Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 19

Lights on Scripture

I

If Sri Aurobindo gave the place of honour in the Arya to the The Life Divine, he started two other important sequences also in the very first issue of the journal - The Synthesis of Yoga and The Secret of the Veda. The Synthesis was planned as a survey and as an assessment of various systems of Yoga past and present with reference to their relevance to his own "integral Yoga" which was duly to grow into "supramental Yoga"; it was thus conceived as the practical side to the theoretical or philosophical foundations that were to be established in The Life Divine. The Synthesis appeared month after month from August 1914 to January 1921, and even then was left in a sense incomplete. The Secret of the Veda had, however, a different purpose altogether; it was meant to explore and locate the remotest origins of this Yoga, the roots of the aswatha-like magnificence of the spiritual philosophy of The Life Divine, the ancient corroborations (or, rather, seminal anticipations) of this Supramental Manifesto. Other sequences - notably Essays on the Gita, The Psychology of Social Development, The Ideal of Human Unity, A Defence of Indian Culture and The Future Poetry - were started later, and usually four or five or six books were thus being written (or were writing themselves out!) serially at one time. As Satprem has put it, Sri Aurobindo wrote "in a strange way; it was not one book after another, but four or even six books at a time that he wrote".¹ He had providentially stumbled upon the master-key to the mystic chambers of phenomenal life, and every lock that barred admission anywhere opened at the key's magic touch and revealed new pathways, new surmises, new possibilities, winding new slopes of ascent, beckoning new summits of realisation.

Every chapter of The Life Divine was headed by one or more - sometimes as many as six or more - epigraphs, culled from ancient Indian scripture or the classics of spiritual philosophy. The main authorities are the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita. In the revised definitive edition of The Life Divine, out of a total of about 165 epigraphs distributed between fifty-six chapters, as many as 85 are from the Upanishads, nearly 60 from the Vedas (mostly from the Rig Veda, and one from Yajur Veda and three from Atharva Veda), over 20 from the Gita, and one each from the Vishnu Purana and Sankara's Vivekachudamani. To sustain an argument (be it pūrva-paksa or siddhānta) by reference to ancient authority has been the traditional Indian way of convincingly projecting a dialectic, and Sankara, Ramanuja, and the numerous other commentators on the Brahma Sutras and the Gita have not hesitated to draw profusely on scripture. This universe is, after all, a self-adjusted continuum in \which nothing suddenly erupts as from a total vacuum, and what strikes us as something "new" has but sprouted from a seed obscurely secreted in distant past formations. This was the reason why system-makers have  

Page 448

usually wished to make out that they were fulfilling what was implied in old scripture, rather than fabricating something wholly new. Sri Aurobindo was thus merely following a practice sanctified by long usage.

Sri Aurobindo had followed certain pathways at Baroda - at Alipur - at Chandernagore - and had chanced upon certain insights, and he had found his way to certain spiritual realisations. At Alipur he had grown intimate with the Gita and had explored the "Himalayas of the Soul" by entering into the spirit of the Upanishads. It was natural that, after his acquittal and release, he should carry these lights to the new spheres of his activity. He spoke at Uttarpara like one whom prison-life had renewed and transfigured. He preached Sanatana Dharma in the accents of a prophet. He published his translations of the Isha, Kena and other Upanishads in the Karmayogin. He wrote on India's great scriptures in the Dharma. The Vedas are "the basis of the Hindu dharma, but very few know the real form and the fundamental truth of that basis"²; and although the Upanishads unveil for us "the supreme Knowledge, the naked limbs of the real man", few are inclined to go directly to them:

For a thousand years we have accepted the meaning given by Sankara; the commentary by Sankara has become our Veda, our Upanishad. Why should we take the trouble of studying the Upanishads in the original? Even when we, do so, if ever we come across any commentary which contradicts Sankara, we immediately reject it as false.³

The Rishis of the Upanishads had arrived at Knowledge, not by force of logic or fluke of unpredictable inspiration, but by direct Vision that came as the crown of tapasya - the Yoga that tore the veil of Appearance or Ignorance and revealed the Real, the Vast, the Truth. The need, then, was to get back to the Upanishads, and go beyond them too - to the Vedas.

If Upanishad and Veda were the 'Sruti', the Puranas were the 'Smriti': The revelation of the Rishis who were accomplished in Yoga and endowed with spiritual insight, and the Word which the Master of the Universe spoke to their purified intelligence, constitute the 'Sruti'. Ancient knowledge and learning, preserved through countless generations, is known as the 'Smriti'.⁴

Although not as "infallible" as the Sruti, the Smriti also - notably the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata - have been included among the "authoritative scriptures of the Hindu dharma".⁵ As for the Gita, it was Sri Aurobindo's ardent hope that it might become "the universally acknowledged Scripture of the future religion".⁶ Soon after his arrival in Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo embarked upon an adventure in Vedic exegesis and interpretation by delving into the riches of the original Sanskrit instead of the anaemic, it not also flawed, English or Bengali renderings. He had found corroboration (or road-signs) for his integral Yoga in the Gita and in the Upanishads, and he now wondered whether he might not find similar corroboration (or clues) for his supramental Yoga in the still earlier Vedas. Seeking light from this most ancient scripture of humanity, he found that his intuitions and deeper experiences hadn't misled him, and in the very process of looking for light he was able to throw new light on the Vedas.  

Page 449

His intuitions helped him to read the Vedas as they should be read, and this right reading of the Vedas - of the Rig Veda especially - reinforced his evolving philosophy of life-transformation and world-transformation, the philosophy that was to be set forth in all its amplitude in The Life Divine. It was thus not at all surprising that, when the Arya came to be launched, Sri Aurobindo started simultaneously The Secret of the Veda and The Life Divine - the first and the last of the arches of the bridge of visioned thoughts that spans the history of Aryan culture, the inspired first beginnings and the culminating glorious fulfilment of the long and great spiritual traditions of India.

II

In recent years, Nirad C. Chaudhuri has put forward an amazing thesis in his controversial book. The Continent of Circe (1965): that the Aryan Hindus in India are descendents of the arrivals of long ago from Europe, from somewhere between the Danube and the Volga, via Persia, while the 'darks' are likewise the descendents of the aboriginals or survivals of the remote past. But the once 'fair' European-Aryan has now become the brown Hindu whom the climate of North India has enfeebled in body has well as mind, India is the "Continent of Circe", the enervating continent that has reduced the Aryan Hindus to their present swinish plight! It is the popular version of an Aryan invasion involving the struggle between Aryan and Dasyu, fair and dark - ending in triumph of the former and the diminishing and retreating resistance of the latter - that has been given this new twist by Nirad Chaudhuri, and it is complimentary neither to the rival races 'dark' and 'fair' nor to the country of their habitation or adoption. When Sri Aurobindo came to live in Pondicherry in South Indian and began observing the features of the people of the region, he was impressed by "the general recurrence of northern or 'Aryan' types in the Tamil race... not only among the Brahmins but in all casts and classes", and he couldn't escape the conclusion that, "whatever admixtures might have taken place, whatever regional differences might have been evolved, there remains, behind all variations, a unity of physical as well as of cultural type throughout India".⁷ From this it followed that the sharp distinction between 'Aryan' and 'Dravidian' "created by the philologists" simply disappeared. Even as regards the supposed linguistic chasm, Sri Aurobindo found on closer scrutiny that many a Tamil vocable "not only suggested the connection [that is, between Sanskrit and its distant sisters, Latin and Greek] but proved the missing link in a family of connected words", leading to the further conclusion that "the original connection between the Dravidian and Aryan tongues was far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed".⁸ If, then, neither physical characteristics nor linguistic variations offered unmistakable proof of the Aryan-Dravidian racial division of India, was it wise to read too much "history" into the vedic hymns? After all, "there is no actual mention of any such invasion"; and such evidence as we have points to "a

Page 450

cultural rather than a racial difference":

The language of the hymns clearly points to a particular worship or spiritual culture as the distinguishing sign of the Aryan, - a worship of Light and of the powers of Light and a self-discipline based on the culture of the "Truth" and the aspiration to Immortality, - Ritam and Amritam. There is no reliable indication of any racial difference.⁹

And so Sri Aurobindo took up the Veda in the original with a double interest: partly to weigh its value as prehistory, but chiefly to get at the heart of its meaning. And what were the results of this close and sustained inquiry? The supposed foreigner-native (Aryan-Dasyu) confrontation was hardly there in evidence. But the positive findings were exhilarating:

...far more interesting to me was the discovery of a considerable body of profound psychological thought and experience lying neglected in these ancient hymns. And the importance of this element increased in my eyes when I found, first, that the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exact light psychological experiences of my own for which I had found no sufficient explanation either in European psychology or in the teachings of Yoga or of Vedanta... and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas.¹⁰

In other words, he was now able to see the links between Veda and Upanishad on the one hand, and on the other, between the Vedic world of dynamic symbolism and his own inner world of aspiration and spiritual effort.

In long past times, the Rishis had no doubt seized the whole sense of the Veda, but this sense has survived, not as a coherent or integral whole, but either as a congeries of forms in the Brahmanas or as scattered illuminations in the Upanishads without any systematic correlation with the many-patterned lights of the Veda:

The Brahmanas labour to fix and preserve the minutiae of the Vedic ceremony. ... The Rishis of the Upanishads... used the text of the ancient mantras as a prop or an authority for their own intuitions and perceptions; or else the Vedic Word was a seed of thought and vision by which they recovered old truths in new forms.¹¹

If the Brahmanas helped to define the body of ritual (Karma Kanda, or Book of Works), the Upanishads led to Vedanta (Jnana Kanda, or Book of Knowledge). Notwithstanding these vicissitudes, the text of the Veda - "a text determined scrupulously to its very accentuation" - had been carefully preserved, and in course of time Yaska's Lexicon (Nirukta) and Sayana's Commentary (Bhashya) came to be composed as aids to the understanding of the Veda. Faced by the intertwining complexity and baffling multiplicity of ritualistic, mythological, psychological and naturalistic possibilities of interpretation. Sayana ignored none of them but placed the main emphasis on the ritualistic conception. The observation of the various rituals was to lead to specific material rewards like wealth, food, strength, power, progeny, horses, cows and servants, and also to the discomfiture and destruction

Page 451

of the "enemies". The broad effect of Sayana was to shut in with a "double lock" the inner sense, the soul-sense, of the Veda; but at least it opened "the antechambers of Vedic learning" to posterity.¹²

Many centuries later, the Western scholar and his modern Indian counterpart tackled the Veda again, making full use of Sayana no doubt, but arriving at somewhat different conclusions:

In this new light the Vedic hymnology has come to be interpreted as a half-superstitious, half-poetic allegory of Nature with an important astronomical element. The rest is partly contemporary history, partly the formulae and practices of a sacrificial ritualism, not mystic, but merely primitive and superstitious.¹³

The Vedic researches of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and T. Paramasiva Aiyar and the attempt of Swami Dayananda to re-establish the Veda as the living religious scripture of the Arya Samaj were new developments that at least testified to the continued fascination exercised by the Veda on the modem mind. It was in this context that Sri Aurobindo's fresh studies, guided by his own inner light, led him to forge a new key to unlock the Veda's hidden treasures of spiritual Knowledge:

...The Veda has a double aspect... the two, though closely related, must be kept apart. The Rishis arranged the substance of their thought in a system of parallelism by which the same deities were at once internal and external Powers of universal Nature, and they managed its expression through a system of double values by which the same language served for their worship in both aspects. But the psychological sense predominates.... The Veda is primarily intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture.¹⁴

To the physical ear, the Veda indeed speaks of a visible yajña or sacrifice, of ghee or clarified butter, of horse and cow, of dawn and night, and so on; but beyond these physical images lies the symbol-meaning meant for the "purified in soul and the awakened in knowledge". Sacrifice could be both outer offering and inner consecration; ghrta could be clarified butter as well as dedicated thought or mind; and cow and horse could be those familiar animals as well as consciousness and force, or light and energy. The Vedic hymnists are naturalistic poets and ritualistic singers only so long as we choose to look no deeper. But once we have the clue, they stand revealed as mystics preoccupied with self-knowledge and a quintessential world-knowledge.

Having first won by their tapasyā the crown of Truth that was the light of immortal Bliss, the Vedic Rishis found it an ineffable and incommunicable felicity. But what they had seen and experienced, they wished also to describe for the benefit of others. Since everyday language was inadequate for this high purpose, they resorted to esoteric symbols and spiritual formulae. "Seer-words" were invented to contain the "seer-wisdoms", and the resulting language was "terse, knotted, virile, packed", following an inner compulsion of movement rather than the "smooth and careful constructions and the clear transitions of a logical and rhetorical syntax".¹⁵ The seminal idea the Rishis wished to convey was "the transition  

Page 452

of the human soul from a state of death to a state of immortality by the exchange of the Falsehood for the Truth, of divided and limited being for integrality and infinity".¹⁶ A change, a big change, a total change, and transformation was to be effected, but how? By means of a yajña, a sacrifice: by giving up falsehood, by scuttling the ignorance, by dying almost - so that rebirth in knowledge may be possible, so that the bliss of immortality may be won:

Our sacrifice is the offering of all our gains and works to the powers of the higher existence. The whole world is a dumb and helpless sacrifice in which the soul is bound as a victim self-offered to unseen Gods. The liberating Word must be found, the illuminating hymn must be framed in the heart and mind of man and his life must be turned into a conscious and voluntary offering in which the soul is no longer the victim, but the master of the sacrifice....

The image of this sacrifice is sometimes that of a journey or voyage.... It has to climb, led by the flaming strength of the divine Will... it has to cross as in a ship the waters of existence... its aim is to arrive at the far-off ocean of light and infinity.¹⁷

A journey and a struggle - no peaceful march, no easy battle, but a prolonged grappling with adverse forces without and within - the fight with the denizens of the Dark, their ultimate flight with the approach of the Dawn - the final conquest, the hymn of victory: in all this, there is a close correspondence between the drama in the outer theatre of the world and the drama in the inner theatre of the soul. Numberless too are the powers - divine and undivine - that get involved in the play:

...the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted....¹⁸

The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom in which armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, a house where the gods are our guests and which the demons strive to possess; the fullness of its energies and wideness of its being make a seat of sacrifice spread, arranged and purified for a celestial session.¹⁹

And so for every one at all times and in all climes the battle is joined. Man partly is and wholly hopes to be - and should be ready to fight and sacrifice if he is to become able to realise his hopes. When he aspires, he struggles too; and he invokes the assistance of the gods, he resists the tentacles of the demons, he fares forward, he dares the great climb, he reaches the highest heights. And so the Vedic drama is a drama that is ever renewed and is constantly concluded. Nothing is really out-of-date in the Veda, nothing is the abracadabra of wholly dead ritual. The Veda - when rightly understood in terms of Sri Aurobindo's interpretation - is of today as of all our yesterdays; it is about ourselves, it is the drama that is played in our hearts and souls; and the Vedic Rishis still speak to us, exhorting us to embark on  

Page 453

the great adventure of spiritual ascension lifting us from our feeble human light and power to the puissance of an infinite Truth and an immortal Will.

So understood the Rig-Veda ceases to be an obscure, confused and barbarous hymnal; it becomes the high-aspiring Song of Humanity; its chants are episodes of the lyrical epic of the soul in its immortal ascension.²⁰

When Sri Aurobindo was engaged in uncoiling the knot of the Veda's meaning, he had to find the clues to the prescribed outer action or sacrifice, and their exact implications for the inner sacrifice or consecration: in other words, to discover the numerous correspondences between the cosmic system or the outer universe and the microcosmic world of the individual human entity. Sri Aurobindo found it sometimes convenient to work backwards from Purana to Upanishad and Upanishad to Veda, like tracking a known river to its mountainous source; and having done so, he was able to return, refreshed in the springs of the primordial Fount, to clarify and purify the lower reaches where the river of the Indian spiritual tradition had overspread itself or broken off into wandering trivial streams or lost itself in the desert sands of dead formalism and enslaving superstitions. Sri Aurobindo thus traced the origins of the Puranic and Vedantic seven-fold cosmic scheme (satyaloka, tapoloka, janaloka, maharloka, svar, bhūvar, bhūr) corresponding to the seven psychological principles or states of existence (sat-chit-ānanda-vijñāna-manas-prāna-anna) to the Vedic threefold division, - Sat-chit-ananda above, Dyaus-antariksha-prithvi below, and the link world of Supermind or Brihad-dyau of Satyam-ritam-brihat (Truth-Right-Vast). The seven planes of subjective consciousness were seen as the reflection within of the seven objective worlds without, a hierarchy of levels of human consciousness matching exactly a hierarchy or world-stair without; and the tremendous equation "the microcosm is the macrocosm" formed itself inevitably to explain the complex action and tantalising actors in the Vedic drama. It was clear the same Truth or Law sustained the universe without and the bud of the human soul within:

For as the Gods have built the series of the cosmic worlds, even so they labour to build up the same series of ordered states and ascending degrees in man's consciousness from the mortal condition to the crowning immortality... pure thought and feeling are man's sky, his heaven; this whole vitalistic existence of emotion, passions, affections of which desire is the pivot, forms for him a mid-world; body and material living are his earth... he has to break through and out beyond these firmaments of earth and heaven; conquering firm possession of the solar worlds, entering on to his highest Height he has to learn how to dwell in the triple principle of Immortality.²¹

III

Such is the Vedic vision, such the clarion call, such the promise of the possibility of man's self-transcendence and attainment of immortality. But Sri Aurobindo

Page 454

was not content with the brilliantly inspiring formulation of the thesis; he was also anxious to demonstrate its soundness in detail. This meant working out numerous parallelisms between the outer and the inner actions, piercing the crust of many a symbol to reach at the essential meaning, and above all embarking on the hazardous task of translating as many Hymns as possible into intelligible as well as effective English and bringing out wherever possible - in the notes or the commentaries - the inner structure of argument or stream of consciousness and relating it to the total Vedic world-view. During the first year of the Arya, along with 'The Secret of the Veda' sequence, some 'Selected Hymns' also appeared - thirteen in all - in translation, and each carried its own commentary. From August 1915 to January 192O, 'Hymns of the Atris' from the fifth Mandala and a few other Hymns also appeared in translation, with an explanatory Introduction on 'The Doctrine of the Mystics' and several important notes on the 'Guardians of the Light': Surya, Usha the Dawn, Pushan, Savitri, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga. Long after the Arya had ceased publication, Sri Aurobindo published in 1946 Hymns to the Mystic Fire, a new or revised translation of the Hymns to Agni in the second and sixth Mandalas. In 1952, an enlarged edition of Hymns to the Mystic Fire appeared, and this included Hymns from all the ten Mandalas except the ninth, some of those published earlier (like the Hymns of the Atris' from the fifth Mandala) now appearing in a revised form. In all about 175 of the Hymns to Agni are here in translation, and from these alone it should be possible to test the validity of Sri Aurobindo's broad conclusions regarding the esoteric meaning of the Veda. He had also planned an edition of the Rig Veda "or of a large part of it with a word by word construing in Sanskrit and English, notes explanatory of important points in the text and justifying the interpretation both of separate words and of whole verses and also elaborate appendices to fix firmly the rendering of key words like rit, śravas, kratu, ketu, etc. essential to the esoteric interpretation", but greater "preoccupations of a permanent nature" - the demands of the supramental Yoga, the organisation of the Ashram, and the compulsions of the second ; world war - "intervened and no time was left to proceed with such a considerable undertaking".²²

Although many of the hymns are addressed to gods other than Agni - that is to say, Indra, Surya, Mitra, Varuna, Savitri, Soma, Brihaspati, the Ribhus, Usha, the Aswins, the Maruts, the Vishvedevas, Ila, Saraswati, Mahi, and so on - yet Agni is somehow the dominant deity in the Rig Veda. In the various Mandalas, the Suktas addressed to him are placed first, even Indra only following Agni. The very first Sukta in the first Mandala - the celebrated Agnimile purohitam - by Madhuchhandas (son of Vishvamitra) strikes as it were the keynote of the Scripture:

I adore the Flame, the vicar, the divine Ritwik of the Sacrifice, the summoner who most founds the ecstasy.

The Flame adorable by the ancient sages is adorable too by the new. He brings here the Gods.  

Page 455

By the Flame one enjoys a treasure that verily increases day by day, glorious, most full of hero-power.

O Flame! the pilgrim-sacrifice on every side of which thou art with the environing being, that truly goes among the Gods.

The Flame, the summoner, the Seer-Will, true and most full of richly varied listenings, may he come a God with the Gods....²³

A translation is but a translation, and Sri Aurobindo himself was well aware of the limitations, especially when it was a question of turning the Vedic Riks into modern English:

...any rendering of such great poetry as the hymns of the Rig-Veda, magnificent in their colouring and images, noble and beautiful in rhythm, perfect in their diction, must, if it is not to be a merely dead scholastic work, bring at least a faint echo of their poetic force....²⁴

The modern rendering cannot, under such circumstances, a void "a looser, more diluted English form" than the concentrated speech of the Veda with its frequent recourse to double entendre. But on the whole - in this as in numerous other renderings - Sri Aurobindo has managed to bring out the sense as well as something of the relish of the original. But the near-ubiquitousness of Agni in these Hymns makes Sri Aurobindo himself pose the rhetorical question: "Who, then, is this god Agni to whom language of so mystic a fervour is addressed, to whom functions so vast and profound are ascribed?"²⁵ In one Hymn (II.i), Agni is addressed as Indra, Vishnu, Brahma, Rudra, Varuna, Twashtri, Pushan, Savitri, Bhaga, Ribhu, Aditi, Bharati, Ila and Saraswati! In another, again, there is this multiple-identification:

Thou art Varuna, O Fire, when thou art born, thou becomest Mitra when thou blazest high; in thee are all the gods, O son of Force, thou art Indra for the mortal giver....²⁶

In another, the Rishi's vibrant voice is transmitted even in the English translation:

O Fire, we have sought thee with our adoration, bring hither Indra the rich in light, the beloved with his happy chariots to protect us....

Swing wide, O divine doors; be easy of approach that you may be our guard: lead further further and fill full our sacrifice....

May Ila, Saraswati, and Mahi, the three goddesses who create the bliss sit on the sacred seat, they who never err....

O Tree, there where thou knowest the secret names of the gods make rich our offerings.²⁷

And a few more Riks at random:

O Fire, companioning the shining ones bring to us Indra, companioning the Rudras bring vast Rudra, with the Adityas bring the boundless and universal Mother, with those who have the illumined word bring the master of the word in whom are all desirable things...²⁸

Found for us felicity of earth and heaven and universal life that we may worship thee with sacrifice, O god; O doer of works, may we keep close to

Page 456

thy perceptions of knowledge; guard us, O god, with thy wide utterances... .²⁹

O Fire, we know the triple three of thee, we know thy seats borne widely in many planes, we know thy supreme Name which is in the secrecy, we know that fount of things whence thou earnest... .³⁰

In these and hundreds of other Riks we see multi-missioned Agni with his myriad functions and chameleonic personality, and of course we feel puzzled.

The one sheet-anchor of unity is the Rik of Dirghatamas (I. 164.46): Ekam sat viprā bahudā vadanti (Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni they call Him... the Existent is ONE, the sages call Him variously). And in the Rik (V.3.1) quoted above, there is this emphatic assertion: In thee are all the gods, O son of Force! So, then, there is reason to infer that Agni is really a seminal as well as an enveloping and omnicompetent Deity, a synonym almost for the One Existent in its drama of cosmic manifestation. Numberless, indeed, are the Vedic gods and goddesses, and they are more than mere names and symbols and attributes of the Supreme; rather are they substantial realities with their own powers and personalities that are so many divers manifestations of the Supreme Godhead. And as such these gods can find entry into the inner countries of the human heart and mind and soul and effect a divine alchemy. But Agni is of them all a God elect and eclectic and unique:

...of them there is one who is first to be born in man, to act as the Divine Messenger, who, while keeping himself in the front, in fact carries all the Gods in him, at the same time takes up the human soul along the path that leads to the Light, to the Truth, to Immortality - and that is the Divine Will, the Immortal in the mortal, the Flame Wonderful, Agni Adbhuta.³¹

This point is further emphasised by the so-called 'Agni' hymns that are a class apart, although rightly included among the hymns to Agni. They have their own inner structure. The deities mentioned in these hymns are clearly no more than Agni's chameleonic impersonations in the course of his progress in the inner life of the litanist-Rishi. As Kapali Sastry has pointed out:

While the Agni hymns are used in the ritual as a preliminary to the animal sacrifice, its significance in the inner life of the Rishi is quite clear in that it invokes the help and presence of the Gods whose advent is vouchsafed to the Rishi by the progressive unfoldment of the powers of Agni himself.³²

Of the other insights scattered in Sri Aurobindo's essays on the Veda, there is not space enough here to speak at length. Everywhere he has brought his own illumined mind to dispel the obscurity in symbolism or clear up the ambiguity in phrasing. Varuna and Mitra are Powers of the Truth that compel the human mentality to burst through its egoistic shell and take a leap towards the supramental godheads. Indra is a giver of Light, "Mind-power released from the limits and obscurations of the nervous consciousness". Vayu is the Lord of Life. Saraswati represents śruti (truth-audition), Ila represent a drsti (truth-vision), and Mahi (or Bharati) the largeness of the truth-consciousness. Sarama the 'Hound of Heaven' and her dogs, the Sarameya, have their symbolic overtones too.

These dogs... range as the messengers of the Lord of the Law among men....  

Page 457

Whether Sarama figures as the fair-footed goddess speeding on the path or 'the heavenly hound, mother of these wide-ranging guardians of the path, the idea is the same, a power of the Truth that seeks and discovers, that finds by a divine faculty of insight the hidden Light and the denied Immortality.³³

The "seven rivers" mentioned in Vishvamitra's Hymn to Agni (III.i) are not physical rivers but "the seven strands of all being, the seven streams or currents or forms of movement of the one conscious existence".³⁴ Usha the Dawn too is much more than the physical dawn, as in III.61.5:

Meet ye the Dawn as she shines wide towards you and with surrender bring forward your complete energy. Exalted in heaven is the force to which she rises establishing the sweetness; she makes the luminous worlds to shine forth and is a vision of felicity.³⁵

In his commentary, Sri Aurobindo says:

Throughout the Veda Usha, daughter of Heaven... is the medium of the awakening, the activity and the growth of the other gods; she is the first condition of the Vedic realisation. ³⁶

But Dawn also alternates with her sister Night, and "darkness itself is a mother of light and always Dawn comes to reveal what the black-browed Mother has prepared".³⁷ The cow, again, is concealed or imprisoned wealth, the light of the Sun hidden in the darkness, which has to be uncovered and released by a divine show of force. The Angirasa is a seer, and Agni-power, and a Brihaspati-power besides; the "seven Angiraras" represent "different principles of Knowledge. Thought or Word harmonised in a universal Knowledge". The Aswins are "lords of bliss... they seek the honey, the sweetness and fill all things with it". Here is Vamadeva's Rik(IV.45.2):

Full of honey upward rise the delight, upward horses and cars in the wide-shinings of the Dawn and they roll aside the veil of darkness that encompassed on every side and they extend the lower world into a shining form like that of the luminous heaven.³⁸

Surya Savitri is the divine creator (V.81.4):

And thou reachest, O Savitri, to the three shining worlds of heaven; and thou art made manifest by the rays of the Sun; and thou encirclest the Night upon either side; and thou becomes the lord of Love (Mitra) by the law of thy actions, O God.

The Ribhus are the "artisans of Immortality", Vishnu is the all-pervading godhead, Soma is Lord of delight and also the divine food. As for the conquest of the Panis or the Dasyus by the Aryans, "it is clear that these Pani dasyus are crooked powers of the falsehood and ignorance who set their false knowledge, their false strength, will and works against the true knowledge, the true strength, will and works of the gods and the Aryans". What is described is no engagement on the field of battle but an inner struggle and a victory in self-culture. And summing up the central Vedic conception, Sri Aurobindo concludes that the great aim "is the conquest of the Truth out of. the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the  

Page 458

Truth the conquest also of Immortality".³⁹

With a body of inspired poetry as ancient and as opulent and as symbol-ridden as the Rig Veda, it would be too much to claim that Sri Aurobindo's interpretative insights and experiments in translation have laid bare all that was "still hidden" at the time he commenced his vedic studies in depth. His work was continued by T.V. Kapali Sastry in his Sanskrit treatise, Siddhanjana, and by A.B. Purani in his Sri Aurobindo's Vedic Glossary (1962), but a definitive edition of the kind Sri Aurobindo had planned but could not undertake remains a desideratum still. On the other hand, it can hardly be denied that at Sri Aurobindo's touch the Veda has once again leapt into life as a supreme spiritual and poetic treasure that wings us back to the dreams and splendorous insights of humanity's enlightened Dawn. Certainly, Sri Aurobindo has succeeded in unveiling the esoteric meaning of numberless Riks and also of the Rig Veda as a whole. We can now read his renderings of the invocations to the Mystic Fire and rediscover in them with a continual stir of excitement the ineluctable strains of the Spirit. Always, Light and Truth and Immortality are the Vedic hymnists' quarry. Visible material sacrifice is but a screen for the inner spiritual sacrifice which is a travel towards the gods; and Agni the inner Flame, the steady Will, is our pathfinder and leader. The dynamics of the movement are such that the Flame both raises the pilgrim-soul to heaven and brings the heavens down to him. As he battles his way through the mists of the lower mentality and the storms of egoistic desire, man is led by the Flame that is Agni to the shining tablelands of Truths to partake of the Divine Food of Soma. The goal and the journey, the ardour and the discipline, the fret and the fever of the battle as well as the consummation and fulfilment of the victory, all come to us with the immediacy of a drama that has involved us also in its action. The physical is lost in the supra-physical, the Word and the Mantra come to us from the immaculate Sphota, the Vak, the immutable Sabda Brahman; and the symbolic spiritual drama invariably climaxes in the seizure of the shining gold of Truth that is also the guerdon of immortality. It need hardly be added that the Vedic stairway of the worlds and chains of parallelism between the cosmic and the microcosmic universes, the Vedic complex of multiple imagery and symbolism, and above all the Vedic recipe for the elixir of Immortality were constantly in Sri Aurobindo's mind when he wrote The Life Divine and the modern "Divine Comedy", Savitri*

IV

Sri Aurobindo's commentaries on the Isha and Kena Upanishads appeared originally in the Arya in 1914-5 and 1915-6 respectively. These are complementary essays in interpretation that are relevant to the understanding of Sri Aurobindo's

* For further light on the question the reader is referred to V. Chandrasekharam's 'Sri Aurobindo and the Veda' in Sri Aurobindo: Three Essays (1961).

Page 459

thought as much as to the understanding of the Upanishads. A careful reading of the Isha commentary has led R.S. Mugali to the conclusion that Sri Aurobindo "might have obtained in this Upanishad the thought-seed which later grew up into the vast tree of his perfect life-vision" and became The Life Divine.^4O The Isha has but eighteen stanzas, and its method is illumination through a series of diamond-edged affirmations of an extreme and paradoxical brevity; and this Upanishad too ends with an invocation to the Mystic Fire: "O god Agni, knowing all things that are manifested, lead us by the good path to the felicity." Sri Aurobindo sees the central idea of the Upanishad as "a reconciliation and harmony of fundamental opposites"; the conscious Lord and phenomenal Nature, renunciation and enjoyment, action in nature and the soul's freedom, the one stable Brahman and the multiple movement, the state of Being and the dynamics of Becoming, the active Lord and the indifferent Akshara Brahman, Vidya and Avidya, birth and non-birth. Works and Knowledge. If "all this is for habitation of the Lord", it is only through the awakening of the consciousness of such constant Divine participation that the individual can escape from the bondage of egoistic desire. To renounce the prison-house of the ego is to gain the sovereignty of the universe - to renounce wisely is verily to live a hundred years here, nor feel the burden or taint of action. To move out of ego's cabinning categories is to be able to see the One in everything and everything in the One and live the truth that "the microcosm is the macrocosm". How, then, can one suffer division, isolation or defeat? They must cease! Of the stages of such self-realisation, Sri Aurobindo writes:

The first movement of self-realisation is the sense of unity with other existences in the universe. Its early or crude form is the attempt to understand or sympathise with others, the tendency of a widening love.... The oneness so realised is a pluralistic unity.... The Many remain to the consciousness as the real existences; the One is only their result.

Real knowledge begins with the perception of essential oneness, — one Matter, one Life, one Mind, one Soul playing in many forms.

When this Soul of things is seen to be Sachchidananda, then knowledge is perfected. For we see matter to be only a play of Life, Life a play of Mind... Mind a play of Truth.,. Truth a play of Sachchidananda, Sachchidananda the self-manifestation of a supreme Unknowable....

We perceive the soul in all bodies to be this one Self or Sachchidananda multiplying itself in individual consciousness....

This is the vision of all existences in the Self and of the Self in all existences....⁴¹*

But Sachchidananda is also the Lord: in its impersonal infinite existence it is That, but when it is self-aware and self-blissful it is He. The human soul too has this

* At different times, Sri Aurobindo seems to have written different commentaries on the Isha, from different points of view. Some of these are included in Vol. XII of the Centenary Edition. Of especial interest must be the 64-page piece, 'The Ishavasyopanishad', the Upanishad being here turned into a Platonic dialogue between Guru and Student.

Page 460

double term to its existence - only, being at first involved in the Ignorance, it has to outgrow it and learn to engage in Works without being attached to them or limited by them. Neither in the extremities of the negations nor in the one-sided affirmations of birth and non-birth lies the way of wisdom. One has to pierce the golden lid of apparent truth (which is really falsehood) to see the real Truth:

O Fosterer, O sole Seer, O Ordainer, O illumining Sun, O power of the Father of creatures, marshal thy rays, draw together thy light; the Lustre which is thy most blessed form of all, that in Thee I behold. The Purusha there and there, He am I.

Sri Aurobindo's comment is itself a tearing of the veil of the beautiful verse to get at the meaning coiled within:

By the revelation of the vision of Surya the true knowledge is formed.... First, there is an arrangement or marshalling of the rays of Surya, that is to say, the truths concealed behind our concepts and percepts are brought out by separate intuitions of the image and the essence of the image and arranged in their true relations to each other.... The mind can hardly conceive unity except as an abstraction, a sum or a void. Therefore it has to be gradually led from its own manner to that which exceeds it.... Thus by the action of Surya we arrive at that light of the supreme super-conscient in which even the intuitive knowledge of the truth of things based upon the total vision passes into the self-luminous self-vision of the one existent.... This is Surya's godliest form of all.... This is the Lord, the Purusha.. .⁴²

If Surya is invoked to bring about the necessary inner illumination, Agni is like-wise invoked to back knowledge with the will to right action, for knowledge is incomplete without action. The double emergence of Surya's Light and Agni's Will is thus the condition precedent to the winning of immortality. One of the early scriptures and "certainly the most antique of the extant metrical Upanishads", the Isha is full of Vedic overtones and is governed by the "spiritual pragmatism" of the Rishis. Don't deny the Spirit, don't reject material existence on earth, but make this life itself the field of probation for the conquest of immortality which alone should be the aim of human endeavour.*

The Kena is rather longer than the Isha and is cast in a dramatic mould, and unlike the grand affirmation īśāvāsyam idam sarvam in the opening verse of the Isha, here the Upanishad starts with a string of questions:

By Whom missioned falls the mind shot to its mark? By whom yoked moves the first life-breath forward on its paths? By whom impelled is this word that men speak? What god set eye and ear to their workings?

If the Isha is the elaboration of a seminal affirmation, the Kena is the formulation of a definitive answer to a particular series of questions. What is the ground of understanding? Where is the true source of the divers activities of the mind, life-force,

* The reader is also referred to C.C. Dutt's article on 'Sri Aurobindo and the Isha Upanishad' in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, No. 2 (1943).

Page 461

speech and the sensory faculties? The power of thinking - of nervous life-energy - of speech - of sensory cognition is exercised by many, and similar results flow from the exercise; isn't there, then, a source Mind, a source life-energy, a source sensibility? We might equate these with the godheads Indra, Vayu, Agni; dare one think that these gods at least are sovereign in their respective realms?

In the latter part of the Upanishad, the story is told of Brahman the Eternal winning a victory for the gods. But the gods knew not Brahman, and therefore attributed the victory to themselves. Suddenly they had a sense of the presence of That, and "they could not discern of That, what was this mighty Daemon". Agni was sent out to inquire, but put to the test by That, he was unable by his effort alone to bum even a blade of grass. He returned in discomfiture, and now Vayu went on the same errand, and with the same result:

That set before him a blade of grass, "This take." He went towards it with all his speed and he could not take it. Even there he ceased, even thence he returned: "I could not discern of That, what is this mighty Daemon."

Last went Indra, but in the place of That he found only Uma of the snowy summits from whom he learnt that it was Brahman who had teased and contained them all. To have knowledge of the Brahman is to be overwhelmed by Delight, taddha tadvanam nāma; the name of That is "That Delight".

In one of the Mother's prayers (30 September 1914), there is a reference to the gods Agni, Indra and Soma, followed by an invocation to a still higher power:

...Agni assures us of the help of his purifying flame.... Indra is with us for the perfection of the illumination in our knowledge; and the divine Soma has transformed us in his infinite, sovereign, marvellous love, bringer of the supreme beatitudes....

And Thou, O Lord, who art all this made one and much more, O sovereign Master, extreme limit of our thought, who standest for us at the threshold of the Unknown, make rise from that Unthinkable some new splendour, some possibility of a loftier and more integral realisation, that Thy work may be accomplished and the universe take one step farther towards the sublime Identity, the supreme Manifestation.⁴³

The Kena is mainly preoccupied with the problem of consciousness, the stair of consciousness, and the need to batter one's way through the barrier between the limited divisive lower and the inclusive all-puissant, all powerful Brahman-consciousness. The life we live, the thoughts we think, the words we speak are not the highest possible; they are but the crude and perverse formations which, however, contain the infinitely purer and nobler possibilities, and our aspiration and action should be directed to the realisation of these possibilities. Nor is Brahman-consciousness a getting away from here; its action will tend rather to the transfiguration of the lower consciousness. In Sri Aurobindo's words:

The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by  

Page 462

it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses....

It is not by abandoning life on earth... it is here, ihaiva in this mortal life and body that immortality must be won, here in this lower Brahman and by this embodied soul that the Higher must be known and possessed.⁴⁴*

This makes the Kena too stand witness to the validity of the principal spiritual insights woven into the texture of The Life Divine.

V

Sri Aurobindo saw the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita as a grand succession of syntheses of all current and previous spiritual experience and speculative thought on the issue of right action here and now. The crown of the Vedic synthesis was the visioned possibility and experienced actuality of man's self-transcendence towards divine heights through the invocation and intervention of the powers of the cosmic godheads. The Upanishadic Seers started where the vedic Rishis had left, and Vedanta or the Veda's culmination meant a determined movement from the defective and decisive mental to the Brahman-consciousness. The Gita carried this dynamic of synthesis a step further in consonance with the needs and spirit of the Heroic or Epic Age:

The Gita starts from this Vedantic synthesis and upon the basis of its essential ideas builds another harmony of the three great means and powers. Love, Knowledge and Works, through which the soul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal.⁴⁵

Sri Aurobindo's The Secret of the Veda and his commentaries on the Isha and Kena Upanishads concluded in the Arya of July 1916, and his Essays on the Gita commenced in August 1916 and came to an end in July 1920. There was thus a logic in this magisterial movement from Veda and Upanishad to the Gita, - and together these commentaries constitute Sri Aurobindo's monumental attempt to correlate past spiritual experiences and philosophical formulations - along with other intervening syntheses like the Tantra - with his own inner realisations and their intellectual formulation in the work simultaneously in progress. The Life Divine. While his own realisations gave him the central inspiration and ambience of certainty, nevertheless he found in the Veda, Upanishads and the Gita valuable

* The interested reader may refer also to T.V. Kapali Sastry's article on 'Sri Aurobindo and the Kena Upanishad' included in his Lights on the Ancients (1954).  

Page 463

hints for the structuring of The Life Divine; nor did he make any secret about it for the epigraphs to the chapters tell their own tale, and so do these commentaries that appeared alongside of that treatise in the Arya.

The Gita, holding as it does a pivotal place in India's scriptural literature, has been stretched on many a doctrinal Procrustes' bed, and trimmed or extended to fit its exacting dimensions. In modern times, Lokamanya Tilak has expounded the Gita as a Gospel of Karma Yoga, and Mahatma Gandhi has been able to read into it his own Ahimsa Yoga. Sri Aurobindo's aim in his Essays on the Gita was not to add one more scholastic study or doctrinal tract to the existing Himalayan heap, but to discover and present the essential message separated from the merely local and temporal. In words that, now and then, cease to be merely words but vibrate like a flotilla of the spirit, Sri Aurobindo has set forth in his Essays the ancient and perennial and forever pertinent wisdom of the Gita, "the living message it still brings for man the eternal seeker and discoverer to guide him through the present circuits and the possible steeper ascent of his life up to the luminous heights of his spirit".⁴⁶

If the Gita is a great manual of spiritual philosophy, it is also philosophy with a difference: the teacher is a divine personality, the pupil is his comrade and kinsman, and the occasion is the moment of a sanguinary clash of arms. Arjuna and Krishna have been compared to nara and narayana, who do tapasya together, and to the two birds of the Rig Veda. (1.164.20) that cling to a common tree, one eating the sweet fruit, the other unregarding and silent:

Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle.⁴⁷

The fighter, Arjuna, suddenly and inexplicably acts most unheroically; he declines to fight and kill the "enemy", who are really his own kinsmen and elders and preceptors. The fighter will not fight! Such is the extraordinary existential situation of the Gita.

The drama of the Arjuna-Krishna dialectic spans the eighteen chapters of the Gita and comprises three high arches of wide-glancing. But in the Gita's integral vision, the three arches - Works, Knowledge, Love - make a single bridge of Transcendence and Realisation, for it leads the puzzled Arjuna (and all such Naras) from irresolution to determination, from bewilderment to enlightenment, from distraction to love and surrender. The quality of Works will be a function of the Knowledge sustaining them, and when Knowledge is lit by an absolute Love, Works-Knowledge-Love become a triune blaze of realisation. As the colloquy between Arjuna and Krishna unfolds on the background of the great armies drawn up in battle-array, many a philosophical concept, many a specious argument, many a familiar stance of sensibility come up to be tossed into the widening sweep of the dialectic, and Arjuna is helped to breast the waves - half understanding half confused - till he safely comes through at last and is ready to engage in battle,

Page 464

not merely as an Aryan fighter who has been awakened to the call of his dharma, but even more as one lit up by the higher knowledge and charged with irresistible power by the mysterium tremendum of the assurance of the Lord's absolute protection. The systems of Sankhya and Yoga and Vedanta, the ideal of Works as Sacrifice to the gods and to the supreme Divine, the determinism of Nature, the concepts of svabhāva and svadharma, the purpose of Avatarhood, the poise needed for the Divine Worker, the three Gunas and the two Natures and the three Purushas (Kshara, Akshara and Purushottama), the divine Vibhutis and the Vision of the World-Spirit, these and many other themes are taken up, dropped, taken up again and tossed and whirled and fused into the final revelation and exhortation and benediction: "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I shall deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve." Sri Aurobindo's commentary too partakes of all the sinuousness and self-assurance of the Lord's winding and winging Son, and the explication and exposition are illumined off and on by the lightning-streaks of Aurobindonian imagery, and the great truths of the Gita, its hidden layers of thought and experience, its profound poetic symbolism, all are gathered into this eloquent contemporaneous restatement of India's ancient testament of spiritual philosophy. And even before he wrote Essays on the Gita, it was with the Gita's teaching that Sri Aurobindo - during his political days - had "vitalised the sinews of India and illumined its darkened soul".⁴⁸

Early in his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo brilliantly sums up the teaching in a single paragraph:

The argument of the Gita resolves itself into three great steps by which action rises out of the human into the divine plane leaving the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law. First, by the renunciation of desire and a perfect equality works have to be done as a sacrifice by man as the doer, a sacrifice to a deity who is the supreme and only Self though by him not yet realised in his own being. This is the initial step. Secondly, not only the desire of the fruit, but the claim to be the doer of works has to be renounced in the realisation of the Self as the equal, the inactive, the immutable principle and of all works as simply the operation of universal Force, of the Nature-Soul, Prakriti, „ the unequal, active, mutable power. Lastly, the supreme Self has to be seen as the supreme Purusha governing this Prakriti, of whom the soul in Nature is a partial manifestation, by whom all works are directed, in a perfect transcendence, through Nature. To Him love and adoration and the sacrifice of works have to be offered; the whole being has to be surrendered to Him and the whole consciousness raised up to dwell in this divine consciousness so that the human soul may share in His divine transcendence of Nature and of His works and act in a perfect spiritual liberty.⁴⁹

Quite obviously, the Gita in its immediate intention is a call to "action". Arjuna has to be made to take up his Gandiva again and fight the hosts ranged in front of him. But any action could be effective only if based on conviction and commitment. Nishkama karma ("desireless action"), certainly; but this is, at best, a negative

Page 465

capability. The positive stance would be to turn action into sacrifice or yajña, "The whole of the Gita's gospel of works", says Sri Aurobindo, "rests upon its idea of sacrifice and contains in fact the eternal connecting truth of God and the world and works."⁵⁰ The first six Books of the Gita, forming as they do "a sort of preliminary block of the teaching", describe this phenomenon of sacrifice in relation, not only to Karma, but also Jnana and Bhakti, although these are to receive fuller treatment only in the subsequent Books. For Krishna, it is not simply a question of making Arjuna fight, but charging him with a new sense of power and purpose. As an avatar, Krishna has both to enact the Divine manifestation and to effect Arjuna's upliftment to a higher - to the divine - level. The very purpose of the Avatar is to demonstrate that the divine essence can be housed in humanity with all the limitations of that material tenement:

The Avatar is always a dual phenomenon of divinity and humanity; the Divine takes upon himself the human nature with all its outward limitations and makes them the circumstances, means, instruments of the divine consciousness and the divine power, a vessel of the divine birth and the divine works... the object of the Avatar's descent... is precisely to show that the human birth with all its limitations can be made such a means and instrument of the divine birth and divine works, precisely to show that the human type of consciousness can be compatible with the divine essence of consciousness made manifest, can be converted into its vessel, drawn into nearer conformity with it by a change of its mould and a heightening of its powers of light and love and strength and purity.. .⁵¹

The reasoning is that, if the Divine can descend into humanity, humanity too can ascend to the Divine heights:

...there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhāvam āgataha; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve.⁵²

The aim of Krishna the Avatar is to raise the man Arjuna to the level of a 'superman' deploying a divine consciousness and a divine energy and drive - not a Nietzschean, Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian 'superman', but a man "whose whole personality has been offered up into the being, nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universal Divinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self'.⁵³

The commentary on the first six Books takes up 24 of the 48 chapters of Essays on the Gita, but already some of the leading ideas of the later Books of the Gita have been touched upon and the strands have been woven into the tapestry of the unfolding narrative. Jnana and Bhakti receive fresh emphasis now, but indeed it is idle to compartmentalise what is, after all, a single massive cataract of revelation. If right Knowledge gives a new dimension to Action, right Devotion likewise charges Knowledge itself with a new vibrancy and power.   

Page 466

What is the clue to the mingling and melting together of Works, Knowledge and Love to flow onward as infallible irresistible existential action? What is the king-knowledge (Raja-Vidya), the king-science (Raja-Guhya), the right and just knowledge and the very law of our being? The secret of secrets is, says Krishna, that the Divine is in each individual being or thing, in all beings and things, and also transcends the entire phantasmagoria of the phenomenal play. To seize this "secret of secrets" is to be able to batter one's way out of one's egoistic prison-house and function from a greater wideness, the ego being dissolved in the "impersonality of spiritual being". This in turn must facilitate a Divine orientation for all actions, all thoughts, all loves. In one sense, not the ego, but Prakriti or Nature is the doer of all works; but Prakriti is only a power of the being or Purusha who is the master and controller of all her multitudinous works and million-faceted energisms. The supreme rule of life is thus categorical and clear:

...since his works are that Being's, he has to give up all his actions to the Godhead in him and the world, by whom they are done in the divine mystery of Nature. This is the double condition of the divine birth of the soul, of its release from the mortality of the ego and the body into the spiritual and eternal, - knowledge first of one's timeless immutable self and union through it with the timeless Godhead, but knowledge too of that which lives behind the riddle of cosmos.... Here is the place of Bhakti in the scheme of the Yoga of an integral self-liberation. It is an adoration and aspiration towards that which is greater than imperishable self or changing Nature. All knowledge then becomes an adoration and aspiration, but all works too become an adoration and aspiration. Works of nature and freedom of soul are unified in this adoration arid become one self-uplifting to the one Godhead.⁵⁴

After such knowledge translated into a continuum of sacrificial offering in a spirit of pure adoration, where is the room for ambiguity in aim or uncertainty in action? Vāsudevah sarvamiti: in His will is our peace, in His Grace is our happiness.

Arjuna, with Krishna beside him wonders: the words are certainly from his friend and comrade - but what else is he, what is he? He has put such authority into his words - words that are battle-cries as well as seer-wisdoms - as if he knows, as if he is what he has been describing. Can he Arjuna, can he the Nara, see that also, - see, see with his physical eyes, Krishna's Narayana's total Form-Substance, his viśvarūpa? He at last ventures to ask: "Let me see your real Form, your Ishwara-Form, O Yogeshwara!" Krishna has now no option but to reveal his real self, or rather he gives Arjuna the suprasensuous sight to glimpse the terrible and tremendous and all-inclusive Ishwara-Form behind the human form. And here we come to the most inspired and most powerfully evocative passage in Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita:

The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of his being,  

Page 467

a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision.⁵⁵

It would be an understatement to say that Arjuna is overwhelmed; what happens to him is something more elemental. As Krishnaprem puts it in a letter to Govinda Gopal:

Why did it terrify Arjuna? Because the visvarupa is death to the ego and all fear of death. The ego is false and all that is false must die in the fire of Truth.⁵⁶*

Arjuna is thus greatly relieved to see Krishna again in his familiar human form, mānusīrūpam; but the memory of the all-in-one Form cannot fade away.

Now at long last the way is clear for the definitive enunciation of the dynamics of the Yoga of Devotion, Bhakti Yoga. As one scales higher and higher in Karma Yoga, first the clear light of Knowledge makes for detachment and even vision in the doing of action, then the power of Love makes for pure joy in the action, and all culminate in the perfect and blissful surrender to the Divine and union with Him and henceforth the Divine becomes, in fact, the doer of the action. To progress in the Gita's multiple Yoga is thus to get beyond the shackles of the gunas (tamas, rajas, sattwa), beyond the fourfold order of society, and beyond all other limitations as well. And so Krishna gives his closing supreme Word in just two verses (XVII. 65-6):

Become My-minded, My lover and adorer, a sacrificer to Me, bow thyself to Me, to Me thou shalt come, this is my pledge and promise to thee, for dear thou art to Me.

Abandon all Dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve.

The last chapter summarises the message of the Gita, and these pages contain the cream of the book and of the Gita as well. We are led by slow gradations to the peremptory all-dissolving exhortation:

This then is the supreme movement, this complete surrender of your whole

* The reader is referred also to Anilbaran Roy's article on 'Sri Aurobindo and the Gita' in Sri Aurobindo Annual, Number 1 (1942), his edition of the Gita with translation and Notes compiled from Essays on the Gita and his The Message of the Gita (as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo).

Page 468

self and nature, this abandonment of all dharmas to the Divine who is your highest Self, this absolute aspiration of all your members to the supreme spiritual nature. If you can once achieve it, whether at the outset or much later on the way, then whatever you are or were in your outward nature, your way is sure and your perfection inevitable. A supreme Presence within you will take up your Yoga and carry it swiftly along the lines of your svabhāva to its consummate completion. And afterwards whatever your way of life and mode of action, you will be consciously living, acting and moving in him and the Divine Power will act through you in your every inner and outer motion.⁵⁷

Since its first publication in book form in 1922, Essays on the Gita has been frequently reprinted, and it is perhaps the most widely read of Sri Aurobindo's major prose works; and, undoubtedly, it is both preparation and corroboration for The Life Divine. And the sweep of its comprehension, the resilience of its argument, the brilliance of its Nara-Narayana portraiture and the steady flow and sustained glow of its language secure for the work a place of special honour among the great Commentaries on the world's greatest poem of spiritual philosophy.  

Page 469