On Savitri
THEME/S
Savitri: The Devikāvyam
In the Sadhana Shastra of the Pooma or Integral Yoga posited by Sri Aurobindo, there are very helpful guides for the aspirants. While the tattva (philosophy) of man's transformation is brought to us by works like The Life Divine and The Supramental Manifestation, the hita (way) is outlined in The Synthesis of Yoga. Here 'synthesis' is not to be an "undiscriminating combination" of existing methods of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo says in this volume what the synthesis must be:
It [the synthesis] must therefore be effected by neglecting the forms and outsides of the Yogic disciplines and seizing rather on some central principle common to all which will include and utilise in the right place and proportion their particular principles, and on some central dynamic force which is the common secret of their divergent methods and capable therefore of organising a natural selection and combination of their varied energies and different utilities.1
Thus not only do we learn a good deal about the traditionally demarcated paths of Karma, Jnana, Bhakti, Raja, and Hatha, but we also gain a deep insight into the Tantra Yoga. Sri Aurobindo makes a clarifying statement on the bases of these Yogas quite early in the volume:
In all the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha, the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline,— mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered.2
Part Four of The Synthesis of Yoga spells out the steps of the Yoga of Self-Perfection. This is no time-bound system but is to be a life-long affair since the plan involves an endless progression:
1The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 46.
2Ibid., p. 47.
All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the Spirit within him and in the world.3
And it so happens that the universal energy is always flowing around us and into us. We have "to connect" with this divine Shakti to get the transformation going. But how can we connect unless we know what it is and how it acts? The massive recordation of Tantra gives the answers with its innumerable ranges of experience which together form "an infinite ocean of all the power and energy of illimitable consciousness, an infinite ocean of Ananda, of the self-moved delight of existence."4 The method of Tantra teaches us to draw the divine Shakti to us so she can transform us. The Integral Yoga brings the two poles of reality—Brahman and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti—together. It does not countenance the mere formulaic mechanics of Tantra nor does it favour the Vedantic rejection of Shakti as a power of illusion that one must overcome. Here Purusha or the Conscious Soul is the Lord while Prakriti the Nature Soul is the executrix:
Purusha is of the nature of Sat, conscious self-existence pure and infinite: Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit,—it is power of the Purusha's self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed in the bliss of conscious self-existence, there is rest; when the Purusha pours itself out in the action of its Energy, there is action, creation and the enjoyment or Ananda of becoming.5
This remarkable integral dynamics of transformation was an experienced fact for Sri Aurobindo who pursued the Yoga. He gained valuable inputs for his Yoga from his spiritual collaborator, the Mother. When Sri Aurobindo turned from ratiocinative arguments in The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga to the seemingly perilous paths of mystic poetry in Savitri, he was not giving in to fanciful conjectures. Even as epics of action record a racial experience, Savitri records a
3Ibid., p. 704.
4The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 21, p. 759.
5Ibid., p. 48.
Page 182
spiritual experience which has an equally ancient history, though he also knew that the seeming illogical ratiocination of poetic recordation might not be appreciated easily by the general public:
Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry.6
Though Sri Aurobindo said that Savitri is "only an attempt to render into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual," he was not going to give us broken images, constructs that need to be deconstructed and set in place again. That was never the Indian way. Indian aesthesis calls for a fullness in presentation that would not tax the reader unnecessarily, since, as it is, the reader would be struggling with difficult concepts. The epic as we have it is a full kāvya, a scripture that is ideal for pārāyaṇa, for being recited aloud daily. It tells a story. It makes us think, meditate, struggle and then reach to the spaces of a divine calm where all is one seamless Ananda. It comes in the line of the Sapthashati, the Devi Bhagavatam.
Quite early in the epic, we are introduced to the duo of Purusha and Prakriti as the concept is used in Integral Yoga. Even as Aswapati begins his travels in the occult stair which is an image of his Yoga, he gains the "secret knowledge" which explains to him the truth about creation and how he is to go about his task. In the absence of an ability to see Reality as a whole, one is helped by the twofold explanation of Reality which is a constant balance of the static and the dynamic. In this drama of the Supreme, the Supreme as Purusha is seen as the Soul; the same Supreme as Prakriti is seen as Nature and together they are "this whole wide world":
This is the knot that ties together the stars:
The Two who are one are the secret of all power,
The Two who are one are the might and right in things
His soul, silent, supports the world and her,
His acts are her commandment's registers.
Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:
His breast he offers for her cosmic dance
6 Savitri, p. 794.
Page 183
Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,
And none could bear but for his strength within,
Yet none would leave because of his delight.7
It is the Ekam Sat that has caused this twyfold form to make it easier for man to comprehend the Absolute:
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.8
In the original Upakhyana of Vyasa the power of the Supreme as Action (Prakriti) comes to Aswapati with the promise of a daughter described by Goddess Savitri as kanya tejasvini, though the king had prayed for sons at first (putra me bahavo devi bhaveyu kulapāvanāh). At the same time, the Goddess makes it clear that the boon she was granting had its origin in Brahma. It was the Creator who had ordained that the child be a girl. While we should not be carried away by the gender-differentiation in its minutiae, the fact that the incarnation is cast as a female figure is no doubt to draw our minds to the efficacy of drawing close to Tantra in the Integral Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo was thus enabled to lay his track on the lines of Vedanta and Tantra with felicity. He prepares us for the leaning towards Tantra by the Yoga of Aswapati. The traveller of the worlds has an astonishing range of experiences after gaining the secret knowledge regarding the Purusha-Prakriti combine. All these experiences are reflections of the varied facets of the Nature-Soul within us which are revealed to Aswapati by his Conscious-Soul. He becomes "conscious" and lo! he is able to see and understand the workings of Nature in her entirety. A beginning is made with the mastery of occult powers by the "conscious" (as against persons driven by blind desire to control Nature) Aswapati:
Incalculable in their wizard modes,
Immediate and invincible in the act,
Her secret strengths native to greater worlds
Lifted above our needy limited scope,
The occult privilege of demigods
And the sure power-pattern of her cryptic signs,
7bid., p. 63. 8Ibid., p. 67.
Page 184
Her diagrams of geometric force,
Her potencies of marvel-fraught design
Courted employment by an earth-nursed might.9
The vast literature of Tantra, the very best in this path, is distilled and presented in evocative poetry by Sri Aurobindo. The occult siddhis are not brushed aside as fraudulent but accepted by him as part of Sat, the Existence. He also points out that whenever the Tantra Yogin seemed to get out of control because of the nature of the siddhis, the Supreme as the Conscious-Soul steps in and applies the needed correctives:
Her dangerous moods and arbitrary force
She surrendered to the service of the soul
And the control of a spiritual will.
A greater despot tamed her despotism.10
All the travels of Aswapati on the world-stair draw a good deal from Tannic lore which in turn has its beginning in the hymns of the Vedas. For, the Tantra speaks of such stairs of gods and goddesses too:
It teaches that in this creation, apart from this world in which we live, there exist other worlds and universes in serried sequence spreading over a rising tier of Consciousness and planes. There is one Supreme Deity presiding over every thing. He does so with a gradation of his powers, personalities and emenations, vibhutis, with a hierarchy of gods and goddesses who perform the functions delegated to them, deriving their authority from the Supreme Godhead. These are posited in the various planes on the rising tier of Consciousness. These are distinct and can be distinguished by their particular forms, ornaments, weapons and retinue. The numerous devatas help man in his spiritual progress, aid him in his uphill task of reaching the summit, the Supreme Deity.11
Something close to such a step-by-step progression does take place in Aswapati's travels that culminate with a vision of the Divine Mother. Of course the elaborate rituals of Tantric worship are not found in Savitri. The rituals of Tantra descended from the Vedic Yajna and
9Ibid, p. 83. 10 Ibid., p. 87.
11 S. Shankaranarayanan, Sri Chakra (1979), p. 2.
Page 185
continue to be a part of temple worship. T.V. Kapali Sastri says that though there is a parallel between the Tantric synthesis of jnānapāda (knowledge-part), yoga-pāda, kriyā-pāda (external ceremonies) and caryā-pāda(code of conduct), and the New Synthesis of Sri Aurobindo, there is an altogether different turn in the approach to sadhana:
Not that this system [the Aurobindonian synthesis] has been modelled after the Tantric, though it is true that the Tantric truths have gone into the making of it even as the vedantic conceptions have. But they do not, by any means, form the prototypes; they are important elements... for the realisation of the fundamental truths in one's being, for the development of social psychology in consonance with the principles enunciated and finally for the actual working out of the Unity of man.12
Sri Aurobindo has also given much thought to perfecting the instrument of his message, the blank verse in Savitri. The Vedic Rishis gave particular attention to the sound-patterns of their hymns, for the Goddess Vak was the mediatrix between the human and the divine:
When the Rishi makes an invocation by a Rik he contacts, with the power of consciousness packed in the Rik, the supernal ether and in the Ether, the particular god who vibrates in resonance to the particular frequency of the sound symbol. The Vak itself is the vehicle on which the gods come in response to the prayer of the Rishi.
Adopting this Vedic theory of Vak into its system, the Tantra has developed this line with an eye on practical utility so much that the Tantra is popularly known as mantra shāstra and acclaimed as a great sadhanā shāstra, practical science."13
Apart from researches in linguistics, Sri Aurobindo has written extensively on the hymns to Saraswati (Vak, Ila, Mahi) in the Vedas, and on classical prosody. He sought to draw the mantra-power into English and Savitri turned out to be his vast field for experiments:
Savitri... is blank verse without enjambment (except rarely)— each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one,
12 Collected Works of T. V. Kapali Sastri, Vol. I (1977), p. 294.
13SriChakra, p. 3.
Page 186
two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch somethings of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English....
In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.14
Any approach to the epic has to keep in mind this fact that it is Sri Aurobindo's yogic consciousness that is transmitting mystic experiences that have been seen and felt. His attempts to set them in mantric poetry have often succeeded very well, the beat of the rhythm, the seal of certitude in this message, for instance in the following:
Death is a passage, not the goal of our walk:
Some ancient deep impulsion labours on:
Our souls are dragged as with a hidden leash,
Carried from birth to birth, from world to world.
Our acts prolong after the body's fall
The old perpetual journey without pause.15
In the Book of the Divine Mother, language and thought coalesce into perfect poetry full of revelatory vibrations. There are four cantos which take in the final segment of Aswapati's Yoga. There is great poetry in these cantos but then, it is not for mere aesthetic enjoyment. Many of the passages are transformatory in character. This Book makes one understand the Mother's statement: "Reading Savitri is itself Yoga."
When we come to this Book, Aswapati has already had an experience of Paradisal felicity in the plane of Greater Knowledge. This is the realm of vijnāna far above the realm of Mind. He had achieved the "freedom from the known" that was the aim of J. Krishnamurti's philosophy, an escape from all kinds of conditioning which come in the way of self-awareness. But this is not all. How about the next step? There is no wooliness in the Aurobindonian vision, While freedom from the known is a vital step, one must also know how to enter the unknown lest one fall between the two and be lost for ever. Actually this Unknown is a realm of splendour that becomes the base of Tantra. We invoke the splendours of this Unknown through our worship of cosmic godheads. While it is
14 Savitri, pp. 727-28. 15 Savitri, p. 197.
Page 187
difficult enough to comprehend the whole of earth, it is impossible to envision the Beyond in its entirety:
The known released him from its limiting chain,
He knocked at the doors of the Unknowable.
Thence gazing with an immesurable outlook
One with self s inlook into its own pure vasts,
He saw the splendour of the spirit's realms,
The greatness and wonder of its boundless works,
The power and passion leaping from its calm,
The rapture of its movement and its rest.16
Reading this canto is like watching the Sri Chakra used for worship in Sri Vidya Upasana. Tier upon tier the alert Immortals, the sun-eyed Guardians, the immutable Lords were seen by Aswapati:
His self s infinities began to emerge,
The hidden universes cried to him;
Eternities called to eternities
Sending their speechless message still remote.
Arisen from the marvel of the depths
And burning from the superconscious heights
And sweeping in great horizontal gyres
A million energies joined and were the One.17
Aswapati was now strengthened by the primal Energy, the Adya Shakti. The traditional Sri Chakra which deals with colourful images and names helps us to understand the mystic diction of Sri Aurobindo, as Aswapati prepares to enter the realms of the Unknowable, the summit where the Divine Mother resides as an Empress, Sri Mata Sri Maharajni:
The Sri Chakra which is the abode of the Supreme Goddess, the Divine Mother, is the residence as well of all her emanations, powers and personalities. Each one of them is distinct, has a definite function to perform and has a definite and distinct place in the hierarchy. Posited in different planes in the rising tier of consciousness, in the pyramidal structure of the Meru, each one has its functioning in the particular sphere of cosmic existence, is important in its own way and fulfils a purpose in the scheme of things. They all derive their strength, their very existence
16 Ibid., p. 298. 17 Ibid., p. 300.
Page 188
from the Divine Mother, carry out her behest and accomplish her work in the various spheres allotted to them. Radiating from her, they also converge to her. When the aspirant comes within their province of influence and action, their help is there for him to enlarge his existence progressively so that he may finally perceive the source from which they all have emanated.18
To the source, then. But by its very nature this is Unknowable! Aswapati has now come here to knock "at the doors of the Unknowable" and the Book of the Divine Mother begins at this point of timeless time in Aswapati's Yoga. This is a vital moment in the sadhana because it is here that we learn not to sit back in self-satisfaction but to press forward, fully knowing that greater hurdles would block the way. This is the Yoga of an endless progression, for what is there in creation that can really satisfy man's spirit? The canto opens with deceptive simplicity:
All is too little that the world can give:
Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time
And cannot fill the spirit's sacred thirst.19
There is also another dimension to this achievement of the Yogin at self-transcendence. He has striven and he has gained. But how about the human race? Must it go on suffering as one blindfolded unto eternity? Not unoften do we use the term 'Collective Yoga' when speaking of Sri Aurobindo's vision. The collectivity of humans should not be left behind by the fortunate few who have climbed the stair that leads to the sun of knowledge. Probably it is to instill in man the truism that "no man is an island", the Divine has imbedded chip of compassion in his heart. To the high-minded Yogin, none of his personal achievements brings unalloyed Ananda. As a true Vedantin, he thinks of "the other" all the time. When "the other" remains in the slush of ignorance, how can he enjoy the fruits of his strenuous Yoga? Such a Vedantic all-embracing emotion and compassion strike Aswapati even as he stands on the cutting edge of the Known:
All he had been and all towards which he grew
Must now be left behind or else transform
Into a self of That which has no name.
Alone and fronting an intangible Force
18 Sri Chakra, p. 47. 19Savitri, p. 305.
Page 189
Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,
His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.
Abandoned by the worlds of form he strove.20
At the same time, the Tantric mode that helps one "to connect" with the Unknowable helps Aswapati not to be lost in the "Everlastingness cut off from Time." There has been a single-minded meditative quest relying on the "Saviour Name" and Aswapati retains his closeness with Prakriti. Else, he would not have thought of "the other". The Mind has ceased to be, but not the spirit and it is the spirit which unites creation while Mind but divides it. In that deep of meditative silence when all else has ceased to be, the spirit of Aswapati calls out in silence. There is at once an answer. This creation has come to be because of the mātrutva in Existence, and so a child's call is always answered. This Motherhood is eternal, close, a never-failing help; the reason is that it has sprung from the glance of the Purusha as the multifoliate Prakriti.
In Tantra, this Motherhood is given a clear-cut gender-image of Lalita Tripurasundari. Though the Lalita Sahasranama lists a thousand names for her, actually her names cannot be exhausted. Seen seated on the lap of Shiva-Kameshwara, the Supreme has taken the form of a woman out of compassion. Hence she is called Lalita-Ambika: the beautiful Mother. The Lalita Sahasranama opens with the word Sri Mata and concludes with Ambika to underline this compassionate motherhood of the Supreme. Ambika is a word that connotes the mother coming to the child on her own out of loving anxiety.
Such a scene is enacted before us in the second canto of the Book of the Divine Mother. Aswapati finds himself in a tremendous stillness. No more joy or sorrow for him in this "boundless silence of the Self," but he understands that a personal release is not his aim. A world's desire to escape from the ills with which it is entangled is pressing him to become articulate. An escape into Nirvana is not in the agenda of Aswapati who represents the human family. Hence he is attentive to the voice within, the conscience that keeps track of all human movements here and in the beyond:
Only the everlasting No has neared
And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:
But where is the Lover's everlasting Yes,
And immortality in the secret heart,
20 bid., p. 307.
Page 190
The voice that chants to the creator Fire,
The symbolled OM, the great assenting Word,
The bridge between the rapture and the calm,
The passion and the beauty of the Bride,
The chamber where the glorious enemies kiss,
The smile that saves, the golden peak of things?
This too is Truth at the mystic fount of Life.21
Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. Ananda: How to realise the Ananda, "the mystic fount of Life" then? Sri Aurobindo's The Mother speaks of this Ananda repeatedly. Identifying oneself completely with the Divine Mother brings us this gift:
You will know and see and feel that you are a person and power formed by her out of herself, put out from her for the play and yet always safe in her, being of her being, consciousness of her consciousness, force of her force, Ananda of her Ananda.22
This is the language of Tantra without its external ritualism. T.V. Kapali Sastri has also indicated the triple form of the Divine Mother described by Sri Aurobindo in The Mother as the Matustrayividya with Tantrik elements:
The Transcendent Shakti: Mulashakti
The Universal Power: Vishveshvari
The Individual Mother: Jivabhutā
Again and again we are drawn to the Mother idea in Savitri for Sri Aurobindo found this to be the most potent instrument to lead man to the life divine. Aswapati, the forerunner, has nothing to help him as he stands poised on the edge of being, except the sterling faith in the Mother. Such "a fixed and unfailing aspiration" is answered by "a supreme Grace from above":
The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.
Across the silence of the ultimate Calm,
Out of a marvellous Transcendence' core,
A body of wonder and translucency
As if a sweet mystic summary of her self
Escaping into the original Bliss
Had come enlarged out of eternity,
Someone came infinite and absolute.
21 Ibid., pp. 310-311. 22 The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 18.
Page 191
A being of wisdom, power and delight,
Even as a mother draws her child to her arms,
Took to her breast Nature and world and soul.23
The Vishvesvari, Universal Mother had manifested in answer to the aspirant-Rishi's mantric meditation. As in days of old when the various gods and goddesses descended to the earth to answer the call of the Vedic seers, Mother Savitri appeared now before Aswapati. In Vyasa's description of the goddess no details are given except that she was a rūpini:
Then, O Yudhistira, rising from the sacrificial flames in her splendid form she appeared in front of the King, exceedingly glad as she was...24
It is the joy of a mother who finds her son to be a perfect, noble person. Sri Aurobindo uses almost the same description for rūpini: "a beautiful and felicitous lustre". This is the Mother of all godheads and all strengths / Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme."25 The Presence brings him the understanding of the all-embracing Nature-Soul while burning away all falsities, ignorance, self-doubts, depressions and frustrations. At this moment when Aswapati recognises the Mulashakti as Vishveshwari, Sri Aurobindo brings together with electrical ease the Vedantic and Tantric elements in our spiritual heritage. In fact, we would not be far off the mark if we consider this canto, the Adoration of the Divine Mother, to be a handbook of Integral Yoga. As Sri Aurobindo says:
Veda and Vedanta are one side of the One Truth; Tantra with its emphasis on Shakti is another; in this yoga all sides of the truth are taken up, not in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their essence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance. But Vedanta deals more with the principles and essentials of the divine knowledge and therefore much of its spiritual knowledge and experience has been taken bodily into the Arya. Tantra deals more with forms and processes and organised powers—all these could not be taken as they were, for the integral yoga needs to develop its own forms and processes; but the ascent of the consciousness through the
23 Savitri, p. 312. 24 R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, p. 4.
25 Savitri, p. 313.
Page 192
centres and other Tantric knowledge are there behind the process of transformation to which as much importance is given by me— also the truth that nothing can be done except through the force of the Mother.26
Indeed, Aswapati's coming face to face with the Divine Mother in this canto cannot have been just an episode in the vast epic of Savitri. The Presence in Savitri is no fiction. It is an experienced reality for Sri Aurobindo; for there is verily a shower of overhead poetry that reveals the essence of Tantra, the Yoga that unites the aspirant with the Supreme. The noble accents of Sanskrit hymnology to Lalita Tripurasundari can be heard in this sublime passage:
At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,
In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;
Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.
Here is the mystery the Night conceals;
The spirit's alchemist energy is hers;
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The Might of all that never yet came down.
All Nature dumbly calls to her alone
To heal with her feet the aching throb of life
And break the seals on the dim soul of man
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.27
As Aswapati gazes at this Presence, he is invaded by a rare spiritual strength while his very nature is filled with bliss. Indeed, he does not seem to possess anything now except "a hunger of infinite bliss." How does one explain this infinite bliss, Brahmananda?
As we read this mantric passage, we realise that here is a block that stands by itself outside the epic too, an incandescent prayer of the Rishi placed within the framework of epic action. There are such wonderfully articulated prayers in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata
26Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 73.
27Ibid., p. 314.
Page 193
and the Bhagavata. Stotras like Aditya Hridayam, Vishnu Sahasranamam and Gajendra's Prayer have been priceless gifts for the sadhaka down the centuries. Such prayers stop us on our tracks and we gain a rare Ananda by reciting them while reading the epic or whenever we feel drawn to the prayers themselves and are closeted with them.
The prayer in the Adoration of the Divine Mother stops the epic action for a moment. The passage itself takes us to Sri Lalita Sahasranama. This important scripture for Sri Vidya Upasana (Tantra) begins with the words Sri Mata: the Divine Mother. The opening in the prayer "At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate" draws us straight to a passage in the Sahasranama:
Vimarśarupini Vidya Vijadadhijgatprasuh;
Sarvavyaadhiprasamani Sarvamruthyunivarini;
Agraganya Achinthyarupa Kalikalmashanasini;
Katyayani Kalahantri Kamalakshnanishevita.
Here is a series of affirmations that envision the cosmic powers of the Divine Mother as Lalita, the Beautiful Mother. She is vimarśarūpini, an explanation of the inexplicable brilliance of the Supreme. She is the Word that explains, since Vak is vimarśa. The Divine Mother is Vak. She is the true knowledge which explains the Supreme in the right way. That is why Kalidasa compared Parvati to the Word that explains the Meaning which is Parameshwara: vāgarthāviva sampriktau vāgarthapratipathtaye: jagatah pitarau vande pārvati parameśwarau.
The Divine Mother is viyat-adi-jagat-prasuh, the Mother of space and all else. The Taittiriya Upanishad deals at length with creation which began with space: Air, fire, water, earth, crops and food followed one after another leading finally to the creation of man.28
The Divine Mother cures all illnesses, both physical and mental: sarva vyādhi prasamani. She guards us from all kinds of unnatural deaths (apamrityu, akālamrityu, kālamrityu, etc.) and by giving us knowledge, she leads us to deathlessness (Realisation) thus saving us from death for all time.
She is agragaṇyā, the first to appear before our thoughts when we are in trouble. When we find ourselves helpless, she is very much
28I have received much illumination from S.V. Radhakrishna Sastri's Tamil commentary on Sri Lalita Sahasranama for comparing the lines from Savitri with the phrases in the Sahsaranama.
Page 194
near us, close to us, part of us, guarding us as a mother guards the naked, newborn babe. She is achintyarūpā, one whose presence chases away all worries, one who is beyond our knowing.
The Divine Mother is also kālikalmasha-nāshini, for she destroys all the effects of Kali Age like pride, jealousy and hate. When we compartmentalise ourselves into the prisons of our dimunitive ego, meditation upon the Mother breaks down these shells of separativity, increases friendship and goodness so that we do not gather bad Karmas. She is Katyayani who never fails to answer our prayers. It was by praying to the Mother as Katyayani that the Gopis received Krishna, the Delight of Existence. So Katyayani is one who gives us joy, an unending Ananda.
She is kālahantri, the Destroyer of Yama. As Shivashakti she had destroyed Yama and saved Markandeya. Death approaches us only wehen we cease to meditate upon her. But when we invoke her, Time that brings Death closer to us keeps away.
The Divine Mother is worshipped by the sustainer Vishnu, Kamalaksha Nishevita. Hence she sustains us all without a moment's respite.
These cosmic powers of the Divine Mother (Vishveshwari) get engaged in the Adoration of the Divine Mother.
viyadhādhi jagatprasuh:
In their slow round the cycles turn to her call.
kālahantri:
achintyarūpā:
Hers is the mystery the Night conceals.
kāli-kalmasha-nāsini:
The spirit's alchemist energy is hers.
vimarsha-rūpini:
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she
A power of silence in the depths of God.
Page 195
vidyā:
She is the Force, the inevitable Word.
agraganyā:
The magnet of our difficult ascent
The sun from which we kindle all our suns.
kātyāyani:
The Light that leans from the Unrealised Vasts
The joy that beckons from the impossible.
kamalāksha nishevitā:
sarva vyādhi prasamaṇi
sarva mrityu nivārani:
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.
Coming face to face with the Divine Mother, Aswapati is quite overpowered and at the same time rejuvenated in spirit, the aim promised by Tantra Yoga:
:
Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes,
Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.
This known as in a thunder-flash of God,
The rapture of things eternal filled his limbs;
Amazement fell upon his ravished sense;
His spirit was caught in her intolerant flame.29
The Yoga of the king has come to a triumphant conclusion with the manifestation of the Divine Mother. How shall he make use of the Presence now? In the original epic we find Aswapati asking for a boon of children to perpetuate his race. But the Mother's presence changes the equations. It has always been so. We know of Swami Vivekananda as the youngster Naren being advised by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa to go and pray to Mother Kali for alleviating his (Naren's) poverty as the family was in dire straights:
29 Savitri, p. 315.
Page 196
At nine o'clock in the evening, Narendranath went to the Kali temple. Passing through the courtyard, he felt within himself a surge of emotion and his heart leapt with joy in anticipation of the vision of the Divine Mother. Entering the temple, he cast his eyes upon the image and found the stone figure to be nothing else but the living Goddess, the Divine Mother Herself, ready to give him any boon he wanted—either a happy worldly life or the joy of spiritual freedom. He was in ecstasy. He prayed for the boon of wisdom, discrimination, renunciation and Her uninterrupted vision, but forgot to ask the Deity for money. He felt great peace within as he returned to the Master's room and, when asked if he had prayed for money, was startled.30
In our epic also we find that Aswapati ha$ ceased to think of his own dynasty, his Madra kingdom, his personal hegemony over a portion of the earth. After the yogic experiences he has been through, his vision has embraced all creation. He now addresses himself to the task of saving the entire human race and transforming it, and avoid the mistake of Pururavas who had been satisfied by the fulfilment of his personal need for Urvashi, while the earth was abandoned to Death and Fate. At this point of time in the epic we watch a new Aswapati who has been shaped by the transformatory adoration of the divine powers of the Mother:
But now his being was too wide for self;
His heart's demand had grown immeasurable:
His single freedom could not satisfy,
Her light, her bliss, he asked for earth and men.31
The Divine Mother: Sri Mata Maharajni Srimat Simhasaneshwari. Lalitambika: Sweet, Beautiful Mother. He must not lose this Presence by remaining dumb; for, here was the golden doorway opening into the Next Future. Nor can he afford to lose his connection with the world below in this comforting experience of being a baby on the lap of its mother. In fact, Aswapati does not even reject Inconscience as he sits in meditation, the vital base of Tantra. When we open the follow-up canto, the House of the Spirit and the New Creation, we see him seated in poised tranquillity,
Page 197
In the unapproachable stillness of his soul,
Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone,
Patient he sat like an incarnate hope
Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.32
No more will he desire for any personal gain! As he makes this firm resolve, a mighty transformation comes upon him and he automatically falls in rhythm with the steps of the entire creation:
He tore desire up from its bleeding roots
And offered to the gods the vacant place.
Thus could he bear the touch immaculate.
A last and mighty transformation came.
His soul was all in front like a great sea
Flooding the mind and body with its waves;
His being, spread to embrace the universe,
United the within and the without
To make of life a cosmic harmony,
An empire of the immanent Divine-
One grew the Spirit's secret unity,
All nature felt again the single bliss.33
A certainty floods into him. All shall be yet well with this creation. When Death, Ignorance, Nescience, Inconscience and the rest are slayed by a master-act of the divine force, the world gets transformed into a divine spaceship. Ananda will be the reigning Law. Aswapati's vision recaptures the Tantric mode of understanding Existence as the Meru. No more compartmentalisations or limitations though there is a seeming hierarchy: "For worlds were many, but the Self was one." It is the Ananda that courses through one's veins which have been freed of the knots of ignorance, when one's power rises from the base of the spine to the crown on the head and pours it forth into the cleared channels of one's being, an image of the effect at the conclusion of the Kundalini's adventure:
He felt the footsteps of a million wills
Moving in unison to a single goal.
A stream ever new-bom that never dies,
Caught in its thousandfold current's ravishing flow,
With eddies of immortal sweetness thrilled,
32 Ibid., p. 317. 35 Ibid., pp. 318-19.
Page 198
He bore coiling through his members as they passed
Calm movements of interminable delight,
The bliss of a myriad myriads who are one.34
The Integral Yoga calls upon the seed idea of Tantra to help the aspirant move in his path with ease. Hence, Sri Aurobindo does not ask for the complete cessation of thought and action. Instead, he wants the aspirant to open his vision inward so that the sights he meets can help him achieve transformation. Aswapati acting out this approach now sees an externalised image of this thoughts that resemble the different āvaranas or coverings in Sri Chakra where the one Divine is also seen as the many in gradations of divinity:
He saw a hierarchy of lucent planes
Enfeoffed to this highest kingdom of God-state.
Attuning to one Truth their own right rule
Each housed the gladness of a bright degree,
Alone in beauty, perfect in self-kind,
An image cast by one deep truth's absolute,
Married to all in happy difference.
Each gave its powers to help its neighbours' parts,
But suffered no diminution by the gift;
Profiteers of a mystic interchange,
They grew by what they took and what they gave,
All others they felt as their own complements,
One in the might and joy of multitude.35
All the facets that make up the human beings—life, mind, spirit— work in harmony in the transformed person. But Aswapati is Aswapati still. While one part of him is electrically free in the spaces of Ananda, another part of him remains conscious of the world below. Even as he bears witness to the splendours above, his soul articulates the earth's prayer set as a poetic image of incalculable charm by Sri Aurobindo:
In the centre of his vast and fateful trance
Half-way between his free and fallen selves,
Interceding twixt God's day and the mortal's night,
Accepting worship as its single law,
Accepting bliss as the sole cause of things,
54 Ibid., p. 325. 35 Ibid., p. 326.
Page 199
Refusing the austere joy which none can share,
Refusing the calm that lives for calm alone,
To her it turned for whom it willed to be.
In the passion of its solitary dream
It lay like a closed soundless oratory
Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor
Lit by a single and untrembling ray
And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer.36
For the moment we brush aside all the tomes of philosophical exegesis, the complications of metaphysical calculations and the whirring chaos of Nature's activities. The Nature-soul in man itself is now withdrawn into a single-pointed prayer from the depths of the heart. It is the anxious call of the lost child searching for its mother in a crowded bazaar, interiorised as the prayer of Aswapati. This is the ultimate point of any Yoga, the calling out to the Mother, the Mediatrix, the puruṣakāra bhūtā, the one who holds our hand in darkness and light, speaks to us of what is good for us, and sustains us in such a way that we grow into the divine as a child grows into strong youth and from thence to the wisdom of maturity.
It cannot be stressed too often that Sri Aurobindo has used Tantric elements in Savitri but has scrupulously avoided the ritualism associated with the Tantra Yoga as it has been practised since the Puranic times. Thus his description of the Divine Mother remains universal and does not use symbols like the various weapons, auspicious things like flowers and the sugarcane symbolising plenty. The Divine Mother is brought to us by Sri Aurobindo in the chariot of his magnificent blank verse; it is for us to recognise her, welcome her to the temple of our heart and consecrate her on the lotus within:
The One he worshipped was within him now:
Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face
Appeared and lips moved by immortal words;
Lids, wisdom's leaves, drooped over rapture's orbs.
A marble monumet of ponderings, shone
A forehead, sight's crypt, and large like ocean's gaze
Towards Heaven two tranquil eyes of boundless thought
Looked into man's and saw the god to come.37
When Sri Aurobindo says that Aswapati thrills to the core with
36 Ibid., p. 332. 37 Ibid., pp. 334-35.
Page 200
happiness all at once is said. The Divine Mother's descent into the aspirant at this moment transforming him entirely into a being of Ananda can be understood in the light of what Sri Aurobindo says about the seven Suns of the Supermind making a steady and inexorable descent into man's material body in terms of Tantrik diction:
1.The Sun of Supramental Truth (Descent into the Sahasradala)
2.The Sun of Supramental Light and Will-Power (Descent into the Ajna Chakra, the centre between the eyes)
3.The Sun of Supramental Word (Descent into Throat)
4.The Sun of Supramenetal Love, Beauty, Bliss (Descent into the Heart-Lotus)
5.The Sun of Supramental Force (Descent into the Navel)
6.The Sun of Life-Radiances (Descent into the Penultimate Centre)
7.The Sun of Supramental Substance-Energy (Descent into the Muladhara)38
One is naturally reminded of the opening stanza of the mantric poem, Rose of God:
Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,
Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!
Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,
Passion-flower of the nameless, bud of the mystical Name.39
The Mother-Son confrontation in the Vision and the Boon takes place within Aswapati, in the "listening spaces of the soul." The Divine Mother advises him not to be hasty in asking for a transformation of the life on earth into a life divine. Let evolution take its own course so that the decree of Fate need not be questioned or overruled for the general mankind. Of course she will not deny him anything since his Yoga cannot have been in vain. So she takes him back to the original intention when he had begun the tapasya. That was for the gift of a child to continue the racial line in Madra:
My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.
Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart,
Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.
38See The Hour of God, SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 27.
39 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 584.
Page 201
Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;
Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.40
But it is this same Divine Mother who has now given Aswapati the strength to persevere and stop not till the goal is reached. How can the Mother still remain indifferent to the sufferings of her creation? Again, how can he have peace of mind with the comforts and joys of his palace further enriched by the gift of a progeny, when the rest of creation continues to suffer in the grip of Death and Nescience? For Aswapati this earth is not merely a material universe. It is verily Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Mother herself! The passage in Savitri is not unlike the cry wrung from the agonised soul of Sri Aurobindo when he wrote to Mrinalini on his three "frenzies":
... whereas others regard the country as an inert piece of matter and know it as the plains, the fields, the forests, the mountains and the rivers, I know my country as the Mother, I worship her and adore her accordingly. What would a son do when a demon sitting on his mother's breast prepared to drink her blood? Would he sit down content to take his meals or go on enjoying himself in the company of his wife and children, or would he rather run to the rescue of his mother? I know I have the strength to uplift this fallen race; not a physical strength, I am not going to fight with a sword or a gun, but with the power of knowledge...41
Sri Aurobindo had used his brahmatej in the national arena but had withdrawn to the cave of tapasya at Pondicherry, because now he had to think of rescuing not merely a single nation but the entire human family from the grip of Ignorance and Death. He had striven with single-minded application and had marked some signal triumphs. Aswapati is a projection of Sri Aurobindo's own aspirations for uplifting this fallen race of humanity that had become a prey to several ills due to involution. Must this repetitive death-birth-death cycle go on for ever? When can mankind step upwards leaving behind the darknesses of the mental plane? Aswapati had seen all the future possibilities for this marvellous tiny dot in eternity called Man. Already in the far distant was he not watching the Hunters of Joy, the
40Ibid., p 341.
41K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo: a bibliography and a history, p. 200.
Page 202
Seekers after Knowledge, the Climbers in the quest of Power?42
I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude,
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came.43
Aswapati prays for a manifestation to help humanity proceed forward quickly towards the promised future. The times call for a leader who can use all the powers of the mind and heart to draw humanity onto the right path and make them march to the life-sustaining goal:
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time.
Let a great word be spoken from the heights
And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.44
The Divine Mother can be indifferent no more. The Yoga of Savitri is tuned only to success in one's endeavours and so we hear the voice of the Divine Mother, Vishweshwari, promising an individual power to incarnate on the earth, the jivabhutā who will wage the war on humanity's behalf and save the future of man. This incarnation will be an image of love, wisdom, strength and also something more. It will be an image of Ananda, a positive Power; for, "from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze."
One of the important ways used by our ancients to help the aspirant get settled in the concept of the Supreme's motherhood is to see the
42Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 523.
43Savitri, pp. 343-44. 44Ibid., p. 345.
Page 203
Divine Mother in different stages of age which is an easily assimilable experience for man who is controlled by the concept of Time. The Upakhyana of Vyasa briefly touches upon this aspect in just two verses:
The Princess grew like the goddess Fortune herself incarnate, fair and beautiful; then, in course of time she entered into youthful maidenhood.
With large hips and a slender waist graceful as she was, like a golden statue, people beholding her believed that some heavenly damsel had descended amidst them.45
But the Tantra texts deal extensively with the different ages of the Mother. A one-year old girl is called Sandhya, a two-year old is Saraswati, when she is seven years old she is called Chandika, a sixteen-year old is Shodasi. Shodasi's Mantra is made of sixteen syllables. The Tamil culture has perfected a type of poetic genre called Pillai-t-tamizh. Here the deity is seen as passing through different stages of childhood, boyhood/girlhood and youth. Thus, when we read a Pillai-t-tamizh on Meenakshi or Andal we go through the stages of the Divine Mother as a babe waving one hand (the Chenkeerai-stage), the babe in the cradle, the child clapping its hands, blowing a kiss, the toddler moving forward like a tiny elephant, calling out to the moon to come and play with the baby, building sand castles as a little girl, playing 'house' with tiny utensils and winging to-and-fro in a golden swing. The sacred and the secular, the familiar baby at home and the Supreme Mother are thus brought together into an incandescent whole making us very, very close to divinity.
Sri Aurobindo follows this idea and we have the canto the Birth and Childhood of the Flame, a whole canto that had been inspired by a single term in Vyasa: kanya tejasvini. This and the following the Growth of the Flame are the Aurobindonian Pillai-t-tamizh for us. Besides, unlike the Upakhyana of Vyasa, Savitri's poem is cast in the epic scale, a Devi Kavyam, a Golden Poem. Hence we have also to grow along with the idea of the Devi; and so we are granted a double vision through the magic of his poetry to watch the human and the divine as an indivisible whole. We see Savitri as one among her kind and yet, somehow, different. Her companions sense this 'difference' too, albeit dimly:
45 R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, p. 8.
Page 204
A key to a Light still kept in being's core,
The sun-word of an ancient mystery's sense,
Her name ran murmuring on the lips of men
Exalted and sweet like an inspired verse...
Admired, unsought, intangible to the grasp
Her beauty and flaming strength were seen afar
Like lightning playing with the fallen day,
A glory unapproachably divine.46
It then does not come as a surprise to us when Aswapati,—who has been musing one day on the way humanity has not heeded the call of ever so many seers, sages and poets,—finds Savitri advancing towards him "like a shining answer from the gods." Because she has come to this earth, "a gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births," all will yet be well. Aswapati asks her to go and find her soul-mate. His words are like the Mantra that a Yogin absorbs in his very cells, and Savitri starts on her quest.
In this ancient culture of varied religious and spiritual quests, the Puranas have played an important part in getting the aspirant accustomed to certain ideas. For instance, the universal deities take an individual form and not only walk on this earth but go through all the motions of life as lived by ordinary man. A goddess as a Princess going in search of a consort is familiar to the Indian psyche. The wonderful Puranic tale of the Divine Mother as Princess Tadatakai (Meenakshi) finding her consort in Chokkesa (Sundaresha) has been a favourite with the worshippers of the Mother Goddess in South India. Then the marriage, an auspicious moment is renacted annually even today in several temples as Meenakshi Kalyanam, Sita Kalyanam, or Andal Kalyanam. Significantly it is only the name of the goddess which is used to indicate the divine marriage. Even the lay man will speak of Rukmini Kalyanam or Radha Kalyanam but never a Krishna Kalyanam!
Sri Aurobindo draws in for his Yoga this wonderful concept of a divine marriage, again without any of the rituals. Savitri and Satyavan have met in a forest glade, there is an instant recognition and a marvellous wedding takes place under the canopy of Mother Nature in the Book of Love:
On the high glowing cupola of the day
46 Savitri, p. 367.
Page 205
Fate tied a knot with morning's halo threads
While by the ministry of an auspice-hour
Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,
The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse
Took place again on earth in human forms:
In a new act of the drama of the world
The united Two began a greater age.47
The Book of Yoga draws a major portion of its material from Tantra. If in Aswapati's Yoga we found him ascending and descending the several planes of the Meru, in Savitri's Yoga we find her journeying through several enclosures (āvaranās) as in the Sri Chakra. Tantra Yoga has gone into the minutest detail possible of all concepts and experiences and given them highly evocative names. Each enclosure (like Trailokyamohana Chakra and Sarvarogahara Chakra) has its own set of compartments with guardians and in-dwellers, but everything is directly connected to the Divine Mother as well. Sri Aurobindo has scmpulously avoided the use of such colourful representations. The canto, the Entry into the Inner Countries, just gives a brief indication as when in one of the corridors she finds a "glorious crowd" of gods and goddesses. As in the Tantra, these deities belonging to higher planes are helpers of man in his Yoga. They give a helpful direction to Savitri too:
O Savitri, from thy hidden soul we come.
We are the messengers, the occult gods
Who help man's drab and heavy ignorant lives
To wake to beauty and the wonder of things
Touching them with glory and divinity;
In evil we light the deathless flame of good
And hold the torch of knowledge on ignorant roads;
We are thy will and all men's will towards Light.48
The deities direct her to the Fire burning on the bare stone / And the deep cavern of [her] secret soul." The following canto, the Triple Soul-Forces, gives us a view of the major facets of Savitri's inmost soul that is a spark of the Divine Mother as we have known her at work on earth. Each of the forces is given a recognisable image. Each of them claims to be Savitri's soul and each is partly right; but
47Ibid.,p.411. 48Ibid., p. 501.
Page 206
Savitri will not be satisfied with partial identifications. All this has to be part of our soul's make-up but there has to be something else as well!
During Savitri's journey in the inscapes of her soul, she is first met by the Mother of Sorrows, one to whom the gods pray in Saptashati: yā devi sarvabhuteshu dayā rūpeṇa samsthithā. There are no external indications in the epic except that she is clothed in "a pale lustrous robe". The rest is a series of intuitive flashes on a major aspect of human experience on earth symbolised as a woman with "a moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair."
The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,
Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.
Her heart was riven with the world's agony
And burdened with the sorrow and struggle in Time,
An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice.
Absorbed in a deep compassion's ecstasy,
Lifting the mild ray of her patient gaze,
In soft sweet training words slowly she spoke.49
Sri Aurobindo could be limning a portrait of Mother Sarada Devi here, so accurate is the vision that comes through the poetry. Philosophy and metaphysics are challenges to the mind but how can they help the heart that is buffeted around by reality? The approach of Shakta Tantra, of the Divine Mother taking universal forms to destroy evil becomes absolutely necessary for Pooma Yoga. Hence the stress on Prakriti, the Nature-Soul. Prakriti is able to understand the pain of man and also convey to him that his needs are very much in her agenda. Not so the Purusha, who is an inexorable but inactive witness to the happenings around.
The Mother of Sorrows is full of karuna. But what is the use of compassion if it is not backed by the power to alleviate the misery of humanity? Savitri tells the Madonna of Suffering that she is dear to humanity as she helps man "bear the unbearable sorrow of the world." It is the image of a mother who listens to her sad children and infuses in them the hope for a future dawn. Savitri would now journey further and get the needed strength to back compassion. She now meets the Mother of Might ( yā devi sarvabhuteshu shakti rūpeṇa samsthithā),
49 Ibid, p. 503.
Page 207
and Sri Aurobindo brings in the image of Mahakali as found in the Tantra literature:
A Woman sat in gold and purple sheen,
Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt,
Her feet upon a couchant lion's back.
A formidable smile curved round her lips,
Heaven-fire laughed in the comers of her eyes;
Her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength,
She menaced the triumph of the nether gods.50
The passage naturally takes us to the creation of Mahalakshmi in Saptashati by the gods:
As all the gods gave arms and ornaments
Mahalakshmi roared with delight.
And the reverberation of her roar
rumbled in the firmament.
The oceans heaved, the worlds trembled, the earth
and its mountains shook unfirm.
Greeting her mounted on her lion, the gods
and sages cried 'Victory!'51
Indeed the very essence of Tantra's force is brought to us soon after by Sri Aurobindo, and possibly he had Sister Nivedita in his consciousness when he wrote the lines:
I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,
And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and fortunate;
I wear the face of Kali when I kill,
I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.
I am charged by God to do his mighty work.52
Savitri moves on further saying that strength without wisdom cannot build eternal things. It can only give momentary succour. Last to meet Savitri is the Mother of Joy and Peace. The description of the Madonna of Light reminds one of Mrinalini Devi:
50Ibid., p. 508. 51Translated by K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar.
52Savitri, p. 509.
Page 208
Here, living centre of that vision of peace,
A Woman sat in clear and crystal light:
Heaven had unveiled its lustre in her eyes,
Her feet were moonbeams, her face was a bright sun,
Her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart
To live again and feel the hands of calm.53
This is verily the Maheshwari described by Sri Aurobindo in The Mother.
Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother's eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever.54
Though the figure of Maheshwari has not had a particular image in the Saptashati, T.V. Kapali Sastri finds Sri Aurobindo's vision to have descended from a verse in the poem beginning, medhāsi devi vidhitākhila shastrasārā:
You are Saraswati, scripture's essence;
Sri, who abides with Vishnu;
Gauri, with the moon-crested Shiva, and
Durga, boat to the Beyond.55
Savitri finds that this too is inadequate. Pooma Shakti needs to be incarnated on earth to help mankind. As she seeks her secret soul, it is suddenly revealed to her as a mystic cavern with two golden serpents round the lintel, an eagle with massive wings above and doves at the cornices. Within the cavern are deities innumerable each of whom has an identity with Savitri. She passes them all as she had earlier the three soul-forces. It is in the last chamber of this seemingly endless cavern that she finds her secret soul, "no bigger than the thumb of man." Yet, this is the power that keeps all our actions and thoughts going, itself remaining as an immoveable Witness. The two become one again now:
53Ibid., p. 514. 54 The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 26.
55 Translated by K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar.
Page 209
Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;
They looked upon each other, knew themselves,
The secret deity and its human part,
The calm immortal and the struggling soul.
Then with a magic transformation's speed
They rushed into each other and grew one.56
An in-depth reading and recitation of Savitri's journey is itself the discipline of Tantra and the discipline (the meditation, the sincerity, the surrender) pays dividends. For we would be re-enacting the spiritual experience of Savitri when the latent power that had lain coiled at her base (the Muladhara) begins to climb upwards, undoing the knots (also centres imaged as lotuses), of Vishnu-granthi, Brahma-granthi and Rudra-granthi, and meets at the thousand-petalled Sahasrara at the crown, receive the nectarian powers there only to pour through the cleared channels of the body all these powers readied for the strike order. This movement of the Kundalini Yoga is brilliantly described in Sri Aurobindo's inimitable English style:
A flaming serpent rose released from sleep.
It rose billowing its coils and stood erect
And climbing mightily stormily on its way
It touched her centres with its flaming mouth:
As if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep,
They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss;
Then at the crown it joined the Eternal's space.
In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter's base,
In each divine stronghold and Nature-knot
It held together the mystic stream which joins
The viewless summits with the unseen depths,
The string of forts that make the frail defence
Safeguarding us against the enormous world,
Our lines of self-expression in its Vast.
An image sat of the original Power
Wearing the mighty Mother's form and face.57
Thus we are introduced to an important image of Tantra where the Divine Mother as Kameshwari joins Kameshwara Shiva in the thousand-petalled lotus flowing with nectar. The rays of the Divine Mother's feet direct the nectar downwards as a flood (sudhāsāra),
56 Ibid., p. 527. 57 Savitri, p. 528.
Page 210
joining "the viewless summits with the unseen depths." The individual aspirant is now totally transformed and is not restrained by the innumerable knots of our own making since
She streams into us with her unbound force,
Into mortal limbs the Immortal's rapture and power.58
This background makes it easier to understand Savitri's cosmic consciousness described in the following cantos as also the images of Eternal Night, Double Twilight, Everlasting Day and the figure of Savitri when she takes her cosmic form to vanquish Death. There is, for instance, the tradition that one must recite the Ratri Sukta at the commencement of reciting Saptashati. The Eternal Night in Savitri is not something to be frightened of, since that is a part of the greater reality as the Vedic hymn testifies to us. As S. Sankaranarayanan says:
If the day is an image of divine light, it is night that retains the light in its breast and reveals it at the right time. Night is the primordial mother who keeps the entire creation, all light and consciousness within her womb, sustains them and reveals them at the proper moment... Sleep that precedes creation, mental confusion that kindles, darkness that illumes light, Yoganidra, Yogamaya, Kalaratri are all different names given to the Primordial Mother. She is the eldest, Jyeshtā of the Dasha Maha Vidyas. She is seen as a cloud who has light in her womb, Dhumavati.59
The elements of Tantra continue to glimmer in the concluding Books also, but they do not have visual specificity since they are immerged in the total vision. Mahakali is very much a presence as Savitri answers Death point by point during their struggle in the Eternal Night and Double Twilight. It is not the Savitri of the earlier parts of the epic. The Princess had become the Devi after she had recognised her secret soul and Death realises that the ordinary rules that apply for death-bound mortal man will not apply to her:
Who then art thou hiding in human guise?
Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,
Knowledge is with thee, truth speaks through thy words;
The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.
58Ibid., p. 530.
59Translated by Prema Nandakumar, Sri Devi Mahātmyam, p. 62.
Page 211
But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?
Hast thou God's force to build heaven's values here?60
Without wasting any words, Savitri meets Death's challenge swiftly, thereby indicating that man, if he perfects himself by the self-discipline of Pooma Yoga can conquer Time, annihilate Death and build on earth the life divine.
There are none of the descriptions that one finds in the battles of Saptashati where the Mother destroys evil forces like Shumbha, Nishumbha, Raktabija and Mahishasura. And yet the battle is brought to us in the diction of Tantra. The uprising energy, the Power of Kundalini reaching the thousand-petalled lotus in the crown and encircling the Purusha (Shiva) there and holding its hood above him as an umbrella, is recorded exactly as it is in Aurobindonian style to delineate the cosmic image of the Divine Mother:
Her forehead's span vaulted the Omniscient's gaze,
Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.
The Power that from her being's summit reigned,
The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,
Came down and held the centre in her brow
Where the mind's Lord in his control-room sits.61
The Mother has thus entered the twin-petalled Anjna Chakra, in the Sushumna, between the brows. Thrusting through the Rudra-granthi to reach to the Sahasrara, the energy spreads all over the cosmic figure, indicating the triumphal movement of the Kundalini:
It poured into a navel's lotus depth,
Lodged in the little life-nature's narrow home,
On the body's longings grew heaven-rapture's flower
And made desire a pure celestial flame,
Broke into the cave where coiled World-Energy sleeps
And smote the thousand-hooded serpent Force
That blazing towered and clasped the World-Self above,
Joined Matter's dumbness to the Spirit's hush
And filled earth's acts with the Spirit's silent power.
Thus changed she waited for the Word to speak.62
Of the innumerable names of the Devi, one is tadi-latā-samaruchih, she who is brilliant like a creeper of lightning. As she stands confronting Death like "a little figure in infinity," the Word comes
60 Savitri, p. 663-64. 61Ibid., p. 665. 62Ibid.
Page 212
from her, asking Death to release "the soul of the world called Satyavan." But he will not. To action, then! Savitri had stood exhibiting only a fraction of the Power of Mulashakti even as a lightning is but a fraction of the shoreless brilliance in the endless space. The tadi-latā-samaruchih now becomes a total blaze:
Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,
Light was a luminous torture in his heart,
Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;
His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.63
After Savitri makes her choice to go back to the world as she cannot forget the cry of a million creatures nor ignore the "dreadful whirlings of the world," the Supreme assures her all support and blessings. We are reminded by Sri Aurobindo about the bases of the Yoga, through the images of the Shalwa Prince and the Madran Princess, a recurring image in the evolution of earth, the togetherness of the Conscious-Soul and the Nature-Soul, Purusha and Prakriti:
O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,
Isent you forth of old beneath the stars,
A dual power of God in an ignorant world,
In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,
Bringing down God to the insentient globe,
Lifting earth-beings to immortality...
He is the soul of man climbing to God
In Nature's surge out of earth's ignorance.
O Savitri, thou art my spirit's Power,
The revealing voice of my immortal Word-
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.64
Even as the entire Tantra Shastra has descended from the Vedic Devi Suktas, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is also a direct child of the Vedas. Though the subtitle says the epic is a "legend and a symbol," Savitri is more than that. It is a living experience. Just as we recognise the deities of the Tantra as a living experience for us to grow in, the world of Savitri needs also to be seen as an experiential truth. Sri Aurobindo himself has indicated this by saying that the epic is a living force, that Savitri
Page 213
...is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.
Salutations to Sri Aurobindo for this gift of Savitri, the Devi Kavyam that leads us from untruth to Truth, from darkness to Light, from death to Immortality:
Though abiding in the high pinnacles, it is capable of coming down; though lying on the terrestrial plane below, it is daring and persistent in its climb up—this Yoga bom of the gracious side-long glances of Bhagavan Sri Aurobindo reigns victorious as the vastness charged with the Play of the Force Immortal.65
PREMA NANDAKUMAR
65T.V.Kapali Sastri
Page 214
Home
Disciples
R Y Deshpande
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.