On Savitri
THEME/S
Savitri is an epic of more than 23,000 lines. It won't be easy to do justice to it in three days. What will be attempted is only an outline and some kind of foretaste by which you might be induced to get into the body of the book; that's all we can attempt. I consider the appearance of Savitri as the first ray of the new age that is coming in the realm of culture. It begins with the symbol of dawn, and I think symbolically it is itself a dawn of the new age that is coming to mankind. Poetry very often sums up an age and inaugurates a new age and Savitri seems to be an expression which presages; it shows us the coming of a new age. It may take hundreds of years, it is not that it will come tomorrow, but the fact that Savitri has been written now and has found expression in letters - well, that is the sign of the coming age.
It is a gift of the power of speech, as we say in India. The goddess of speech is called Saraswati; she is the goddess of inspiration, and Savitri is like a gift from the goddess Saraswati to mankind. It is not the intellectual expression of some individual, it is directly an expression of the power of speech itself taking form in words, which the Mother says is like the prophetic history of the earth, embodying in itself the fulfilment of man's life on earth. It is the earth's prophetic history and at the same time it is the reading of man's future fulfilment. It is the whole evolutionary span of mankind and even the whole of the universe.
Savitri begins with the beginning of the universe - even before the beginning of the universe - and it ends at the point where man attains the purpose of his existence on earth; so it is a song of the creation from the beginning to the possible fulfilment which the poet is able to see and give us sight of. We have dealt, while talking of poetry, with the power of Mantra. Mantra is the word that rises from the heart, an act
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of inspiration, the consciousness casting itself in word-value or sound-value, taking body, so to say, and Savitri is in that sense charged with the power of Mantra. Mantric power is the power of re-creating consciousness in a word-group or word-symbol or word-vibration. The word-vibration is not only the vibration of a word, but it is symbolic of a conscious vibration, a vibration of consciousness; the word-vibration has, therefore, the power to awaken a vibration of consciousness in the man who is open to it. It carries a Mantric power, a power which is spiritual, charging the group of words with the capacity or the power to reproduce the condition of consciousness which the word-vibration represents.
This idea of the power of the word is not peculiar to Indian classical attitude. I think the power of the word is not properly understood in modern times, because people think that a word which expresses a truth or a reality, is generally intellectual, practical, turned to some use, so they don't think that it has any other power. But if you study the growth of man's cultural movement, you find that at times the power of the word has brought great revolutions in mankind. For instance, the Indian Freedom Movement was preceded by one such word-group, Bande Mataram (Hail to the Mother, Mother India). Now that cry came in 1872, long before the Indian National Movement was even launched - there was no political life at that time to speak of. In 1872, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the Bengali seer, first saw this Mantra as the cry that must come to the sons of India in order to get their freedom. But it doesn't speak of freedom at all. Bande Mataram is a salutation to the Supreme Mother India, that's all. It only speaks of concentrating the will and the attention of the people on an objective: the collective entity, Mother India, the Bharat Shakti, as they call it. The attention of the people was drawn to that. And it is that for which many people went to jail, surrendered their property, sacrificed
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everything, died. It was the power of this Mantra. It was 1872 when it first came out in the open and it's application took about 60 or 70 years. But that's how it works.
There are other such things. I don't know whether the French National Anthem had the same effect, "Allons lesenfants de la patrie." Perhaps that might have been after the revolution or during the revolution. Then there is the cry of the Socialist: "Workers of the world, unite! Brothers of the world, unite!" That sort of expression carries a power within it which is capable of changing the course of human life. Savitri might in the end prove to be something like that. And it is not only the past where you see it. If you read even a modern poet like C. Day Lewis, you will find "The Word Over AH", a poem in which he says: Why should we write poems when people are destroying each other? It's about the Second World War. He says: What is there to write about? There is nothing much, and "yet words there must be, wept on the cratered present, To gleam beyond it".
Words there must be, yes, to express that cry over the "cratered present", because when bombings take place there is a crater created in the ground. And then the splinters of the bomb are shining over the edge of the crater, so he says, to dream in the future. In another poem Day Lewis speaks of the intuitive height to which the poet rises. "Oh on the Strident Wings" - that is his song on poetry, on the power of the word. I am only illustrating that even modern poets have got a little inkling of this great truth that an intuitive or inspired expression carries in it a tremendous power:
Oh, on this striding edge.
This hare-bell height of calm
Where intuitions swarm
Like nestling gulls and knowledge
Is free as the winds that blow.
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A little while sustain me,
Love, till my answer is heard!
Oblivion roars below,
Death's cordon narrows: but vainly
If I have slipped the carrier word.
I am here on this strident height of intuition to catch the carrier word, because it is a word that is effective. So we see that the word has been given a sufficient significance even by modern people.
There is an idea that in modern times the epic is not possible. The critics will always say so. I have dealt with it in my book. I don't want to go over it again, but there is an argument in the literary world that today is not the age of the epic. The epic's age has past, it is primitive people's business and all that sort of thing. They forget that when the seer comes, he doesn't wait for the critics. He doesn't take orders from the critics. It is like this: "The spirit bloweth where it listeth". So it blows where it likes and suddenly when all the critics say it can't happen, somebody says: "Well it happened here." Their idea was: in primitive times, battles took place between races, or some prehistoric something might have occurred which acquired a mythical value in the imagination of the people and then imaginative things were added on to the historical background and somehow or the other they made up an imaginative picture of society in which elements of culture, perfection, morality, ethics, life, the goal of life, and everything else was put together. That was a time when people were primitive, now we are very much advanced so we need not have that kind of epic - a story. But epic as a story has ceased to be long ago.
Milton's Paradise Lost is not a story in the strict sense of the term, it is what you call a religious myth. Even though it puts forth characters that are human characters, it doesn't
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deal with a human event; nor does the Divine Comedy of Dante deal with any historical episode. It is not history. The Divine Comedy is something that deals with the conditions of the human soul, particularly after death, and the conditions of man. Even now history is not indispensable for the creation of an epic. Now the epic has outgrown the objective attitude, .it has become subjective. From Milton's time onward you can see that greater and greater subjectivity becomes the point of departure for an epic, and Savitri, in that sense, is a far greater epic than all the epics put together, from Homer's time right up to the Divine Comedy. The subjectivity that has found expression in Savitri is tremendous. Savitri is not one world, it is several universes, one, two, three, four, five universes, one after another, so that it is a complex creation of universes for which there is no parallel in the world's history so far as poems are concerned.
There is also a wrong impression that the epic must have a great event to inspire it. It is not the size of the event that gives it greatness. The measure of the greatness of an event is in its significance, in the meaning, in what people read into it. To have 1,500 miles of front in the last world war was unprecedented in human history, so far as the military history of the world is concerned. Such a front there never was and never so many people participated in war. What took place in Greece in Troy - the Trojan War between the Greeks and the Trojans - was in a tiny corner. It was nothing, materially speaking, and externally it took place in a corner of the world. Nobody even knew about it. And yet it could give rise to an epic, because its significance was great. The people participating knew: it was for values that they were fighting: the freedom of man, man's height, his horizon, his promise, his nobility. There was something at stake, not land and money and property, nothing material. It is that which gives it the epic height. The Mahabharata war, for
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instance, was fought for only 18 days and it must have turned out one-tenth of a million persons at the most. But the Mahabharata war has given rise to an epic because the war was fought for, or at least the poet saw it as a fight for, the values of life, for what the human being ultimately means. What is he here for? When that answer is given, and its significance understood, it can give rise to an epic.
When the war is a big war and only utilitarian interests are at stake, it doesn't inspire anyone and you will see the contradiction. I mean it looks like a contradiction if you look at the course of the last world war - it really came to a head spiritually when the Atlantic Charter was declared. It had to rise to a height of idealism before it could concentrate the will-power of humanity for a complete showdown. It began with this exterior, materialistic, utilitarian, practical world as a frontier, with the struggle for commerce and balance of economic distribution of the world and exploitation for getting raw materials and all that. A complex of causes led to that war, but they were all wedded to the vital life of man, which has nothing to do with man as the heighest creature of creation, man as the divine spirit, man as an idealist, man as a noble creature. Those values had been lowered down in collective life. That is why the war doesn't inspire us - it creates a sense of, "Oh, no. What we did was wrong." Everybody thinks like that, not only those who participated; all the human beings who were not even partisans also thought: "No, that was not right; we didn't do the right thing." That's it. And here, even when parties had to fight, as I said, they had to rise to an idealistic plane before they themselves could create in their collective life, their animal mankind, the will to fight, the belief that the war was worth fighting for and winning. Naturally it was a question of the rights of man. freedom of association and freedom of belief-many things which have nothing to do with frontiers. So an
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epic comes into being when values are at stake. The epic has come into being because the poet has seen the world situation and in this world situation something has to emerge out of the values of life that have now been churned.
We say that when you churn milk or cream, butter, which is the very product of it, comes out. Savitri is a result of such churning and without taking notice of the undesirable element, it just says: If you churn, this is what you get. If the world is churned in its present condition, what do you expect as a result of the churning? A fulfilment of man on earth? In what way does life result in a fulfilment of man on earth? Savitri gives the answer to it. As Mother said, "It is prophetic reading of the world's history and the promise of its fulfilment."
Now what is Savitri? Sri Aurobindo calls it a legend and a symbol. The legend is as old as the Mahabharata, the epic of India. He has borrowed the legend from the epic of India. Before I go into the story I will give you the opinion of one of my friends, the respected writer Dr. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, whose opinion counts in the world of letters today. He says that in its final form Savitri is a poem with hardly a parallel in the world's literature:
The Mahabharata story of Savitri and Satyavan is now rendered anew with scaffolding unimaginably vast and undertones of incalculable import, written in blank verse but with a weight of thought and edges of articulation unattempted ever before. The poem with- its 23,000 lines, spans earth and heaven, comprises life, death, and immortality. It is a modem Divina Commedia, in which paradise is lost and won. Man learns to exceed himself and Savitri, the girl-wife, becomes mother-might and vanquisher of death and also the Creatrix of life divine on this terrestrial base. Sri Aurobindo often speculated on contours of future poetry partaking of the power of
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the ancient mantra and achieving the instantaneous communication between souls awakened and awakening. In Savitri he brought out such effects again and again, and criticism is almost dumb before a feat so stupendous and unique.
The Legend
Now what is the original legend? The legend is simple: because King Aswapathy was childless he performed askesis, or, as we say in India, Tapasya. He performed penance in order to get a child, for eighteen years he performed penance, sacrificed and gave charity. The whole original legend is contained in the Mahabharata in four chapters, from chapter 248 onwards, in very simple verse. There the King performs penances and the goddess whom he is trying to propitiate, is pleased and comes out of the sacrificial fire on the last day and asks him to demand a boon, so he demands a boon and she grants him the birth of a son. And then pleased with him, she says: "I give you an extra boon, that you will also have a daughter who will be a portion of myself." Then the goddess goes away and the prince and the princess are born. Thus Savitri is born, and when she grows up she is so brilliant in her character, her power and strength of character, that nobody comes forward to offer her his hand in marriage. Always the bridegroom goes to propose to the bride; the bride does not ever seek the bridegroom: that was the law in those days, in the society at that time. But as nobody dared to come forward to claim her hand, after waiting for two years King Aswapathy said to her: "Go out and see whether you can find somebody who can be your companion." So she set out with a minister and in two and a half years went all over India visiting important places and the capitals of the various states.
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But Savitri didn't find anyone she thought was worth her attention until she came to a forest. In the forest there were some huts, and in one of them was a King who was dispossessed of his kingdom on account of his enemies getting the upper hand. He lost his sight and became blind, and, dispossessed of his kingdom and driven out of his territory, he was living in the forest outside his kingdom. The King and the Queen were, so to say, living in exile and their son was looking after them. Savitri thought this young man was really an ideal young man, so she decided in her mind to select him as her future companion. She came back from her travel to report to her father. And when she came back, Narada, the great divine sage, was sitting with the King and Queen. They were talking when Savitri came. When the King asked her about her choice, she declared her choice and said that Satyavan living in the forest was the person whom she had selected. The King thought it was quite right because it was her choice. But he asked the divine sage Narada: "Cast this horoscope and see the position of the constellations in their future life and see whether this match is happy." So Narada cast the horoscope and said, "Yes, it is all right. But there is one catch: this young man will die after one year. He is going to die after one year."
Then everything was upset in a certain way and the mother and everybody else said to Savitri, "You are not yet married, you have not given your word, so you can go again and try to find someone else." But Savitri refused and insisted that she was going to stick to her decision and take the consequences. The result was that they were married, and after one year the God of Death came and Satyavan died. But Savitri pursued the God of Death to his home in the upper regions or in whichever regions the dead go. And she persuaded him to release the soul of Satyavan. Satyavan was revived and they went back home.
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The Symbol
That is the original story. Now, this is only a simple story told in a legendary way, a certain kind of myth. But there is a significance behind it and Sri Aurobindo took hold of this significance for his work.
Aswapathy in Sri Aurobindo's epic is not a King who is childless; he is a representative of the human race trying to fulfil the inmost aspiration of the human being by bringing down to the earth a kind of perfection in life. Aspiration for perfection is his one flame, and in that he is a representative of the whole human race. He is not a King only and he is not asking for a child. He is, first of all, trying to find out what man is, what a human being is. And he finds that a human being is not merely his mind and life and body, a bundle of desires, of material elements like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, of thoughts and ideas, but that he is a spirit, and that there are powers and capacities in him which he can awaken, and by which he can come to fulfil himself. So Aswapathy follows a triple Yoga. That Yoga we will leave aside for the time being. Now, he is a representative of the human race, and as representative of the human race, he first tries to find out the true self that is in man. And then he finds that man is cosmic. Man is not merely an individual, he is cosmic. Aswapathy finds further that man is not only cosmic but something beyond the cosmos too: he can ascend to a plane of consciousness where he can be identified with the supreme divine.
Aswapathy ascends and goes over to those regions and enters into the "House of the Spirit", as he calls it in the third book - a plane of consciousness where the universe is overpassed and one enters into the "House of the Supreme Spirit". There he meets the creatrix, the Mother of the universe, and he carries to her feet the whole aspiration of
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mankind, which has been working here in the human heart for thousands of years. He lays it at her feet and says: "Unless and until an emanation of yourself is sent down to mankind, man will not be able to fulfil the highest dream of his aspiration, the highest dream of his ideals. It will be only when you send down an emanation of yourself that man will be able to fulfil himself in the Divine." First, the Mother persuades him not to press for such a demand because the earth is not ready - mankind is not ready. And she pleads in a long, long poetic passage in which she shows how man is incapable, not ready and not qualified now to bear the descent of anything so high as the divine consciousness. But Aswapathy persists and by persistent prayer and sincere aspiration he succeeds in persuading her to extend her Grace. And she, at the end of a long discussion, grants him the boon and says, "All right, I will send down an emanation of myself on earth and that will help mankind to conquer ignorance and death." The boon is granted and Aswapathy returns to the earth. Then Savitri is born. That is how the symbol works.
Savitri is born and she grows up - birth, childhood, adolescence and youth. She goes through her educational course; she goes to meet Satyavan, and she chooses him.
Now to the double movement. Here we are in the symbol. So after birth, Savitri goes through education, adolescence and youth and when she develops, she goes out and meets Satyavan. Here, the going out is not on account of marriage. One day Aswapathy sees her coming. He was meditating at that time and when she approached he forgot that it was his child, his daughter. He simply saw her as a spirit that was coming, "an unknown spirit - born his child". And then he felt that she had her own mission and that she has come to fulfil it and he told her, "Why don't you try to fulfil that which is your inmost wish?" So the next day she leaves her
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house and goes out. The country she travels through is very beautifully described in the fourth book.
That is one of the great passages in world literature. She travels all over and passes through various spiritual atmos: pheres, meeting different persons, covering deserts, out-of-the-way sylvan retreats and the capitals of kings, and at the end she comes to the forest where Satyavan is living and they meet. It is the fifth book where their meeting takes place. It is the shortest portion of the whole writing. The whole intensity of the meeting of Satyavan and Savitri occupies hardly fourteen to fifteen pages.
And then she comes back to her home and Narada is sitting there, as in the old legend also. In the symbol they are trying to persuade the King to look at mankind and do something for it. And as Narada sings the song of man's perfection, she walks in. And Narada asks, "Who is this girl who has come?" She is introduced to Narada and Narada feels that this is a great spirit - not only the King's daughter, but somebody with extraordinary power, though he doesn't say so. He only says: "Who is this extraordinary lady who has come?" The description of Savitri, at four places in the epic, is one of the highlights of literature. First, when the poet describes Savitri, in the first canto, one day previous to the death of Satyavan, preparing herself to meet the God of Death - that's one place. Second, when Aswapathy sees her approaching in the palace, the description that the poet gives through Aswapathy.
The third place is when Savitri is described by Narada, the divine sage, who marvels at her human beauty. It is the height of our world's literature, I think. Nowhere is there something that can come near it. It is the description or the appreciation of human beauty by a divine being, and you must read it in order to see. Savitri was approaching; Narada saw her and
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He cried to her, "Who is this that comes, the bride,
The flame-born, and round her illumined head
Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps
Move flashing about her?"
And then he says:
"The empty roses of thy hands are filled
Only with their own beauty and the thrill
Of a remembered clasp."
Narada was a sage, a Yogi. His words are the throwing back of Yogic knowledge into aesthetics. "The empty roses of thy hands" - the hands are like roses - "The empty roses of thy hands are filled only with their own beauty, and the thrill of a remembered clasp", because Savitri has met Satyavan. And Narada, the divine sage, is able to perceive not only the empty roses and the beauty of her hands, but "the thrill of a remembered clasp". Many people miss it when they read it, it passes over their heads. Cultivate the power to look inside, and go to the thing that is expressed, for then only do you get at it. It is a fine description, it is something that has not happened before in the world's literature. Savitri chooses, and then Narada describes her. That is the third description. And the fourth is when she is facing death, when she is face to face with the God of Death. And in the description which the poet gives of Savitri at that time, with her four aspects, like a human person, you will find that it is not simply some material being that the poet describes, but a being with a charge of divinity in her. And the poet gives you her four aspects in a way which shows that although divine she is also a person in flesh and blood.
I was talking to you about Savitri's selection of Satyavan. Narada predicted that Satyavan was going to die after one
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year, so the mother first questions Narada: "Why should there be pain in the world? Why should there be suffering? And suffering unmerited, because my young daughter and this young Satyavan have done nothing wrong as far as 1 know. My daughter has been brought up by me and I know that she is absolutely innocent. Is this the working of divine wisdom and of a God who is merciful and kind and all knowledge and all goodness? How is it that in such a world created by a merciful God, unmerited suffering comes to a human being?"
It is in the sixth book that the problem of pain is thrashed out in detail as nowhere else in the world's literature. I can tell you from direct study that the problem of pain has not been as well understood anywhere as it has in the two cantos in the sixth book where Narada is confronted by Savitri's mother, the Queen. "Like sorrow... she was like an embodiment of sorrow addressing heaven." Like sorrow appealing to or addressing heaven, she spoke, and she said, "Who is this God who has created this world? Is this God who is impotent in the face of pain some power other than God, or a God who is not merciful but cruel?"
No atheist has put the case of non-acceptance of God more powerfully. Very strongly, the mother of Savitri puts the case of atheism, questioning the origin of suffering and pain in mankind. And the answer that you get has not been given anywhere in philosophy or literature. The answer is radical and it is a new answer. It shows the place of pain in the growth of man's evolution and shows the necessity which has invited pain into this cosmic scheme, and how pain in its ultimate origin is nothing but a perversion or a distortion of the original delight of existence. It is only the original delight of existence which is felt as pain because the receiving apparatus apprehends it in a distorted or perverted way. Therefore, instead of receiving the delight, it reacts to it in
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the form of a vibration which it feels as pain - pain is thus a distortion or perversion of delight.
So, Narada answers the Queen saying: "Oh, was then the sun a dream because there is night?" That is how Narada begins to answer: "Was then the sun a dream because there is night?" Could you reduce the sun to an unreality because now you are passing through darkness? "Was then the sun a dream because there is night?" And Narada answers: "Ultimately leave her to her own fate. She will meet her own destiny in the way she is intended to by the inner spirit. Don't try to interfere with her decision. Don't try to change her decision." That is the advice Narada gives. Savitri sticks to her decision and she performs Tapasya, proceeds along the path of self-knowledge and universal knowledge and enters into the divine knowledge. Here Savitri goes into the constitution of the universe and, entering deep inside, she meets all the universal powers that are at work, and finds that the universal powers themselves are incomplete and imperfect. The universe is not perfect, because the powers working in it are not perfect. Therefore she says, "Wait. I will go back and bring powers from the Divine which will give you what you lack, what is wanting in you."
Three great powers Savitri comes across in her passage: one is the Madonna of Suffering, the psychic fortitude or toleration in the consciousness of humanity, by which in spite of the greatest suffering, the human being puts up with life because subconsciously or consciously there is hope, a hope of fulfilment of whatever is in the human heart. This Madonna of Suffering is a cosmic power which allows man to continue life in spite of all reverses, in spite of all difficulties. Savitri sees that she is the great support, the psychic support to all life, but she has no power to prevent pain and suffering being inflicted. She suffers with faith, but she has no power to prevent suffering. So Savitri says, "I will go and bring the
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power from the Divine so that you will be able to prevent suffering."
The Madonna of Might is the second power whom Savitri meets when she goes into inner life. The Madonna of Might is the will working in the cosmic life, in the whole of human life; it keeps a sort of rough order in the evolutionary movement, keeps the upward trend. The Madonna of Might is the human race gathering all its will-power in order to maintain a sort of rough order in a world in which everything would have become infra-rational if this Mother of Might had not been there to maintain the higher values of life - ethics, idealism, religion, morality; some standard is being kept up by a conception of right, a conception of justice. It is this universal power that maintains some values in life so as to allow life to take an upward turn. The Madonna of Light, the third power, is an intellectual power or mental power working in mankind to enrich life by intellectual gains and intellectual idealism.
These three powers Savitri meets, the three powers that are working in mankind, and she says that all these are imperfect. "I will go to my inmost divinity and bring back to each the element that it lacks." So Savitri goes inside to find her soul, her inmost divinity. When she returns, the death of Satyavan takes place and she is standing face to face with the God of Death. And there is a long debate between the two.
The Tenth Book is very simple, very simple. There can't be a simpler book in poetry than this one, because all the questions which come to man are there. Death is arguing all the time with Savitri that she is unnecessarily trying to revive somebody who is dead because it is no use trying to revive him. "If Satyavan had lived," he says, "love would have died. It is better that Satyavan is dead and love lives in your mind." He gives all the sophistical arguments that you can imagine. He says, "The One alone is true, the Divine is only
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one, the Divine is the transcendent, unique, inexpressible, infinite reality. So why do you want somebody else to love? You are trying to introduce a duality into the Ultimate which is single." All kinds of arguments Death puts forward to Savitri, and Savitri answers every time in the light of her inmost being. She is not answering as an individual, but as a representative of the divine power; thus it is the power that is replying to the God of Death through Savitri. This is very clear in the poem. She says: "I have no need to revive Satyavan at all; if it is fated that he must die, all right, let him die."
Then the spirit in Savitri wakes up and says that there is a mission given to her and she cannot be unfaithful to the mission. She must fulfil the mission. That is how Savitri then says, "Come along and do what you want me to do." Then the spirit in Savitri begins to speak, and throughout the book the spirit of Savitri, the original divine motherhood, is speaking. She answers Death and Death says: "I also want the Divine. I am set to work by the Divine, I am not working on my own." And Savitri replies: "You are the Divine, only you are not the whole of the Divine." He continues, "If you are the Divine, manifest the Divine that you are. Then I will be fulfilled because it is for that death that I am waiting. I am at work because the Divine has given me the command that mortality shall be there for man's evolution. I am working on behalf of the Divine. I am deputed by Him to work and if you are the Divine, reveal your divinity, I will submit." So Savitri reveals her divinity and Death is swallowed up. He is licked up as they say. Electrical power - an ocean of electricity comes out and like a dark hill in the midst of a great ocean, the God of Death is swallowed up in the flames of the electric light of Savitri's consciousness. And then Satyavan and Savitri both rise into the eternal sun of everlasting day, as the poet calls it. And in the everlasting day, they look upon
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mankind and try to bring down the ray of the eternal sun, the knowledge of truth into the world and try to change the world into a divine life. That is roughly the story of the epic.
Now the poem begins with the dawn, but this dawn is not the ordinary morning rise of the sun. It is a symbol dawn. This dawn that is spoken of as a symbol - a symbol of the illuminating dawn of the higher and undivided consciousness; it is always the dawn of the Truth. Usha, the Goddess of the dawn, is that illumined dawn. Sun follows the path of Usha, sun follows the path of the dawn. Night in the Veda is a symbol of our obscure consciousness, full of ignorance and of stumbling in our will and in our acts.
Light is the coming of the illumined higher consciousness which leads to Truth and to Light. Usha is a power of Aditi. Aditi means the power of the Supreme Infinite Consciousness, Mother of the Gods, according to the Veda. In a more general aspect, she is the source of all cosmic forms of consciousness. The dawn is the source of all the cosmic forms of consciousness from the physical upwards. Usha is the Mother of the Cows and she can only be a power of the supreme light, the light of the Supreme Consciousness, Aditi. Non-existence of the truth of things is the first aspect of things that emerges from the inconscient ocean, and its darkness is a Vedic night which holds the worlds and their unrevealed potentialities in her obscure bosom. Night extends her realm over this triple world of ours, physical, vital and mental, and out of her, in heaven, in the mental being, dawn is born.
Dawn delivers the sun out of the darkness in which it was lying concealed and eclipsed and it creates a vision of the supreme day, in the non-existence and in the night. This is the symbol dawn, in the sense that it is the first awakening of man to his divine potentiality, to his divine possibility - that is the dawn. Dawn is the awakening of the human being from
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the limitations of his physical consciousness, his desire-consciousness of animality, even from the limitation of his mind to the perception of a divine essential element in him. That is the dawn. It can come in the midst of life, dawn can come in the midst of the most ordinary experience of life. Dawn does not come only when you are in a pious mood, dawn comes when your inner being is ready, in a flash; it is thrown across the face of life and then you suddenly see that there is something greater than everything that the world can offer, something which is the object of existence. That glimpse is given. That is the dawn. Dawn is the awakening of man to his divine possibility with a flash, with a light that is unmistakable, convincing and capable of evoking in him an aspiration which can lead him to fulfil the first vision of the dawn. Dawn is the first promise of fulfilment of the spiritual life in man.
The epic opens with the beginning of the universe. It gives a picture of the night, really speaking, as a lady who is asleep. I will give you roughly the idea of the picture that is there. Dawn is the awakening of a dark lady who is asleep, with no light at all, lying in the whole cosmos, occupying the world, occupying the universe.
"It was the hour before the Gods awake." That is how the book begins. Savitri begins with this sentence. Even the Gods, the universal powers, were not yet set into functioning. That is the time, it is primordial. It is just before the cosmos was organized, so you have to imagine somebody who is occupying the whole universe, completely dark and resisting any attempt to be awakened. "It was the hour before the Gods awake". The second line is "Across the path of the divine Event". The divine Event is the coming of the dawn:
Across the path of the divine Event
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The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
Night is the lady who is asleep.
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
And she doesn't want to be awakened so there is an effort to awaken her; she thinks it is a nightmare and throws it out. The second time a somnambulist movement is inaugurated. Somnambulism is a condition in which a man is fully asleep and yet goes out and does something very sensible and rational and forgets all about it; the next morning when you ask him, he says he didn't do it at all, it is quite wrong to say that he did it - but he has done it. That's somnambulism. So when the nightmare was over, and she did not awaken and the pressure was being exerted from inside, a somnambulist movement got hold of her and this material universe came into existence. The stars and the constellations began to move, like somnambulists working in sleep, and earth was there, a most insignificant place in the whole cosmic material scheme of interstellar bodies - moving like a somnambulist -and there was no light, no sky, nothing. And some idea, some will began to work and suddenly out of this inconscience ignorance awoke, and a ray began to penetrate and disturb this Night, but Night refused to get up. But this ray penetrated her because a past memory of the creation came back to this lady and she said: "Oh, in the past we have done something, so let me see what happens." And when that ray came, the ray took the form of a child and got hold of the sleeping lady. She would not get up so the child went and put his hand on the cheek of the mother and she thought, "Oh I have moved everything in somnambulism, but here is a child that I have to take care of." And so she set about trying to
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get up and when she fully got up there was the dawn - and then Savitri awoke. The poet has connected this dawn with Satyavan's last day, the day before Savitri is going to confront Death, on the day when the night has allowed the ray to penetrate and allowed the full blaze of morn to come, The description of the morn in the first canto is very fine. The first canto is a little tough, therefore you shouldn't attempt to read it at one time. You must read it twenty-five times before you get somewhere inside. Darkness failed (this dark night lady sleeping) and "slipped like a fallen cloak". Like a cloak that falls, "darkness failed and slipped like a fallen cloak from the reclining body of a God". It was not night, it was the reclining body of a God. The reclining body of a God was revealed when the cloak of night fell down.
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
Then life began to penetrate.
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
The seed of grandeur was buried in the hours. Then the higher power also supports the dawn, and this divine power stands behind the dawn.
Savitri is described in this very first canto, and the poet says that though she was semi-divine, she was full of human
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elements also. The call that comes to the human being and creates a kind of leap of mind, came to Savitri also with its "illusion of desire", but it came to her like a sweet alien note. Desire did not come to Savitri as if it was something known to her.
The call that wakes the leap of human mind,
Its chequered eager motion of pursuit,
Its fluttering-hued illusion of desire,
Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.
Sri Aurobindo is not discussing Savitri only as a divine being. And then he says:
A magic leverage suddenly is caught
That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:
A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.
Then miracle is made the common rule,
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
Savitri was faced with this problem of conquering death and the poet is putting before us an idea as to how one individual can conquer death. Cosmic machinery is grinding its wheels, one heart is standing before it and wants to stop it. That is how the poet puts it.
Now imagine man in the darkness, in a room with thick walls of darkness all around and he is trying to find a way out. He scratches somewhere and makes a little dent. If he constantly makes a dent, naturally the wall will break and the opening will come and perhaps whatever is beyond will reveal itself to him. But if suddenly his hand drops over a lever, an electric switch, so to say, and happens to press it, well!
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then he can get light immediately. "A magic lever suddenly is caught." You think that one man is working, and one man is doing, but he catches a magic lever and that moves a "veiled Ineffable's timeless will". It does not move a human agency, but it moves some divine powers. What could be those levers? A "prayer" - it can be a powerful lever - or a "master act", some action which one does in obedience to one's inmost spiritual entity, or a "king idea", an idea that comes in the mind and seeks expression in life. In such cases the lever sets into movement the mission of the transcendent force, and then what people call a miracle happens; though the lever is moved by a human agency, the power that is at work is not human.
People think that unless we do things the things will not be done. Yes, man has a part to play. He has to touch the lever consciously or unconsciously, set .it into movement. But to set it into movement is enough work for man. To set the higher lever working is not easy for man to do. His whole effort is that - how to move the lever - and when that is done, people think, "Oh, how can such a thing happen. We pray every day. We go to the church. We go to the temple." But they are not praying at all in the church, I can tell you, in the temple nobody is really praying. More things are wrought by prayer in this world than this world dreams of - but then it must be a true prayer.
I was talking to someone in India - a university boy. He asked me about the efficacy of prayer. I said, "Do you want a historical example? I will give you one. Do you know the history of India ?"
He said, "Yes."
"You know the first Moghul King who conquered the north of India ? His name was Babar."
"Yes. yes."
"And his son's name was Humayun."
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"Yes."
"And you know that Humayun was ill, it was a mortal illness and this was Babar's only son. So Babar went seven times around his son's sick bed and prayed that his illness be transferred to him, for he was ready to give his life for his son. He died on the seventh day."
This is his own record. Babar has written his own autobiography. This is a historically authentic fact, it happened in the sixteenth century and Babar has written the record of his daily life. So if you want a historical incident, here is one to show that the efficacy of prayer is borne out by facts in life.
Prayer is not for immediate efficacy according to one's desires, prayer is only to move the higher will to do what is best. Prayer is not for receiving the answer that one desires. It is wrong on the part of human being to say, "What I pray for must be given because I pray for it." Tagore says in his Gitanjali: "My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, and yet did thou save me by hard refusals." He is telling the Divine, "By not fulfilling my desires you have saved me." So prayer doesn't mean that what one asks for must be given - otherwise there is no God. That's what people think, but it's not true. Prayer is only an appeal to set into movement the higher divine consciousness and allow it to do what is best, what it considers best, that's all. That is what can happen.
A "master act". I illustrate it sometimes by giving the example of Gautama Buddha leaving his house at dead of night to relieve the suffering of mankind. It is an action which he did intuitively, instinctively or under an inspiration of his inner being. When he did it, even fifty square miles around they did not know anything about that action. It was an age when transport and communication were very primitive. Gautama Buddha's abandonment of his house and the renunciation of his family in order to find out a remedy for the suffering of man is a "master act", what the Master calls
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here a "master act"; it was the higher will - and how many millions of people afterwards knew about it and tried to understand something of what that act meant? A "king idea", an idea which comes to one human being - liberty, equality, fraternity - immediately catches somewhere and moves and then nations and groups of mankind undergo change. That is how the mission is set into movement.
I think we had better postpone Aswapathy's Yoga until tomorrow, otherwise we will never come to the end. I have read Savitri for one year and nine months, - one hour every day! So don't expect to go to the end of Savitri in one hour.
QUESTION AND ANSWERS
Has Savitri been translated into many other languages, Indian languages?
Not yet. In Bengali and in Hindi some portions have been translated. A poetess is working with me. She is translating it into Hindi.
Is she able to maintain the qualities of the original in the translation?
Very difficult. She has done three versions already, this lady who is working with me. She is herself a great poet, a very good poet. She has done it three times, all the portions and she is going through it a fourth time, a fifth time, like that. But she will come to something, because she is concentrating only on the quality, on the inner stuff and not on success. She is a disciple, so she will get somewhere.
You were speaking about songs of mantric quality. It is
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interesting to know that in our history the last songs written that had any quality were written in the Civil War, before the age of science and. reason. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "John Brown's Body" were two of the most stirring anthems written in this country. But in World War One and World War Two, there was absolutely nothing that had any parallel to it.
Yes, that's because the Civil War was about the principle of the equality of man, the freedom of man; the fighting was on the slavery question.
The ideals in World War One and World War Two were equally high. We just weren't translating them into terms of words. We reduced them to economics.
Yes, had to, were compelled to.
/ think the ideals were just as high. There was much more self-interest in the Civil War than in World War One and World War Two. Would you tell us the second superb passage in which Savitri is described. The first one was Savitri preparing to meet the God of Death and the third one was Savitri described by Narada.
The second one is when Aswapathy sees Savitri approaching. It is given in the appendix of my book. If you refer to the appendix, all the four are given there. All the quotations of the relevent passages just to help the student.
(Question inaudible)
Walt Whitman has given expression to it for the first time in
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the last century. A hundred years ago, it was Whitman who said: "Why should we take the idiom of Europe? Why should we idealise the characters of Greek mythology or European history? There is sufficient grandeur all around here in the democratic country where we are living. People are performing deeds which are equally capable of being called heroic." His idea is right, but his own poetry doesn't create such characters as can stand by the side of the characters created by the classical poets. That is a fact. Now a hundred years have passed and time has passed its judgement. It is not a personal opinion. Whitman has -not succeeded in creating one average man and average citizen raised to that height, because the average citizen has not risen to that height. How could he do that? He saw that the potentiality is there and that every citizen could be great and grand, but the performance has not justified it. So that is that.
I also grant that there is no point in repeating what has been done in the past in the poetical world. What has been done need not be repeated. You have to create the future, and in order to create the future you have to have a vision of the future. It is not necessary to go back to the past for seeking form or seeking guidance. Even as far as the technique is concerned, you can create your own technique - it is quite possible. Seen through a period of uncertainty and churning, we are not yet out of the whole thing. We have not come to any ground. Savitri first gives you the inkling that there is a new age and you can create greatly, but Savitri is so great that probably fifty years will not be sufficient for man to realize what Savitri is. I am not surprised, nor disappointed. It's nothing. A hundred years will perhaps be the time when people will think, "Oh, Sri Aurobindo is worth something." That's all, because we are passing through a period of turmoil and uncertainty of values. Everything is now thrown into the boiling pot. There are no values on
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which you can depend today in cultural life and the values that are there are not worth the grandeur of man. So there we are. We have to see how this journey ultimately results in man seeking his ultimate fulfilment in the blossoming of his true essential being.
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