get started. When Sri Aurobindo had not left his body, there was circulated a story that he used to go out of the roof of his room - yes, physically - and move about in all kinds of places. If is even written down in a book. He told me about it himself."
Returning from Ramalingam to Griffiths's main theme, namely Christ, I may reiterate in conclusion on this subject that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew what Christ's resurrected body might connote and they did not regard the description of it as reflecting the transformation they had in mind. Not without significance did the Mother, in evident reference to religious history in general and to Christianity in particular, give the New Year Message of 1957: "It is not the crucified body but the glorified body that will save the
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world." As a later talk (September 13, 1967) clarifies, if Christ had a glorified body it belonged not to the world but to heaven.
Christianity, Reincarnation and Krishna
In Griffiths's remarkably wide-visioned book as well as in his recent elevating speech another sad deficiency is in regard to Reincarnation. He quotes Shankara to the effect that "the Lord is the only transmigrator". Reasoning from this, he infers that the one Self dwelling in humanity as in everything is alone the reality that passes from life to life. In support he quotes Aquinas's dictum: "All men are one Man." The whole argument strikes me as an evasion of what the theory of reincarnation implies.
Did not Aquinas write at some length on the individual soul created by God at birth? And did not Shankara too grant a "jivatman"? He may have regarded the "jivatman" as ultimately an illusion, but then he regarded the "Lord" also as the highest illusion and believed the birthless and deathless, undivided and qualitiless Atman or Brahman, a-cosmic and free from name and form, to be the one and only Existent. In the world which for all practical purposes he took as real, even though for the final spiritual experience it might be mere Maya, he granted the traditional Indian view of the individual soul reincarnating or transmigrating. Aquinas can escape just as little as Shankara the destiny, whatever it may be, of each separate man. Both Shankara and Aquinas are brought in by Griffiths in order not to abandon the dogma of a new soul called into existence ex nihilo at every birth and to evade the concept of a soul going through many lives, getting diverse experiences, gradually rising higher and higher. If evolution is a fact and if it is to have a spiritual meaning, the spiritual evolution can proceed only through the progress of an individual soul through a series of lives across the ages. Reincarnation in a literal sense is unavoidable in a spiritually evolutionary world-vision.
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Doubtless, there is a host of subtleties and the popular idea is too school-masterish: Sri Aurobindo has discussed all the aspects of "rebirth" in a few exceedingly insightful chapters of The Life Divine and put it in the right framework. If Griffiths is drawing strength, as he does, from modern science for his spiritual outlook he can ill afford to get round the individual soul's spiritual evolution. He has accepted many truths of the Spirit from India, which his too conservative co-religionists would be inclined to look askance at. It is best not to jib at literal reincarnation. Perhaps it should be enough for him to believe that the soul was created out of nothing at the very start of the evolutionary process and that afterwards it goes on getting reborn in the manner Sri Aurobindo expounds.
I personally don't fancy this compromise. It is a pity that one so profound in his spiritual practice and so finely touched by the tremendous truths of Indian seerhood should have to make concessions to his accepted religion and feel compelled not only here but in a number of other instances to argue the superiority of that religion: thus "Christian love" is sought to be made out so much greater than the love that flows from the heart of both Hinduism and Buddhism to all creatures and not merely to human beings. Similarly, Krishna, though appreciated, is cut down in comparison to Christ and also relegated to the world of myth. Krishna is obviously historical in the Chhandogya Upanishad. In the Mahabharata he is depicted fully as a human being who is the Divine Incarnate. Even in the Brindavan story the substratum of reality is clear in the midst of the poetry and the symbolism. And why does Griffiths sidetrack to the Brindavan-context the phrase quoted from Chapter XVIII.65 of the Bhagavad Gita and declared to have been spoken on the battlefield of Kurukshetra: "Give me thy mind and give me thy heart and thy sacrifice and thy adoration. This is my word of promise: thou shalt in truth come to me, for thou art dear to me"? R. C. Zaehner,26 a convert to Catholicism, looks on the Gita as "the most significant sacred text in the whole history of
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religion", and indeed the range of spiritual vision and experience it sets before us cannot be matched by anything in any other scripture. (Here I hold no brief for the Gathas of Zarathustra, though I was born a Parsi.) The Krishna who emerges from whatever myth and legend have grown around his historicity is a uniquely many-sided and magnificently soul-satisfying figure at once ideal and actual, immense and intense, oceanic and intimate, Himalayan and heart-luring -Lord and lover, Master and life-companion. Those who inwardly know him are not just indulging in poetic ecstasy: he is to them both the Supreme and a fact of history. It is out of such knowledge that Sri Aurobindo has said that in Krishna we have the certainty of the Divine having at least once touched the earth.
Scriptural Translation
There are some other points in the Book and in Griffiths's conference-address which I could question, but I'll pass over them at the moment, for they are mostly concerned with secondary matters like scriptural translation - I mean rendering of some Biblical passages, which strike me as misguided. Only one text I'll mention in passing. The famous "Logos"-prelude in John's Gospel has a controversial reading at one point (1:13). The commonly accepted version uses the third-person plural, but the Jerusalem Bible prepared by French scholars differs from it, although admitting in a footnote the general opinion against which it runs. The eminent Roman Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown is quite frank about the untenableness of the minority view to which Griffiths subscribes. He27 remarks: "The third-person singular reading in John 1:13: 'He who was begotten, not by blood, nor by carnal desire, nor by man's desires, but of God', is considered by most an early patristic change from the original plural in order to make the text christologically useful." Brown28 expresses his surprise at quite a number of French-speaking exegetes favouring this reading although it
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is "not found in a single Greek Gospel ms". I don't know why Griffiths flouts the scholarly consensus. But I won't dwell overmuch on these things lest I should convey to you a wrong impression of my attitude to him. I should like to turn to his scientific deliverances.
But here there is a danger of my being carried away by the fascination of the subject. Already my letter has lengthened out inordinately. The new discussion must be reserved for some other time. I am not at home with Rupert Sheldrake's New Science of Life; so I shan't venture to treat it. Fritjof Capra's Tao of Modern Physics has been in my hands for quite a time and I think I can comment on it a little as well as on Griffiths's understanding of it. In the meanwhile please acknowledge this letter and accept my regards and convey the same to your teacher whom I have esteemed for several years.
K. D. Sethna
References
1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 26, p. 449.
2.The Jerusalem Bible (Longman, Darton and Todd, London, 1966), p. 326 of the New Testament.
3.Pathway to God trod by Ramalingam Swamikal (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1976).
4.Ibid., p. xviii.
5.Ibid., p. 677.
6.Ibid., p.659.
7.Ibid., p. 728.
8.Ibid., p. 730.
9.Ibid., p. 46.
10.Ibid.
11.Ibid., p. 710.
12.Ibid., p. 730.
13.Ibid., p. 731.
14.Ibid.
15.Ibid., p. xvii.
16.Ibid., p. 44.
17.Ibid.
18.Ibid.
19.Ibid., p. xviii.
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20.Letters on Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, 1972, Vol. 22, p. 94.
21.Ibid., Vol. 24, p. 1237.
22.Ibid., Vol. 22, pp. 78-79.
23.Ibid., p. 95.
24.Ibid.
25.Words of the Mother, The Centenary Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1980), Vol. 15, p. 395.
26.Concordant Discord: The Interdependence of Faiths (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 117.
27.Raymond Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (Paulist Press, New York, 1973), p. 59.
28.Ibid., fn. 96.
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