The Mother

7: In Japan

In the world of forms a flaw in Beauty is as great a deficiency as a flaw in Truth in the world of ideas.¹

– The Mother

After a few moments spent in arranging familiar objects, Mirra wrote in her diary on 2 November 1915: ‘As a strong breeze passes over the sea and crowns with foam its countless waves, so a great breath passed over the memory and awoke the multitude of its remembrances. Intense, complex, crowded, the past lived again in a flash, having lost nothing of its savour, its richness. Then was the whole being lifted up in a great surge of adoration, and gathering all its memories like an abundant harvest, it placed them at Thy feet, O Lord, as an offering. For throughout its life, without knowing it or with some presentiment of it, it was Thou whom it was seeking …’ ²

Paul and Mirra Richard were in Paris again; they would stay there, in relative safety, till the beginning of March 1916. Paul Richard had been exempted from military service on (simulated?) medical grounds. As for Mirra, after the taxing physical and spiritual ordeal she had been through, things had settled down again. ‘Errors have become stepping-stones, the blind gropings conquests. Thy glory transforms defeats into victories of eternity, and all the shadows have fled before their radiant light.’ ³

But the war went on unabated and produced horrors as yet unknown to humanity. It was as if she were connected to it with every nerve in her body. A few days later she wrote in the middle of the night: ‘For the last two days the Earth seems to have been going through a decisive crisis; it seems that the great, formidable contest between material resistances and spiritual powers is nearing its conclusion, or, in any case, that some element of capital importance has made or is going to make its appearance in the play.’ The task ahead, now and on so many occasions to come, was much more arduous than anticipated by her or by Sri Aurobindo. The reason why this material world had never been divinized became ever clearer to them as they advanced into unknown but very concrete and resistant physical-spiritual territory. (In years to come an ironic Sri Aurobindo would even say that he would have been much less enthusiastic had he known what lay ahead.)

And Mirra added: ‘How little do individual beings count at such times! They are like wisps of straw carried away by the passing breeze, whirling for a moment above the ground, only to be flung back upon it again and reduced to dust.’ ⁴ Indeed, in their many thousands the youthful bodies torn to shreds by bullets, shells and shrapnel were reduced to dust. Still, in the middle of that holocaust ‘the Lord’ was there, as He is everywhere. ‘O Thou whom I may call my God, Thou who art the personal form of the Transcendent Eternal, the Cause, Source and Reality of my individual being, Thou who hast through the centuries and millenniums slowly and subtly kneaded this Matter, so that one day it could become consciously identified with Thee, and be nothing but Thee; O Thou who hast appeared to me in all Thy divine splendour – this individual being in all its complexity offers itself to Thee in an act of supreme adoration … Will the great miracle of the integral Divine Life in the individual at last be accomplished?’ ⁵

All the main themes of the endeavour of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, all the main items on the agenda of their spiritual labour for humanity, which most of their biographers suppose to have been taken up years and even decades later, were already present in their consciousness and their yogic effort at this early stage. Their yoga was as intense in its beginning as in its middle and end – including their yoga of the matter of the body, of the cells.

‘It was not possible for them to go to India,’ writes Pournaprema, ‘but the circumstances arranged themselves so that they could go to Japan.’ ⁶ In the First World War Japan was an ally of Great Britain and therefore of Great Britain’s allies, including France. Paul Richard received a commission to promote the export of French products in China and Japan, as the following letter dated 28 February 1916 makes clear: ‘The bearer of this letter, Mr. Paul Richard, a barrister at the Court of Appeals at Paris and a delegate of the National Union for the Export of French Products, is on his way to Japan and China. Kindly extend a warm welcome to Mr. Richard should he be in need of your good offices.’ The letter was signed ‘for the Prime Minister.’ ⁷

As the Mother later said, it was not all that difficult to get this kind of overseas commission, for nobody else wanted to run the risk of the voyage. Not only were some pirate German battleships, like the Emden, making the seas unsafe, the German Kaiser by that time had also given carte blanche to his 150 submarines to attack any enemy vessel within range. On 7 May 1915 the British passenger ship Lusitania and on 15 November the Italian ocean liner Ancona had been torpedoed and sunk, both with huge losses of civilian life. A favoured hunting ground of the German submarines was the Channel, between France and Great Britain, and this was the stretch of water the Richards had to cross in order to reach Britain and then embark on a voyage all the way around South Africa towards the East, for the Suez Canal was closed. Did Mirra realize on 4 March 1916 that she was taking leave of her house, of Paris and of France for the last time? There is no such indication, for the next entry in her diary is dated 7 June four months later, and in it she describes those months as ‘a period of transition, the passage from one equilibrium to another, larger and more complete.’

Many formalities were required in London before they could board, on 11 March, the Kamo Maru, the same Japanese ship that had brought them from Colombo to France a year before. This time the Richards did not travel alone. They were accompanied by an English lady, Miss Dorothy Hodgson, of whom all that is known is that her fiancé had died, that therefore she never wanted to marry, and that she had chosen Mirra as her spiritual mentor. Dorothy Hodgson, later named Datta by Sri Aurobindo, would remain with the Mother for the rest of her life.

Pournaprema relates a story, supposedly told to her by the Mother, that somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean the Kamo Maru was approached threateningly by ‘a very big ship,’ which was most probably a German battleship. The incident happened around four o’clock in the morning and Mirra, an early riser, was the only one among the passengers to observe it. There was an exchange of signals, the warship slowly circled around the Kamo Maru and then suddenly continued on its course. When Mirra asked the Japanese captain, with whom ‘she had sympathized since the beginning of the journey’ and of whom she had drawn a sketch, what had happened, he asked her to tell nobody what she had seen. For he had signalled the warship that he had a gun on board, and threatened to fire. In actual fact he had no gun, and his bravado had put his passengers and his ship in jeopardy.

On 6 April the Kamo Maru dropped anchor at Table Bay and the Richards visited Cape Town, the capital of South Africa, from where they sent a postcard to André. More than a month later, on 9 and 10 May, the ship called at Shanghai, where Mirra caught a whiff of China. On 18 May the Kamo Maru docked at Yokohama, the largest Japanese port.

Tokyo

The first year of their stay in Japan was spent for the most part in Tokyo, in the house of Dr. Shumei Okawa and his wife. Okawa was a university professor in Tokyo, teaching Asian History. He was also a member of the Black Dragon Society and ‘the leading spirit of the pan-Asiatic movement in Japan … a person of considerable influence, who is deeply interested in Indian affairs and is bitterly opposed to British rule in India’ – according to a Government of India document reporting the publication of ‘a photograph of Arabindo Ghosh and a eulogistic article on his work’ by Okawa in Asia Jiron.⁸ (The Richards were shadowed by people spying for the British during their entire stay in Japan.)

Okawa, who had studied Indian philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, had become interested in Sri Aurobindo after reading a newspaper article on him. He had tried to obtain Sri Aurobindo’s address, but in vain. He also harboured for some time Rashbehari Bose (1880-1945), who had masterminded a bomb attempt against Viceroy Lord Hardinge and who fled to Japan in 1915, where he married a Japanese woman and founded the Indian Independence League in 1924. The Richards met Bose as a matter of course.

‘I attended every meeting at which an Indian scholar spoke. I went to listen … in the hope of finding my soul.’ Okawa met the Richards after a talk by one Hara Prasad. In the audience was ‘a young lady who stirred my depths. Something in her drew me to her … There was a light in her eyes as of the great morning of the world that was about to dawn … I saw Hara Prasad the next morning. And what was my surprise when he said that this very lady had desired to see me! … I met her as a brother and a friend and was privileged to be her fellow-worker … She and her friends dreamed of a new Asia, a new world … We lived together for a year. We sat together in meditation every night for an hour. I practised Zen and they practised Yoga.’ ⁹ So Okawa was quoted by V.K. Gokak after he met him in 1957. By then Okawa had become practically blind and was an invalid, but his mind was still very much alive and his memory clear.

After all those years he still considered Sri Aurobindo his guru. In the article mentioned in the Government of India Report, he wrote: ‘Arabinda Ghosh is a great character whom modern India has produced, or rather only India can produce … He is the most genuine Indian of all the Indian thinkers in the strict sense of the word, and at the same time the most nationalistic of all the leaders of the national movements in the radical sense of the word … There is a common belief in this country [Japan] that Tagore is the best thinker [the Indians] may well be proud of. To be sure he is India’s vaunted poet, but he is far from being a great thinker, much less is he equal to Ghosh in depth and extent of thought … Knowing that this “Asian Review” [Asia Jiron] is going to carry one of his recent pictures on the first page and introduce to the Japanese people this towering mind in the Orient who should have been known to us much earlier, I would like to have the opportunity and honour of expressing my enthusiastic admiration for his sublime aspiration, my deep respect for his true patriotic spirit, and my full-hearted sympathy for the hardships which he is now suffering from.’ ¹⁰

In June 1916 the Richards met Rabindranath Tagore, who had come to Japan on a lecture tour. Mirra made a fine pencil sketch of him on 11 June, the day he delivered a speech at the Imperial University in Tokyo, ‘The Message of India to Japan.’ Tagore had become world-famous in 1913, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his volume of poetry Gitanjali. ‘I met [Rabindranath Tagore] in Japan. He claimed to have reached the peace of nirvana and it made him beam with joy. I thought: “Here is a man who claims to have found peace and reached nirvana. Let us see.” I asked him to meditate with me. I followed him in meditation and saw that he had reached just behind the mind into a sort of void. I waited and waited to follow him elsewhere, but he would not go further. I found that he was supremely satisfied imagining that he had entered nirvana.’ ¹¹

The Richards would meet Tagore again in 1919, when they stayed in the same hotel for some time. In 1901 Tagore had founded an educational institute, Shantiniketan (Abode of Peace), ‘where learning would be inculcated in a free and loving community.’ In 1918 this educational centre was raised to university level and renamed Vishva Bharati (World University). Tagore may have had exchanges of views with Mirra about education, for it is said that he proposed that she take charge of Vishva Bharati. Mirra, in the knowledge that her destiny lay elsewhere, had to politely refuse. All the same, as a token of his regard for her, Tagore presented her with his typewriter, which is still kept among the Mother’s memorabilia in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Among the other people the Richards met in Tokyo was ‘a son of Tolstoy,’ on a world tour to propagate his bizarre ideas about redeeming the world. As the world was obviously in a deep crisis, the proposals for an ideal solution were legion and often quite eccentric. ‘In Japan I met Tolstoy’s son who was on a world tour for “the good of mankind’s great unity.” His solution was very simple: everybody ought to speak the same language, lead the same kind of life, dress in the same way, eat the same food … I am not joking, those were his very words. I met him in Tokyo. He said: “But everybody would be happy, all would understand one another, nobody would quarrel if everyone did the same thing.” There was no way to make him understand that it was not very reasonable. He had set out to travel all over the world with that in mind, and when people asked him his name he would say “Tolstoy.” Now, Tolstoy … There were people who did not know that (the great writer Leo) Tolstoy had died, and they thought: “Oh, we are going to hear something extraordinary!” And then he came out with that!’ ¹²

Hardly two months after their arrival, on 7 July, Mirra published an article in Fujoshimbun, a Japanese paper, entitled ‘Woman and the War.’ The article starts as follows: ‘You have asked me what I think of the feminist movement and what will be the consequences of the present war for it. One of the first effects of the war has certainly been to give quite a new aspect to the question. The futility of the perpetual oppositions between men and women has been at once made clearly apparent, and behind the conflict of the sexes, only relating to exterior facts, the gravity of the circumstances allowed the discovery of the always existent, if not always outwardly manifested fact, of the real collaboration, of the true union of these two complementary halves of humanity.’ ¹³

She goes on to show how easily the women have taken over most of the tasks left unoccupied by the men now at the front, and how courageous the women have proved to be at their posts. ‘But where, above all, women have given proof of exceptional gifts is in their organizing faculties.’ In the West ‘Semitic thought allied to Roman legislation has influenced customs too deeply for women to have the opportunity of showing their capacity for organization … This is not to say that only woman’s exceptional qualities have been revealed by the present war. Her weaknesses, her faults, her pettiness have also been given the opportunity of display, and certainly if women wish to take the place they claim in the governing of nations they must progress much further in the mastery of self, in the broadening of ideas and points of view, in intellectual suppleness and oblivion of their sentimental preferences in order to become worthy of the management of public affairs.’

Mirra stresses the need of ‘a collaboration of the two sexes … To reduce the woman’s part to solely interior and domestic occupations, and the man’s part to exclusively exterior and social occupations, thus separating what should be united, would be to perpetuate the present sad state of things from which both are equally suffering … The question to be solved, the real question, is then not only that of a better utilization of their outer activities, but above all of an inner spiritual growth. Without inner progress there is no possible outer progress.’

Exactly when Mirra gave her talk ‘To the Women of Japan’ is not known. Later she found it important enough to have it reprinted several times. To begin with she emphasizes again the spiritual role of women. ‘True maternity begins with the conscious creation of a being, with the willed shaping of a soul come to develop and utilize a new body. The true domain of women is spiritual. We forget it but too often.’ ¹⁴ Then she develops a viewpoint that is demonstrably Lamarckian, to make her female audience understand that their psychological condition and attitude have a direct formative influence on the embryo taking shape in their body. She gives a couple of concrete examples and adds: ‘If we can obtain such results on the physical plane where the materials are the least plastic, how much more so on the psychological plane where the influence of thought and will is so powerful.’

Then she expounds Sri Aurobindo’s and her view of the importance of the point in world history at which humanity has arrived: ‘We are living in an exceptional time at an exceptional turning point of the world’s history. Never before, perhaps, did mankind pass through such a dark period of hatred, bloodshed and confusion. And, at the same time, never has such a strong, such an ardent hope awakened in the hearts of the people … Never is the night so dark as before the dawn … The civilization which is ending now in such a dramatic way was based on the power of the mind, mind dealing with matter and life. What it has meant to the world, we have not to discuss here. But a new reign is coming, that of the Spirit: after the human, the divine.’

She briefly sketches the evolution that is expected to culminate ‘in the descent of the Supramental.’ ‘Only a new spiritual influx, creating in man a new consciousness, can overcome the enormous mass of difficulties barring the way of the workers [collaborating to realize the future], a new spiritual light, a manifestation upon Earth of some divine force unknown until now, a Thought of God, new for us, descending into this world and taking a new form here … This form, meant to manifest the spiritual force capable of transforming the Earth’s present conditions, this new form: who is to construct it if not the women?

‘Thus we see that at this critical period of the world’s life it is no longer sufficient to give birth to a being in whom our highest personal ideal is manifested; we must strive to find out what is the future type whose advent Nature is planning. It is no longer sufficient to form a man similar to the greatest men we have heard of or known, or even greater, more accomplished and gifted than they; we must strive to come in touch mentally, by the constant aspiration of our thought and will, with the supreme possibility which, exceeding all human measures and features, will give birth to the superman …

‘It is by holding firm in our heart and mind the dynamism, the irresistible impetus given by a sincere and ardent aspiration, by maintaining in ourselves a certain state of enlightened receptivity towards the supreme Idea of the new race which wills to be manifested on Earth, that we can take a decisive step in the formation of the sons of the future, and make ourselves fit to serve as intermediaries for the creation of those who shall save Humanity.’ Thoughts like these, spoken in dramatic historical circumstances on one of the islands of Japan in the Far East, would crop up again in one form or another throughout her whole life.

Mirra had left her soul with Sri Aurobindo, who was in his physical body working out his yoga on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. She would later say to a disciple that he was always present with her in Japan, and that he directed her stay there. Around the time that she was writing down and speaking the words quoted above, he wrote to an unknown correspondent: ‘The ordinary Yoga is usually concentrated on a single aim and therefore less exposed to such recoils; ours is so complex and many-sided and embraces such large aims that we cannot expect any smooth progress until we near the completion of an effort – especially as all the hostile forces in the spiritual world are in a constant state of opposition and besiege our gains; for the complete victory of a single one of us would mean a general downfall among them. In fact by our own effort we could not hope to succeed … The final goal is far but the progress made in the face of so constant and massive an opposition is the guarantee of its being gained in the end. But the time is in other hands than ours.’ ¹⁵

Kyoto

For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder.¹⁶

– The Mother

For the next three years the Richards stayed mainly in the beautiful city of Kyoto, the former capital of Japan. Their close friends there were Dr. and Mrs. Kobayashi. When K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar and V.K. Gokak went to Japan in 1957, to participate in the International P.E.N. Congress, Dr. Kobayashi, a surgeon, was no longer alive, but his wife, Nobuko, received them with great courtesy and undiminished affection for her former friend Mirra. ‘She came here to learn Japanese and to be one of us. But we had so much to learn from her and her charming and unpredictable ways … She revered a master from the ancient land of the Buddha … I loved her dearly. Have you seen those lovely Wisteria flowers trailing down the roof of the Kasuga shrine at Nara? We call them hooji. My friend [Mirra] loved those flowers. She was one with them. She called herself Hoojiko⁹¹ when she thought of having a Japanese name.’ ¹⁷

Nobuko Kobayashi was by then the leader of ‘The Art of Still-Sitting Movement,’ founded by a certain Dr. Okata. Unhappy with the results of allopathic medicine, this doctor had made his patients sit in meditation with him and asked them to concentrate on the navel and to aspire that the Light may come down and set right the affected organ. The results were amazing. Dr. Kobayashi left his flourishing practice as a surgeon to become Okata’s disciple. After the death of Dr. Kobayashi, his wife continued the movement and the meditations. The war years had been extremely difficult for the movement, but now everything was going well again and there were several thousands of practising members.

Mirra Richard in Japan with Mrs. Kobayashi

‘She is the Mother to you, but always a dear, dear friend of mine,’ said Nobuko Kobayashi to the two Indian writers about Mirra. ‘It was my great good fortune that, in this strange but explicable world, I should have met this jewel of my heart and this friend of my soul. The perfume of those two years, when we lived like twin roses on the same stalk, lingers like incense around the divine altar and sways serenely in the sanctuary of my mind.’ Later Nobuko was to meet her friend again when, in 1959, she visited India and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. ‘When I see her again, I will put both my arms around her and cling to her, feeding my starved love of thirty-seven long years. Will the members of your Ashram be angry with me if I behave that way? For she is now … the Mother!’

It had always been Mirra’s habit to adapt to the environment in which she was moving. This time she lived the Japanese life, dressed in a kimono, as shown in several photographs, learned to speak and write the Japanese language, took a Japanese name. ‘These people have a wonderful morality, live according to strict moral rules, and have a mental construction even in the least detail of life: one must eat in a certain way and no other, one must bow in a certain way and no other, one must say certain words and not other ones. When addressing certain people one must express oneself in a certain way; when speaking with others, one must express oneself in another way … Not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organized mental-physical domain … If one does not submit to rules there, one may live as Europeans do, who are considered barbarians and looked upon as intruders; but if you want to live a Japanese life among the Japanese you must do as they do, otherwise you make them so unhappy that you can’t even have any relation with them.’ ¹⁸

Mirra was overwhelmed by the Japanese sense of physical and natural beauty. ‘I had everything to learn in Japan. For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder … From the artistic point of view, I don’t think there is a country as beautiful as that one.’ ¹⁹ And she described the cities, then for the most part still built in the traditional Japanese style, the magnificent landscapes with their seasons of irises and flowering maples and cherries, and the artistically designed gardens, which are now imitated all over the world. ‘The other day I spoke to you about those landscapes of Japan. Well, almost all – the most beautiful, the most striking ones – I had seen in vision in France, and yet I had not seen any pictures or photographs of Japan, I knew nothing of Japan. And I had seen these landscapes without human beings, nothing but the landscape, quite pure, like that, and it had seemed to me that they were visions of a world other than the physical; they seemed to me too beautiful for the physical world, too perfectly beautiful.’ ²⁰

On 1 April 1917 Mirra wrote in her diary: ‘Once more I see cherry trees everywhere; Thou hast put a magical power in these flowers; they seem to speak of Thy sole Presence; they bring with them the smile of the Divine … O Japan, this is thy festive adorning, expression of thy goodwill, it is thy purest offering, the pledge of thy fidelity; it is thy way of saying that thou dost mirror the sky.’ ²¹ A few days later she identified with the cherry blossoms:⁹² ‘A deep concentration seized on me, and I perceived that I was identifying myself with a single cherry-blossom, then through it with all cherry-blossoms, and, as I descended deeper in the consciousness following a stream of bluish force, I became suddenly the cherry-tree itself, stretching towards the sky like so many arms its innumerable branches laden with their sacrifice of flowers. Then I heard distinctly this sentence: “Thus hast thou made thyself one with the soul of the cherry-trees and so thou canst take note that it is the Divine who makes the offering of this flower-prayer to heaven.” When I had written it, all was effaced; but now the blood of the cherry-tree flows in my veins and with it flows an incomparable peace and force.’ ²²

She started painting and drawing again, but in a style different from the paintings she had made in Paris; she was now influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. Several of those paintings and drawings have been preserved and recently reproduced in The Mother: Paintings and Drawings. Thanks to them we have an idea how Mrs. Okawa and Nobuko Kobayashi looked, as well as the poet Hirasawa Tetsuo, whom she painted at one sitting and about whom little or nothing is known, and the poet Hayashi, still more mysterious. She also painted or drew some of the places she visited – among them the Daiunji temple – and people she met, such as Rabindranath Tagore. ‘The art of Japan is a kind of a direct mental expression in physical life. The Japanese use the vital world very little. Their art is extremely mentalized; their life is extremely mentalized. It expresses in detail quite precise mental formations. Only in the physical do they have spontaneously the sense of beauty.’ ²³

‘It was a Japanese street brilliantly illuminated by gay lanterns picturesquely adorned with vivid colours. And as gradually what was conscious [i.e. Mirra herself] moved on down the street, the Divine appeared, visible in everyone and everything. One of the lightly-built houses became transparent, revealing a woman seated on a tatami in a sumptuous violet kimono embroidered with gold and bright colours. The woman was beautiful and must have been between thirty-five and forty. She was playing a golden samisen. At her feet lay a little child. And in the woman too the Divine was visible.’ This exquisite cameo of life in Japan was noted down by Mirra in her diary on 5 December 1916. The reader may recall Sri Aurobindo’s realization of the cosmic consciousness when he saw Lord Krishna in all the people and objects of Alipore jail. Mirra must have had the same consciousness at least since her identification with the Great Mother.

The entries in her diary of that period are exceptionally direct and affirmative, although, as we will see, she had to fight a daily battle with no quarter given. Time after time she is reminded of ‘the usual injunction’ to ‘turn towards the Earth.’ For her, who had always remained conscious of her soul, it was easy enough to turn away from the material, from earthly reality towards heavens of which mortals have no notion. But the missioned task of herself and Sri Aurobindo was the yoga of Matter in the material circumstances familiar to all of us – petty, nasty, messy, nagging, scratching, wounding, depressing, and never-ending. The body by itself is a sad burden without relief, which is why human beings seek solace in substances that lighten for a while their affliction of being human. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had to take up the lot of the mortals in order to transform it, there was no other way. ‘Thou hast willed, O Lord, that the being should grow wider and richer. It could not do so without entering once again, at least partially and temporarily, into ignorance and obscurity.’ ²⁴

‘That which speaks to Thee is Thyself in me,’ ²⁵ she wrote. Then again: ‘O my divine Master, who hast appeared to me this night in all Thy radiant splendour …’ ²⁶ And once more the confirmation was given to her: ‘I have appointed thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the Earth, not only invisibly, in a hidden way, but also openly before the eyes of all men. And what thou wert created to be, thou wilt be.’ ²⁷ The entries in her spiritual diary become sparse – or did she tear most of them out later because they were too personal and burn them in the Ashram boiler, as witnessed by some disciples? If so, it is surprising that the following entry, a direct communication from the Buddha Shakyamuni, has survived. ‘… Dost thou fear to be misunderstood? But where hast thou seen man capable of understanding the Divine? And if the eternal truth finds in thee a means of manifesting itself, what dost thou care for all the rest? Thou art like a pilgrim coming out of the sanctuary; standing on the threshold in front of the crowd he hesitates before revealing his precious secret, that of his supreme discovery … “Turn to the Earth and men,” isn’t this the command thou always hearest in thy heart? – in thy heart, for it is thy heart which carries a blessed message for those who are athirst for compassion … Thou doubtest thy power and fearest thy ignorance? It is precisely this that wraps up thy strength in that dark mantle of starless night. Thou hesitatest and tremblest as on the threshold of a mystery, for now the mystery of the manifestation seems to thee more terrible and unfathomable than that of the Eternal Cause. But thou must take courage again and obey the injunction from the depths. It is I who am telling thee this, for I know thee and love thee as thou didst know and love me once. I have appeared clearly before thy sight so that thou mayst in no way doubt my word …’ ²⁸ As thou didst know and love me once …?

V.K. Gokak has recorded some of his conversations with Shumei Okawa and Nobuko Kobayashi in a beautiful poetic form, but poetry in a context like this often comes closer to the truth than ordinary prose. The following words, attributed to Shumei Okawa, are well-known but bear repetition here: ‘You would like to know, my young friend, what struck me about your Mother. She had a will that moved the mountains and an intellect sharp as the edge of a sword. Her thought was clarity itself and her resolve stronger than the roots of a giant oak. Her mystic depths were deeper than the ocean, but her intellect was a plummet that could sound her deepest depths. An artist, she could paint pictures of an unearthly loveliness. A musician, she enchanted my soul when she played on an organ or guitar. A scientist, she could formulate a new Heaven and Earth, a new cosmogony. I do not know what Mirra had not become or was not able of becoming.’ ²⁹

Calvary

I have mounted the Calvary of successive disillusionments high enough to attain to the Resurrection. ³⁰

– The Mother

Meanwhile, what had become of Paul Richard? He had been active all the time as a speaker, a writer, and probably also as a teacher, for in the draft of a letter of his concerning the lease of a house he writes: ‘You will understand that it is not possible for us to leave Tokyo in the middle of winter while the schools are in session, breaking our commitments in this regard.’ ³¹ In January 1917 he wrote and published in Tokyo a tract of seventeen pages entitled Au Japon (To Japan) and translated into English by Mirra. It begins as follows: ‘I am seeking throughout the world for a just nation, a nation of the future. For the future belongs to the just nations. They shall inherit the Earth.’ And he continues in his exalted, prophetic and not infrequently bombastic style: ‘First of all the nations in whom the divorced tendencies of the spirit join again, and, as yet, the only one who knows how to unite the thought of Europe and that of Asia, thou [Japan] art born to become the unifier of those two complementary halves of the future world; thou art the first nation of that future … Nation whose shores are open toward all shores, making them less distant; nation whose thought is turned toward all thoughts, reconciling them; nation in whom the world seems to seek the scattered rays of its soul, thou art born out of a hope of Humanity; thou art born as a hope for the birth of Humanity!’

Then the tone turns exhortative and bellicose: ‘Each day all thy warriors, from lowest to highest, already fight in their hearts and joyously die for thee in their dreams … Thou hast the quivering of the steed who hears his master’s step. Already dost thou feel his hand on thee. People ready for the fight, this master is a divine warrior. Let thy war be worthy of the god who is in thee! For thou shalt fight! Against whom? It matters not, so long as thou knowest why … Liberate and unify Asia; for Asia is thy domain. Asia is thy field of action and, if needed, thy field of war; thou knowest it well … Thine own share is the whole of Asia … Thou hast but to set her free … See at thy door that immense country [China] where throngs a quarter of humanity, that country vaster than all … Go towards China; it is thee she awaits!’ And Richard finishes this grandiloquent exhortation to Japan speaking of ‘the Lord of the Nations.’ ‘… It is the voice of the Lord of thy work. He will accomplish this work with thee, but he can also accomplish it without thee. To the Lord of the Nations who today tills the Earth to found there the Kingdom of his Justice, what nation could long offer resistance? … I saw, I saw thy soul. It was prostrated in silence before him, to receive from him the command, and the promise, the sword of Victories, and the crown of the Future.’

We know who the ‘Lord of the Nations’ is: he is one of the four great Asuras whose actual name is Lord of Falsehood, and of whom Paul Richard was an emanation. The Mother would say that the ‘Lord of the Nations’ bluntly refused to collaborate in the transformation of the world, and that, on the contrary, he promised to fight the changes ahead to the very last and to cause as much havoc and destruction as possible. He was the direct cause, the Mother would say, of all the wars and massacres to which the twentieth century has been witness.

It is not surprising that the Government of India again received a report on To Japan. ‘It is reported that Mr. Paul Richard is about to publish a book entitled To Japan, in which he urges Japan to liberate Asia from European domination. The book will be published in English, Japanese and Chinese, and copies will be distributed by the Pan-Asiatic League … While living in Pondicherry he was an intimate friend of Arabindo Ghosh [sic] and other Indian extremists … When Tagore and his party visited Japan, the Richards attempted to enlist their sympathies in Pan-Asianism … ’ ³² Richard had been lauding Sri Aurobindo openly: ‘The Hour is coming of great things, of great events, and also of great men, the divine men of Asia. All my life I have sought for them across the world, for all my life I have felt they must exist somewhere in the world. For they are its light, its heat, its life. It is in Asia that I have found the greatest among them – the leader, the hero of tomorrow. His name is Aurobindo Ghose.’ ³³

At this point a look at the historical context of Japan may be useful. This island nation had always remained almost completely separated from the rest of the world, particularly from any Western influence. Like the Hebrews, the Indian Brahmins and the Germans, it had a traditional belief of being a superior race that should not be contaminated by the rest of humanity. Around 1870, however – not long before the Richards lived there – it had opened itself up by an act of the state, in the same movement officially breaking with its ‘medieval’ and still deeply ingrained past. Democratization, industrialization and Westernization were the order of the day, as was also a military build-up capable of confronting and even dominating any neighbouring nation. The military capacity of Japan was proven when it defeated China in the 1890s and, as we have seen, Russia in 1905. The latter victory had made Japan into a world power. It may have been the reason that Paul Richard, expelled from India, tried to exert his influence there. The years of the Richards’ stay in Japan were relatively peaceful and democratic, insulated from the slaughter elsewhere in the world, but the superiority complex of the Japanese, their unshakable will-power and their sense of discipline which took them to the point of total individual effacement were seeking for an occasion to assert themselves.

In his writings at the time Paul Richard expounded, on the one hand, the world vision he had received from Sri Aurobindo: a world in upheaval which was the symptom of a profound change, a new phase of evolution leading towards world unity and a suprahuman future. On the other hand, as we have been able to see in the few quotations culled from To Japan, his world unity was a precondition for the total subjection of all to the ‘Lord of the Nations,’ meaning that his ‘superman’ could be little else than a dehumanized being, pitiless in its dominance of others but unconditionally surrendered to that ‘Lord.’ The resemblance to Hitler’s ‘superman’ is striking.⁹³ As the Mother would say, Richard had no idea of the spiritual achievements of Sri Aurobindo; he admired in him only the scholar and philosopher.

We have glimpsed Mirra’s views at the time in her talk ‘To the Women of Japan.’ They were, of course, completely in agreement with those of Sri Aurobindo. Still, she had vowed to convert her husband and through him the essence of his person, the Lord of Falsehood. This she could only do by going all the way and being not only at his side but inside him, by being him and doing, through a direct identification, his yoga of conversion – a conversion difficult to perform for any ordinary human being but near to impossible in the case of an Asura. She had vowed that even if she had to descend into hell, she would do so. Though the pages of her diary hardly tell us about it, her stay in Japan was ‘a perpetual battle with the adverse forces’ – not a battle on the human scale, but a battle of superhuman, divine and antidivine forces. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar writes in his biography of the Mother: ‘The four years Mirra spent in Japan were an oasis in time, and a singular Tea Room of reserve, contemplation and preparation for the future.’ ³⁴ Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In Japan, Paul Richard wrote two more books which he considered to be one opus, To the Nations and The Lord of the Nations. To the Nations was translated by Sri Aurobindo and carries an introduction by Rabindranath Tagore that concludes: ‘When gigantic forces of destruction were holding their orgies of fury I saw this solitary young Frenchman, unknown to fame, his face beaming with the lights of the new dawn and his voice vibrating with the message of new life, and I felt sure that the great To-morrow had already come though not registered in the calendar of the statesmen.’ ³⁵ ‘In all nations there are men, lost in the crowd,’ writes Richard, ‘who bear in themselves this consciousness of a new world. They belong no more to the departing century. They seem to come from the future.’ Again, no Aurobindonian would disagree with this, but the perspective in which it has to be read is very different from that of Sri Aurobindo’s; it becomes fully clear in The Lord of the Nations.

‘When I wrote this book, in Kyoto, Japan, during the winter of 1917,’ writes Richard, ‘I was looking to the world of men and nations from the upper room of a small wood-and-paper house, frozen under the snow, listening in the silence of this retreat to the secret words of my Lord – the Lord of the Nations … Through its fallible words the infallible voice may be heard of Him “who rules the nations with a rod of iron” – the Lord of the Yoga of the Nations.’ ³⁶ (Once more one is reminded of Adolf Hitler, who withdrew to his villa in Berchtesgaden, in the Alps, to communicate with his ‘God.’) And Richard writes in a foreword, ‘[To the Nations] marks a step further in the denunciation of the international anarchy and in the annunciation of the scourges drawn down upon themselves by the nations of pride and prey. Who was I to inveigh against and challenge in such an uncompromising and forcible manner great peoples, and among them the very country of my birth? Nothing but a solitary and unknown witness wandering on the Earth in search of the Future.’

Again we read: ‘We are at the world’s crucial hour, at the hour which must determine whether heaven or hell is to reign over the world … Today it must choose between two paths: the one which descends and the one which mounts; the one whither it is called by the forces from below, the forces of the lower life; whither it is driven, through blood and mud, by the powers of the infernal civilization – for it is hellwards that it leads; the other, the higher path, not yet hewn for the world, but which is now to be opened through fire by the Powers of the Light, to lead it towards the new Civilization – that of the Spirit!’ Which strangely contradicts the motto of the book, taken from the Bible and referring to Jehovah: ‘He shall rule the Nations with a rod of iron.’ Says Richard: ‘They talk of the war aims of all the belligerents. But they speak not of those which alone count – for it is they alone which will be realized: the war aims of the Lord of the Nations … It is said this war will be the last … Nay! It is but the first; the first of the great wars – of the great wars of the Spirit!’ ³⁷ All exclamation marks are his.

In May 1940, shortly after the outbreak of hostilities in Western Europe, Sri Aurobindo conversed with a handful of disciples in his room. He said that it was not Hitler who took the crucial decisions, but ‘the Being’ behind him. ‘There are more than one, but this is a very powerful Being … [Paul Richard] was in communion with this Being, and the plans and methods he has written of in the book [The Lord of the Nations] are the same as those carried out now [by Hitler]. He said there that the present civilization was to be destroyed, but really it is the destruction of the whole human civilization that is aimed at.’ ³⁸

‘Oiwake, 3 September 1919. Since the man refused the meal I had prepared with so much love and care, I invoked the God to take it.

‘My God, Thou hast accepted my invitation, Thou hast come to sit at my table, and in exchange for my poor and humble offering Thou hast granted to me the last liberation. My heart, even this morning so heavy with anguish and care, my head surcharged with responsibility, are delivered of their burden. Now are they light and joyful as my inner being has been for a long time past. My body smiles to Thee with happiness as before my soul smiled to Thee. And surely hereafter Thou wilt withdraw no more from me this joy, O my God! for this time, I think, the lesson has been sufficient, I have mounted the Calvary of successive disillusionments high enough to attain to the Resurrection. Nothing remains of the past but a potent love which gives me the pure heart of a child and the lightness and freedom of thought of a god.’ (Prayers and Meditations)

Towards the end of the war there was a severe pandemic of ‘Spanish flu’ which killed more than twenty million people, more than had died in the war itself.⁹⁴ The pandemic raged also in Japan. The Mother told how a little village had been attacked by it without anybody outside the village knowing, for it was wintertime, the countryside was covered with snow and the village was isolated. When a letter was sent to one of the villagers, the postman who took it found no sign of life any more in the village; all had died and the snow was their common shroud.

Mirra Richard in Japan

Mirra herself had a close call. ‘I was in Japan. It was at the beginning of January 1919. It was the time that a terrible flu raged in the whole of Japan which killed hundreds of thousands of people. It was one of those epidemics the like of which are rarely seen. In Tokyo there were hundreds and hundreds of new cases every day. The disease … lasted three days and on the third day the patient died … If one did not die on the third day, at the end of seven days one was altogether cured …

‘It so happened that I was living with somebody [Paul Richard] who never ceased troubling me: “But what is this disease? What is there behind this disease?” What I was doing, you know, was simply to cover myself with my force, my protection, so as not to catch it and I did not think of it any more and went along doing my work … But constantly I had to hear: “What is this? I would like to know what is there behind this illness. Could you not tell me what this illness is, why it is there?” And so on.

‘One day I was called to the other end of the town by a young woman whom I knew and who wanted to introduce me to some friends and show me certain things … I had to cross the whole city in a tramcar. And I was in the tram and saw all those people with masks on their noses, and there was in the atmosphere that constant fear, and so there came a suggestion to me – I began to ask myself: “Actually what is this illness? What is there behind this illness? What are the forces that are in this illness?” … I returned home with a terrible fever. I had caught it …’

Mirra refused the medicine given to her by the doctor called to her bed. ‘At the end of the second day, as I was lying all alone, I clearly saw a being with a part of the head cut off, in a military uniform – or what remained of a military uniform – approaching me and suddenly flinging himself upon my chest, with that half head, to suck my force. I took a good look, then realized that I was about to die. He was drawing my life out … I was completely nailed to the bed, without any movement, in deep trance. I could not stir and he was pulling. I thought: “This is the end.” Then I called on my occult power, I fought a big fight and I succeeded in pushing him off so that he could not stay any longer. And I woke up …

‘I understood that the illness originated from beings who had been thrown violently out of their bodies. I had seen this during the First World War, towards the end, when people were staying in trenches and were killed in bombardments. They were in perfect health, altogether healthy, and in the blink of an eye they were thrown out of their bodies, not conscious that they were dead. They didn’t know that they had no body any more and tried to find in others the life force they could not find in themselves. Which means that they had become that many countless vampires. And they vampirized upon human beings … I know how much knowledge and force were necessary for me to resist. It was irresistible [for ordinary persons].’ ³⁹ Then Mirra asked to be left alone for a couple of days, concentrated on the evil that was sucking the life out of so many humans, and put things straight. At the end of two or three days there was no longer a single case of illness in the city.

But Mirra had not been able to convert Paul Richard. When she put everything before ‘the Lord,’ the real one, he appeared to her in a vision ‘more beautiful than that in the Gita.’ He lifted her up in his arms and turned her towards the West, towards India, where Sri Aurobindo was waiting.⁴⁰

With the help of the Japanese government, and in spite of British protests, the Richards obtained their travel documents and left for Pondicherry.