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My friend Mr. Baldoon Dhingra of UNESCO has sent me for comment a letter to him from you as Editors of the periodical MANAS of Los Angeles, touching upon Sri Aurobindo. I should like to clarify a few matters.
While saying you "are far from qualifying as 'experts' on Indian philosophy", you have submitted your "impression" that Sri Aurobindo has said nothing that is not better said in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Then you go on to make two points: (1) "Gandhi, on the other hand, it seems to us, gave a new vitality and contemporary life to India's ancient wisdom;" (2) "Gandhi, therefore, again it seems to us, was able to move other men in the direction of greatness - toward heroism, that is." Finally, you declare: "If Sri Aurobindo has anything of this sort to his credit, it has not come to our attention."
I should like to start with the point about Gandhi and the ancient wisdom of India. Let me ask: "What is meant by this wisdom?" The answer is in the two scriptures mentioned by you: the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. There are various interpretations of these scriptures, but no interpretation can have any value if it denies that these scriptures put before us a life of God-realisation by means of direct concrete mystical experience of the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. This experience must be distinguished from the merely moral life. One can be a great mystic, a great Yogi, as well as a highly moral person. Indeed, morality in the highest sense goes hand in hand with mysticism and Yoga. But to be the practitioner of a moral life - however that may be conceived -does not necessarily make one a great mystic, a great Yogi. To be a knower of Brahman (the ultimate Reality), Atman (the Universal Self of selves, basically one with Brahman), Ishwara (the creative Personal God, the aspect of ultimate Reality which is in relationship with the persons that we are and with the universe He has emanated) - to be a knower of
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these supreme existences and to let that supra-intellectual knowledge issue in a life lived in the light of a more-than-human consciousness is something far greater than to be a mere moralist following ahimsa - non-violence - or any other rule by means of will-power and fellow-feeling. The moral life in itself is a fine thing, but it cannot be compared in greatness to the mystical life - the Life of a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ, a Teresa of Avila, a Ramakrishna, a Vivekananda, a Ramana Maharshi. Nor can we deny that nothing short of the mystical life, the Yogic spirituality, is the beau ideal of the Upanishads and the Gita, the vibrant luminous essence of India's ancient wisdom.
Now I may ask: "Whatever be Gandhi's greatness - and surely he was no small creature - can we regard him as a knower of Brahman, Atman, ishwara by direct concrete experience and reaksation such as the Upanishads and the Gita at their core urge upon us?" Nobody who has studied Gandhi's life will make the claim, nor did Gandhi himself think that he was a mystic or a Yogi. Mysticism and Yoga are never enjoined by him in any of his writings. All that he enjoins are truthfulness and non-violence. Valuable virtues, no doubt, but in themselves not at all identical with God-realisation such as India's ancient wisdom envisaged. You will perhaps say that Gandhi was not only a moral man but also a religious one. Granted. But surely you cannot put mere religion on a par with God-realisation. Religion at its best is a mental and emotional acceptance of the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. It can be a good preparation for the truly spiritual life, just as the practice of moral virtues can. But to be religious, no matter how highly, is not the same thing as to know the unitive life, the state of inner union with a more-than-human, a divine reality that brings a light, a bliss, a power, a love the merely mental and emotional acceptance of the Eternal and the Infinite can never compass. To talk of having faith in God or even of listening to an "inner voice" is to encourage and practise the ordinary religious temper and the ordinary moral conscience. A man of unusual calibre like
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Gandhi may encourage and practise these things in an unusual way, but they still remain, for all their intensification, within the domain of ordinary morality and religion and never cross the barrier between them and God-realisation.
Possibly at this point you will protest: "Don't you know that Gandhi was doing Karma Yoga, the Yoga of Work, and that the Indian scriptures speak ever so highly of the Karma Yogi?" Well, there is a lot of confusion caused by a loose employment of these scriptural terms. Popularly, Karma Yoga is supposed to be the doing of work with trust in God, a keen sense of duty and as much disinterestedness as possible. And the motive behind it is believed to be service of mankind. But one may inquire: "How does such action become Yoga?" Yoga means union - with the Divine; where is any room here for the unitive life?" What we have here is yet a mixture of religion and morality. The true Karma Yogi is a-fire with aspiration to unite with the Eternal and the Infinite. Service of mankind is only a means to an end for him: it is a means towards the mystical experience by enlarging one's scope of action beyond the small individual ego and, when the mystical experience is reached, service of mankind is a means to express that experience in the world. But this service is not the only means. Literature, art, science, educational activity, law, medicine, even humble private occupation, or anything else suiting one's abilities - all these and not social service alone are the legitimate means available. And true Karma Yoga is done fundamentally by a threefold process: (1) there is a deeply devoted inner offering of one's actions to the Supreme Lord - a constant remembrance and consecration; (2) there is an inner detachment not only from the fruit of one's actions but also from the actions themselves, an ever-increasing detachment until the infinite desireless impersonal peace of the Atman, the one World-Self that is an ever-silent witness or watcher, is attained and a spontaneous superhuman disinterestedness becomes possible; (3) there is, through this attainment and through complete surrender of one's nature-parts to the Lord, the
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Ishwara, the transmission of a divine dynamism, a superb World-Will from beyond the world, in all one's acti
If a man does not have this God-realisation, it is anomalous to speak of his giving "a new vitabty and contemporary life to India's ancient wisdom" - for he does not at all embody that wisdom at its purest and profoundest. This is not to refuse greatness to him, but it is not the greatness ancient India upheld as the top reach of the human soul. So the comparison between Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo cannot stand. Even if, as alleged, Sri Aurobindo "has said nothing that is not better said in the Upanishads and the Bhagawad Gita" he is still in the direct line of the ancient wisdom of India. If India has anything pre-eminently to give humanity at present, it would be this wisdom in a form suitable and applicable to modern needs, this wisdom with a new and contemporary vitality. But without this wisdom the greatness and heroism one may induce in others are certainly never what ancient India considered the highest achievement in life and what modern India in tune with its inmost being could charge with appropriate new values and offer as the highest achievement.
If you are after spreading India's ancient wisdom in a form vibrant with contemporary vitality, you may choose somebody else than Sri Aurobindo whom you may think better than he in the line of mystical experience and philosophy and all-round constructivism, but if you choose Gandhi you are off the track altogether and are hardly acting in consonance with your aim. Declare your aim to be Tolstoyan Christianity in a garb of Jain and Buddhist morality coloured with the nomenclature of Hindu piety, and you will be justified in referring so frequently to Gandhi. And you will be justified in extolling whatever greatness and heroism this way of thought and life may cause. But neither this way of thought and life nor such greatness and heroism are relevant to the aim you have actually declared. Please do not imagine 1 am trying to belittle Gandhi in your eyes or to pour
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cold water on the enthusiasm you have for pushing his precepts. You are welcome to your admiration and your work. But the second and third points submitted in your letter are, in my opinion, based on a misunderstanding of fundamental facts.
Once the misunderstanding is cleared, you will be more inclined to study what Sri Aurobindo has to say and what he has done. I have written a score of articles scattered over several periodicals to bring home in various ways the newness of Sri Aurobindo, the extension he has made of India's ancient wisdom and the completeness, the integrality, to which he has carried the spiritual life and made it the fount of a dynamism and creativity in the world. Others too have written on the same theme and I may refer you to the article entitled Towards a New World by "Synergist" in the series The World Crisis and India in the fortnightly I am editing, Mother India.1 The article appeared in the Special Number of August 15, 1949. August 15, by the way, is not only the day of India's Independence but also the birthday of Sri Aurobindo - a seeming coincidence which we may well take to be really symbolic of the representative character of one who was Bengal's and afterwards all India's acknowledged leader in the most formative years of the country's struggle for freedom from British rule and who is a distinguished poet and an admirable prose-writer on a variety of subjects - philosophical, cultural, literary, sociological, political - and who, above alt, is the Master of a Yoga which does not reject but embraces the whole field of life and seeks to transform it to the uttermost.
Apropos of India's struggle for freedom, I may remark that in those six years which Sri Aurobindo spent in political activity and during which he was three times charged with sedition and three times acquitted, there was a play of heroism in his revolutionary programmes not only on his own part but also by way of infusing selfless courage in a .
1. At the time this letter was written (1950) Mother India was a fortnightly. .
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host of his followers. He has himself spoken of the grave and dangerous work he had to do, work which exposed him even to losing his life along with those who had turned heroes under his inspiration. Many of his "boys" actually went to the gallows with smiling faces and the cry he had made India-wide of "Bande Mataram" - "I bow to You, O Mother" - with which Bankim Chandra Chatterji's famous patriotic song begins. Sri Aurobindo was never an armchair theorist, a doctrinaire politician. He was a dynamic figure who charted out in embryo most of the constructive policies Gandhi later developed. Where he differed from Gandhi was in the latter's making a fetish of ahimsd and on two or three crucial occasions spoiling by such a one-sided obsession the political mass-movement which he had brought about as a push towards Swaraj. Again, Sri Aurobindo could never hesitate to throw his full weight behind the effort of the Allies to check Hitler, never put any hindrance in their way as Gandhian politicians did when Cripps came with his enlightened proposals and the Cabinet Mission brought similar plans for full support by India to the Allied Cause and for a post-war declaration of India's complete freedom either within the British Commonwealth or outside it. With a living grip always on fundamental realities both of the spiritual life and of the common world within which his brand of dynamic spirituality was to function, Sri Aurobindo stands out as an example par excellence of what editors of a periodical like Manas whose aim is to provoke vitalising thought would be expected to put forward before their readers.
(21.1.1950)
You in Singapore are felt by me nearer than you in England not merely because the "-Lion's City" is geographically nearer than any English "burgh" (from the same root as the Sanskrit "pur" in the "pore" of your place) to Pondicherry (meaning "The New Town") but also and prinapally because the ambience of Sri Aurobindo seems more living where you
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function as the President of the Sri Aurobindo Society than where you are just a stray Aurobindonian, Of course, there is another vision possible of England. You have touched on it yourself by referring to No, 2, Plynlinimon Road in Hastings where Sri Aurobindo spent his sixteenth birthday with his brothers. I say "touched" because many more spots in England felt the impress of the bud-form of what traditional Indians continue to call the "lotus-feet" of the Avatar who was their Guru.
Perhaps the most sacred spot is the room at King's College, Cambridge, where young Aurobindo was unfolding his powers the most with superb proficiency in Greek and Latin side by side with mastery in English and where the founts of poetic inspiration were first unsealed to issue in lines like the opening of "Night by the Sea" in which in spite of a half-Romantic half-Victorian colour in the language we get a glimpse or rather a foreshadow of inner mysteries -
Love, a moment drop thy hands;
Night within my soul expands.
Veil thy beauties milk-rose fair
In that dark and showering hair.
Coral kisses ravish not
When the soul is tinged with thought;
Burning looks are then forbid.
Let each shyly parted lid
Hover like a settling dove
O'er those deep blue wells of love.
Outer mysteries making a vague counterpart to the inner secrecies, hover in the preluding speech of the dialogue named "Songs to Myrtilla". They are also likely to have beckoned to Aurobindo in his late teens during his stay in that Cambridge-room. His expression of them is surprisingly mature with a distinct originality in a genre that is part Wordsworth, part Shelley and part Keats:
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When earth is full of whispers, when
No daily voice is heard of men,
But higher audience brings
The footsteps of invisible things.
When o'er the glimmering tree-tops bowed
The night is leaning on a luminous cloud,
And always a melodious breeze
Sings secret in the weird and charmed trees.
Pleasant 'tis then heart-overawed to lie
Alone with that clear moonlight and that listening sky.
Along with the sheer loveliness of the imaged idea and emotion, there is the enchanting modulation of the metrical length of the lines, the way in which, as it were, "the footsteps of invisible things" fall variously in a changing pattern of four, three and five feet and culminate in a final run of six, subtly suggesting the spreading wideness overhead of a calm luminosity and of an intent silence. Here is technical skill at its best, spontaneously striking.
By the way, in the same dialogue between Glaucus and Aethon occurs, among several felicities sometimes extending to quite a number of lines in the midst of scattered passages somewhat immature and cloying, that simple-looking pentameter -
Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks -
about whose "heart" and "art" 1 have written at some length in a letter published in Mother India. Here inerrant is the choice of "hurrying" for the water's movement in the context of "reluctant rocks" - a context where along with the r-alliteration picking up the internal r-sound of "hurrying" we have an appropriate retarding effect in the cluster of consonants in "reluctant".
King's College has indeed a lot of Sri Aurobindo impressed on its subtle ether akash, but possibly the central being in him, the one that became the Master Yogi of the age, can be
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best tuned-in to at 6 Burlington Road, London, where in 1892 the young Aurobindo, just turned 20, was not only oriented towards India's cause of freedom by joining the clandestine "Lotus and Dagger" Society but also had, through an "empathic" study of Indian spiritual philosophy in the pages of Max Muller, his first experience which may be situated on the threshold of Yoga, as it were: by an intense effort of mental concentration he had a distant imaginative sense of the Atman, the universal Self of selves.
I don't know whether, on return to India, he had any keen nostalgia for the country where he had spent 14 formative years. His early verse takes much pleasure in English flowers and landscapes and there is an unforgettable prolonged revelling in the memory of the English countryside in an essay by him on translating Kalidasa. Throughout his life English literature - English poetry in particular - was a living presence, and a speech in Baroda evinces an appreciative recollection of the temper of "liberal education" at the great English universities. But, according to his own declaration, he had more affinity with France, which he never visited, than with England where his material circumstances had been difficult and where, unlike his brother Manmohan, he had scarcely any warm friendships. But the lack of personal attachment would hardly have stood in the way of his understanding your present feelings about the natural scenery of the land of your birth. At least I, who only spent three months as a boy of 6 in the London of hansom-cabs and gas-lamps, have a tremendous attraction to your native country. It is as if life after life in the past I had spent there -or as if in any case my last birth before now had been in England and the sense of its physical features no less than of its language had persisted across the oblivion which succeeds each re-entry of the soul into earth-life. Were I to visit certain scenes in England I might repeat in myself something like Wordsworth's experience when he wrote those four lines which move me strangely:
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My eyes are filled with idle tears.
My heart is vainly stirred.
For the same sounds are in my ears
As in my youth I heard.
Your words - "the Welsh mountains, and the 'long roads full of rain' of the seaside town where I went to school" - remind me of that stanza which has haunted me for years:
From the lone shieling1 of our misty island
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
But still the blood is warm, the heart is highland
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
Perhaps mostly the spell is due to the last line which goes repeating the long e-sound and culminates this characteristic with a name which has been invested with a soulfully romantic magic after that passage in "The Solitary Reaper" of Wordsworth:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In springtime from the Cuckoo-bird
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Your recent experiences in England interest me a great deal. The appearance of Champaklal in your midst must have been indeed inspiring. How did his globe-trotting steps turn right towards your Kentish house? Your short but vivid account of Champaklal's play with the ancient sword sent my mind to an incident in Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse: the feat of bow-less and sling-less Colan the Gael, swifter than the arrow-flight attempted by Earl Harold from the opposite side:
Whirling the one sword round his head,
A great wheel in the sun,
1. Scottish word for grazing ground for cattle.
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He sent it splendid through the sky,
Flying before the shaft could fly -
It smote Earl Harold in the eye.
And blood began to run.
Marvelling at this feat,
... Said Alfred: "Who would see
Signs, must give all things. Verily
Man shall not taste of victory
Till he throws his sword away."
Then Alfred, prince of England,
And all the Christian earls,
Unhooked their swords and held them up,
Each offered to Colan, like a cup
Of chrysolite and pearls.
And the King said, "Do thou take my sword
Who have done this deed of fire.
For this is the manner of Christian men,
Whether of steel or priestly pen.
That they cast their hearts out of their ken
To get their hearts' desire.
Your sweet whisper to yourself, "Why can't Amal come?", got a good answer from yourself. But it is not only his "Collected Poems" that would remain unprepared for publication: his other 20 books or so, plus the 2 already in the press, will find it hard to be out. Amal also feels that in the time still left to him for the Aurobindonian yoga he can't afford to disperse his powers: he needs all of them to cast his heart out of his ken towards the depths of the intense Unseen and the heights of the immense Unknown.
(31.7.1988)
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I also felt a little sad that the line from Sri Aurobindo we have known in the form —
All can be done if the God-touch is there -
has been found to be in the original text with a small g which has to be restored when we publish the Critical or Revised Edition of Savitri. In my mind the wonderfully simple yet profound line with the capital G always belonged to the highly inspiring company of those other single-line masterpieces of Sri Aurobindo in a similar vein alluding to the ultimate Deity:
One who has shaped the world is still its lord....
His failure is not failure whom God leads....
How can his work be vain when God is guide?...
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all...
But let me console you (and myself) that all is not really lost with the small g. What Sri Aurobindo means is a psychological-spiritual generalisation, pointing not directly to the one supreme Divinity but to the Godlike derived from Him. The difference from the miscopied version which has been current is that God is spoken of in a broad instead of a specific connotation, and there is the conjuration of a secret potency in the depths of all human beings to bring up into activity a divine element which laughs at the difficult. and even the seeming impossible. This nuance I hint at in my expression: "psychological-spiritual." In the passage itself where the line occurs, the reference is to the advent of the Dawn, a preparation for the account of the approach of this superhuman Presence which would break the bonds of darkness - Dawn that is called "the godhead" in the line:
An instant's visitor the godhead shone.
A little later she is given the name: "The omniscient Goddess". And not too further on we have in the original
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text a line which too has become a part of our quotation-stock with a mistaken capital:
Only a little the god-light can stay. .
In between we have "the fields of God" and "the reclining body of a god". From this blend of the upper and lower cases in the same extended context I conclude that Sri Aurobindo does not draw any sharp line of significance between them but distinguishes fine shades of the Divine's presence or power according to his sense of the appropriate in each place.
In one sense the small g should buck us up. In facing obstacles we have now a twofold source of sustenance. There is the Supreme outside of us to whom we can raise our cry and there is also the Supreme inside of us whom we can call up. Though both are essentially the same, now the pointer is more directly to the latter than to the former and the hope, nay, the promise, is given us that by the evocation of the divinity within, who is an image of the divinity without - by the feeling and perception of the two as simultaneously existent for us - we have the gift of a strength capable of overcoming hurdles of the most formidable nature if only we realise unegoistically the Grace that has come with this gift.
(7.7.1986)
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