Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

A Gross Misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo

1. A LETTER FROM PRADIP BHATTACHARYA

Here is something for the Editor of Mother India: I have been in correspondence with Dr. K. K. Nair (Krishna Chaitanya), the eminent philosopher and litterateur, apropos his comment apropos the Peter Brook film on the Mahabharata, "Anticipating Buber, he (Vyasa) saw history as the encounter of the temporal and the eternal, the empirical and the transcendental; and anticipating Berdyaev, he saw in history a divine programme for divinising human existence." I had asked Nair why he had to refer to Berdyaev when India's very own Sri Aurobindo had posited the same thesis. Nair replies, "I had dodged your query in my earlier letter. But you have brought it up again. So I have to say something though I am afraid it will be a dodge in disguise. Briefly: I hero-worshipped Aurobindo in my college days; but now, half a century later, I am terribly disappointed. His discussion of time and eternity is wholly derived from that of Boethius; page after page in Life Divine is watered down Plotinus. His vision of History has the bookishness of Hegel's tidy schema, Spirit fulfilling its schedule of progress with no problem whatever. But history is fatefully open-ended, for man can abuse his freedom to become an Asura and wreck himself too thereby. Man can regress to a cannibal, Bhima drinking Duhsasana's blood. Man may commit race-suicide, as nearly happened in Kurukshetra where only nine men survived out of 18 vast armies. I am afraid Aurobindo's inflated rhetoric does not see the terror and the tears at the heart of things. I must confess your casual rating of Vyasa and Berdyaev vis-a-vis Aurobindo shocked me."

Coming from someone who is an acknowledged name in these matters, this needs an answer from you. To provide you with some insight into this argument against Sri

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Aurobindo, I enclose a xerox from his latest book, The Betrayal of Krishna (Clarion Books, 1991).

(15.10.1993)

2. K. D. SETHNA'S COMMENT

The letter you have quoted from Dr. K. K. Nair (Krishna Chaitanya) "the eminent philosopher and litterateur", as you put it, and the xerox you have sent of the "Epilogue" to his latest book, The Betrayal of Krishna, have been lying before me for quite a time. Now I have a bit of leisure and feel inclined to make the comment you have asked for.

The trouble with Nair is that he is amazingly ill-versed in Sri Aurobindo — amazingly because he is expected to be a good student of both spiritual thought and spiritual experience. At the very outset he should know that Sri Aurobindo is not spouting mere philosophy: he is putting in intellectual terms the insights brought him by Yogic realisations. The question of plagiarising an early Christian writer or profusely pouring out Plotinus-cum-water does not arise at all. Again, an acknowledged intellectual and literary master plus Yogi does not need to cast about for adequate language from past philosophers to couch his illuminations. Besides, I am pretty sure that Sri Aurobindo had less than nodding acquaintance with De Consolatione Philosophiae and was very far from being immersed in the Enneads. Furthermore, I begin to doubt not only whether Nair has read Sri Aurobindo enough but also whether he has even dived sufficiently into Boethius and Plotinus. Boethius expounds the "Blessedness" of a good life according to God's self-revelation as seen by him in the Christian Bible and glimpsed in Neoplatonism — a good life with its eye all the while on a heavenly hereafter. What could he have genuinely in common with Sri Aurobindo's setting forth of the Yogic process of "psychi-cisation, spiritualisation, supramentalisation" on this very earth — a process which brings about a relation between Time and Eternity quite apart from Boethius's idea of tem-

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poral values having to be sacrificed for eternal ones? A radical difference is bound to exist too between Plotinism's ultimate "flight of the alone to the Alone" and Sri Aurobindo's vision of a collective terrestrial fulfilment due to the supreme Divine operating not only from a free status beyond and a subtle omnipresence around but also from a Rigvedic "darkness wrapped within darkness" below — an "Inconscient" in which the Divine has figured its own opposite as the starting-point of a difficult evolution which is yet meant to express the supreme plenitude in earthly terms in what has been till now the Gita's "transient and unhappy world". What has the Aurobindonian "divine life" in common ultimately with the philosophy of one who, according to his biographer Porphyry, was such an intransigent mystic that "he seemed ashamed to be in a body"? Indeed a world away is Sri Aurobindo who affirms that "anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it"¹ — Sri Aurobindo of those lines of his "A God's Labour", which he himself quotes in this context:

He who would bring the heavens here,

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.

I should like to know if any mystic has had more sense of "the terror and the tears at the heart of things", as Nair finely puts it with reminiscence of Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum" ("Tears in the nature of things") and Wilfred Owen's "heartbreak at the heart of things", than he who talked of having undergone more difficulties than any spiritual seeker before him because he wanted to face in full all the grievous lack and sorrowful strain which man in his imperfection suffers and to assure him of the possibility of overcoming them. Has Berdyaev, to whom both you and Nair refer, or even the great Vyasa ever written words like the following in a letter of Sri Aurobindo's to a disciple? — "No, it is not with the

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Empyrean that I am busy: I wish I were. It is rather with the opposite end of things; it is in the Abyss that I have to plunge to build a bridge between the two. But that too is necessary for my work and one has to face it."²

Let me cite also some other words to bring home to Nair's unseeing mind the character of the work Sri Aurobindo undertook: "It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine. The Gallio-like 'Je m'en fiche'-ism (I do not care) would not carry me one step; it would certainly not be divine. It is quite another thing that enables me to walk unweeping and unlamenting towards the goal."³

When Nair brings in Hegel and connects him with Sri Aurobindo's "vision of History" and talks of Hegel's "tidy schema, Spirit fulfilling its schedule of progress with no problem whatever", he forgets one central point: whoever posits an Absolute has to attune the world of change to the Permanent and the Eternal in the final reckoning. This does not necessarily mean failure to take stock of the world as it is or to deny man's sense of freedom and the open-endedness of history. In the absolutely free Absolute pervading no less than subsuming everything can lie the only possibility of freedom and open-endedness anywhere. No doubt, all these are recondite matters but unless we appreciate them we cannot understand the various aspects of Sri Aurobindo's vision and work. Nair seems to stumble at every step. He can only see "contradictions". Nor can he get to the core of key-concepts like "the supramental Truth-Consciousness". I find him peppering his "Epilogue" with the adjective "supramental" six times,⁴ aware — as his quotation-marks show — that it is a special term of Sri Aurobindo's but using it as if it signified nothing more than "above the mind". Sri Aurobindo focuses in it what he specifically calls "Supermind" or "Truth-Consciousness" and distinguishes it from the several other "overhead" levels such as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition (or Intuitive Mind), Overmind. Sri

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Aurobindo does not just posit these levels and beyond them the Supermind: having had direct experience of them by means of his "Integral Yoga" he has described them and their workings in detail and, in his works of literary criticism, illustrated their peculiar seeing, verbal quality and expressive rhythm. Not finding any knowledge of these "planes" in Gopi Krishna, Vivekananda or even Ramakrishna, Nair finds fault with Sri Aurobindo's statements that the Gita "does not bring forward the idea of the higher planes and the supramental Truth-Consciousness..."⁵ Similarly, not understanding what precisely Sri Aurobindo intends by the word "transformation"⁶ in spite of his making it quite clear what he does not mean and what he means by it, Nair objects to his adding that the Gita overlooks "the bringing down of the supramental Truth-Consciousness as the means of the complete transformation of earthly life".⁷ Nair asserts: "the great central aim of the Gita has in fact been to inspire men to work for the 'complete transformation of earth life,' actually the divinisation of history."⁸ Then comes Nair's confession of faith and sight of Pisgah: "The last verse of the Gita affirms that this can be achieved only by a conjoint action by man and deity which means that man can and should attain similitude (sadharmya) to God, accepting deity who incessantly works for the world as his own soteriological model and working in the same manner. This I would regard as the highest perception, mental or supramental." Now we know how far-removed Nair is from the Aurobindonian universe of discourse and how little he has cared to penetrate the deliverances of the Master of the Integral Yoga.

His own insensitivity to shades of meaning lead Nair to convict Sri Aurobindo of misjudgment and contradiction in the above issue. The charge of contradiction is also laid at Sri Aurobindo's door in the matter of what Nair calls the former's "philosophy of action". "According to him," writes Nair again in relation to the Gita, "Krishna demands of Arjuna (which means all of us) 'to be free from repulsion and desire... to renounce self-will and become a passive and

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faithful instrument in his hands.' "⁹ Nair believes such freedom and such renunciation illegitimate and ineffective. "It is Arjuna and not the Cosmic Divinity (Visvarupa)," argues Nair, "that had to liquidate the hordes of Duryo-dhana. For this historic end Arjuna had to resume his action... Krishna does not want man to renounce his volition and become a passive instrument... When we work with dedication, our conviction that we are real agents of action is not a deluded belief... Desire and revulsion also should not be surrendered in a mental or supramental state of bemused apathy."¹⁰ This is a strange doctrine to be put into Krishna's mouth. Surely, what Krishna wants is no bemused apapthy. Nobody, he avers, can cease from action. True, but action should not arise from personal desire, from private like or dislike, from any motive of the separate ego. There must be a vast equanimity and a surrender of the individual self to the Divine Presence, the Inner Lord, the Universal Oversoul. By a constant spiritual gesture of union (Yoga) with the dynamic Divinity (Ishwara) by the intelligent will (buddhi), the individual has to be active with the illumined energy of a more-than-human consciousness. Krishna is teaching Arjuna Karma Yoga: Karma implies Work, not passivity, but Work by Yoga (inner spiritual unification with God), not by ego-impelled desire and revulsion. Nair completely misconstrues the true drift of the Gita and the basic drive of Sri Aurobindo's interpretation in this context.

There is some mis-seeing by Nair of Sri Aurobindo's experience of Vasudeva (Krishna) being behind everything. This experience is identical with what is implied by the Gita's own pronouncement which later Vaishnavism formulated as Vasudeva sarvam iti (Vasudeva is all). Although Duryodhana's armies were also Vasudeva, Krishna as Vasudeva incarnate exhorts Vasudeva-Arjuna to destroy them. The universal Vasudeva plays many roles according to the situation presented each moment by the many-sided phenomenon of a world moving under multiform aspects. Once one has realised in Yogic experience Vasudeva's unity and multi-

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plicity, sameness and difference, openness and disguise, friendliness and enmity, one discerns by an inner light the proper mode of action and reaction. Thus Sri Aurobindo the politician is a relentless freedom-fighter against the British rule in India, was imprisoned under inhuman conditions for a long while and yet he finds Krishna's hand behind everything and even sees him, as Nair notes, during the sedition-trial in 1908, in the magistrate and the prosecuting counsel: "It was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled."¹¹ Years later, this very Sri Aurobindo took whole-heartedly the side of the British and their allies in World War II and regarded Hitler as the instrument of a demonic force and set his own spiritual power working against him and later against Japan. Nair, unable to fathom the fact that, as a line in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri puts it,

Our life is a paradox with God for key¹²

and unable to follow the varying steps of an intuitive guidance in Sri Aurobindo's facing of diverse situations and problems, can only cry: "Contradictions within contradic-tions."¹³

I am sorry to mark a lack of suppleness as well as of depth in Nair's mind. It is a sharp weapon in several respects but it fails to cut sufficiently beneath the surface and to cope with the diversity no less than the complexity of event and attitude. There is also an incapacity to appreciate an expository style like Sri Aurobindo's in a book like The Life Divine. In this book there is at times an alliance of the direct, the lucid, the profound, the harmonious, at other times a concomitance of the wide-wheeling, the multi-layered, the symphonic. An allergy to the second stylistic mode seems to be responsible for so sweeping a characterisation by Nair of The Life Divine as "inflated rhetoric". I wish he had given samples.

In a mischievous spirit of tit for tat I am tempted to cite some parts of Nair's "Epilogue" as reprehensible style. At

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the very start he quotes the epigram: "When the gods decline, the nations wither." After five and a half lines deprecating the possible "pettifogging schoolmen-type vivisection", he puts forth his own reading of "this living truth" as follows: "It merely means that, as far as men are concerned, God can live only in their hearts and that if the hearts turn inhospitable, he will die to men and men too will die — as beings who could have grown to some similitude to him — even if they may continue to infest the world and altogether ruin its character as sacred precincts."¹⁴

This interpretation strikes me as ingenious, extravagant and pompous, a pseudo-profundity showing off. The epigram appears to mean simply that when the religious and spiritual temper fades, the community loses its inner sustaining vigour.

On p. 542 Nair notes that "in the time of Emerson (1803-1882) not much knowledge of Indian religious traditions had percolated into the West; thus he refers to the Gita as "the much renowned book of Buddhism'." Then Nair comments: "He was responding to the pure poetry of the Gita, the way it sees the halations around facts when it conceptualises, and transfigures concepts into images whose charges of affect can achieve the remaking of man; and he found the poem 'wonderful'." Here undoubtedly in a couple of places is a deplorable dash of jargon, an unnecessary infusion of gob-bledegook.

There, Pradip, you have what "the Editor of Mother India" is provoked by you to say. Perhaps I have said too much. But what is writ is writ. You may do what you like with it. Don't think I have no admiration for Nair. He has penned a series of penetrating surveys of modern thought. I only object to his sallies into regions unsuited to his intellect — and superficial sallies, at that!

(10.1.1994)

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Notes and References

1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection, Vol. 1, Pondicherry 1953), p. 222

2.Ibid.,pp. 222-23.

3.Ibid., p. 221.

4.Epilogue, pp. 535, 536, 537.

5.Ibid., p. 221.

6.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, pp. 162-64, 168-69.

7.Epilogue, p. 535.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., pp. 535-36.

10.Ibid., p. 536.

11.Ibid.

12.Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Revised Edition, Pondicherry 1993), p. 67, last line.

13.Epilogue, p. 536.

14.Ibid., p. 531.

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