... prevail on Europe and create there new forms congenial to the West, or will European rationalism and commercialism put an end for ever to the Indian type of culture? Not, then, whether India is civilised is the query that should be put, but whether the motive which has shaped her civilisation or the old-European intellectual or the new-European materialistic motive is to lead human culture. Is the... his eulogy of the mediaeval civilisation of Europe. Its interest, the beauty of its artistic motives, its deep and sincere spiritual urgings are marred for me by its large strain of ignorance and obscurantism, its cruel intolerance, its revolting early-Teutonic hardness, brutality, ferocity and coarseness. He seems to me to hit a little too hard at the later European culture. This predominantly economic... survival of Indian civilisation and the inevitability of a war of cultures. The question whether there has been or is a civilisation in India is not any longer debatable; for everyone whose opinion counts recognises the presence of a distinct and a great civilisation unique in its character. Sir John Woodroffe's purpose was to disclose the conflict of European and Asiatic culture and, in greater ...
... d more to European culture than incompetent and unfortunate Italy. The misfortunes of India have been considerably exaggerated, at least in their incidence, but take them at their worst, admit that no nation has suffered more. If all that is due to the badness of our civilisation, to what is due then the remarkable fact of the obstinate survival of India, her culture and her civilisation under this... type of European culture which he wishes to foist on us in its place. Mr. Archer feels the openings which European civilisation gives to this kind of retort and he pleads plaintively that it ought not to be made; he takes refuge in the old tag that a tu quoque is no argument. Certainly the retort would be irrelevant if this were only a question of the dispassionate criticism of Indian culture without... incurable badness of our civilisation, the total absence of a true and sound culture. Now misfortune is not a proof of absence of culture, nor good fortune the sign of salvation. Greece was unfortunate; she was as much torn by internal dissensions and civil wars as India, she was finally unable to arrive at unity or preserve independence; yet Europe owes half its civilisation to those squabbling inconsequent ...
... forms of our civilisation have become inapt and effete and others stand in need of radical change and renovation. But that can be said equally well of European culture; for all its recently acquired progressiveness and habit of more rapid self-adaptation, large parts of it are already rotten and out of date. In spite of all drawbacks and in spite of downfall the spirit of Indian culture, its central... claim that theirs alone is the way for mankind. The one real and perfect civilisation is the one in which they happen to be born, all the rest must perish or go under. But the real and perfect civilisation yet waits to be discovered; for the life of mankind is still nine tenths of barbarism to one tenth of culture. The European mind gives the first place to the principle of growth by struggle; it is... large and spiritual than the old Egyptian, more vast and original than any other Asiatic civilisation, more intellectual than the European prior to the eighteenth century, possessing all that these had and more, it was the most powerful, self-possessed, stimulating and wide in influence of all past human cultures. And if we look from the view-point of the present and the fruitful workings of the ...
... upon this idea of existence and must serve this one aim and endeavour. This is the formula which European civilisation has accepted and is still labouring to bring into some kind of realisation. It is the formula of an intelligently mechanised civilisation supporting a rational and utilitarian culture. Or is not the truth of our being rather that of a Soul embodied in Nature which is seeking to... material development and efficiency, are not the products of civilisation, but the offspring of a crudely subtle barbarism. But this thesis obviously proves too much; most of the great past of humanity would fall under its condemnation. Even ancient Greek culture would not escape it; much of the thought and art of modern European civilisation itself would in that case have to be damned as at least se... narrow the sense of the word and impoverish the significance of the past strivings of the race. Indian civilisation in the past has been and must be recognised as the fruit of a great culture, quite as much as the Graeco-Roman, the Christian, the Islamic or the later Renaissance civilisation of Europe. But the essential question remains open; the dispute is only narrowed to its central issue. A more ...
... properly to the doctrine of rebirth but to other elements stigmatised as an ascetic pessimism by the vitalistic thought of Europe. Pessimism is not peculiar to the Indian mind: it has been an element in the thought of all developed civilisations. It is the sign of a culture already old, the fruit of a mind which has lived much, experienced much, sounded life and found it full of suffering, sounded... a count against her civilisation would be a singular severity of criticism which few civilisations watched to their end could survive. Failure in the end, yes, because of the decline of her culture, but not as a result of its most valuable elements. A later eclipse of the more essential elements of her civilisation is not a disproof of their original value. Indian civilisation must be judged mainly... experience, are signs, not of barbarism or of a mean and ignorant culture, but marks of the highest possible type of civilisation. There is nothing here that would warrant us in abasing ourselves before the idols of the positivist reason or putting the spirit and aim of Indian culture at all lower than the spirit and aim of Western civilisation whether in its high ancient period of rational enlightenment ...
... belief and a troubled or else a self-confident scepticism. In Europe philosophy has been sometimes the handmaid—not the sister—of religion; but more often it has turned its back on religious belief in hostility or in a disdainful separation. The war between religion and science has been almost the leading phenomenon of European culture. Even philosophy and science have been unable to agree; they too... Indian civilisation. When you strip them of their journalistic rhetoric, you find that they amount simply to this natural antagonism of the rationalised vital and practical man against a culture which subordinates reason to a supra-rational spirituality and life and action to a feeling after something which is greater than life and action. Philosophy and religion are the soul of Indian culture, inseparable... typical modern European. Not only could a Pythagoras or a philosopher of the Neo-platonist school, an Alexander or a Menander understand with a more ready sympathy the root ideas of Asiatic culture, but an average man of ability, a Megasthenes for instance, could be trusted to see and understand, though not inwardly and perfectly, yet in a sufficient measure. The mediaeval European, for all his militant ...
... modification. But let us be clear about the meaning of our terms. That the attempt in the last century which still in some directions continues,—to imitate European civilisation and to make ourselves a sort of brown Englishmen, to throw our ancient culture into the dust-bin and put on the livery or uniform of the West was a mistaken and illegitimate endeavour, I heartily agree. At the same time a certain... modern world. The modern world is still Page 51 mainly European, a world dominated by the European mind and Western civilisation. We claim to set right this undue preponderance, to reassert the Asiatic and, for ourselves, the Indian mind and to preserve and develop the great values of Asiatic and of Indian civilisation. But the Asiatic or the Indian mind can only assert itself successfully... Indian Culture and External Influence In considering Indian civilisation and its renascence, I suggested that a powerful new creation in all fields was our great need, the meaning of the renascence and the one way of preserving the civilisation. Confronted with the huge rush of modern life and thought, invaded by another dominant civilisation almost her opposite or inspired ...
... that the European vision is opening to the secret of Indian painting & sculpture. But the art of Japan presented certain outward characteristics on which the European could readily seize. Japanese painting had already begun to make its way into Europe even before the victories of Japan and its acceptance of much of the outward circumstances of European civilisation opened a broad door into Europe for all... Japan that Europe can receive without unease or the feeling of an incompatible strangeness. Japanese painting, Japanese dress, Japanese decoration are not only accepted as a part of Western life by the select few and the cultured classes but known and allowed, without being adopted, by the millions. Asiatic civilisation has entered into Europe as definitely though not so victoriously as European civilisation... a single intellectual unit with a common fund of knowledge and ideas and a unified culture. The process is far from complete, but the broad lines of the plan laid down by the great Artificer of things already begin to appear. For a time this unification was applied to Europe only. Asia had its own triune civilisation, predominatingly spiritual, complex and meditative in India, predominatingly vital ...
... rapidly sown in the conscious mentality of the race. This new turn of the impact of cultures shows itself most clearly where the European and the Asiatic meet. French culture in Northern Africa, English culture in India cease at once to be French or English and become simply the common European civilisation in face of the Asiatic; it is no longer an imperial Page 320 domination intent... this confrontation it is no longer a self-confident European civilisation that offers its light and good to the semi-barbarous Asiatic and the latter that gratefully accepts a beneficent transformation. Even adaptable Japan, after the first enthusiasm of acceptance, has retained all that is fundamental in her culture, and everywhere else the European current has met the opposition of an inner voice and... cultural units in the European whole has been lifted almost to the dignity of a creed. The recognition of the value of Asiatic cultures, confined formerly to the thinker, scholar and artist, has now been brought into the popular mind by association on the battle-field. The theory of "inferior" races, an inferiority and superiority measured by approximation to one's own form of culture, has received what ...
... that India is practically a continent almost as large as Europe containing a great number of peoples and the difficulties of the problem have been as great or at least almost as considerable. And if then it is no proof of the insufficiency of Western civilisation or of the political incapacity of the European peoples that the idea of European unity should still remain an ineffective phantasm on the... like certain European countries remained for many centuries passive, acquiescent and impotent under an alien sway, that would indeed have been a proof of a great inherent weakness; but the British is the first really continuous foreign rule that has dominated India. The ancient civilisation underwent indeed an eclipse and decline under the weight of a Central Asiatic religion and culture with which it... the analogy is far from perfect and the conditions were not quite of the same order. The peoples of Europe are nations very sharply divided from each other in their collective personality, and their spiritual unity in the Christian religion or even their cultural unity in a common European civilisation, never so real and complete as the ancient spiritual and cultural unity of India, was also not the ...
... vision and intensity of aspiration, spreading all around something that is new and not too common, a happy guest come from elsewhere. Ancient Greece, the fountainhead of European civilisation – of the world culture reigning today, one can almost say – Page 205 found itself epitomised in the Periclean Age. The light – grace, harmony, sweet reasonableness – that was Greece, reached... also a heightening, an ascent into ranges that are not normally Page 213 perceived, towards summits of our true reality. We have spoken of the Græco-Roman culture as the source and foundation of European civilisation; but apart from that there was a secret vein of life that truly vivified it, led it by an occult but constant influence along channels and achievements that are meant to... how the spirit of progress and evolution has worked and advanced in the European world. And one can take it as the pattern of human growth generally; but in the scheme described above we have left out one particular phase and purposely. I refer to the great event of Christ and Christianity. For without that European civilisation loses more than half of its import and value. After the Roman Decline began ...
... of vision and intensity of aspiration, spreading all around something that is new and not too common, a happy guest come from else-where. Ancient Greece, the fountainhead of European civilisation —of the world culture reigning today, one can almost say— Page 95 found itself epitomised in the Periclean Age. The light— grace, harmony, sweet reasonableness—that was Greece, reached its... also a heightening, an ascent into ranges that are not normally Page 103 perceived, towards summits of our true reality. We have spoken of the Graeco-Roman culture as the source and foundation of European civilisation; but apart from that there was a secret vein of life that truly vivified it, led it by an occult but constant influence along channels and achievements that are meant ' to... how the spirit of progress and evolution has worked and advanced in the European world. And one can take it as the pattern of human growth generally; but in the scheme described above we have left out one particular phase and purposely. I refer to the great event of Christ and Christianity. For without that European civilisation loses more than half of its import and value. After the Roman Decline began ...
... the hostile argument is that modern, that is to say, European civilisation is the thing that we have to acquire and fit ourselves for, so only Page 421 can we live and prosper and it is this that our education must do for us. The idea of national education challenges the sufficiency of this assumption. Europe built up her ancient culture on a foundation largely taken from the East, from Egypt... independence in a country like our own which is peculiarly circumstanced not only by the clash of the Asiatic and the European or occidental consciousness and the very different civilisations they have created and the enforced meeting of the English and the Indian mind and culture, but by a political subjection which has left the decisive shaping and supreme control of education in the hands of foreigners... Latin, the Celtic and Slav races. It is the civilisation so created that has long offered itself as the last and imperative word of the mind of humanity, but the nations of Asia are not bound so to accept it, and will do better, taking over in their turn whatever new knowledge or just ideas Europe has to offer, to assimilate them to their own knowledge and culture, their own native temperament and spirit ...
... taken by the hostile argument is that modern, that is to say, European civilisation is the thing that we have to acquire and fit ourselves for, so only can we live and prosper and it is this that our education must do for us. The idea of national education challenges the sufficiency of this assumption. Europe built up her ancient culture on a foundation largely taken from the East, from Egypt, Chaldea... independence in a country like our own which is peculiarly circumstanced not only by the clash of the Asiatic and the European or occidental consciousness and the very different civilisations they have created and the enforced meeting of the English and the Indian mind and culture, but by a political subjection which has left the decisive shaping and supreme control of education in the hands of foreigners... Latin, the Celtic and Slav races. lt is the civilisation so created that has long offered itself as the last and imperative word of the mind of humanity, but the nations of Asia are not bound so to accept it, and will do better, taking over in their turn whatever new knowledge or just ideas Europe has to offer, to assimilate them to their own knowledge and culture, their own native temperament and spirit ...
... strengthen its expansion. It readily refuses the name of culture to those civilisations or periods, however noble their aim or even however beautiful in itself their order, which have not allowed an intelligent freedom of development. On the other hand, we are tempted to give the name of a full culture to all those periods and civilisations, whatever their defects, which have encouraged a freely... existence, we say that that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its abundant or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the realisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant and teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the works of... narrow, tepid and conventional religiosity which was so marked an element in nineteenth-century England; that was not an ethical culture, but simply a local variation of the general type of bourgeois respectability you will find everywhere at a certain stage of civilisation,—it was Philistinism pure and simple. Nor should we take as an instance of the aesthetic any merely Bohemian society or such examples ...
... the Greek civilisation bequeathed to the West. It seems justified to consider humanism (plus political democracy) and individualism as the foundations of “Europe”, of the common culture which developed on the most western peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, spread to the Americas, and is now so influential worldwide. In a series of interviews Alison Browning had in 1989 with prominent European intellectuals... these fundamentals were referred to time and again: “Europe equals humanism” (Eugene Ionesco); Europe stands for “a more human being” (Peter Härtling); Europe is “the land of the human … the country of origin of the individual” (Denis de Rougemont). 12 Christianity Another essential element that contributed to the building of European culture was Christianity. “Greece with its rational bent... be suggested by considering the intrinsic value of the Eastern and Western civilisations, and their eventual reciprocality. The Western Way – Greece The difference between East and West is essentially a difference of culture. Seen in this way, the “West” means the various aspects and developments of the European culture, generally thought to have originated in the city-states of ancient Greece ...
... will not move us to change our view-point for theirs; but we can get fresh light from a study of this kind and help our self-introspection. But there are different ways of seeing a foreign civilisation and culture. There is the eye of sympathy and intuition and a close appreciative self-identification: that gives us work like Sister Nivedita's Web of Indian Life or Mr. Fielding's book on Burma or... then for a well-informed outside view or even an instructive adverse criticism of Indian civilisation that I have turned to Mr. William Archer. In the end it is only those who possess a culture who can judge the intrinsic value of its productions, because they alone can enter entirely into its spirit. To the foreign critic we can only go for help in forming a comparative judgment,—which too is ind... that either he must have used a very different method in dealing with European literature or else it is very easy to get a reputation of this kind in England. An ill-informed misrepresentation of facts, a light-hearted temerity of judgment on things he has not cared to study constitute this critic's title to write on Indian culture and dismiss it authoritatively as a mass of barbarism. It is not then ...
... Greece and India were no exceptions to the general high culture of Asia and the Mediterranean races. If the Vedic Indians do not get the benefit Page 25 of this revised knowledge, it is due to the survival of the theory with which European erudition started, that they belonged to the so-called Aryan race and were on the same level of culture with the early Aryan Greeks, Celts, Germans as they... in entire harmony with the scientific theories of early human culture and of the recent emergence from the mere savage which were in vogue throughout the nineteenth century and are even now dominant. But the increase of our knowledge has considerably shaken this first and too hasty generalisation. We now know that remarkable civilisations existed in China, Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria many thousands of years... conception of and relations with the gods they worshipped, distinguish the Aryan type from the more sumptuous and materialistic Egypto Chaldean civilisation and its solemn and occult religions. But those characteristics are not inconsistent with a high internal culture. On the contrary, indications of a great spiritual tradition meet us at many points and negate the ordinary theory. The old Celtic races certainly ...
... which ought to disappear as soon as possible, and in embracing English speech, English institutions, English ideas lay their sole road to civilisation, culture and prosperity. The British domination in India was justified by the priceless gift of British civilisation and British ideals, to say nothing of the one and only true religion, Christianity, to a heathen, orientally benighted and semi-barbarous... clearly enough that the long suppression of the Celtic spirit and Celtic culture, superior in spirituality if inferior in certain practical directions to the Latin and Teutonic, was a loss not only to the Celtic peoples, but to the world. India has vehemently rejected the pretensions to superiority of British civilisation, culture and religion, while still admitting, not so much the British, as the modern... the psychological question of the advantage to the soul of humanity, to its culture, to its intellectual, moral, aesthetic, spiritual growth. At present, the first great need of the psychological life of humanity is the growth towards a greater unity; but its need is that of a living unity, not in the externals of civilisation, in dress, manners, habits of life, details of political, social and economic ...
... Defence of Indian Page 448 Culture (1918-1921). This was undertaken as a reply to a considerable work by Mr. William Archer criticising and attacking Indian civilisation and culture in all its domains: at that time this critic's views were typical of a very general attitude of the European mind towards the Indian civilisation and its special character, forms and creations and... Indian Culture (see below) as volume 14 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (de luxe and popular editions). Indian Culture and External Influence . This essay, published in March 1919, was written in answer to a comment in the Bengali journal Narayan on Sri Aurobindo's series, The Renaissance in India . In 1953 the essay was included in The Foundations of Indian Culture as an... dealing in more detail with William Archer's criticisms of Indian culture, taken to represent a typical Western attitude at that time. Six essays were published under the title "A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture" between February and July 1919. In the August 1919 issue of the Arya the title "A Defence of Indian Culture" appeared for the first time with this note: "As these articles have ...
... 9 He evaluates the two cultures and their achievements in following terms : " From the view of evolutionary future European and Indian Civilisations at their best have only been half achievements, infant dawns pointing to the mature sunlight that is to come"10. He can forecast a severe judgment of the future against the present : " The coming ages may look on Europe and Asia of today much as... spiritual motive which India represents prevail on Europe and create there new forms congenial to the West, or will European rationalism and commercialism put an end ever to the Indian type of culture?"26 " Creative assimilation is needed, a mastering and helpful assimilation _______________________________ 25 The Foundations of Indian Culture, P. 25 26 Ibid P. 15. Page 49 ... of dominant European ideas and motives, the temptations of the political needs of the hour, the velocity of rapid inevitable change will leave no time for the growth of sound thought and spiritual reflection and may strain to bursting-point the old Indian cultural and social system, and shatter this ancient civilisation. "24 " There is need to emphasise this aspect of our culture, for, even though ...
... greater spiritual consciousness that is the innermost sense of Indian culture. It is this that constitutes the much-talked-of Indian spirituality. It is evidently very remote from the dominant European idea; it is different even from the form given by Europe to the Christian conception of life. But it does not mean at all that Indian culture concedes no reality to life, follows no material or vital aims and... subsist in its peninsular seclusion, but must perish in the keen and arduous air of the modern struggle of life. No anti-vital culture can survive. A too intellectual or too ethereal civilisation void of strong vital stimulus and motive must languish for want of sap and blood. A culture to be permanently and completely serviceable to man must give him something more than some kind of rare transcendental uprush... history of the civilisation makes a drab, effete, melancholy picture. There is no power of life in this religion and this Page 152 philosophy, there is no breath of life in this history, there is no colour of life in this art and poetry; that is the blank result of Indian culture. Whoever has seen at first hand and felt the literature, followed the history, studied the civilisation of India, ...
... an old culture transformed, not an affiliation of a new-born civilisation to one that is old and dead, but a true rebirth, a renascence. The first step was the reception of the European contact, a radical reconsideration of many of the prominent elements and some revolutionary denial of the very principles of the old culture. The second was a reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European influence... spirit and life. Intensely patriotic in motive, they were yet denationalised in their mental attitude. They admitted practically, if not in set opinion, the occidental view of our past culture as only a half-civilisation and their governing ideals were borrowed from the West or at least centrally inspired by the purely Western spirit and type of their education. From mediaeval India they drew away in... of the European form. Whatever value for the future there may be in the things they grasped at with this eager conviction, their method was, as we now recognise, a false method,—an anglicised India is a thing we can no longer view as either possible or desirable,—and it could only, if pursued to the end, have made us painful copyists, clumsy followers always stumbling in the wake of European evolution ...
... spirituality (17). Sri Aurobindo then identifies three "impulses" that arise from the "impact of European life and culture" (18). In the second essay, he rephrases them. The Western impact reawakened "a free activity of the intellect"; "it threw definitely the ferment of modern ideas into the old culture"; and "it made us turn our look upon all that our past contains with new eyes" (25-26). These are... outline the three phases of the renaissance: The first step was the reception of the European contact, a radical reconsideration of many of the prominent elements and some revolutionary denial of the very principles of the old culture. The second was a reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European influence, sometimes with a total denial of what it offered and a stressing both of the essential... renaissance, and Europe's contact with that renaissance through the Crusades and their aftermath. But Schawb argues that there was another renaissance, which hasn't been properly assessed and acknowledged. This he calls the "Oriental Renaissance." The impact on Europe of the discovery of the "Orient" was stupendous. In India, Sir William Jones discovered the common origin of the Indo-European languages. ...
... Veda, Vedanta & Yoga. We need not understand by an advanced civilisation a culture or a society at all resembling what our modern notions conceive to be the only model of a civilised society—the modern European; neither need or indeed can we suppose it to have been at all on the model of the modern Hindu. It is probable that this ancient culture had none of those material conveniences on which we vaunt... Government may have been surprisingly different from our own and yet not inconsistent with civilisation; there may have been a simple communism without over-government, large armies or wars of aggression, or even an entire absence of government, a human freedom & natural coordination such as Tolstoy & other European idealists have seen again in their dreams,—for it is at least conceivable that, given certain... precise scientific value of these philological conclusions, the view of this modern naturalistic interpretation of which so much is made. We are too apt in India to take the European sciences at their own valuation. The Europeans themselves are often more sceptical. In ethnology the evidence of philology is increasingly disregarded. The ethnologists tend to disregard altogether, for example, the philological ...
... record appears in other ancient cultures, but nobody Page 249 suggests that Egypt, Assyria or Persia have to be reconstructed for us by the archaeologists for an analogous reason. The genius of Greece developed the art of history, though only in the later period of her activity, and Europe has cherished and preserved the art; India and other ancient civilisations did not arrive at it or neglected... history. And it must be remembered that by virtue of its culture and its system the whole nation shared in the common life. In all countries in the past the mass has indeed lived with a less active and vivid force than the few,—sometimes with the mere elements of life, not with even any beginning of finished richness,—nor has modern civilisation yet got rid of this disparity, though it has opened the... people as a result of their culture is then a myth. The circumstances which have given some colour to it in later times will be noted in their proper place; but they are a feature of the decline and even then must be taken with considerable qualification, and the much longer history of its past greatness tells quite another story. That history has not been recorded in the European fashion; for the art of ...
... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Polity The Renaissance in India XXI Indian Polity - 1 I have spoken hitherto of the greatness of Indian civilisation in the things most important to human culture, those activities that raise man to his noblest potentialities as a mental, a spiritual, religious, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic... regard on the actual achievement of the culture. There is revealed not only a great civilisation, but one of the half dozen greatest of which we have a still existing record. But there are many who would admit the greatness of the achievement of India in the things of the mind and the spirit, but would still point out that she has failed in life, her culture has not resulted in a strong, successful... democracy characteristic of the bourgeois or Vaishya period of the cycle of European progress. But the time is passing when the uncritical praise of these things as the ideal state and the last word of social and political progress was fashionable, their defects are now visible and the greatness of an oriental civilisation need not be judged by the standard of these Western developments. Indian scholars ...
... especially distinguish the normal European mind,—for we must leave aside some great souls and some great thinkers or some moments or epochs of abnormal religiosity and look at the dominant strain. Its two significant characters are the cult of the inquiring, defining, effective, practical reason and the cult of life. The great high tides of European civilisation, Greek culture, the Roman world before Constantine... single culture; there is a need of divergent lines of advance until we can raise our heads into that infinity of the spirit in which there is a light broad enough to draw together and reconcile all highest ways of thinking, feeling and living. That is a truth which the violent Indian assailant of a materialistic Europe or the contemptuous enemy or cold disparager of Asiatic or Indian culture agree to... has been neither this predominance of reason and the life-cult nor any incompatibility of these two powers with the religious spirit. The great ages of Asia, the strong culminations of her civilisation and culture,—in India the high Vedic beginning, the grand spiritual stir of the Upanishads, the wide flood of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sankhya, the Puranic and Tantric religions, the flowering of Vaishnavism ...
... unspiritual, engrossed by the needs and desires of his physical being. If a civilisation has not any of these aims, it can hardly at all be said to have a culture and certainly in no sense a great and noble culture 2 . * The concept of Progress in no less subject to variations, if not confusion, than that of Culture. Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork, instead of bare fingers... existence, we say that that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its abundant or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the realisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant and teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the works of... instead of enjoying life, sacrifice it so that the weapon to be made of his bone could destroy the elements hostile to civilisation? That of course is beyond the scope of the present treatment of the subject. It is important to examine the relationship between Civilisation and Culture. Here is a poignant statement on the issue by Sri Aurobindo: Even when a nation or an age has developed ...
... influences of the sceptical and materialistic civilisation of the West. Krishna Dhan took his M.D. from the Aberdeen University and returned to India in 1871. But he returned a changed man. He was completely anglicised. His outlook and manners had undergone a sea-change. He loved everything English, and felt a great admiration for the culture and civilisation of the West - its material glamour, its vigorous... Page 2 Rishi Rajnarayan Bose who, to quote the Karmayogin, ¹ "represented the high water-mark of the composite culture of the country - Vedantic, Islamic and European." He was a saintly man of high attainments, synthesising in himself the cultures of both the East and the West, and widely known in Bengal as a leader of the Adi Brahmo Samaj and as "the grandfather of Indian ... realisation. But a phenomenal advance of technology, geared to industrialism and commercial greed, was posing a menace to the higher values of human culture. Clouds were gathering in the sky foreboding a disruption of the very bases of materialistic civilisation. Deep down in the heart of suffering humanity, there was a prayer for a change, for the birth of a new age, a new world-order. Sri Aurobindo ...
... them have this especial characteristic that theirs is not a land-locked civilisation, that is to say, they were not peoples wedded to their own land, a mother-country of their own, theirs was a peripatetic genius which went abroad and sought to make their own or make themselves over to and enter into other countries and other cultures. Perhaps this is their way of securing a long life. The reason... avatar. One usually begins Indian history with the Dravido-Aryan civilisation which is taken as the basic foundation, the general layout of the whole structure. The first shock or blow the edifice received was from the Greeks and then the Huns and Scythians – the Tartars– something that struck at the most essential element of Indian culture and character. Psychologically the new leaven was brought in and... Greece is dead, Augustan Rome is gone, but the mind of light that Greece brought into play, the cast of social character that Rome established are among the permanent acquisitions of human culture and civilisation. They have gone into the making of the warp and woof of the standard human life today. Apart, however, from this general survival, could there be a reappearance of the very soul of a nation ...
... moment that the European wave swept over India. The first effect of this entry of a new and quite opposite civilisation was the destruction of much that had no longer the Page 14 power to live, the deliquescence of much else, a tendency to the devitalisation of the rest. A new activity came in, but this was at first crudely and confusedly imitative of the foreign culture. It was a crucial... History shows us how disastrous this situation can be to nations and civilisations. But fortunately the energy of life was there, sleeping only for a moment, not dead, and, given that energy, the evil carried within itself its own cure. For whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude impact of European life and culture has caused, it gave three needed impulses. It revived the dormant intellectual... according to the Indian idea of the cycles a new age has to start. It was that moment and the pressure of a superimposed European culture which followed it that made the reawakening necessary. We have practically to take three facts into consideration, the great past of Indian culture and life with the moment of inadaptive torpor into which it had lapsed, the first period of the Western contact in which ...
... long-lived, Europe brief and ephemeral. Asia is in everything hugely-mapped, immense and grandiose in its motions, and its life-periods are measured accordingly. Europe lives by centuries, Asia by millenniums. Europe is parcelled out in nations, Asia in civilisations. The whole of Europe forms only one civilisation with a common, derived and largely second-hand culture; Asia supports three civilisations, each... each of them original and of the soil. Everything in Europe is small, rapid and short-lived; she has not the secret of immortality. Greece, the chief source of her civilisation, matured in two or three centuries, flourished for another two, and two more were sufficient for her decline and death. How few in years are the modern European nations, yet Spain is already dead, Austria death-stricken and suffering... find to their amazement and dismay that she is rather emerging into her age of robust and perfect manhood. It is true that she reached ages ago heights of science, philosophy, civilisation which Europe is now toilfully trying to reach and that afterwards there was a slackening down, loss and disturbance from which she is only now recovering, but there was no decay or Page 574 decline. It was ...
... its greatness. One might describe Greek or Roman civilisation from this outlook and miss little that was of importance; but Indian civilisation was not only a great cultural system, but an immense religious effort of the human spirit. The whole root of difference between Indian and European culture springs from the spiritual aim of Indian civilisation. It is the turn which this aim imposes on all the... behind all its thousand forms, its one common essence. If there were nothing else to be said in favour of the spiritual genius of the Indian people or the claim of Indian civilisation to stand in the front rank as a spiritual culture, it would be sufficiently substantiated by this single fact that not only was this greatest and widest spiritual truth seen in India with the boldest largeness, felt and... its inevitable fruit, a great, ancient and still living spiritual culture. It is this absolute freedom of thought and experience and this provision of a framework sufficiently flexible and various to ensure liberty and yet sufficiently sure and firm to be the means of a stable and powerful evolution that have given to Indian civilisation this wonderful and seemingly eternal religion with its marvellous ...
... if it expends itself slowly, conservatively, at a leisurely pace, it can create a civilisation and culture which will last for centuries or even for one or more thousands of years; but that too will exhaust itself in time; if it throws itself into a brilliant or rapid movement as in ancient Greece or in modern Europe a few centuries are likely to see the end of this flaming up as of a new star. Afterwards... existence. A new civilisation no longer vitalistic or mainly political and economic, but intellectual, cultural, idealistic, taking up the ancient ideal of man, the perfected mental being in an ennobled life and sound body, a great expansion of human mind and intellect, a mankind more mentally alive, even a human race grown capable of culture and not only of a greater external civilisation, thus fulfilling... as happened in the Graeco-Roman world or in China or elsewhere where the mental intellect became the predominant power of life. If this arrest were avoided either by the multiplication of different cultures—different peoples acting upon each other but escaping the tendency to replication and standardisation which is the tendency of the human collective mind or by a free progressiveness of the human ...
... and commerce, but by carrying her own civilisation, purified of the weaknesses that have overtaken it, to a much higher and mightier fulfilment than any that it has reached in the past. Our mission is to outdistance, lead and instruct Europe, not merely to imitate and learn from her. Dr. Coomaraswamy speaks of art, but it is certain that a man of his wide culture would not Page 244 exclude... spirit of the Vedanta might be released and, by absorbing all that is needed of the aristocratic and theocratic culture, create for the Indian race a new and Page 247 powerful political and social organisation. We have to learn and use the democratic principle and methods of Europe, in order that hereafter we may build up something more suited to our past and to the future of humanity. We... and tastes by a grossly commercial, materialistic and insufficient European education is a fact on which the young Nationalism has always insisted. The practical destruction of our artistic perceptions and the plastic skill and fineness of eye and hand which once gave our productions pre-eminence, distinction and mastery of the European markets, is also a thing accomplished. Most vital of all, the spiritual ...
... Church and by the sudden flooding of Europe with a German barbarism whose temperament in its merits no less than in its defects was the very antitype both of the Christian spirit and the Graeco-Roman intellect. The Islamic invasion of Spain and the southern coast of the Mediterranean—curious as the sole noteworthy example of Asiatic culture using the European method of material and political irruption... influences in both Europe and America. On the other hand, there have been two reactions of Europe upon Asia; first, the invasion of Alexander with his aggressive Hellenism which for a time held Western Asia, created echoes and reactions in India and returned through Islamic culture upon mediaeval Europe; secondly, the modern onslaught of commercial, political, scientific Europe upon the moral, artistic... ages of the present cycle of civilisation the movement has been almost entirely centred in the twin continents of Asia and Europe. And there it has been often seen that when Asia was moving through the light, Europe was passing through one of her epochs of obscurity and on the other hand the nights of Asia's repose or stagnation have corresponded with the days of Europe's mental vigour and vital activity ...
... existence a great deal of what is strongest and most potential of fruitful consequences in recent European thinking already turns with a growing impetus. This turn may be a relapse to "barbarism" or it may be the high natural outcome of her own increasing and ripened culture; that is a question for Europe to decide. But Page 214 always to India this ideal inspiration or rather this spiritual... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Spirituality and Life The Renaissance in India IX Indian Spirituality and Life - 3 It is essential, if we are to get a right view of Indian civilisation or of any civilisation, to keep to the central, living, governing things and not to be led away by the confusion of accidents and details... details. This is a precaution which the critics of our culture steadily refuse to take. A civilisation, a culture must be looked at first in its initiating, supporting, durable central motives, in its heart of abiding principle; otherwise we shall be likely to find ourselves, like these critics, in a maze without a clue and we shall stumble about among false and partial conclusions and miss entirely the ...
... necessity or the hope of some great and palpable gain that will compensate the immediate and visible loss. There is, too, the claim of Europe, not yet renounced, to hold the rest of the world in the interests of civilisation, by which is meant European civilisation, and to insist upon its acceptance as a condition for the admission of Asiatic races to any kind of equality or freedom. This claim which... possible issue,—that the liberal sentiments and principles at first aroused by the war in Europe should become settled and permanent forces of action and extend themselves to the dealings of European nations with their non-European dependencies. In other words, it must become a settled political principle with European nations to change the character of their imperialism and convert their empires as soon... rationally and conveniently arrange itself upon the basis of a European grouping, an Asiatic grouping, an American grouping, with two or three sub-groups in America, Latin and English-speaking, three in Asia, the Mongolian, Indian and West-Asian, with Moslem North Africa perhaps as a natural annexe to the third of these, four in Europe, the Latin, Slavonic, Teutonic and Anglo-Celtic, the latter with ...
... centuries has it reached such vast and disconcerting proportions as to swallow all Europe's other motives and velleities and to appear as the only form of her life-expression. But in the earlier centuries, those that preceded the New Enlightenment, Europe had a different conception of culture and civilisation, she possessed almost another soul. The long period that is known as the mediaeval... The other aspect of European Culture Two cultures, one of Europe and the other of Asia, are now contending with each other to have sway over humanity; and it has been for some time past a moot problem with the best representatives of either, whether a synthesis, at least a reconciliation of the two is possible or not. Europe's distinctive trait, it has also been pointed... without influence in shaping the more secret undercurrents of Europe's creative and formative genius. The composite culture which they grew and developed had undisputed empire over Europe for some ten or twelve centuries; and it was nothing, if not at heart a spiritual and religious and other-worldly culture. Herein lay Europe's soul; and to it turned often and anon the gaze of those who ...
... right attainment the necessity of the next step in the evolution of the race. The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 336-38 Page 270 (d) Barbarism, Civilisation, Culture The time is passing away, permanently — let us hope — for. this cycle of civilisation, when the entire identification of the self with the body and the physical life was possible for the general... existence, we say that that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its abundant or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the realisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant and teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the works... and moral culture. It evolves the vital side of human life and creates an ever-growing system of economic efficiency and vital enjoyment, and this system becomes more and more rich, cumbrous and complex as civilisation develops. Depressing by its mental and vital overgrowth the natural vigour of the physical and animal man, it tries to set the balance right by systems of physical culture, a cumbrous ...
... Mother. Within the gross body is a subtler body, the thoughts, the literature, the philosophy, the mental and emotional activities, the sum of hopes, pleasures, aspirations, fulfilments, the civilisation and culture, which make up the sukshma sharir of the nation. This is as much a part of the Mother's life as the outward existence which is visible to the physical eyes. This subtle life of the nation... Narayan, One in the Many of whom we are all the children. When, therefore, we speak of a nation, we mean the separate life of the millions who people the country, but we mean also a separate culture and civilisation, a peculiar national temperament which has become too deeply rooted to be altered and in all these we discover a manifestation of God in national life which is living, sacred and adorable... the nation is the country, so much land containing so many millions of men who speak one speech and live one political life owing allegiance to a single governing power of its own choosing. When the European wishes to feel a living emotion for his country, he personifies the land he lives in, tries to feel that a heart beats in the brute earth and worships a vague abstraction of his own intellect. The ...
... and in spite of the only half-illumined spiritual wave which swept over Europe from Asia in an ill-understood Christianity, the whole real trend of Western civilisation has been intellectual, rational, secular and even materialistic, and it keeps this character to the present day. Its general aim has been a strong or a fine culture of the vital and physical man by the power of an intellectualised ethics... ethical and social culture. But left in Europe to its own resources, combated rather than helped by obscure religious emotion and dogma, here it was guided, uplifted and more and more penetrated and suffused by a great saving power of spirituality and a vast stimulating and tolerant light of wisdom from a highest ether of knowledge. The second or post-Vedic age of Indian civilisation was distinguished... created the whole difference between the evolution of Indian civilisation and the quite different curve of other cultures. For a time had come when the original Vedic symbols must lose their significance and pass into an obscurity that became impenetrable, as did the inner teaching of the Mysteries in other countries. The old poise of culture between two extremes with a bridge of religious cult and ...
... WAS AT THIS MOMENT that the European wave swept over India. The first effect of this entry of a new and quite opposite civilisation was the destruction of much that had no longer the power to live, the deliquescence of much else, a tendency to the devitalisation of the rest. A new activity came in, but this was at first crudely and confusedly imitative of the foreign culture. It was a crucial moment and... us how disastrous this situation can be to nations and civilisations. But fortunately the energy of life Page 49 was there, sleeping only for a moment, not dead, and, given that energy, the evil carried within itself its own cure. For whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude impact of European life and culture has caused, it gave three needed impulses. It revived... failure of the great endeavour which is the whole meaning of Indian culture, a falling short in the progress towards the perfect spiritualisation of the mind and the life. The beginnings were superlative, the developments very great, but at a certain point where progress, adaptation, a new flowering should have come in, the old civilisation stopped short, partly drew back, partly lost its way. The essential ...
... corresponds best to the European idea of the epic; yet the intellectualism of even the Mahabharat, its preference of mind-issues to physical and emotional collisions and catastrophes, its continual suffusion of these when they occur with mind and ideality, the civilisation, depth and lack of mere sensational turbulence, in one word the Aryan cast of its characters, are irritating to European scholars. Thus... shall go away discontented; for these also are sublimities which belong to cruder civilisations and more barbarous national types; in worst crimes & deepest suffering as well as in happiness & virtue, the Aryan was more civilized & temperate, less crudely enormous than the hard, earthy & material African peoples whom in Europe he only half moralised. If he seeks a Père Goriot or a Madame Bovary, he will... exceptionally favourable arena for the exercise of its ingenuity; for here there is no great body of general culture and well-informed lay opinion to check the extravagances to which a specialised knowledge is always prone. Undaunted therefore by the utter silence of history on the question, European scholars have set about filling up the void with theories which we are asked or rather bidden to accept ...
... special characteristic and mental turn that has set its pervading impress upon their culture and civilisation, upon their creations ~ and activities; that which distinguishes them is a fine, clear and subtle, rational, logical, artistic and literary mind. France, it has often been said, is the head of modern Europe. The Indians are not in the same way a predominantly intellectual race, in spite of the... consciousness and in the being. Keeping this difference in view, we may at once point out that Europe, when she is non-materialist, is primarily religious and only secondarily spiritual, but India is always primarily spiritual and only secondarily religious. The vein of real spirituality in European culture runs underground and follows narrow and circuitous by-paths; rarely does it appear on the top... and high above all lesser tones and wields a power vivid and manifest. We could say in terms of modern Biology that spirituality tends to be a recessive character in European culture, while in India, it is dominant. But when we say that India is spiritual, we do not mean that all or most Indians, or even a very large minority among them, are adepts in spirituality, or that the attachment to life ...
... movements. And a civilisation must be judged by the manner in which all its principles, ideas, forms, ways of living work to bring that harmony out, manage its rhythmic play and secure its continuance or the development of its motives. A civilisation in pursuit of this aim may be predominantly material like modern European culture, predominantly mental and intellectual like the old Graeco-Roman or... or predominantly spiritual like the still persistent culture of India. 3 The present contrast, then, is between the Western science-based materialist civilisation and India's "still persistent" spiritual culture. Before we venture to decide which is the better of the two, we should begin by acknowledging their honourable separative existence without summarily damning one as barbarous and extolling... thought that the time had come to ask the right questions about culture and to formulate answers in a spirit of "aggressive defence": This question of Indian civilisation, once it has raised this greater issue, shifts from its narrow meaning and disappears into a much larger problem. Does the future of humanity lie in a culture founded solely upon reason and science?... Or is not the truth ...
... British Empire or a dependent adjunct of European civilisation. That is a future which we do not think it worth making any sacrifice to accomplish. We believe on the other hand that India is destined to work out her own independent life and civilisation, to stand in the forefront of the world and solve the political, social, economical and moral problems which Europe has failed to solve, yet the pursuit... politics, literature, art, jurisprudence, science, thought, everything that was and is ours, so that we may be able to say to ourselves and our nation, 'This is our dharma .' We shall review European civilisation entirely from the standpoint of Indian thought and knowledge and seek to throw off from us the dominating stamp of the Occident; what we have to take from the West we shall take as Indians.... adopted Western motives and methods, ignored the spirit, history and destiny of our race and thought that by taking over Page 24 European education, European machinery, European organisation and equipment we should reproduce in ourselves European prosperity, energy and progress. We of the twentieth century reject the aims, ideals and methods of the Anglicised nineteenth precisely because ...
... tradition. But the hoary past of their source is just being revealed. Greece was considered to be the mainspring of European culture and civilisation. But that a still more civilised race had inhabited the neighbouring island of Crete can by no means be denied now. The older civilisations of Atlantis, Sumeria, Akad, Aztec, Maya and Toltec no longer appear to be mere poetical imaginations. We are won... Page 82 prehistoric achievements. We can hardly assert that we possess a culture and civilisation superior to theirs. According to the Biblical statement the world came into existence only four thousand years ago. This statement had left its stamp unawares on the mind of the European savants. At present, not to speak of the age of the world or of the advent of man, the age of civilised... An Introduction to the Vedas (I) WHAT is it that we call Veda? It is already known to us that the Vedas are the perennial fount of Indian culture and education, the foundation of Hinduism and the basis of the Aryan civilisation. He who defies Veda is an atheist, a non-Hindu, an untouchable and a non-Aryan. All the various religious systems and scriptures of the Hindus look upon the ...
... special characteristic and mental turn that has set its pervading impress upon their culture and civilisation, upon their creations and activities; that which distinguishes them is a fine, clear and subtle, rational, logical, artistic and literary mind. France, it has often been said, is the head of modern Europe. The Indians are not in the same way a predominantly intellectual race, in spite of the... and in the being. Keeping this difference in view, we may at once point out that Europe, when she is non-materialist, is primarily religious and only secondarily spiritual, but India is always primarily spiritual and only secondarily religious. The vein of real spirituality in European culture runs underground and follows narrow and circuitous by-paths; rarely does it appear on the top... god-fearing and addicted to religious rite and ceremony. And Europe too, when she entered on a new cycle of life and began to reconstruct herself after the ruin of the Græco-Latin culture, started with the religion of the Christ and experimented with it during a long period of Page 154 time. But that is what was – Troja fuit. Europe has outgrown her nonage and for a century and a half, ...
... British Empire or a dependent adjunct of European civilisation. That is a future which we do not think it worth making any sacrifice to accomplish. We believe on the other hand that India is destined to work out her own independent life and civilisation, to stand in the forefront of the world and solve the political, social, economical and moral problems which Europe has failed to solve, yet the pursuit... politics, literature, art, jurisprudence, science, thought, everything that was and is ours, so that we may be able to say to ourselves and our nation, 'This is our dharma .' We shall review European civilisation entirely from the standpoint of Indian thought and knowledge and seek to throw off from us the dominating stamp of the Occident; what we have to take from the West we shall take as Indians.... it adopted Western motives and methods, ignored the spirit, history and destiny of our race and thought that by taking over Page 4 European education, European machinery, European organisation and equipment we should reproduce in ourselves European prosperity, energy and progress. We of the twentieth century reject the aims, ideals and methods of the Anglicised nineteenth precisely because ...
... Nothing is our own, nothing native to our intelligence, all is derived. As little have we understood the new knowledge; we have only understood what the Europeans want us to think about themselves and their modern civilisation. Our English culture—if culture it can be called—has increased tenfold the evil of our dependence instead of remedying it. More even than the other two processes successful selection... version ] We have had recently in India a great abundance of speculations on the real causes of that gradual decline and final arrest which Indian civilisation no less than European suffered during the Middle Ages. The arrest was neither so sudden as in Europe nor so complete; but its effect on our nation, like the undermining activity of a slow poison, was all the more profoundly destructive, pervasive... such a process not for India, but for all humanity has been recognised by leading European thinkers. It was what Carlyle meant when he spoke of swallowing all formulas. It was the process by which Goethe helped to reinvigorate European thinking. But in Europe the stream is running dry before it has reached its sea. Europe has for some time ceased to produce original thinkers, though it still produces ...
... liberties as in the second of the three historical stages of national formation in Europe. This process would end, if entirely successful, in a centralised world-government which would impose its uniform rule and law, uniform administration, uniform economic and educational system, one culture, one social principle, one civilisation, perhaps even one language and one religion on all mankind. Centralised, it... towards uniformity which increases as civilisation progresses. The Turkish movement began with the ideal of toleration for all the heterogeneous elements—races, languages, religions, cultures—of the ramshackle Turkish empire, but inevitably the dominant Young Turk element was carried away by the instinct for establishing, even by coercion, a uniform Ottoman culture and Ottoman nationality. 1 Belgium... centre of national activities. The traditional policy of the United States, its pacificism, its anti-militarism, its aversion to entanglement in European complications or any close touch with the politics of Europe, its jealousy of interference by the European Powers in American affairs in spite of their possession of colonies and interests in the Western hemisphere, are largely due to the instinct that ...
... long-lived, Europe brief, ephemeral. Asia is in everything hugely mapped, immense and grandiose in its motions, and its life-periods are measured accordingly. Europe lives by centuries, Asia by millenniums. Europe is parcelled out in nations, Asia in civilisations. The whole of Europe forms only one civilisation with a common, derived and largely second-hand culture; Asia supports three civilisations, each... of its growth. India must remain India if she is to fulfil her destiny. Nor will Europe profit by grafting her civilisation on India, for if India, who is the distinct physician of Europe's maladies, herself falls into the clutches of the disease, the disease will remain uncured and un curable and European civilisation will perish as it perished when Rome declined, first by dry rot within itself and... its material civilisation, a deep-seated moral disease is at work eating into the vitals of European society of which a thousand symptoms strike the eye If India follows in the footsteps of Europe, accepts her political ideals, social system, economic principles, she will be overcome with the same maladies. Such a consummation is neither for the good of India nor for the good of Europe. If India becomes ...
... other race in the world, and perhaps there is no Page 1086 race in the world whose temperament, culture and ideals are so foreign to her own as those of the practical, hard-headed, Pharisaic, shop-keeping Anglo-Saxon. The culture of the Anglo-Saxon is the very antipodes of Indian culture. The temper of the Anglo-Saxon is the very reverse of the Indian temper. His ideals are of the earth, earthy... world needs India and needs her free. The work she has to do now is to organize life in the terms of Vedanta, and that is a work she cannot do while overshadowed by a foreign power and a foreign civilisation. She cannot do it without taking the management of her own life into her own hands. She must live her own life and not the life of a part or subordinate in a foreign Empire. All political ideals... introduce first in the colonies because the mother country is still too much shackled by the past, is the most sordid possible, centred on material aims and void of generous idealism. In such a civilisation, as part of such an Empire, India can have no future. If she is to model herself on the Anglo-Saxon type she must first kill everything in her which is her own. If she is to be a province of the ...
... fine culture; for if it has to some extent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at first sight to have elevated or strengthened it by this large accession of the half-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more directly by the reason and intelligent will of her best minds than before. Commercialism is still the heart of modern civilisation; a sensational... ideas of culture and the mental life, and his conflicting notions about them follow certain definite lines determined by the divisions of his nature and shaped into a general system of curves by his many attempts to arrive either at an exclusive standard or an integral harmony. We have first the distinction between civilisation and barbarism. In its ordinary, popular sense civilisation means the... different types of civilisation to each other,—the one which is for a time dominant and physically successful has naturally the loudest and most self-confident say in the matter. Formerly men were more straightforward and simpleminded and frankly expressed their standpoint by stigmatising all peoples different in general culture from themselves as barbarians or Mlechchhas. The word civilisation so used comes ...
... spiritual motive which India represents prevail on Europe and create there new forms congenial to the West, or will European rationalism and commercialism put an end for ever to the Indian type of culture? 70 The old world that is shaken outwardly in its bases and already crumbling in some of its parts, is the economical and materialistic civilisation which mankind has been forming for the last few... Nothing is our own, nothing native to our intelligence, all is derived. As little have we understood the new knowledge; we have only understood what the Europeans want us to think about themselves and their modern civilisation. Our English culture—if culture it can be called—has increased tenfold the evil of our dependence instead of remedying it. How shall we recover our lost intellectual freedom and... society—the modern European; neither need or indeed can we suppose it to have been at all on the model of the modern Hindu. It is probable that this ancient culture had none of those material conveniences on which we vaunt ourselves,—but it may have had others of a higher, possibly even a more potent kind. I believe the Vedas to hold a sense which neither mediaeval India nor modern Europe has grasped ...
... for the readmission of another and more ancient synthesis. For if once we allow the existence of prehistoric civilisations older, it would seem, than the Egyptian,—such as may be argued from the deep-buried cities of Asia,—and the presence in an unknown antiquity of great national cultures where now the savage or the semi-savage swarm uncreative and unreflecting,—such as may be argued from the ruins... the ravages of Moor and Vandal or even the fate which overtook for almost a millennium the magnificent structure of Graeco-Roman culture and threatened even to blot out its remnants and ruins,—the question then arises, what was the nature of these forgotten civilisations and how was the relapse to barbarism often of an extreme form, so completely effected. These gigantic spaces of time, this worldwide... of more thoughtful generalisations. The time-limit allowed for the growth of civilisation is still impossibly short and in consequence an air of unreality hangs over the application of the evolutionary idea to our human development. Nor is this essential objection cured by any evidence of the modernity of human civilisation. Its great antiquity is denied merely on the absence [of] affirmative data; ...
... found on cultivated ground indicates that she is a symbol of agriculture; (3) the Kshatriyas were really the ones responsible for the growth of culture and civilisation while the Brahmins were only its preservers. SRI AUROBINDO: All these are old European ideas. He is not even being original. They are as old as the hills. ... entire support to the British in their struggle. It is not only a war for self-defence and the defence of nations threatened with world domination by Hitler, but also a war for the preservation of civilisation, etc. SRI AUROBINDO(looking at Purani): So? PURANI: It will be published in all the papers. Gandhi will see it. NIRODBARAN: He may find some light in his groping. (Laughter) SRI ...
... the air of modern European culture—the culture of individual emancipation, equal rights, daring experimental inquiry, the historical and economic sense, opposition to old customs and conventions, fearlessness towards both the known and the unknown, desire to stand up and fight for a brotherhood of rationalism and socialism. The culmination of the true spirit of this culture seems to him the Soviet... attitude, however, is not altogether biased. He has enough historical sense to see that ancient Indian culture was mystical and at the same time to admit: "The basic background of that culture was not one of other-worldliness or world-worthlessness. In India we find during every period when her civilisation bloomed, an intense joy in fife and nature, a pleasure in the act of living, the development of... is thought. And this thought is not the dry and abstract speculation of the pure philosopher: it is a warm movement, a visioning activity, an ethical drive—it is the mind of humane civilisation and constructive culture. You have just to glance at Nehru's face to have a sense of his disposition. The features are very handsome but with no fiashiness—there is nothing of the glamour-boy about ...
... temperament, culture and manners between Asia and Europe has been a commonplace of observation and criticism since the times when Herodotus noted in his history the objection of both men and women to be seen naked as a curious and amusing trait of Asiatic barbarism. Much water has flown under the bridges since Herodotus wrote and in this respect Asia seems not only to have infected Europe with this ... of wealth which was once depreciated as a sign of oriental barbarism now parades itself, much vulgarised, at least to our barbaric eastern notion of aesthetics as the splendid face of occidental civilisation. But if circumstances have changed, the essential opposition abides; East is still East in its soul and West is still West and the misunderstanding of continents still flourishes, not only in the... d by her pupil in the development of sartorial superfluities. Excessive wealth and gorgeous splendour was also quoted as a characteristic of Asiatic barbarism from the time of the classical poets. Europe has seen to it that this charge shall only apply now in a very minimum quantity to the eastern continent. Asia now stands, not only by choice of her ascetics, but by economic compulsion for the simple ...
... age with which he was in temperamental sympathy and a civilisation which lent itself naturally to his peculiar descriptive genius. It was an aristocratic civilisation, as indeed were those which had preceded it, but it far more nearly resembled the aristocratic civilisations of Europe by its material luxury, its aesthetic tastes, its polite culture, its keen worldly wisdom and its excessive appreciation... and India was left with only the remnants of the culture of the material age to piece out her existence. Yet even the little that was done afterwards, proved to be much; for it saved her from gradually petrifying and perishing as almost all the old civilisations, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, petrified and perished, as the material civilisation of Europe, unless spiritualised, must before long petrify... fact all subjects, and whatever he touches he makes fruitful and interesting by originality, penetration and a sane and bold vision. In all this he is the son of the civilisation Page 159 he has mirrored to us, a civilisation in which both morality and material development are powerfully intellectualised. Nothing is more remarkable in all the characters of the Mahabharata than this puissant ...
... excellence,—must surely be counted among the greatest civilisations and the world's most developed and creative peoples. A mental activity so great and of so fine a quality commencing more than three thousand years ago and still not exhausted is unique and the best and most undeniable witness to something extraordinarily sound and vital in the culture. A criticism that ignores or belittles the significance... vision and a deep, clear and greatly outlined intellectual and ethical thinking and heroic action and creation which founded and traced the plan and made the permanent structure of her unique culture and civilisation, is represented by four of the supreme productions of her genius, the Veda, the Upanishads and the two vast epics, and each of them is of a kind, a form and an intention not easily paralleled... continental effect and does not fall so far short in the quantity of its really lasting things and equals in its things of best excellence the work of ancient and mediaeval and modern Europe. The people and the civilisation that count among their great works and their great names the Veda and the Upanishads, the mighty structures of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti and Bhartrihari ...
... Alexander the great Ancient Greece and Alexander: A brief outline A civilisation appears to have emerged on mainland Greece about 1600 B.C. This came to be known as the Mycenaean civilisation. Feudal1 warrior leaders ruled their districts from hilltop fortresses, the principal fort being Mycenae itself. Minoan Crete exercised a strong influence in these early... however, did not interfere with Alexander's vision of a commonwealth of peoples united by Greek culture. All the successor states were dominated by Greeks and by natives who imitated the Greek way of life. And although the peasants and much of the urban population of the Middle East held fast to their native cultures and native languages, scholars, administrators, and businessmen all used Greek and were guided... under Macedonian rule, just before the birth of Alexander the Great in 356 B.C. State of the civilised world in Alexander^ time (around 330 B.C,) For the Greeks of that time, civilisation was concentrated in the Mediterranean world. Besides Greece and its city states, there was the immense Persian Empire which embraced nearly all of the Middle East: Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Syria ...
... if we considered the Rigveda anterior to the Harappa Culture. And logically the presence of cotton cloth in this Culture and its non-mention in the Vedic texts should raise the question: "Did not these texts precede in time that Culture?" (KPI: 19-20) Yet, if the Rigveda and its documentary progeny are set after this Civilisation, we have literature glaringly contradicting archaeology... Harappa Culture as posterior to it and draw it broadly into the fold of Aryanism in however modified a form. This historical perspective passes even beyond extreme probability and becomes a certainty the moment we concentrate on the topic with which we have initiated our research: Indian cotton. The crucial point deciding the issue of precedence as between the Indus Valley Civilisation and the... Indus Valley Civilisation even when certain aspects are in common. And in this hypothesis of ours we are confirmed from another side also: Sutra-material apart from mention of cotton. The Cambridge History of India informs us: 6 "We find in the Sutras for the first time the recognition of images of the gods." There we have the characteristic iconism of the Harappa Culture thrown into relief ...
... India has described from the early Vedic times to India of Buddha and the philosophers and again from Buddha to the time of the European irruption was in its own way as vast in change religious, social, cultural, even political and administrative as the double cycle of Europe; but because it preserved old names for new things, old formulas for new methods and old coverings for new institutions and because... in the sense of the problems forced upon it by Europe. The new Orient must necessarily be the result either of some balance and fusion or of some ardent struggle between progressive and conservative ideals and tendencies. If therefore the conservative mind in this country opens itself sufficiently to the necessity of transformation, the resulting culture born of a resurgent India may well bring about... throws over her processes of mutation. If we look casually at European history in this light the attention is only seized by a few conspicuous landmarks, the evolution and end of Athenian democracy, the transition from the Roman republic to the empire, the emergence of feudal Europe out of the ruins of Rome, the Christianisation of Europe, the Reformation and Renascence together preparing a new society ...
... humanity by a tendency towards a common civilisation and protected in that community with each other and in their diversity from others by favourable geographical circumstances. Thus Greece, Italy, Gaul, Egypt, China, Medo-Persia, India, Arabia, Israel, all began with a loose cultural and geographical aggregation which made them separate and distinct culture-units before they could become nation-units... and fulfilled nor was broken up beyond recall; it revived in new incarnations. And this revival was disastrous to the nation-life of Italy, though an incalculable boon and advantage to the culture and civilisation of the world; for as the city-life of Greece had originally created, so the city-life of Italy recovered, renewed and gave in a new form to our modern times the art, literature, thought and... the phenomenon of nation-units formed or in formation coexisting as disunited parts of the loose geographical and cultural unity, first, of Christendom, then, of Europe, and with it the problem of the union of this Christendom or of this Europe which, though more than once conceived by individual statesmen or political thinkers, was never achieved nor even the first steps attempted. Before its difficulties ...
... desert. What business has he to pass through it? NIRODBARAN: But surely Italy's conquest will bring in culture, aesthetics, roads, buildings, etc., into Abyssinia, a country which is said to be without a civilisation at all? SRI AUROBINDO: Aesthetics? The Negroes have no art? And what culture will be brought in? Of course, if you walk into a Negro den, you may get killed, but the same thing may... gentle and attractive could be revolutionary. Even the ordinary criminals I found very human; they were better than European criminals. There will always be different states of development of humanity. It is a fallacy to say that education will do everything, and your so-called civilisation is not an "unmixed good". You have only to look at the "civilised" countries. Take the condition of affairs under... remark on Hitler. (Smiling) You can't say Germany is progressing. I have come in contact with the Indian masses and I have found them better than the Europeans of the same class. So too the working classes here—they are superior to the European ones: the latter may be more efficient but that is due to external reasons. The French Governor Solomiac said during the riots that the labourers were really ...
... of view of evolution, I think Sri Aurobindo has explained this very clearly in The Human Cycle. Evolution, that is to say, culture Page 309 and civilisation, describes a more or less regular spiral movement around the earth, and the results of one civilisation, it may be said, slowly go to form another; then, when the total development is harmonious, this creates simultaneously the field... it is more complex, more complete. Is the average Indian more advanced spiritually than the average man in other countries, like those of Europe, for instance? There is an essential difference, but generally if he has not been contaminated by European materialism, when someone speaks to him about spiritual things, he has an opening, he understands. In the countries of the West, if you are in... according to their affinities and, for a reason which may be quite material or for a mental or cyclic reason, they reunite at a certain place, and in this place there is a new civilisation or a special progress in a civilisation or a kind of effervescence, blossoming, flowering of beauty, as in the great ages in Greece, Egypt, India, Italy, Spain.... Everywhere, Page 310 in all the countries ...
... founded, thus trained, the ancient Indian race grew to astonishing heights of culture and civilisation; it lived with a noble, well-based, ample and vigorous order and freedom; it developed a great literature, sciences, arts, crafts, industries; it rose to the highest possible ideals and no mean practice of knowledge and culture, of arduous greatness and heroism, of kindness, philanthropy and human sympathy... haphazardly alive. The impact of the West, and the subsequent national confusions and disasters, Page 10 quickened the process of decay and disintegration, and the stream of Indian culture and civilisation was in very truth lost — as if for ever — amidst the brambles and quicksands of the eighteenth century. The wheel had turned and turned and brought the season of drought and difficulty... Foreword to a formidable tome. Modern India and the West: A Study of the Interaction of Their Civilisations, first published in 1941 and reprinted in 1968, Lord Meston remarked that "the metaphor of the impact is inappropriate"; there has been "nothing, or very little, of a clash" between the two cultures! The trauma of conquest of an alien power was nothing. It had all been so gentle, so civilised ...
... intercourse with Europe upon so many of her intelligentsia, and quickens to her own profundities and sees as the Soul of her soul the supreme Godhead, the Divine World-Mother, the more apt will she be to use her acutely felt youthfulness today for genuine growth in greatness and for carrying to a still more glorious height than in the past the wonder of her perpetually young civilisation. Page 9... breaking forth is conducive to the sense of youth. Yet, when we reflect that we are the only nation in the world whose civilisation has continued alive for so many thousands of years, we cannot help wondering how after so long a history we can still feel young. Even the Chinese civilisation is more recent than ours. We go back and back into remote antiquity and we have come out into the living present with... and why we are vigorously and hopefully what we are despite such a lengthy past trailing behind us. Surely it is no accident that civilisations seeming equally rich and powerful as ours died and disappeared. There is only one view of the history of civilisations that can explain our survival and our youthfulness. It is the view put forth by Sri Aurobindo and formulable in no terms save the mystical ...
... thronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art and Learning. From this meeting of a foreign Art and civilisation with a temperament differing from the temperament which created them, there issued, as there usually does issue from such meetings, an original Art and an original civilisation. Originality does not lie in rejecting outside influences but in accepting them as a new mould into which... formed a sort of seed-bed for the creative geniuses, men of fine critical ability and appreciative temper, scholarly, accomplished, learned in music and the arts, men in short not only of culture, but of original culture. Of these perhaps the most finished patterns were Madhu Sudan's friends, Page 94 Gourdas Byshak, and that scholarly patron of letters, Rajah Jyotindra Mohun Tagore. At the... training acquired a religious temper, a taste for law and a taste for learning, yet his peculiar sphere is language. Another circumstance must not be forgotten. Our renascence was marked like its European prototype, though not to so startling an extent, by a thawing of old moral custom. The calm, docile, pious, dutiful Hindu ideal was pushed aside with impatient energy, and the Bengali, released from ...
... told when I went down from this world of the Ancients to be born again into humanity, "Twice has Italy given a new civilisation to Europe, the third time she shall give it." The voice that speaks when we are sent, does not lie. CAVOUR No, but the fruit does not always come at once. There is sometimes a long probation, a slow agony of purification, and the thing destined seems a dream that has come... government and society into a fit mould for the ideas of an age of emancipation, is a laggard lingering in the steps of the Gaul and the Saxon. She who should have been the fountain of a new European culture, hardly figures among the leaders of humanity. The semi-Asiatic Muscovite is doing more for mankind than the heirs of the Roman. CAVOUR The statesman must have patience and work quietly towards... The brain and sword of Italy may yet lead and rule Europe. MAZZINI It is not the diplomatist and the servant of the moment who can bring about that great consummation, but the heroic soul and the mighty brain that command Time and create opportunity. I sought to cast Italy into a Roman mould. I knew that a third revelation had to be made to Europe and that Italy was the chosen channel. So I was told ...
... battle to the end. It is the British Navy alone that keeps the war from our gates and confines it to European lands and seas and a strip of North Africa. If there were defeat and the strength of Britain and her colonies were to go down before the totalitarian nations, Page 458 all Europe, Africa and Asia would be doomed to domination by three or four Powers all anti-democratic and all pushing... principles of civilisation which a Nazi victory would destroy. These beliefs have to be taken into consideration in assessing the significance of the struggle. It is in fact a clash between two world-forces which are contending for the control of the whole future of humanity. One Page 455 force seeks to destroy the past civilisation and substitute a new one; but this new civilisation is in substance... and, wherever the Nazi idea spreads, a violent racialism denying the human idea; outside Europe what is promised is the degradation of the coloured peoples to helotry as an inferior, even a subhuman race. Hitler, carrying with him everywhere the new idea and the new order, is now master of almost all Europe minus Great Britain and Russia. [Faced with the stubborn opposition of Britain he is turning ...
... those who go to the opposite extreme and see nothing good outside the mediaeval Hindu culture and forms, the same thing happened in Europe and for the same reason, as a reaction from that very intolerance and sweeping denunciation which are the spirit of Dr. Ray's article. It cannot last any more than it lasted in Europe. Some of the strictures we hold to be too much at second-hand; especially in his ... training and the method of education followed point to a system far in advance of the National Council of Education which is still tyrannised over by a tradition and method not only European but unprogressively European. A brief instalment of Sj. Aurobindo Ghose's Karakahini is also given which describes the identification parades of the Bomb Case, gives some glimpses Page 566 of the approver... nation to rise but rather depress it and push it back into the past. Moreover, Dr. Ray makes the same mistake which European writers made when they condemned the Middle Ages wholesale because they were a period of contraction and not of expansion. That mistake has now been recognised in Europe and justice has been done to that which was praiseworthy as well as to that which was bad in the "Dark Ages". We ...
... elements for the development of man as a mental being. The old Hellenic or Graeco-Roman civilisation perished, among other reasons, because it only imperfectly generalised culture in its own society and was surrounded by huge masses of humanity who were still possessed by the barbarian habit of mind. Civilisation can never be safe so long as, confining the cultured mentality to a small minority, it... 76 semi-barbarous Christendom and to the half-pagan spirit of the Renaissance and a long struggle between religion and science to complete the return of a free intellectual culture in the re-emerging mind of Europe. Knowledge must be aggressive, if it wishes to survive and perpetuate itself; to leave an extensive ignorance either below or around it, is to expose humanity to the perpetual danger... its light, full of the natural vigour of the barbarian, who may at any moment seize upon the physical weapons of the civilised without undergoing an intellectual transformation by their culture. The Graeco-Roman culture perished from within and from without, from without by the floods of Teutonic barbarism, from within by the loss of its vitality. It gave the proletariate some measure of comfort and amusement ...
... race, colour and temperament between the European and the Asiatic. There is the age-long past, the absolute divergence of origins, indelible associations, inherent tendencies Page 333 which forbid any possibility of the line of demarcation being effaced or minimised by India's acceptance of an entirely or predominantly English or European culture. All these difficulties need not necessarily... separateness which has always made India a country and a people apart, even when it was unable to realise its political unity and was receiving by invasion and mutual communication of cultures the full shock of the civilisations around it. There is the mere mass of its population of three hundred millions whose fusion in any sort with the rest of the nations of the Empire would be a far other matter than... Canada half French, half English; but in all three countries habits of life, political tendencies, a new type of character and temperament and culture, if it can be so called, were being developed which were as the poles asunder from the old British culture, temperament, habits of life and social and political tendencies. On the other hand, the mother country derived no tangible political, military ...
... created by modern circumstances. One of the oldest races and greatest civilisations on this earth, the most indomitable in vitality, the most fecund in greatness,the deepest in life, the most wonderful in potentiality, after taking into itself numerous sources of strength from foreign strains of blood and other types of human civilisation, is now seeking to lift itself for good into an organised national... individual and especially to the young who are now arising to do India's work, the world's work, God's work: "You cannot cherish these ideals, still less can you fulfil them if you subject your minds to European ideas or look at life from .the material standpoint. Materially you are nothing, spiritually you are everything. . . . Recover the Aryan thought, the Aryan discipline, the Aryan character, the Aryan... of the forms of our spirit will have to take place; but it is the spirit itself behind past forms that we have to disengage and preserve and to- give to it new and powerful thought significances, culture-values, a new instrumentation, greater figures. And so long as we recognise these essential things and are faithful to their spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical ...
... remains. “Very long ago there have been great and beautiful civilisations perhaps as advanced materially as ours. Looked at from a certain standpoint, the most modern culture seems no more than a repetition of ancient cultures …” 19 she said in 1929. And in 1951, under the threat of a third world war, she said: “There have been many civilisations on the Earth. There are scientists who try to rediscover... was localised in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilisation of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era. It was only in the 18th century that we developed practical means of... From where did the suddenly flourishing civilisation of Egypt get its amazing theoretical and practical knowledge – a knowledge that after a resplendent beginning gradually deteriorated? Another case in point: “The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation of an advanced kind, which either was ...
... a sign—although their attempt is rather on a small scale—yet it is a sign that India's artistic taste, in spite of a modern education, still turns to what is essential and permanent in her culture and civilisation. You have still before you, within your reach, the old temples, the old paintings, to teach you that art creation is meant to express a faith, to give you the sense of totality and organisation... With the exchange of goods, there happens an exchange of ideas and even of habits and manners. In ancient days Rome conquered Greece and through that conquest was herself conquered by the Culture and Civilisation of Greece. The thing is happening today on a much greater scale and more intensely perhaps. At one time Japan was educating herself on the American pattern; now that America has conquered... decorative art. And in so far as this art is successful, we are a step forward even in these days towards true art. Here in India things are and should be a little different. In spite of the modern European invasion and in spite of certain lapses in some directions—I may refer to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Ravi Varma interlude—the heart of India is not anglicised or Europeanised. The Calcutta School ...
... themselves felt even in plutocratic America. In any case, whatever retardation of pace there may be, the direction of the stream is already clear and the result hardly doubtful. The existing European system of civilisation at least in its figure of capitalistic industrialism has reached its own monstrous limits, broken itself by its own mass and is condemned to perish. The issue of the future lies between... with this imitative seizing on principles associated with the modern forms of freedom and progress,—an ideal of spiritual and moral independence and the defence against the European invasion of the subtle principle of Asiatic culture. In India the notion of an Asiatic, a spiritualised democracy has begun to be voiced, though it is as yet vague and formless. The Khilafat agitation has a religious and therefore... ion once so loudly asserted is now openly denied and summarily put aside by the victorious empires. In its place we have the map of Europe remade on old diplomatic principles, Africa appropriated and partitioned as the personal property of two or three great European powers and western Asia condemned to be administered under a system of mandates that are now quite openly justified as instruments of ...
... closer to the earthly texture of humanity. The humanism, known to Europe generally, both in its profane and religious aspects, is all "human – too human" as Nietzsche pronounced it; it was for this reason that the Promethean prophet conjured man to transcend his humanity anyhow, and rise to a superior status of culture and civilisation, of being and consciousness as we would say. Indian spirituality... GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in what is called "humanism."¹ So our scholars and philosophers on their side have been at pains to rebut the charge and demonstrate the humanistic element in our tradition. It may be asked however, if such a vindication is at all necessary, or if it is proper to apply a European standard... transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age. The Graeco – Latin culture was essentially and predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture also, in spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the religion itself, as has been pointed out, is deeply humanistic, in the sense ...
... of having a common soul-life, a common culture, a common social organisation, a common political head, but not nation-States. The State machine existed only for a restricted and superficial action; the real life of the people was determined by other powers with which it could not meddle. Its principal function was to preserve and protect the national culture and to maintain sufficient political, social... would eliminate even such occasional violences of civil strife as disturbed the old Roman imperial economy and, whatever perturbations there might still be, need not disturb the settled fabric of civilisation so as to cast all again into the throes of a great radical and violent change. Peace assured, there would be an unparalleled development of ease and well-being. A great number of outstanding problems... religious ideas, as was done in many ancient forms of education. Only if it finds this weapon ineffective, is it likely to limit freedom of thought directly on the plea of danger to the State and to civilisation. Already we see the right of the State to interfere with individual thought announced here and there in a most ominous Page 510 manner. One would have imagined religious liberty at least ...
... obstinate factors of disunion. In some cases even an entire change of name, culture and civilisation has been necessary, as well as a more or less profound modification of the race. Notably has this happened in the formation of French nationality. The ancient Gallic people, in spite of or perhaps because of its Druidic civilisation and early greatness, was more incapable of organising a firm political unity... even the ancient Greeks or the old Indian kingdoms and republics. It needed the Roman rule and Latin culture, the superimposition of a Teutonic ruling caste and finally the shock of the temporary and partial English conquest to found the unequalled unity of modern France. Yet though name, civilisation and all else seem to have changed, the French nation of today is still and has always remained the old... the established phenomenon of nationhood in relation to the ideal of human unity. Two different ideals and therefore two different possibilities were precipitated much nearer to realisation by the European conflict,—a federation of free nations and, on the other hand, the distribution of the earth into a few great empires or imperial hegemonies. A practical combination of the two ideas became the most ...
... sign – although their attempt is rather on a small scale – yet it is a sign that India's artistic taste, in spite of a modern education, still turns to what is essential and permanent in her culture and civilisation. You have still before you, within your reach, the old temples, the old paintings, to teach you that art creation is meant to express a faith, to give you the sense of totality and organisation... With the exchange of goods, there happens an exchange of ideas and even of habits and manners. In ancient days Rome conquered Greece and through that conquest was herself conquered by the culture and civilisation of Greece. The thing is happening today on a much greater scale and more intensely perhaps. At one time Japan was educating herself on the American pattern; now that America has conquered... decorative art. And in so far as this art is successful, we are a step forward even in these days towards true art. Here in India things are and should be a little different. In spite of the modern European invasion and in spite of certain lapses in some directions – I may refer to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Ravi Varma interlude – the heart of India is not anglicised or Europeanised. The Calcutta ...
... closer to the earthly texture of humanity. The humanism, known to Europe generally, both in its profane and religious aspects, is all "human—too human" as Nietzsche pronounced it; it was for this reason that the Promethean prophet conjured man to transcend his humanity anyhow, and rise to a superior status of culture and civilisation, of being and consciousness as we would say. Indian spirituality... GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in what is called "humanism."1 So our scholars and philosophers on their side have been at pains to rebut the charge and demonstrate the humanistic element in our tradition. It may be asked however, if such a vindication is at all necessary, or if it is proper to apply a European standard... transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age. The Graeco-Latin culture was essentially and predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture also, in spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the religion itself, as has been pointed out, is deeply humanistic, in the sense ...
... obliterated by a mere denial. For surely man does not live by bread alone, however indispensable that article may be to him: not even culture—the kind admitted by communism, severely intellectual, rational, scientific, pragmatic-can be the be-all and end-all of human civilisation. Communistic Russia attempted to sweep away all traces of religion and church and piety; the attempt does not seem to have been... happier solution for the nation too, and not the other way round. The more significant urge today is towards this greater aggregation—Pan-America, Pan-Russia, Pan-Arabia, a Western European Block and an Eastern European Block are movements that have been thrown up because of a greater necessity in human life and its evolution. Man's stupidity, his failure to grasp the situation, his incapacity to march... the good he experiences within. An all-round culture, a well-developed mind, a well-organised life, a well-formed Page 130 body, a harmonious working of all the members of the system at a high level of consciousness—that is man's need, for there lies his self-fulfilment. That is the ideal of Humanism—which the ancient Graeco-Roman culture worshipped, which was again revived by the ...
... the old system the defect of ignoring the psychology of the race. The mere inclusion of the matter of Indian thought and culture in the field of knowledge does not make a system of education Indian, and the instruction given in the Bengal National College was only an improved European system, not Indian or National. Another error which has to be avoided and to which careless minds are liable, is the ... created in Europe admiring or astonished comment; but the universality of the ordinary curriculum in ancient India was for every student and not for the exceptional few, and it implied, not a tasting of many subjects after the modern plan, but the thorough mastery of all. The original achievement of a Kalidasa accomplishing the highest in every line of poetic creation is so incredible to the European mind... and experience of Sri Ramakrishna in our own era. These instances are not so common as the others, because pure creative genius is not common; but in Europe they are, with a single modern exception, non-existent. The highest creative intellects in Europe have achieved sovereignty by limitation, by striving to excel only in one field of a single intellectual province or at most in two; when they have ...
... Church and by the sudden flooding of Europe with a German barbarism whose temperament in its merits no less than in its defects was the very anti-type of the Christian spirit and the Graeco-Roman intellect. ‘The Islamic invasion of Spain and the southern coast of the Mediterranean — curious as the sole noteworthy example of Asiatic culture using the European method of material and political irruption... result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism, filtered through the Semitic temperament, entered Europe in the form of Christianity. Christianity came within an ace of spiritualising and even of asceticising the mind of Europe; it was baffled by its own theological deformation in the... the progress of human civilisation. Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated; its other still subject or partly subject parts are moving through whatever struggles towards freedom. Only a little has to be done and that will be done today or tomorrow.’ 24 Thirty years before, he had written in The Human Cycle: ‘It is in Europe that the age of individualism ...
... obliterated by a mere denial. For surely man does not live by bread alone, however indispensable that article may be to him: not even culture – the kind admitted by communism, severely intellectual, rational, scientific, pragmatic – can be the be-all and end-all of human civilisation. Communistic Russia attempted to sweep away all Page 125 traces of religion and church and piety; the attempt... happier solution for the nation too, and not the other way round. The more significant urge today is towards this greater aggregation – Pan-America, Pan-Russia, Pan-Arabia, a Western European Block and an Eastern European Block are movements that have been thrown up because of 'a greater necessity in human life and its evolution. Man's stupidity, his failure to grasp the situation, his incapacity to... the good he experiences within. An all-round culture, a well-developed mind, a well-organised life, a well-formed body, a harmonious working of all the members of the system at a high level of consciousness – that is man's need, for there lies his self-fulfilment. That is the ideal of Page 129 Humanism – which the ancient Græco-Roman culture worshipped, which was again revived by the ...
... take up the cast-off clothes of European thought and life and to straggle along in the old rut of her wheels, always taking up today what she had cast off yesterday. We should not allow our cultural independence to be paralysed by the accident that at the moment Europe came in upon us, we were in a state of ebb and weakness, such as comes some day upon all civilisations. That no more proves that our... this in all its potentialities, is what we mean by a spiritual culture and the application of spirituality to life. Those who distrust this ideal or who cannot understand it, are still under the sway of the European conception of life which for a time threatened to swamp entirely the Indian spirit. But let us remember that Europe itself is labouring to outgrow the limitations of its own conceptions... infiltrating and are now more freely streaming into Western thought, poetry, art, ideas of life, not to overturn its culture, but to transform, enlighten and aggrandise its best values and to add new elements which have too long been ignored or forgotten. It will be singular if while Europe is thus intelligently enlarging herself in the new light she has been able to seize and admitting the truths of the ...
... to spread and universalise European civilisation by annexation and governmental force presents on its larger scale a certain moral analogy. This, too, extended, might justify Page 537 the pre-war German ideal of a sort of unification of the world under the aegis of German power and German culture. But, however liable to abuse by extension, vital necessity must be allowed a word in a world... expansion of the European nations which has now no moral justification and could only have been justified morally in the future by the creation of supra-national psychological unities; for the vital and physical grounds always exist. Even the moral, at least the psychological and cultural justification of a unified Russian culture and life in process of creation, could be extended, and the European claim to... motive to a historical and geographical association. Nationhood founds itself partly on this association, partly on others which accentuate it, common interests, community of language, community of culture, and all these in unison have evolved a psychological idea, a psychological unity, which finds expression in the idea of nationalism. But the nation idea and the State idea do not everywhere coincide ...
... movements of the resurgence of Asia and intellectual idealism of Europe. Asiatic peoples had begun to make bold and clear claims to equality and independence and they had behind them centuries of inner culture and discovery of spiritual knowledge which, if applied to life, could serve as effective means of the change of human nature. In Europe, the contest between Capital and Labour had entered into a... chief theme of our culture, and the quest of man of himself and the universe has been the chief theme of education. These themes are closely interrelated, and it is increasingly realised that this interrelation ship needs to be effectively reflected in our educational system. Education promoting culture, and culture promoting education, will characterise the new effort. Culture depends on large and... element of the educational process. That every Indian student should receive an adequate exposure to Indian culture seems obvious, and yet, despite previous efforts, much remains to be attempted and achieved to promote among students the study, understanding and appreciation of Indian culture. This involves an arduous task, as it implies not only reorientation of textbooks but also preparation of ...
... centuries. And its suggestions, when another civilisation discovered and set itself to study the Veda, became in the European mind the parent of fresh errors. Nevertheless, if Sayana's work has been a key turned with double lock on the inner sense of the Veda, it is yet indispensable for opening the antechambers of Vedic learning. All the vast labour of European erudition has not been able to replace... thousand years. It dates, so far as we know, from that great period of Indian intellectual activity, contemporaneous with the Greek efflorescence, but earlier in its beginnings, which founded the culture and civilisation recorded in the classical literature of the land. We cannot say to how much earlier a date our text may be carried. But there are certain considerations which justify us in supposing for it... The terms orthodox and heterodox in the European or sectarian sense have no true application to India where opinion has always been free. × There is reason to suppose that Purana (legend and apologue) and Itihasa (historical tradition) were parts of Vedic culture long before the present forms of the Puranas ...
... inflicted in part even on under-trial prisoners who may be perfectly innocent. This also is probably dictated by the finer feelings of Europe and intended mercifully to prepare their gentle and easy descent into the Inferno around them. European Justice The European Court of Justice is also a curious and instructive institution. Under a civilised disguise it is really the mediaeval ordeal by battle;... as modesty, culture, self-respect, generosity, fellow-feeling. If everything else fails, I have the exquisite rack of mental torture called solitary imprisonment Page 496 to shake his reason or destroy his manhood. And if in the end I have not succeeded, if he comes out a man and not a brute or an idiot, it is not my fault but his; I have done my best. This is the European prison system... human advancement. The mere fact of a government doing what it does well and firmly, is nothing in its favour. It is more important to know what it does and where it is leading us. The European Jail The European jail is a luminous commentary on the humanitarian boasts of the Occident and its pious horror at Oriental barbarities. To mutilate, to impale, to torture, how shocking, how Oriental! And ...
... intelligence, no whit inferior to any modern scientific brain. Hence a distinction is sometimes made between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, Page 133 that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down. One can answer, however, that even... the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially cultivated in India, while the second has led us to Science, man's physical mastery, which is the especial field of European culture. Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or more... minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisanship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to ...
... essential power of intelligence, no whit inferior to any modern scientific brain. Hence a distinction is sometimes made between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Laotse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down. Page 18 One can answer however... the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially cultivated in India, while the second has led us to Science, man's physical mastery, which is the especial field of European culture. Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or... Page 16 instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisan-ship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to ...
... mediaeval method to take possession of Vedic interpretation. European scholarship which regards human civilisation as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander and ending today with Haeckel and Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily primitive culture and primitive culture as necessarily half-savage culture, has turned the light of its Comparative Philology & Comparative... the Kalewala, the Homeric poems, were written in the dawn of civilisation by semi-barbarous races, by poets not superior in culture to the Vedic Rishis; yet though their poetical value varies, the nations that possess them, need not be ashamed of their ancient heritage. The same cannot be said of the Vedic poems presented to us by European scholarship. Never surely was there even among savages such... circumstanced than the Europeans for determining the truth about our past and divining its difficult secrets. The triumphant & rapid march of the physical sciences in Europe has so mastered our intellects and dazzled our eyes, that we are apt to extend the unquestioned finality which we are accustomed to attach to the discoveries & theories of modern Science, to all the results of European research & intellectual ...
... imposition of the culture of a dominant race and, in general, a system of absorption wholesale or as complete as possible. The Roman Empire was the classic example of this kind of endeavour and the Graeco-Roman unity of a single way of life and culture in a vast framework of political and administrative unity was the nearest approach within the geographical limits reached by this civilisation to something... possibilities suggested at the time was the growth of continental agglomerates, a united Europe, some kind of a combine of the peoples of the American continent under the leadership of the United States, even possibly in the resurgence of Asia and its drive towards independence from the dominance of the European peoples, a drawing together for self-defensive combination of the nations of this continent;... prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation. A new, a difficult and uncertain beginning might have to be made in the midst of the chaos and ruin after perhaps an extermination on a large scale, and a more successful creation could ...
... year all the prizes for Greek and Latin verse. In the open I.C.S. examination in which he competed he scored record marks in these ancient languages that lie at the very foundation of European culture. Among Europe's modern languages, he has been intimately acquainted Page 73 with French from his early Manchester years. Nor are Italian and German any strangers: he rubs shoulders... heart of Eastern culture. He steeped himself in Sanskrit and took in his rapid linguistic stride many present-day vernaculars. India's hoary civilisation unveiled its real form to him and holding in his two hands the treasures of the two hemispheres he stands between as a creative mediator. Creative—because Sri Aurobindo is not simply a superb scholar and man of culture; he is also a thinker... puzzling psychological cross-currents. Educated in England from early boyhood, he was as completely Westernised as any Indian could be-Westernised not only in the sense that the whole world of European culture, ancient, me diaevaland modern, became part of him; but also in the sense that a strong stamp was laid upon his mind of what Shaw has called the infidel half-century, the period in which scientific ...
... ancient Egyptian family – perhaps even to a royal family of Egypt, the Pharaos. So she is not European or French by blood although she was brought up as such. Strictly speaking, she would belong to the Middle East, that is to say, the portion joining east of Europe and west of Asia. It means the union of Europe and Asia, the two harmonised, and that reflects the character of Mother's life and its destiny... you, the first thing it touches is your head, that is, your mind: you see it, you are conscious of it. France represents today just this mind of humanity at its best, the flowering of its culture and civilisation. She was born there so that the highest mind of the human race may receive that light through her. She passed her life there in the company of the elite, the most cultured people of the time... as you all know, the Mother passed in France, she was born in France, in Paris. So, naturally it was very often pointed out to her that she was French, she was European. To this, however, she was always protesting, saying, "I am not European, I am not French." It would indeed sound somewhat strange to say that her family came in fact from Egypt. Her parents, her father and mother went to France just ...
... 2 Ireland had its own tongue when it had its own free nationality and culture and its loss was a loss to humanity as well as to the Irish nation. For what might not this Celtic race with its fine psychic turn and quick intelligence and delicate imagination, which did so much in the beginning for European culture and religion, have given to the world through all these centuries under natural... more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation and increasing intercourse, it has been rather a blessing than a curse, a gift to mankind rather than a disability laid upon it. The purposeless exaggeration of anything is always an evil, and an excessive pullulation of varying tongues that serve no purpose in the expression of a real diversity of spirit and culture is certainly a stumbling-block rather... general domination in the West, became a dead thing, impotent for creation, and generated no new or living and evolving culture in the nations that spoke it; even so great a force as Christianity could not give it a new life. The times during which it was an instrument of European thought, were precisely those in which that thought was heaviest, most traditional and least fruitful. A rapid and vigorous ...
... this civilisation [Graeco-Roman] was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in its life-aspects but in its intellectual aspects. It was therefore a supreme intellectual, Leonardo da Vinci, who took up again the work and summarised in himself the seeds of modern Europe." (29 July 1937) Books enhanced communication. The invention of mechanical clock gave the Europeans the habit... cultural nationalism. The linguistic standards developed by each European country were disseminated uniformly by books. As books became easily accessible, ideas spread quickly. That was when the Italian Renaissance (c. 1350-1600) of which we have heard Page 124 so much took place. As the epitome of the Renaissance culture, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) springs to mind. Sri Aurobindo... capable of producing cast-iron; they were already using a magnetic needle for navigation. Their ships were big enough to sail around the world, but they did not do so. The Europeans proved their superiority in applied science. European civilization seems to have developed side by side two tendencies. One was a voyage of discovery in the realm of Thought. Universities played an important role in the ...
... intelligence, no whit inferior to any modern scientific brain. Hence a distinction is sometimes made between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, Page 82 that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down. One can answer, however, that... the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially cultivated in India, while the second has led us to Science, man's physical mastery, which is the especial field of European culture. Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or... minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress, upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisanship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to ...
... imposition of the culture of a dominant race and, in general, a System of absorption wholesale or as complete as possible. The Roman Empire was the classical example of this kind of endeavour and the Graeco-Roman unity of a single way of life and culture in a vast framework of political and administrative unity was the nearest approach within the geographical limits reached by this civilisation to something... possibilities suggested at the time was the growth of continental agglomerates, a united Europe, some kind of a combine of the peoples of the American continent under the leadership of the United States, even possibly in the resurgence of Asia and its drive towards independence from the dominance of the European peoples a drawing together for self-defensive combination of the nations of this continent;... prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation. A new, a difficult and uncertain beginning might have to be made in the midst of the chaos and ruin after perhaps an extermination on a large scale, and a more successful creation could ...
... she was European. To this, however, she was always protesting, saying, "I am not European, I am not French." Her family came in fact from Egypt. Her parents, her father and mother went to France just a year before she was born, a year only. And in Egypt, her family, it seems, belonged to a very ancient Egyptian family—perhaps even to a royal family of Egypt, the Pharaohs. So she is not European or French... you, the first thing it touches is your head, that is, your mind: you see it, you are conscious of it. France represents today just this mind of humanity at its best, the flowering of its culture and civilisation. She was born there so that the highest mind of the human race may receive that light through her. She passed her life there in the company of the elite, the most cultured people of the time... French by blood, although she was brought up as if it were so. Strictly speaking, she would belong to the Middle East, that is to say, the portion joining the east of Europe and the west of Asia. It means the union of Europe and Asia, the two harmonised, and that reflects the character of Mother's life and its destiny. As I said, she spent the first part of her life in France. But why France? ...
... national movement, nor the dignity and purity of our religion. It is an evil and foreign principle which has entered into our system, one of the many evil results of our disastrous contact with European civilisation at a time of national weakness and disintegration and our attempt to assimilate it without first vindicating our inner liberty and establishing ourselves as free agents. A great social revolution... stopping the heartbeats, dispensing with the process of breathing, and other of the outworks of Yogic knowledge and achievement are being slowly established in order to break down the exclusive pride of European Science and prepare for a new order of knowledge and a greater science to which its dogmatic narrowness is bitterly and scornfully opposed. Page 310 ... thing; the harmony created by a mighty enthusiasm, such as led the aristocracy of Japan to lay down their exclusive privileges and, without reserve, call upon the masses to come up and share their high culture, their seats of might and their ennobling traditions, is quite another. Hindu society in the mofussil is now bitterly divided, and tends more and more to be convulsed, by the new aspirations of the ...
... what callous and brutal treatment can be inflicted by English officials in England itself even on women, and women of education, good birth, position and culture, guilty only of political obstruction and disorderliness. Yet this is the civilisation for which we are asked to sacrifice the inheritance of our forefathers! An Official Freak We suppose in a bureaucracy it is inevitable that officials... world—for Northern Africa is thoroughly Asianised if not Asiatic,—is convulsed with struggles which may well precede another resurgence. There was a time when the Moor held Spain and gave civilisation to semi-barbarous Europe. The revolution of the wheel has now gone to Page 191 its utmost length and finds the Spaniard invading Morocco. But this invasion does not seem to promise any Spanish expansion... disruption of Turkey and expulsion of the Ottoman from Europe. But true freedom is always conscious of strength and knows that it is better to perish than to live for a short while longer at the cost of continual insult, degradation and weakness. The first efforts of the new Government have been to save what remained of the outskirts of Turkish empire in Europe, the suzerainty in Crete, the supreme control ...
... republics also, diverse races, sub-nations with a marked characteristic of their own, developing different brands or forms of civilisation and culture, many schools of art and architecture which yet succeeded in fitting into the general Indian type of civilisation and culture. India's history has been throughout Page 164 marked by a tendency, a constant effort to unite... ancient and of modern Europe. A profound respect for the creations of the past as the natural expression of the Indian mind and life, the sound manifestation of its Dharma or right law of being, was the strongest element in the mental attitude and this preservative instinct was not disturbed but rather yet more firmly settled and fixed even in modern times after the advent of the European powers. The Indian... Indian culture is that all human activity ultimately leads to a deeper spiritual unfolding and realization. Cultural unity in India has, therefore, inevitably to be based on a spiritual unity. This is one of the characteristics of Indian culture. The culture of a people Let us now try to define what we mean by the culture of a people. The culture of a people ...
... India or Egypt. Indeed they are the builders of Culture, culture which is the inner life of a civilisation. The decline of culture and civilisation means precisely the displacement of the "cultured" man by the economic man. In the present age when economic values have been grossly exaggerated holding the entire social fabric in its stifling grip, the culture spirit has been pushed into the background and... Page 118 What is the thing in human society which makes it valuable, worthy of humanity, gives it a place of honour and the right to live and continue to live? It is its culture and civilisation, as everyone knows. Greece or Rome, China or India did not attain, at least according to modern conceptions, a high stage in economic evolution: the production and distribution of wealth,... priorities. And according to the older view-point, the Brahmin, being the emblem and repository of knowledge, was considered as the head of the social body. He is the fount and origin of a culture, the creator of a civilisation; the others protect, nourish and serve, although all are equally necessary for the common welfare. Fundamentally all human society is built upon this pattern which is ...
... India or Egypt. Indeed they are the builders of Culture, culture which is the inner life of a civilisation. The decline of culture and civilisation means precisely the displacement of the "cultured" man by the economic man. In the present age when economic values have been grossly exaggerated holding the entire social fabric in its stifling grip, the culture spirit has been pushed into the background and... make-up of the individual. What is the thing in human society which makes it valuable, worthy of humanity, gives it a place of honour and the right to live and continue to live? It is its culture and civilisation, as everyone knows. Greece or Rome, China or India did not attain, at least according to modem conceptions, a high stage in economic Page 110 evolution: the production and... priorities. And according to the older view-point, the Brahmin, being the emblem and repository of knowledge, was considered as the head of the social body. He is the fount origin of a culture, the creator of a civilisation; the others protect, nourish and serve, although all are equally necessary for thecommon. welfare. Page 117 Fundamentally all human society is built upon this pattern ...
... was shut out of spiritual truth and culture on the ground of caste. Vidura, the half-brother of Kuru king Dhritarashtra, born of a Shudra servant-woman, was honoured for his knowledge of ethics. So much so that he was made an adviser at the court of the Kuru king. As for Yogis caste never counted for anything. All were free to search for the Divine. In Europe "social hierarchies had begun to emerge... forefathers swam in a vast sea of thought and gained a vast knowledge; they established a vast civilisation. But as they went forward on their path they were overcome by exhaustion and weariness. The force of their thought decreased, and along with it decreased the force of their creative power. Our civilisation has become a stagnant backwater, our religion a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint... the students in a class would have stood first, and a field of runners would have breasted the tape together in the same split second. But it does not mean that culture should not be brought to every doorstep. Shutting out someone from culture was an invention of later times. But even in later times when the four orders had grown into a fixed social hierarchy, when we had lost almost all our freedom ...
... times, republics also, diverse races, sub-nations with a marked character of their own, developing different brands or forms of civilisation and culture, many schools of art and architecture which yet succeeded in fitting into the general Indian type of civilisation and culture. India's history throughout has been marked by a tendency, a constant effort to unite all this diversity of elements into a single... is Page 240 the Indian tradition and that the acceptance of life and works of all kinds, sarvakarmani, is un-Indian, European or western and unspiritual. 127 September, 1945 (From a letter.) About the present human civilisation. It is not this which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily... ocean, has always been the home of a peculiar people with characteristics of its own recognisably distinct from all Page 247 others, with its own distinct civilisation, way of life, way of the spirit, a separate culture, arts, building of society. It has absorbed all that has entered into it, put upon all the Indian stamp, welded the most diverse elements into its fundamental unity. But ...
... different way this fusion of the spiritual and aesthetic mind and it is a distinguishing stamp of their art and culture. The Persian had a sort of sensuous magic of the transforming aesthesis born of psychic delight and vision. Ancient Greece did all its work of founding European civilisation by a union of a subtle and active intelligence with a fine aesthetic spirit and worship of beauty. The Celtic... the sign of the poetic and artistic peoples and the great ages of art and poetry and supreme creation. The ancient communities who created those fine many-sided cultures which still remain the fountain-head of all our evolving civilisation, had the instinct for beauty, the aesthetic turn of the temperament and formation of the mind almost, it would seem, from the beginning, planted in their spirit... of experience, but has not yet found the right meeting-place; and it is besides still labouring under the disadvantage of its aberration into a mechanical, economical, materialistic, utilitarian civilisation from which it cannot get free, though it is struggling to shake off that dullest side of it for which a naked and unashamed riot of ugliness could be indulged in without any prickings of the spiritual ...
... from France, all Europe will echo it in the course of time. For, France is still the vital core of European civilisation. Hence, both from the standpoint of helping out in the cause of the Divine some of our receded powers and from the standpoint of accomplishing as widely as we can the mission of mysticism that is India's, it is desirable to promote a Franco-Indian culture. ¹. A... Marcel's short treatise Positions et Approches Concrètes du Mystère Ontologique has been a luminously seminal document for European thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. In the second half the most significant event so far for Europe's thought has been the publication of Le Phenomène humain (The Phenomenon of Man) by the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard ... the virtues of the culture of England are not likely to vanish from amongst us. But the centres of French culture are small - in fact, a few towns - and its peculiar essence is likely to be elusive unless we are studious to capture it. After the Merger in 1954, a local non-governmental association was formed in Pondicherry: the Friends of French Language and Culture. Also, with the willing ...
... period. In Japan the dominant Japanese type had been moulded by the shaping processes of an admirable culture and when the Western impact came, Japan remained faithful to her ancient spirit; she merely took over certain forms of European social & political organization necessary to complete her culture under modern conditions and poured into these forms the old potent dynamic spirit of Japan, the spirit... title any merit in the holder, nor the big house or fine dress a mastery of the art of social life, nor the English clothes, European grit, science and enterprise. They were merely counters borrowed from Europe, but universally taken, as they are not usually taken in Europe or any living nation, as a sufficient substitute for the reality. Wealth, success, and certain outward signs of a facile resp... spirit of the Samurai. It is the Samurai type which has been dominant in that country during the nineteenth century. In India the mass of the nation has remained dormant; European culture has had upon it a powerful disintegrating and destructive influence, but has been powerless to reconstruct or revivify. But in the upper strata a new type has been evolved to serve the necessities and interests of the ...
... that scientific utilisation of Science, that spirit of organisation, State help and intelligent dealing with national and social problems and ordering of economic well-being which Europe understands by the word civilisation,—the fact that such a nation should be possessed and driven by such ideas and impulses is certainly a proof that the old gods are not dead, the old ideal of dominant Force conquering... single great nation imposing its political rule and its predominant culture on the whole earth as Rome once imposed hers on the Mediterranean peoples and on Gaul and Britain. Or let us even suppose that one of the great nations might possibly succeed in overcoming all its rivals by force and diplomacy and afterwards, respecting the culture and separate internal life of its subject nations, secure its sway... breaking or depression of the body which they animate is a small matter, for they know well how to transmigrate. Germany overthrew the Napoleonic spirit in France in 1813 and broke the remnants of her European leadership in 1870; the same Germany became the incarnation of that which it had overthrown. The phenomenon is easily capable of renewal on a more formidable scale. Nor was the failure of Germany ...
... dispensed, either deliberately or from impatience, with the lower, yet not negligible perfections which the more material European demanded. Therefore Art has Page 450 flowed in two separate streams in Europe and Asia, so diverse that it is only now that the European aesthetic sense has so far trained itself as to begin to appreciate the artistic conventions, aims and traditions of Asia... value of the beautiful and overstress the value of the useful, a tendency curbed in Europe by the imperious insistence of an age-long tradition of culture and generous training of the aesthetic perceptions; but in India, where we have been cut off by a mercenary and soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture and tradition, it is corrected only by the stress of imagination, emotion and spiritual... ed, fair and pleasing is an artistic sense and can best be fostered in a nation by artistic culture of the perceptions and sensibilities. It is noteworthy that the two great nations who are most hampered by the defect of these qualities in action are also the least imaginative, poetic and artistic in Europe. It is the South German who contributes the art, poetry and music of Germany, the Celt and Norman ...
... myself, and in his own way works for a general renovation of the world by which the present European civilisation shall be replaced by a spiritual civilisation. In that change the resurrection of the Asiatic races and especially of India is an essential point. He and Madame Richard are rare examples of European Yogins who have not been led away bv Theosophical Page 409 and other aberrations... rotten politics of French India, with its following of interested Page 410 local Europeans and subservience to their petty ambitions in favour of a politics of principle which will support one of our own men or a European like Richard who is practically an Indian in belief, in personal culture, in sympathies and aspirations, one of the Nivedita type. If also a certain number of votes can ...
... been the ruin of Spain. For a man of this kind—a man of eminent culture and unstained character, the friend and fellow worker of distinguished men all over the occidental world,—to be shot without any reputable evidence by a military tribunal regardless of universal protest, was an outrage on civilisation and an insult to European culture. Such an incident, however, might have happened formerly with... indicates something wrong in modern civilisation. But, whatever the malady is, it is not peculiar to Hindus or to India, but a worldwide disease. Page 294 The Death of Señor Ferrer The extraordinary commotion in Europe over the execution of the enthusiast and idealist Ferrer,—a judicial murder committed by Court Martial,—has revealed a force in Europe with which statesmen and Governments... may have been in other times to European countries when men could not be trusted not to misuse power for their own purposes to the detriment of their country. In Europe the present high standard of public spirit, duty and honour was the slow creation of free institutions. To Asiatics, not yet corrupted, as many of us in India have been, by the worst part of European individualism and an Page 289 ...
... Church and the monarchical power in mediaeval Europe under the compulsion of the new circumstances created by the growth of large social and political aggregates. Societies advancing in culture under these conditions of the early Greek, Roman and Indian city states and clan-nations were bound to develop a general vividness of life and dynamic force of culture and creation which the later national aggregates... subtle philosophical conversations of Socrates, created for Europe not only its fundamental political types and ideals but practically all its basic forms of intellectual, philosophical, Page 360 literary and artistic culture. The equally vivid political, juridical and military life of the single city of Rome created for Europe its types of political activity, military discipline and science... classes, but in social functions and connections also there was a free association and equality. We see a similar democratic equality, though of a different type, in the earlier records of Indian civilisation. The rigid hierarchy of castes with the pretensions and arrogance of the caste spirit was a later development; in the simpler life of old, difference or even superiority of function did not carry ...
... present cold war which more than once has brought the world to the brink of a hot war between Western Democracy and East-European Communism. Throughout the ages, man on the whole has remained the same ignorant, crude, selfish, narrow and rapacious creature in spite of his vaunted civilisation and enlightenment and the progress of his mental and moral life. Morality is born out of mind which is ever-changing... of the human race. Science has placed in his hands such lethal weapons, conventional, nuclear, chemical and bacteriological, as when used on a global scale, may easily bring about the collapse of civilisation and a return to barbarism in course of a few months if not of weeks. And this it no mere speculation but Page 66 almost a certainty if he fails to bring his erring and animal... are the ever-changing and perishable surface instruments. And it is the life of the Spirit which is unchanging, one and the same everywhere in spite of the differences of race, religion, climate, culture, tradition and history of the various peoples that inhabit the earth,—the life of the Spirit pure, true and perfect in its knowledge, will and workings, that we have to discover if we are to survive ...
... expansion. Like the two massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, mole met sua" 17 If barbarism is below civilisation or is soured civilisation, philistinism is civilisation grown hypocritical and soulless and lifeless, petrified before it could flower into culture. The Philistine, against whom Matthew Arnold raised his voice, "is not dead, - quite the contrary, he abounds, - but he... talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular success... ." 19 For true culture, however, we have to go beyond sensationalism and philistinism and even civilisation. Culture is the cultivation of the inner countries of the mind and sensibility. But the ethical man and the aesthetic man - who flower in an age of culture - themselves need a sovereign third power to sustain and greaten them. This... but Nature's way has been a spiralling movement through trial and error and partial success. Sri Aurobindo refers in a footnote to the "practical possibility" of a United States of Europe, almost anticipating the European Common Market and the fuller union that seems to be set towards self-accomplishment. Page 484 There might arise too, Sri Aurobindo thinks, "a system of large imperial ...
... appreciate different forms of culture. The gulf was too wide for any bridge of culture then built to span. To the European mind Indian art was a thing barbarous, immature, monstrous, an arrested growth from humanity's primitive savagery and incompetent childhood. If there has been now some change, it is due to the remarkably sudden widening of the horizon and view of European culture, a partial shifting even... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Art The Renaissance in India XII Indian Art - 1 A good deal of hostile or unsympathetic Western criticism of Indian civilisation has been directed in the past against its aesthetic side and taken the form of a disdainful or violent depreciation of its fine arts, architecture, sculpture and... of the gulf which till recently separated the oriental and the Western mind and most of all the European and the Indian way of seeing things. An inability to understand the motives and methods of Indian art and a contempt of or repulsion from it was almost universal till yesterday in the mind of Europe. There was little Page 259 difference in this regard between the average man bound by ...
... 5 October 1935 Prospects for India after Independence In the Times, there are some predictions by Mme Laila saying that India's civilisation, philosophy, culture etc. will spread in the world very slowly but at last it will be recognised as the best culture. She has however also predicted that India will always remain under Britain. Perhaps it is not advisable for India to get freedom soon,... Bengal and they are not going to be exterminated,—even Hitler with his scientific methods of massacre could not exterminate the Jews who are still showing themselves very much alive and, as for Hindu culture, it is not such a weak and fluffy thing as to be easily stamped out; it has lasted through something like 5 millenniums at least and is going to carry on much longer and has accumulated quite enough... fomented this communal incident [in Bengal, as described in a newspaper report that the correspondent summarised for Sri Aurobindo]. It looks as if it were going to be like that everywhere. In Europe also. Page 206 In your scheme of things do you definitely see a free India? You have stated that for the spreading of spirituality in the world India must be free. I suppose you must be ...
... an engineers. The Bengali term for telescope is dūrbīn , a word not of European origin. We cannot conclude that the Bengalis had invented the telescope independently before their contact with the Europeans. Yet on the principles by which the philologists seem to be guided in their conjectural restorations of vanished cultures, these are precisely the conclusions at which we should arrive. Here we... talking of the Indo-European races, claiming or disclaiming Aryan kinship & building on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or pseudo-scientific conclusions. But if language is no sound factor of ethnological research, it may be put forward as a proof of common civilisation and used as a useful & reliable guide to the phenomena of early civilisations. Enormous, most ingenious... believe, an established fact of anthropology that many savage tongues change their vocabulary almost from generation to generation. It is, therefore, perfectly possible that implements of civilisation and culture ideas for which no two Aryan tongues have a common term may yet have been common property before their dispersion; since each of them may have rejected after that dispersion the original common ...
... appeared serially in the Arya . These works embodied much of the inner knowledge that had come to him in his practice of Yoga. Others were concerned with the spirit and significance of Indian civilisation and culture, the true meaning of the Vedas, the progress of human society, the nature and evolution of poetry, the possibility of the unification of the human race. At this time also he began to publish... × It may be observed that Sri Aurobindo's education in England gave him a wide introduction to the culture of ancient, of mediaeval and of modern Europe. He was a brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin. He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself German and Italian sufficiently to read Goethe... in the Baroda College. These were years of self-culture, of literary activity—for much of the poetry afterwards published from Pondicherry was written at this time—and of preparation for his future work. In England he had received, according to his father's express instructions, an entirely occidental education without any contact with the culture of India and the East. 3 At Baroda he made up the ...
... lose intensity and productiveness. Europe has lived in England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, the small States of Germany—all her later civilisation and progress evolved itself there, not in the huge mass of the Holy Roman or the Russian Empire. We see a similar phenomenon in the social and political field when we compare the intense life and activity of Europe in its many nations acting richly... precisely those ages and countries in which humanity was able to organise itself in little independent centres acting intimately upon each other but not fused into a single unity. Modern Europe owes two-thirds of its civilisation to three such supreme moments of human history, the religious life of the congeries of tribes which called itself Israel and, subsequently, of the little nation of the Jews, the ... always of the best quality. Their impulse was rather towards elaborate organisation than original, stimulating and creative. Nevertheless, in this regime of the small city state or of regional cultures there was always a defect which compelled a tendency towards large organisations. The defect was a characteristic of impermanence, often of disorder, especially of defencelessness against the onslaught ...
... within the type which spring from national difference, the past of the civilisation, the cultural atmosphere, the individual idiosyncrasy, but some fundamental likeness of spirit will emerge. Elizabethan poetry was the work of the life-spirit in a new, raw and vigorous people not yet tamed by a restraining and formative culture, a people with the crude tendencies of the occidental mind rioting almost... control, and they have only an occasional or uncertain glimpse of its self motives. Thus they give to it often a form of speech and movement which is borrowed from their intellect, normal temperament or culture rather than wells up as the native voice and rhythm of the spirit within, and they fall away easily to a lower kind of work. They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they... strives constantly to lift their thought and imagination to its own heights, a spirit or Daemon who does not seem to trouble at all with his voice or his oestrus the contemporary poets of continental Europe. But they have no clearly seen or no firmly based constant idea of the greater work which this spirit demands from them; they get at its best only in an inspiration over which they have not artistic ...
... 222) In the words of another historian, American Will Durant: "the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying within". India, before the advent of Islamic imperialism... way, a personal despotism or an absolutist autocracy. It had no resemblance to the ancient Persian monarchy or the monarchies of western and central Asia or the Roman imperial government or later European autocracies: it was of an altogether different type. In spite of a certain sanctity and the great authority conceded to the regal position and the personality of the king as the representative of... which created the Mogul empire. This was followed by the rise of Shivaji's empire and just when it seemed that a new life was about to rise in the regional peoples, there came the intrusion of the European nations, in particular the British. The failure of the Peshwas and the confusion and anarchy that followed, gave the British the opportunity to take over the whole of India. Page 24 ...
... deal. It develops a system of mental growth and efficiency, an intellectual, aesthetic and moral culture. It evolves the vital side of human life and creates an ever-growing system of economic efficiency and vital enjoyment, and this system becomes more and more rich, cumbrous and complex as civilisation develops. Depressing by its mental and vital overgrowth the natural vigour Page 222 ... you have not found the means of social salvation. All these things human society has developed, but none of them has saved it from disillusionment, weariness and decay. The ancient intellectual cultures of Europe ended in disruptive doubt and sceptical impotence, the pieties of Asia in stagnation and decline. Modern society has discovered a new principle of survival, progress, but the aim of that progress... satisfaction and efficiency of the physical, the vital and the mental life of man, in a word, by the growth and advantages of civilisation. A good many losses have indeed to be written off as against these gains, but those are to be accepted as the price we must pay for civilisation. The normal society treats man essentially as a physical, vital and mental being. For the life, the mind, the body are ...
... result of its awakening, follows its own bent and evolves a novel social tendency and culture, that is bound to have an enormous effect on the direction of the world's civilisation; we can measure its probable influence by the profound results of the first reflux of the ideas even of the unawakened East upon Europe. Whatever that effect may be, it will not be in favour of any re-ordering of society... things, an order and principles which all can observe and verify in their ground and fact and to which therefore all may freely and must rationally subscribe, is the culminating movement of European civilisation. It has been the fulfilment and triumph of the individualistic age of human society; it has seemed likely also to be its end, the cause of the death of individualism and its putting away and... d thought and customary action. Yet the truths which Europe has found by its individualistic age covered only the first more obvious, physical and outward facts of life and only such of their more hidden realities and powers as the habit of analytical reason and the pursuit of practical utility can give to man. If its rationalistic civilisation has swept so triumphantly over the world, it is because ...
... it would not be far wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows... the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and Page 72 progresses with discoveries and inventions—devices for artfully manipulating nature—has been essentially and preeminently mechanical in... acquisition of this shifting of the viewpoint has been that we are now in touch with the natural and deeper movement of humanity and not as before merely with its artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civilisation of humanity, in Nietzsche's phrase, was a sort of divagation from nature, it was following a loop away from the direct path of natural evolution. And the new Renaissance of today has precisely corrected ...
... it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows... the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and Page 17 progresses with discoveries and inventions - devices for artfully manipulating nature - has been essentially and pre-eminently mechanical... acquisition of this shifting of the viewpoint has been that we are now in touch with the natural and deeper movement of humanity and not as before merely with its artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civilisation of humanity, in Nietzsche's phrase, was a sort of divagation from nature, it was following a loop away from the direct path of natural evolution. And the new Renaissance of today has precisely corrected ...
... organic life, desires a double self-fulfilment, intensive and extensive or expansive. The deepening and enriching of its culture, political strength and economic well-being within its borders is not felt to be sufficient if there is not, without, an extension or expansion of its culture, an increase of its political extent, dominion, power or influence and a masterful widening of its commercial exploitation... situation was to be the right of nations to dispose of their own destinies and to be governed only by their free consent. The latter condition is impossible of immediate fulfilment except in Europe, and even for Europe the principle is not really recognised in its total meaning or put into entire practice. If it were capable of universal application, if the existing relations of peoples and the psychology... civilised forms,—mild in comparison, for are not the jail and the executioner still the two great pillars of the social order?—but it is there silently upholding the specious appearances of our civilisation and ready to intervene, whenever called upon, in the workings of the fairer but still feebler gods of the social cosmos. Diffused, force fulfils the free workings of Nature and is the servant of ...
... would have conquered England. SATYENDRA: Ludwig writes in his biography of Napoleon that Napoleon was the first to conceive of a federation of Europe under France. SRI AUROBINDO: No, Henry IV and his minister were the first to conceive of federated European states. SATYENDRA: Napoleon of course wanted the federation to be under France. SRI AUROBINDO: Under himself. SATYENDRA: He was France... has been a wise decision. They would have done well if they had defended it, because it is not likely that Germany will preserve it. Destruction of Paris means the destruction of modern Europen civilisation. NIRODBARAN: Especially if the tide of war turns against them, they are certain to destroy it. SRI AUROBINDO: The French first decided to defend; what made them change their minds? PURANI:... AUROBINDO: No, on the contrary, he tried to prove the possibility of the existence of God. Goethe was a cosmopolitan. When he was asked to express hatred against France, he said that he owed most of his culture to France. PURANI: Frederick the Great had a deep respect for France. He tried to establish a friendship with Voltaire and frequently invited him to his court. Voltaire used to get disgusted with ...
... This also is sufficiently clear and positive. The tradition of a mystic element in the Veda as a source of Indian civilisation, its religion, its philosophy, its culture is more in consonance with historical fact than the European scouting of this idea. The nineteenth-century European scholarship writing in a period of materialistic rationalism regarded the history of the race as a development out... and Yoga. The Vedic tradition, the fact of a mystical element in the Veda fits in perfectly with this historical truth and takes its place in the history of Indian culture. The tradition of the Veda as the bed-rock of Indian civilisation—not merely a barbaric sacrificial liturgy—is more than a tradition, it is an actual fact of history. But even if an element of high spiritual knowledge, or passages... meanings of the Vedic verses and give a new presentation often arbitrary and imaginative. What they sought for in the Veda was the early history of India, its society, institutions, customs, a civilisation-picture of the times. They invented the theory based on the difference of languages of an Aryan invasion from the north, an invasion of a Dravidian India of which the Indians themselves had no memory ...
... Roman empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe - he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in its life aspects but in its i... summarised in himself the seeds of modern Europe." (29.7.1937) The appearance of Augustus in the very period when Christianity had its origination seems to have answered a need of the future Europe standing on the threshold of an era in which a new powerful spirit had broken in upon old Judaism and a Graecised Near East and a rising Roman culture. Its invasion, with its "Christ crucified"... something Page 8 highly fecundating by means of a subtilising light from the deep heart of religious aspiration, it brought also a threat to the existing progressive elan of the European consciousness. There was the danger of its submerging the glory that was the Greek mind of inspired reason and chastened aesthetic sense and the grandeur that was the Roman vitality building a manifold ...
... or admissible. On the other hand, Indian polity never arrived at that unwholesome substitution of the mechanical for the natural order of the life of the people which has been the disease of European civilisation now culminating in the monstrous artificial organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State. The advantages of the idealising intellect were absent, but so also were the disadvantages... Virat, the universal spirit. Another point must be noted which creates a difference between the ancient polity of India and that of the European peoples and makes the standards of the West as inapplicable here as in the things of the mind and the inner culture. Human society has in its growth to pass through three stages of evolution before it can arrive at the completeness of its possibilities.... ancient and of modern Europe. A profound respect for the creations of the past as the natural expression of the Indian mind and life, the sound manifestation of its Dharma or right law of being, was the strongest element in the mental attitude and this preservative instinct was not disturbed but rather yet more firmly settled and fixed by the great millennium of high intellectual culture. A slow evolution ...
... citizenship and a voluntary fusion of cultures may appear in the process of the change and the spirit of nationalism losing its militancy may find these things perfectly compatible with the integrity of its own outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. The spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever increasing... or voluntary fusion of cultures. Nationalism will have fulfilled itself and lost its militancy and would no longer find these things incompatible with self-preservation and the integrality of its outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever... order these: a revolution which would achieve India's freedom and her unity; the resurgence and liberation of Asia and her return to the great role which she had played in the progress of human civilisation; the rise of a new, a greater, brighter and nobler life for mankind which for its entire realisation would rest outwardly on an international unification of the separate existence of the peoples ...
... This attempt of the State to grow into an intellectual and moral being is one of the most interesting phenomena of modern civilisation. Even the necessity of intellectualising and moralising it in its external relations has been enforced upon the conscience of mankind by the European catastrophe. But the claim of the State to absorb all free individual activities, a claim which it increasingly makes as... imperfect mentality than by its means. But even if the governing instrument were better constituted and of a higher mental and moral character, even if some way could be found to do what ancient civilisations by their enforcement of certain high ideals and disciplines tried to do with their ruling classes, still the State would not be what the State idea pretends that it is. Theoretically, it is the... impossible. The State tends always to uniformity, because uniformity is easy to it and natural variation is impossible to its essentially mechanical nature; but uniformity is death, not life. A national culture, a national religion, a national education may still be useful things provided they do not interfere with the growth of human solidarity on the one side and individual freedom of thought and conscience ...
... reeling back into the beast, that relapse into barbarism which was the condition of the Roman Empire at a high stage of material civilisation and intellectual culture and which a distinguished British statesman declared the other day to be the condition to which all Europe approached. The development of the emotions is therefore the first condition of a sound human evolution. Unless the feelings tend... primary emotions connected with the prāṇa that seek to feed upon the world in the beast and in the savage man who approximates to the condition of the beast. Out of this animal state, according to European Science, man rises working out the tiger and the ape by intellectual and moral development in the social condition. If the beast has to be worked out, it is obvious that the body and the prāṇa must ...
... he founded. Though mixtures of culture might be expected later, vet in his attitude to Greek culture he must have had the desire and confident expectation that it would be the leading factor. The great question of the future in fact was, which of the two cultures would prove itself the stronger. For many centuries this was the chief problem of the history of civilisation. (...) Taken from: ... Greek culture prevail as far as possible. But just as he had learned as a politician that he could not rule his Asiatic Empire with Macedonians alone, so in active contact with Oriental cultures it must have become clear to him that neither could he make Greek culture exclusively dominant. The chief requisite was that centres should at first be created from which the spread of Greek culture could take... prospect therefore of a gradual mixture of cultures in the settlements cannot have run counter to the views which he then held. Was he thus unfaithful to his original object of spreading Greek culture in the East? Personally, in spite of all the political concessions which he made to the Iranians, he remained to the last, as we saw, a thorough admirer of Greek culture, and it must accordingly still have been ...
... Vision of the Vedic Poets (Mouton, The Hague, 1963). Gordon, D.H., The Prehistoric Background of Indian Culture (Tripathi, Bombay, 1959). Grist, D.H., Rice 4th ed. (Longmans, 1965). Greppin, A.C., review of J.P. Mallory's book In Search of the Indo-Europeans ... in Times Literary Supplement (August 11-17 1989). review of Indoeuropejskij jazyk i indoeuropejcy... (Madras) (August 25, 1974). Chandra, Moti, in The Illustrated Weekly of India (Bombay) (February 16, 1964). Chatterji, S.K., "The Basic Unity underlying the Diversity of Culture", in Interrelations of Culture (UNESCO, Paris, 1951). Chattopadhyaya, DebipRasād, Harappān Religion and the Aryan Question (Prakashana, Bangalore, 1987). Chattopadhyaya, K., Studies in Vedic and... A Cultural History of India, ed. A.L. Basham (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975). "Some reflections on structural remains at Kalibangan", in Indus Page 438 Civilisation: new perspectives, ed. A.H. Dani (Islamabad, 1981). Law, B.C., "North India in the Sixth Century B.C.", in The Age of Imperial Unity, ed. R.C. Majumdar and A.D. Pusalker (Bharatiya Vidya ...
... between the East and the West. We usually attach the word "freedom" or "liberty" to Western culture and civilisation as expressing its essential character: similarly it is bondage, submission, suppression of the individual and individuality that come up in our mind when we think of Eastern culture and civilisation. The judgment is not without truth, so far as it goes; but looked at Page 228 ... For some consider the mixture of influence, like that of blood, as a necessary condition of progress and creativity: others again are keen on maintaining, the purity of stock, the particular type of culture to which each is attached and any intrusion of a foreign vein they consider as a lowering, a degeneration of the type. We all know the great difference between the East and the West that has... said and admitted as a fact that there is in the East an atmosphere that is predominantly spiritual and one can more easily come in contact with it; whereas in the West it is the mental and material culture that predominates Page 224 and the approach to it is nearer and closer to man. The science of the Spirit has received greater attention in the East; it has been studied, experimented ...
... forms now current, and I am not altogether in love with the European kind, however great an improvement it may be on the past. I hold that India having a spirit of her own and a governing temperament proper to her own civilisation, should in politics as in everything else strike out her own original path and not stumble in the wake of Europe. But this is precisely what she will be obliged to do, if she... rights and duties are European ideas. Dharma is the Indian conception in which rights and duties lose the artificial antagonism created by a view of the world which makes selfishness the root of action, and regain their deep and eternal unity. Dharma is the basis of democracy which Asia must recognise, for in this lies the distinction between the soul of Asia and the soul of Europe. 1 ***... guides to the sources. Chapter 1 No 1. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library Vol 14, The Foundations of Indian Culture pp- 366-367 p 16 in the manuscript No 2. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library Vol 14, The Foundations of Indian Culture pp- 367-368. p 21-22 in the manuscript Chapter 5 No 1. Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics by Haridas ...
... patriots but good Europeans. But immediately the question arose, what then of the increasing importance of America in world politics, what of Japan and China, what of the renewed stirrings of life in Asia? The writer had therefore to draw back from his first formula and to explain that by Europe he meant not Europe but all nations that had accepted the principles of European civilisation as the basis of... victorious allies dominating the rest of Europe, or by a concert of all the European Powers or else by a United States of Europe or some other form of European federation. A dominating alliance of great Powers would be simply a repetition in principle of the system of Metternich and would inevitably break down after some lapse of time, while a Concert of Europe must mean, as experience has shown, the... to the European standard. Indeed, though Europe is still strongly separate in its own conception from the rest of the world,—as was shown by the often expressed resentment of the continual existence of Turkey in Europe and the desire to put an end to this government of Europeans by Asiatics,—yet as a matter of fact it is inextricably tangled up with America and Asia. Some of the European nations ...
... 217 Greek (language), 109 Greeks , 158, 179, 183,213,217 Griffith, Ralph T. H., 97(11) guru, 119 H Haeckel , 87 Hardpans civilisation, 1oo (fn) hell, 126 , 143 , 147 Page 265 Hindu, culture. see under Indian culture Hindus, 19,31 ,39,40,44,58,63,65, 167,179 190,201 ,222·223,227, 241,242,245 religion, see under Hinduism society, see under Indian society... British European, 39, 43, 52, 55, 59, 60, 65, 183, 220 language emedium of, 75, 157 moral or re legions, 7 3 national, 23, 27, 35, 38, 67 , 133, 180 scientific, 65 teaching by snippets, 74 -76 Egypt (ancient), 137 England, 24 , 60 ,61, 67, 202, 236, 239 English, the English, 24, 43 , 67 , 71, 217, 239 their coming to India, 60,61,178 language , 157 see also British rule, Europe Europe, 55... creation (new), 21 , 23, 32, 57 , 91 , 128, 154 , 193 ,200.201,241,244,247 criminals. Indian, 214 in politics , 221 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 237 Cripps' proposal, 224(11), 237 culture. see under Indian culture Curzon, 17 Czechoslovakia , 23 I D Danton, 24 Das, Chillaranjan, 13,47, 159, 185,216, 221,223,242 Dayananda Saraswati, 116 ·118, 170 democracy, 61, 62, 103 ,104, 149 ...
... between the East and the West. We usually attach the word "freedom" or "liberty" to Western culture and civilisation as expressing its essential character: similarly it is bondage, submission, suppression of the individual and individuality that come up in our mind when we think of Eastern culture and civilisation. The judgment is not without truth, so far as it goes; but looked at Page 170 ... For some consider the mixture of influence, like that of blood, as a necessary condition of progress and creativity: others again are keen on maintaining the purity of stock, the particular type of culture to which each is attached and any intrusion of a foreign vein they consider as a lowering, a degeneration of the type. We all know the great difference between the East and the West that has... and admitted as a fact that there is in the East an atmosphere that is predominantly spiritual and one can more easily come in contact with it; whereas in the West it is the mental and material culture that predominates Page 166 and the approach to it is nearer and closer to man. The science of the Spirit has received greater attention in the East; it has been studied, experimented ...
... times, republics also, diverse races, sub-nations with a marked character of their own, developing different brands or forms of civilisation and culture, many schools of art and architecture which yet succeeded in fitting into the general Indian type of civilisation and culture. India's history throughout has been marked by a tendency, a constant effort to unite all this diversity of elements into a single... the Himalayas and the ocean, has always been the home of a peculiar people with characteristics of its own recognisably distinct from all others, with its own distinct civilisation, way of life, way of the spirit, a separate culture, arts, building of society. It has absorbed all that has entered into it, put upon all the Indian stamp, welded the most diverse elements into its fundamental unity. But... voluntary fusion of cultures may appear in the process of the change and the spirit of nationalism losing its militancy may find these things perfectly compatible with the integrity of its own outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. The spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in ...
... classical afternoon of Indian civilisation. The soul of an age is mirrored in this single mind. It was an age when the Indian world after seeking God through the spirit and through action turned to seek Him through the activity of the senses, an age therefore of infinite life, colour and splendour, an age of brilliant painting and architecture, wide learning, complex culture, developing sciences; an age... dramas; the most varied and splendid panorama of human life; the noblest & most grandiose epic of our classical literature; and its one matchless poem of passionate love and descriptive beauty. In Europe the Shacountala is the one poem of Kalidasa universally known and appreciated. In India the Cloud has gone even nearer home to the national imagination. For this there is good reason. It is, essentially ...
... or voluntary fusion of cultures. Nationalism will have fulfilled itself and lost its militancy and would no longer find these things incompatible with self-preservation and the integrality of its outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever... for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future. Another dream was for the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation. Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated: its other still subject or partly subject parts are moving through whatever struggles towards freedom. Only ...
... world by German culture is the straight path of human progress. But culture is not, in this view, merely a state of knowledge or a system or cast of ideas and moral and aesthetic tendencies; Page 50 culture is life governed by ideas, but by ideas based on the truths of life and so organised as to bring it to its highest efficiency. Therefore all life not capable of this culture and this efficiency... of man to live by the law of his subjective being whether as an individual or as a social unit one in its corporate mind and body. For this is the sense of the characteristic turn which modern civilisation is taking. Everywhere we are beginning, though still sparsely and in a groping tentative fashion, to approach things Page 44 from the subjective standpoint. In education our object is... practice of military domination and commercial exploitation of the weak by the strong; all that Germany has done is to attempt to give it a wider extension and more rigorous execution and apply it to European as well as to Asiatic and African peoples. Even the severity or brutality of her military methods or of her ways of colonial or internal political repression, taken at their worst, for much once stated ...
... consciousness. We know also of the nature of the Hebraic genius, the moral fervour, the serious, almost grim spirit of Righteousness that formed and even now forms a major strain in the European or Christian culture and civilisation. The famous "sweetness and light" of the Hellenic mind supplied the other strain. The Roman genius for law and government is a well-known commonplace of history. Well-known also... an individual being, the collective being too is a unit, a close knit living unit. As the individual has different parts and limbs, organs and systems, so is humanity composed of nations and races, cultures and religions. And as the parts of the "body natural" do not exist by themselves, independently of one another, each for its own sake without regard for others, so do the various human aggregates ...
... developed ethical and aesthetic mind and a high social and political ideal, the ensouled image of a great culture. As rich in freshness of life but immeasurably more profound and evolved in thought and substance than the Greek, as advanced in maturity of culture but more vigorous and vital and young in strength than the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned... Kalidasa. Something is lost, and something is gained. The change is significant, but no more significant than the change from the Heroic Age to the more recent period of sophistication and organised civilisation. The old epics were evidently recited Page 371 before groups of appreciative listeners, but the 'literary' epics are read more often than listened to, treasured in books... loses in one way it gains in another; there is less of the blaze of action and assertion and more of the twilight revelation of inner striving and struggle and achievement. Of the European epic poets between Dante and Milton, two Italians, Ariosto andTasso, and the Portuguese, Camoens, stand rather in the forefront. Camoens's Os Lusiadas preceded by a few years Tasso's Gerusalemme ...
... words, the effective symbols of a spiritual experience and knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which were then the highest achievement of the human race. The ritual system recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand; the naturalistic sense discovered by European scholarship may, in its general conceptions, be accepted; but behind them there is always the true and still... Page 6 also, Gods of War, Love, Beauty, whose material functions have disappeared if they ever existed. It is not enough to say that this change was inevitable with the progress of human civilisation: the process also of the change demands inquiry and elucidation. We see the same revolution effected in the Puranas partly by the substitution of other divine names and figures, but also in part... in its entirety the traditional interpretation of the Indian scholar Sayana and we have in our own day the interpretation constructed after an immense labour of comparison and conjecture by modern European scholarship. Both of them present one characteristic in common, the extraordinary incoherence and poverty of sense which their results stamp upon the ancient hymns. The separate lines can be given ...
... material Nature-gods, as supposed by the Europeans, but something more profound and noble, that they were indeed, I thought, the true substance & foundation of the Upanishads, if not of all “Hindu” religion & spirituality. Certain considerations were added which, it seemed to me, delivered me from the intellectual necessity of implicit submission to European standards and modern theories. Modern Science... language but of Vedic ritual. We have therefore two different clues to the inner sense of these ancient words and obsolete practices. The European clue has been followed for many decades; the Vedantic clue perhaps might also be not unprofitably pursued. We know what European scholars understand by the Vedas; it may not be Page 9 labour lost to know what the Vedantic sages understood by the Vedas... the Europeans, was personified to the Vedic consciousness as Agnidevata, fire the god; Agni had originally no other significance. But now we see Madhuchchhanda with his eyes on that flame beholding in it a vision of wisdom, truth, knowledge, fatherhood, moral force, spiritual helpfulness. How has this psychological miracle been effected? By the anthropomorphic tendency in man, say the Europeans,—Fire ...
... English education and European culture" 9 — a genuine enthusiasm for the works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Being a persona grata with European as well as Bengalee society. Dr. Krishnadhan was able to act as a link, a bridge, between the two; and, indeed, he came to be called the "Suez Canal", for his house served as a common meeting place, day after day, for both Europeans and Bengalees. During... typical products of Western culture, uncontaminated by Oriental ways and ideas and in total ignorance of India, her people, her religion, her languages and her culture. It was during this visit that Swarnalata Devi gave birth to another son, Barindra Kumar; but in the birth register, his name was as "Emmanuel Ghose", another instance of Dr. Krishnadhan's predilection for European names! While Sri... record of the education and ideas, imagination and feelings, engendered by a purely European culture. The derivative element is prominent enough, the names and lineaments and allusions appearing rather exotic to an Indian reader; but, then, knowing a§ he did at the time hardly anything about India and her culture, Sri Aurobindo couldn't have written in any other strain. In like manner, the poems ...
... idea that the modern European civilisation is a thing that we have to acquire and fit ourselves for, and so only can we live and prosper, and it is this that our education must do for us, he argued that the idea of national education challenges the sufficiency of that assumption. He pointed out that India would do better, taking over whatever new knowledge or just ideas Europe has to offer, to assimilate... assimilate them to its own knowledge and culture, its own native temperament and spirit, mind and social genius and create there-from the civilisation of the future. Page 138 According to Sri Aurobindo, there is within the universal mind and soul of humanity the mind and soul of the individual with its infinite variation, its commonness and its uniqueness and between them there stands an ... the indigenous languages so as to get the heart and intimate sense of our own culture and establish a vivid continuity between the still living power of our past and the yet uncreated power of our future, and how we are to learn and use English or any other foreign tongue so as to know helpfully the life, ideas and culture of other countries and establish our right relations with the world around us ...
... and educational system in France. The links with French culture will be retained and enlarged but also, inevitably a much larger place will be given to our own Indian culture. It is to be hoped this autonomous French India will become a powerful centre of intellectual development and interchange and meeting place of European and Asiatic culture and [a] spiritual factor of the world unification which... existence of autonomous units with a vivid life and individuality of their own has always been a characteristic of our country, part of its polity and civilisation and one of the causes of its greatness and the variety and opulence of Indian culture. The unity of India is desirable but not a mechanical unification and that is indeed no part of the scheme envisaged by the leaders of India; they envisage... legislation and other differentiating characteristics. There is also the impress of the French language and French culture. All Asiatic countries have been developing a mixed intellectuality, public life and social ideas; our life is Asiatic in its basis with a structure at the top adopted from Europe. In British India this superstructure has been formed by the use of English as a common language of the educated ...
... and culture, this has been its root and stalk, and in modern times this truth of his temperament, always there, has come aggressively to the Page 157 surface and triumphed over the traditions of Christian piety and Latinistic culture. This triumphant emergence and lead of the vital man and his motives has been the whole significance of the great economic and political civilisation of the... to languish, stagnate and finally move towards disintegration. The modern European idea of society is founded upon the primary and predominant part played by this vital dynamism in the formation and maintenance of society; for the European, ever since the Teutonic mind and temperament took possession of western Europe, has been fundamentally the practical, dynamic and kinetic man, vitalistic in... All has been therefore a half-ordered confusion of the struggle for life corrected by the need and instinct of association, a struggle of individuals, clans, tribes, parties, nations, ideas, civilisations, cultures, ideals, religions, each affirming itself, each compelled into contact, association, strife with the others. For while Nature imposes the ego as a veil behind which she labours out the individual ...
... known as the Harappa Culture, was discovered, the assumed in-coming Aryan were thought to have destroyed it around 1500 B.C. and, though the script of this Civlization has not yet been acceptably read, the general tendency is to consider it as couching an old form of the Dravidian language Tamil. Lately several historians have attributed the destruction of the Harappa culture to natural causes... India in c . 1500 B.C. have been considered in detail, including the latest and most impressive by the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola. In dating the Rigveda far earlier than the Indus Valley Civilisation, the author avails himself of Sri Aurobindo's insights into Indian history and Indian linguistics. To appreciate the sustained novelty of Sethna's researches on many fronts the reader is... Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue , both of them convergingalong different and independent routes upon dating the Rigveda farily anterior to the Indus Valley Civilisation of c. 2500-1500 B.C. However, the need for inversion of epochs argued in these books does not tempt the author of the new volume to be a fanatic of the antiquity-favouring Puranas, even ...
... the actual savage in humanity is perhaps not the original primitive man, but a relapse and reversion towards primitiveness,—the infrarational stage of society may arrive at a very lofty order of civilisation. It may have great intuitions of the meaning or general intention of life, admirable ideas of the arrangement of life, a harmonious, well-adapted, durable and serviceable social system, an imposing... get the society to modify or reconstruct itself on the basis of some clearly rational and intelligent principle. Such an age seems to be represented by the traditions of the beginnings of Greek civilisation, or rather the beginnings of its mobile and progressive period. Or if spirituality predominates, there will be great mystics capable of delving into the profound and still occult psychological ... obscurely indicated in the old traditions of the mysteries. In prehistoric India we see it take a peculiar and unique turn which determined the whole future trend of the society and made Indian civilisation a thing apart and of its own kind in the history of the human race. But these things are only a first beginning of light in the midst of a humanity which is still infrarational as well as infra ...
... shaping towards democracy and socialism, on the calibre and civilisation of the lower class depends the future of the entire race. And we have seen what sort of lower class England, with all her splendid success, has been able to evolve—in calibre debased, in civilisation nil. And after seeing what England has produced by her empiricism, her culture of a raw energy, her exaltation of a political method not... suffer from disorders peculiar to ourselves?" Well, the connection is not perhaps so remote as Mr. Mehta imagines: I will not however press that point, but rather appeal to the instance of two great European nations, who also have an entirely modern environment and suffer or have suffered from very similar maladies—and so end my long excursion into the domain of abstract ideas. As the living instances ...
... Sethna's eagle eye spots the inner contradiction in Parpola's hypothesis. Parpola feels that the Harappans spoke proto-Dravidian and not Indo-European because the horse is absent from the seats and figurines. Yet, he characterises the chalcolithic cultures of the Banas Valley and Maiawa (Navdatoli) as Aryan although there too the horse is conspicuously absent. Further, when Parpola asserts that... precedes the Harappa Culture and definitely the post-Harappan Pirak phase of c. 1800 B.C. Even the PGW type of pottery, with its traits of rice cultivation, is absent along the route supposedly taken by immigrating Aryans. The latest excavations (1976-1982) by J.P. Joshi indicate that PGW culture is an indigenous development without any break from the local proto-historic culture and is not associated... Harappan Culture was exposed through Sethna's relentless quest after truth to be a misreading of the Akkadian text by Pusalkar, although thereby Sethna lost a major support for his thesis. In the process, he also corrected a major misconception prevailing among our scholars regarding this word. When Sethna approached H.D. Sankalia with the first draft of his The Harappa Culture and the ...
... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Polity The Renaissance in India XXIII Indian Polity - 3 The socio-political evolution of Indian civilisation, as far as one can judge from the available records, passed through four historical stages, first the simple Aryan community, then a long period of transition in which the national... slow decline and final decadence of the ancient Indian culture that brought about the collapse of considerable parts of the old structure and the degradation and disintegration, with no sufficient means for revival or new creation, of the socio-political life of the people. At the height of its evolution and in the great days of Indian civilisation we find an admirable political system efficient in... the architecture, art, culture, scholarship, literature already created by the communal mind of India. In the person of the Page 423 monarch it was the dignified and powerful head and in the system of his administration the supreme instrument—neither an arbitrary autocracy or bureaucracy, nor a machine oppressing or replacing life—of a great and stable civilisation and a free and living ...
... peculiarly associated with Hindu society. Will Durant, the famous American writer on civilisation and culture, pointedly asks: "Does the attitude of a Brahmin to a Pariah differ, except in words, from that of a British lord to a navvy, or a Park Avenue banker to an East Side huckster, or a white man to a negro, or a European to an Asiatic?" What is clear from Durant's question is Page 77 ... and when the national life was in danger owing to internal decadence and external invasion the strata or classes or castes grew rigid not only as a result of an ebb in the true spirit of Indian civilisation but also in consequence of conditions threatening Indian society with chaos. The caste system as it lingered on up to now was more or less a harmful and superficial institution, but in its origin... and complexity, the supra-cosmic and the cosmic, the universal and the individual - all these are blended together in Hinduism and express themselves in the large number of aspects our country's culture and social life possess. A million gods revealing and concretising a million facets of the inexhaustible Divine and of the infinite Eternal, a supreme trinity-in-unity personalising the creative, ...
... is true that spirituality has played a role in every civilisation and that no culture can claim a monopoly for spirituality. And yet, it can safely be affirmed that the unique greatness and continuity of Indian culture can be traced to her unparalleled experimentation, discovery and achievement in the vast field of spirituality. Indian culture has recognised spirituality not only as the supreme... Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays INDIAN CULTURE: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE The history of India would remain enigmatic, particularly, the remarkable phenomenon of the continuity of Indian culture through the millennia would remain a mystery, if we do not take into account the role that spirituality has played not only in determining the direction... electrified not only spiritually but even socially and politically. India became renascent, and there began to develop a capacity for a new synthesis, not only of the threads of Indian culture but also of world culture. Nationalism came to be proclaimed as the new spirituality and this nationalism was right from the beginning international in its spirit and sweep. Not an escape from life, but acceptance ...
... Hindu system of medicine, etc. etc. To a generation which was the ardent advocate of European or Christian ethics and rationalism, Rajnarayan Bose, himself a prominent product of the English education, boldly proclaimed the superiority of Hindu religion and culture over European and Christian theology and civilisation.... The most significant trait of this nationalism was an intense love of the motherland... was at this moment that the European wave swept over India. The first effect of this entry of a new and quite opposite civilisation was the destruction of much that had no longer the power to live, the deliquescence of much else, a tendency to the devitalisation of the rest. A new activity came in, but this was at first crudely and confusedly imitative of the foreign culture. It was a crucial moment and... of the anglicised English-educated Bengalis towards their own culture and customs. Those who had hitherto thought in English, talked in English, and even dreamed in English, were now asked to speak and write in Bengali, to wear dhoti and chadar instead of hats and coats, to give up the habit of taking European food and frequent European hotels, to adopt indigenous games and physical exercises, to promote ...
... It was as a leader of Nationalism that Sri Aurobindo first caught the public eye. Although educated in England and bringing a rich assimilation of all European culture, he stood out as an incarnation of the true Indian genius. In him the culture of this hoary land sprang vibrantly to life and when he plunged into the political arena at the time of Bengal's partition by Lord Curzon and took up the... appearance a civil war but really the first violent stroke by Communism in its plan of world-conquest burst on us and America undaunted by terrible disadvantages rushed into the carnage in order to save civilisation, we are led to ask whether again this date has a meaning. To get the answer we do not have to search long. The hostilities were preluded in early June by a propaganda campaign by the North Korean... spirit on earth by armed might was August 15! The Democratic Ideals and Our Independence Day Surely a date of momentous implications for the values of Page 104 civilisation has been chosen by India to celebrate her independence. Why did she select this particular date? There seems to have been no conscious assessment of whatever import it bore by the year 1947 in which ...
... of physical and vital life. In terms of the history of civilisation, humankind is turning more and more decisively and globally, not only towards philistinism but even a kind of barbarism where the barbarian can roam about the world taking full advantages of the civilisation that has been created so far by the past achievements of culture, of reason, ethics, aesthetics and religious and spiritual... was able to organise itself in small independent centres, but infused into a single unity. Sri Aurobindo marks out particularly three such moments in human history to which modern Europe owes two-third of its civilisation. The first of these moments is to be found in the religious life of tribes in Israel; the second moment was that of the many-sided life of the small Greek city states; and the third... a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ...
... is true that spirituality has played a role in every civilisation and that no culture can claim a monopoly for spirituality. And yet, it can safely be affirmed that the unique greatness and continuity of Indian culture can be traced to her unparalleled experimentation, discovery and achievement in the vast field of spirituality. Indian culture has recognised spirituality not only as the supreme... Indian Identity and Cultural Continuity Indian Culture: Past, Present and Future The history of India would remain enigmatic, particularly, the remarkable phenomenon of the continuity of Indian culture through the millennia would remain a mystery, if we do not take into account the role that spirituality has played not only in determining the... electrified not only spiritually but even socially and politically. India became renascent, and there began to develop a capacity for a new synthesis, not only of the threads of Indian culture but also of world culture. Nationalism came to be proclaimed as the new spirituality and this nationalism was right from the beginning international in its spirit Page 23 and sweep. Not an escape from ...
... cannot be the last and highest guide; culture, as it is understood ordinarily, cannot be the directing light or find out the regulating and harmonising principle of all our life and action. For reason stops short of the Divine and only compromises with the problems of life, and culture in order to attain the Transcendent and Infinite must become spiritual culture, something much more than an intellectual... and sympathy, this predominance of religion has been violently attacked and rejected by that portion of humanity which was for that time the standard bearer of thought and progress, Europe after the Renascence, modern Europe. This revolt in its extreme form tried to destroy religion altogether, boasted indeed of having killed the religious instinct in man,—a vain and ignorant boast, as we now see,... ing or at least the colouring of life, an overtopping of all the other instincts and fundamental ideas by the religious instinct and the religious idea is, we may note, not peculiar to Asiatic civilisations, but has always been more or less the normal state of the human mind Page 173 and of human societies, or if not quite that, yet a notable and prominent part of their complex tendencies ...
... voluntary fusion of cultures. Nationalism will have fulfilled itself and lost its militancy and would no longer find these things incompatible with self-preservation and the integrality of its outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever... for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future. Another dream was for the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation. Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated: its other still subject or partly subject parts are moving through whatever struggles towards freedom. Only... stay with Sri Aurobindo, on April 24, 1920, she brought with her many things she had used in Japan. The display was arranged in four rooms. The first showed the country, the second its art and culture, the third the contrast between the Japan of 1919 and the new one of 1955, and the fourth room was devoted to home life. Tosiko Kawaguchi, Tasinore Murakoshi and Akira Noda took a vital part in ...
... when it chronicles the advance made by a people —the progress of a civilization. "But the real and perfect civilisation yet waits to be discovered," he wrote decades later, giving the net result of his studies, "for the life of mankind is still nine-tenths of barbarism to one-tenth of culture." But it seems quite significant to me that from his very youth what interested Sri Aurobindo was the... metaphysics and most European philosophy since the Greeks seemed to me a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real that could be firmly grasped, and written in a metaphysical jargon to which I had not the key. ... In sum, my interest in metaphysics was almost null and in general philosophy sporadic." We see then that in England young A. A. Ghose almost excluded Europe's philosophy, and also ...
... the Indian political system and its culture. Indeed, it was the beginning of a very turbulent period in Indian history. As a result of the Muslim conquest, doubts have been cast on the political capacity of the Indian peoples. But first let us try and see why this conquest happened. It took place at a time when the vitality of ancient Indian life and culture, after at least two thousand years... and decline under the weight of a Central Asiatic religion and culture with which it failed to coalesce, but it survived its pressure, put its impact on it in many directions and it remains to this day alive even in decadence and capable of recovery, giving ample proof of a strength and soundness that is rare in the history of cultures. And in the political field, it never ceased to throw... domination. Hindu tradition survived only in remote corners of the country like in Orissa, Assam and parts of South India. The problem, however, was not merely a political one; it was much more a civilisational problem. The real problem introduced by the Mussulman conquest was not that of subjection to a foreign rule and the ability to recover freedom, but the struggle between two civilizations ...
... political life;... the shopkeepers, the artisan class, the immense body of illiterate and ignorant peasantry, the submerged classes, even the wild tribes and races still outside the pale of Hindu civilisation, Nationalism can afford to neglect and omit none. April 1908 (?) —"The new [Nationalism] overleaps every barrier; it calls to the clerk at his counter, the trader in his shop, the peasant at... Kali, the Mahomedan it spurs to Page 308 action for the glory of Islam. It cries to all to come forth, to help in God's work and remake a nation, each with what his creed or his culture, his strength, his manhood or his genius can give to the new nationality. The only qualification it asks for is a body made in the womb of an Indian mother, a heart that can feel for India, a brain... the Vedas, is "independent, self-protecting, and stands by its greatness, and in its greatness—stands sva-mahimni," which is synonymous with Swaraj. The word 'Swaraj' was a bugbear to the Europeans. When they heard it they became full of unreasoning terrors. So there is no need to describe the consternation of the Anglo-Indian Government at Bepin Pal's triumphant oratory. "I do not think we ...
... classed among them. The ideal of Sri Ramakrishna would not admit stupidity as a qualification for saintliness. Sri Ramakrishna's advent took place in a scientific age, in the world of modern civilisation, amid a deluge of atheism, when the physical consciousness was the dominating principle everywhere. He appeared before such a world in all his rusticity, for he was to demonstrate by the very example... soul, with the prayer, "I am thy disciple, deign to teach me." Further, inspired by his Master's unique power he, Vivekananda, threw himself, like a thunderbolt, upon that very country where modern civilisation had reached its acme. In Vivekananda modernism received the initiation of the supreme spirituality to become its instrument and servitor. Sri Ramakrishna, at the very outset, proved in his own... God, to find him dwelling in the heart. "Know Him alone and give up all thought and speech and act that are of no Page 226 value." However great may be the external education and culture, there is something still higher before which all these dwindle into insignificance and even their complete absence does not matter at all if one gets at the one heart of all things. So we see that ...
... mainly upon the examination of the trend of poetical spirit by European critics. They have taken for granted the cultural domination of the world by Europe as they took its economic and political domination. But culture is something much deeper than economics and politics. There are historical instances where a declining culture, politically dominated by another nation, has revived with a remarkable... impact of an alien culture stimulates, invigorates and resuscitates the dormant creative possibilities of the subject race. This seems to have happened in the case of modem India. It is true that the various literatures of regional Indian languages were stagnant on account of the decline of national life, and all of them received a powerful impetus by the impact of European culture, especially as... owes to Europe by her new creations in the English language. It was therefore a phenomenon of very great significance when Sri Aurobindo turned his remarkable poetical capacity to the creation of an epic in English to embody his grand vision of the Spirit. It is well-known that Sri Aurobindo had devoted himself to the pursuit of spirituality which is the foundation of the Indian culture. He is ...
... rests mainly upon the examination of the trend of poetical spirit by European critics. They have taken for granted the cultural domination of the world by Europe as they took its economic and political domination. But culture is something much deeper than economics and politics. There are historical instances where a declining culture, politically dominated by another nation, has revived with a remarkable... impact of an alien culture stimulates, invigorates and resuscitates the dormant creative possibilities of the subject race. This seems to have happened in the case of modem India. It is true that the various literatures of regional Indian languages were stagnant on account of the decline of national life, and all of them received a powerful impetus by the impact of European culture, especially as represented... it owes to Europe by her new creations in the English language. It was therefore a phenomenon of very great significance when Sri Aurobindo turned his remarkable poetical capacity to the creation of an epic in English to embody his grand vision of the Spirit. It is well-known that Sri Aurobindo had devoted himself to the pursuit of spirituality which is the foundation of the Indian culture. He is not ...
... that there can be of the value and soundness of a national culture. Indian culture in this respect need not fear any comparison: if it is less predominantly artistic than that of Japan, it is because it has put first the spiritual need and made all other things subservient to and a means for the spiritual growth of the people. Its civilisation, standing in the first rank in the three great arts as in... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Art The Renaissance in India XV Indian Art - 4 The art of painting in ancient and later India, owing to the comparative scantiness of its surviving creations, does not create quite so great an impression as her architecture and sculpture and it has even been supposed that this art flourished... seek first and foremost this kind of deeper intention—is to understand the reason of the differences between the occidental and the Indian treatment of the life motives. Thus a portrait by a great European painter will express with sovereign power the soul through character, through the active qualities, the ruling powers and passions, the master feeling and temperament, the active mental and vital ...
... and Shelley. A few have heard of some of the recent, fewer of some of the contemporary poets; their readers are hardly enough to make a number. In this matter of culture this huge peninsula, once one of the greatest centres of civilisation, has been for long the most provincial of provinces; it has been a patch of tilled fields round a lawyer's office and a Government cutcherry, a cross between a little... way. The English language and literature is practically the only window the Indian mind, with the narrow and meagre and yet burdensome education given to it, possesses into the world of European thought and culture; but at least as possessed at present, it is a painfully small and insufficient opening. English poetry for all but a few of us stops short with Tennyson and Browning, when it does not stop... mostly indirect acquaintance with some of his work; A. E. only lives for me in Mr. Cousins' pages; other poets of the day are still represented in my mind by scattered citations. In the things of culture such a state of ignorance is certainly an unholy state of sin; but in this immoral and imperfect world even sin has sometimes its rewards, and I get that now in the joy and light of a new world opening ...
... 24 Indo-Aryan, Indo-Aryans, 21, 30, 32, 35 Indo-European, 19, 21 Indo-Germanic culture, 47 Page 146 Indo-Iranian, 31-2, 33, 34 Indra, 31, 34, 35, 41, 42, 46, 67, 86, 89, 95, 104, 110, 111, 112, 119, 121, 131, 132, 133 Indra-Agni, 35 Indus Civilisation, 2fn., 31, 49, 54, 61, 70, 102 Indus Valley, 2, 11, 38, 49... Telugus, 21, 22, 27 Tepe Yahya, 5 Teuton, 18 Thapar, Romila, 50fn. The Harappā Culture and the Rigveda, 56 Thieme, Paul, 33, 35 Tilak, 19, 78, 81, 82, 83 Tocharian, 93 Trinity, Indian, 46 Tripolye, Tripolye Culture, 74, 75, 76 triśūla, 42 trislrsan, 46 Tritsus, 126 trivtsna, 42 Tryaruna, 42 ... 110 Dirghatamas, 108 Diti, 111 Doctrine of Brahman, i Dravidas, Dravidian, Dravidians, ii, 1, 18 30, 43, 44, 45, 50fn., 104, 107, 118, 118, 121 Dravidian cultures, ii Dravidian Theories, 30fn. "Dravidaryan", iv Dravidianism, 51 Dravido-Aryanism, ii Drishadvati, 16, 62, 64 Druhyus, 15, 126 ...
... ugliness are pitted against each other. Of course, every effort must be made to avoid such combat and destruction, compromise should go as far as is consistent with essential loyalty to the cause of civilisation, no mere convenience or superficial advantage should be cherished inordinately, yet a final resort to arms must not be looked upon as an evil. Consequently, from the highest point of view, absolute... or, to take a smaller yet sufficiently vicious example, the marauding tribesmen who with Pakistan's connivance broke into Kashmir, then ahimsa is just an unconscious collaboration with anti-civilisation forces and, far from being a merit, a pernicious mistake. To refuse to see in some collectivities of human beings on certain occasions of history a streak of the diabolic which cannot be mended... Progress has to come often by an attack on religious systems and much of the modern world's intellectual and social development is due to its break with the religionism that was rampant up to the European Renaissance. But this break, for all its benefits of reaction towards freedom and wideness, is a negative force and must sooner or later lead to an arrant materialism and a shipwreck of precious ...
... systematic exploitation of the Indian people. Page 6 Despite this political division and total disunity, the concept of India existed. There was still a notion of Indian civilisation and culture existing in this geographical space called India. And that was because there was a strong fundamental unity based on a cultural and spiritual oneness that ran like the thread holding the garland... the English to trade in India in 1608. As a result, the English established a factory at Surat. However, India's connection with the West had started earlier with the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to establish themselves in India and the last to leave. They arrived as early as 1498 via the ocean route discovered by Vasco-da-Gama. But it was the East India Company, chartered by the British crown... and by the Battle of Plassey, a few years earlier that it got a foothold over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The Battle of Wandiwash was a continuation of the Anglo-French armed struggle and rivalry in Europe and other parts of the world. Eyre Coote commanded the English troops while Comte de Lally commanded the French troops. The British captured the fort near Wandiwash in 1759. This battle sealed the ...
... According to ancient tradition, the Rishi Agastya came to the South to spread the Vedic lore and the Aryan discipline. His seems to have been the first project for the infusion of Aryan culture into the Dravidian civilisation. Many of you may here recall the lines of Hemchandra the Bengali poet: Page 405 Arise, O Mountain, arise, Agastya has returned; A new sign has been floated... five worlds that constitute the universe, – what the Upanishads term body, life, mind, supermind and spirit. The Vedas too speak of pañcaksiti, the five abodes, pañcakrsti, the five fields of culture, pañcajana, the five births or worlds. Sri Krishna's conch of pañcajanya may well occur to the mind. Lord Buddha too when he took his seat under the Bodhi tree is supposed to have said, "I do not... Afterwards came a more serious attack, perhaps the one most fraught with danger. The First World War was on. India had been seething with discontent and things were not going too well abroad on the European front. The British Government now brought pressure on the French: Page 403 they must do something drastic about their political refugees. Either they should hand them over to the ...
... commercial spirit and not like literature a direct instrument of culture. Politics, government itself are becoming more and more a machinery for the development of an industrialised society, divided between the service of bourgeois capitalism and the office of a half-involuntary channel for the incoming of economic Socialism. Free thought and culture remain on the surface of this great increasing mass of c... the world offers no parallel. The angry cry that this must not be suffered again and that the authors of this menace and disturbance to the modern industrial organisation of the world, self-styled civilisation, must be visited with condign punishment and remain for some time as international outcastes under a ban and a boycott, showed how deeply the lesson had gone home. But it showed too, as the postwar... political being, in the Aristotelian sense,—as soon as he ceased to be primarily religious,—and to this preoccupation he added, wherever he was sufficiently at ease, the preoccupation of thought, art and culture. The economic impulses of the group were worked out as a mechanical necessity, a strong desire in the vital being rather than a leading thought in the mind. Nor was the society regarded or studied ...
... conscious effort of Nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual equipment, capacity and farther possibility by universalising the opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the mental life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the externalities of existence is a necessary part of the effort. It seeks to prepare a sufficient... previous civilisation. For if the actuality of intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed, the capacity is spread everywhere. It has been seen that in individual cases even the racial type considered by us the lowest, the negro fresh from the perennial barbarism of Central Africa, is capable, without admixture of blood, without waiting for future generations, of the intellectual culture, if not... not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the dominant European. Even in the mass men seem to need, in favourable circumstances, only a few generations to cover ground that ought apparently to be measured in the terms of millenniums. Either, then, man by his privilege as a mental being is exempt from the full burden of the tardy laws of evolution or else he already represents and with helpful conditions ...
... Page 48 its initiation in Europe in the figure of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was not only an artist but a supreme intellectual and he stands at the head of the Renaissance for the rebirth of the Graeco-Roman civilisation in its intellectual aspects: he sum-marised the seeds of a new European intellectuality taking up the work of that civilisation in new life-moulds. But the vitalistic... natural world and to the human body's vibrant vigour, the large interest in individual self-expression and in earthly concerns - it is these features of ancient Greek culture that proved potent to release the suppressed sensuous vitality of Europe. The mind of the time was stirred also in its own proper nature by the mind of Hellas, but the Renaissance was so drunk with life, with the glory of the senses... the Celtic has a quick and luminous intelligence, a Page 51 rapid and brilliant imagination, and also a "natural love of the things of the mind... left to it from an old forgotten culture in its blood which contained an ancient mystical tradition". 23 Here is "not the fine, calm and measured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races which deals sovereignly with life within ...
... of equus caballus for the presence of the Indo-Europeans. Now, if the Rigveda is taken to precede the Indus Civilization, then logically the Indo-European language whose roots would be in Mehrgarh could have all the more a relation to the essentials of Sanskrit. But Mehrgarh is not strictly the Indus Valley in which both the Harappa Culture and the Rigveda were centred. Hence it may be conceived... traces their burials and nomadic cultures "through successive cultures of the same type" from the "Pit Grave culture" right down to "the Andronovo culture." As Parpola has spoken of the tumuli (kurgan) of the Scythians we may remember Frye's pointed remark about their burial mounds being "huge". What does J.P. Mallory, the latest surveyor of the Indo-European problem, 294 have to say of the... have "the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages of Europe". The hypothesis envisions the people speaking these languages spreading across Europe with the increase and spread of agriculture from Anatolia, which is regarded as the first centre of Indo-European. Renfrew 137 surmises that "the cultivation of cereal crops (six row barley, eincorn ...
... devotional feeling is not enough to produce work of this high turn of beauty, as is shown by the sterility of Christian Europe in this kind; it needs a rich and profound spiritual culture. Another part of the literature is devoted to the bringing of something of the essence of the old culture into the popular tongues through new poetic versions of the story of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana or in romantic... phrase and image, and farther north the high Vedantic spirituality renews itself in the Hindi poetry of Surdas and inspires Nanak and the Sikh gurus. The spiritual culture prepared and perfected by two millenniums of the ancient civilisation has flooded the mind of all these peoples and given birth to great new literatures and Page 380 its voice is heard continually through all their course... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Literature The Renaissance in India XX Indian Literature - 5 The dominant note in the Indian mind, the temperament that has been at the foundation of all its culture and originated and supported the greater part of its creative action in philosophy, religion, art and life has been, I have ...
... and then, at the end, came the alphabet. Evidently, it appears, language could not develop so quickly as the consciousness or the mind did, for we see even in the earlier epochs of human civilisation and culture, man could and did come in contact with the Truth and Realities beyond his normal sense-bound consciousness. And the experiences the seers had on those levels were of such a kind that whenever... his life on earth as an animal and is still continuing to be so in a large measure: his mental equipment also was almost wholly conditioned by the necessities of such a situation: his language, his culture even built upon an outward view of things, upon the mode and manner of his physical reactions to impacts of the gross outward world, the brute objects of physical life. The liberation of the mind... attempt for this liberation was made later, in the age or rather ages of the Gita, the Mahabharata, the Darshanas. It was the rational spirit that impelled and inspired the Buddhist consciousness and in Europe it had its heyday in the age of Socrates and Plato. Those were intellectual ages and the intellect was trying to find and explore its own domain in its full and free power and sovereignty. And the ...
... and the Indian development of religion and spirituality was guided, up-lifted and more and more penetrated and suffused by the Vedantic saving power of spirituality. The next stage of Indian civilisation, the post-Vedic stage was marked by a new climate as a result of the efflorescence of intellectual search and rise of great philosophies, many-sided epic literature, beginning of art and science... apart from his special function, is the one godhead with the others; each holds in himself the universal divinity. Each God is all the other gods. This is the aspect of the Vedic teaching to which a European scholar has given the sounding misnomer henotheism. But the Veda goes on to say that these Godheads put on their highest nature in the triple Infinite and are names of the One nameless Ineffable.... Vedas, Puranas and Thereafter — Continuity and Change — I The Vedas stand out in Indian history as the Himalayas of spirituality and as the perennial source of multisided culture. The Vedic Samhitas bear witness to epical struggle and victory of the Vedic Rishis, and those Rishis are felt even today as the spirits who assist their offsprings as the new dawns repeat the old ...
... Archer and show convincingly the greatness of Indian culture and point out its foundations. The readers will do well if they go through this book, The Foundations of Indian Culture, in order to know what Indian culture and civilisation really stands for. As we are not, in this present work of ours, directly concerned with the topic of Indian culture, we refrain from saying anything more on this. Ours... well-known book, The Foundations of Indian Culture, which is, in the words of Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, "a richly rewarding and many-faceted study of the glory that is India's heritage from the past." This book was written as a rejoinder to the inveterate charges of an egregious critic, William Archer, who threw random brickbats at a great country's culture. Archer had his political axes to grind... ruthless exploitation and starvation of a country by foreign leeches is one of the best services that can be done to mankind, the international crimes of the great captains of finance a supreme work of civilisation and the brutal and selfish immolation of nations to Mammon an acceptable offering on the altar of the indwelling God in humanity. "... Mr. Morley does it with more authority than others, but ...
... and then, at the end, came the alphabet. Evidently, it appears, language could not develop so quickly as the consciousness or the mind did, for we see even in the earlier epochs of human civilisation and culture, man could and did come in contact with the Truth and Realities beyond his normal sense-bound consciousness. And the experiences the seers had on those levels were of such a kind that whenever... his life on earth as an animal and is still continuing to be so in a large measure: his mental equipment also was almost wholly conditioned by the necessities of such a situation: his language, his culture even built upon an outward view of things, upon the mode and manner of his physical reactions to impacts of the gross outward world, the brute objects of physical life. The liberation of the... attempt for this liberation was made later, in the age or rather ages of the Gita, the Mahabharata, the Darshanas. It was the rational spirit that impelled and inspired the Buddhist consciousness and in Europe it had its heyday in the age of Socrates and Plato. Those were intellectual ages and the intellect was trying to find and explore its own domain in its full and free power and sovereignty. And the ...
... of the moment and the future: for its purpose is to bring together in its pages the mind of the Indian renaissance and the most recent developments of European culture. In India we as yet know next to nothing of what the most advanced minds of Europe are thinking and creating in the literary, artistic and philosophic field,—for that matter most of us, preoccupied with politics and domestic life, have... in the French to change and reconstruct, and all these are connected together and are the fruit of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The writer thinks that the Graeco-Roman tradition and its true development in the modern world is the only saving ethical and political ideal, at least for Europe,—a salutary saving clause. At the same time he has found his highest artistic satisfaction in German music and rates... evolution Germany and Russia among European nations have taken a leading place. Germany has failed to go the whole way, because to a strong but coarse and heavy vital force and a strict systematising scientific intellect she could not successfully bring in the saving power of intuition. Her music indeed was very great and revolutionised the artistic mind of Europe, not because it was instinctive, but ...
... part of the unbroken history of Indian culture. If India's spiritual disciplines, philosophies and her long list of great spiritual personalities, thinkers, founders, saints are her greatest glory, they are by no means her sole-glories. It is now proved that India had gone farther than any other country before the modern era in the field of science, and even Europe owes the beginning of her physical science... separate attempt, the balance is righted; a more complete harmony of our parts of knowledge is prepared. The development of Indian culture and the transmission of that culture from generation to generation played a major part in Indian pedagogy. Indian culture had reached over millennia great heights, not only in the fields of spiritual and philosophic domains, but also in the fields of science... producing great and multisided systems of knowledge, in developing profound and inspiring systems of conduct and character building, in creating economic, social, political and stable systems of civilisation, stability and prosperity, and in providing unfailing heroism and power of triumph in various directions, as also in creating inspiring multisided forms of art, literature and other aesthetic and ...
... nations of modern Europe by an essential similarity of religion and culture rising above & beyond their marked racial peculiarities; like the nations of Europe also they were continually going to war with each other; & yet had relations of occasional struggle, of action & reaction, with the other peoples of Asia whom they regarded as barbarous races outside the pale of the Aryan civilisation. Like the continent... defaced by those wicked Brahmins, who are made responsible for all the Page 280 literary and other enormities which have been discovered by the bushelful, and not by European lynxes alone—in our literature and civilisation. Now whether the theory is true or not, and one sees nothing in its favour, it has at present no value at all; for it is a pure theory without any justifying facts. It is not... fallen out of the main flood of civilisation & is therefore becoming provincial & attached to its own isolation. That the nations of the East & South and the Aryan colonies in Bengal should oppose the imperialist policy of Krishna & throw in their lot with Duryodhana is therefore no more than we should expect. On the other hand nations at the very heart of civilisation, who have formed at one time or ...
... voluntary fusion of cultures. Nationalism will have fulfilled itself and lost its militancy and would no longer find these things incompatible with self-preservation and the integrality of its outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an... it is necessary for the greatness of India's future. Another dream was for the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation. Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated: its other still subject or partly subject parts are moving through whatever struggles towards freedom. Only ...
... time to mature in that dimension. He was driven by the Page 97 vision of a united eastern Mediterranean world and, above all, of a fertile cross-breeding of many cultures under the umbrella of Greek civilisation. This was more an instinctive feeling than a product of reflection. Men like Alexander are often seized by blazing intuitions, but these often get mixed with their more fundamental... trade was established throughout the Mediterranean, even with the tribes of north and west Europe. Weakened by internal strife and wars in Asia Minor, Mycenae was overrun by invaders from central Asia toward the end of the 12th century BC. After the Mycenaean period, Greece was invaded by Indo-European tribes from the north. The distribution of peoples in Greece before the city states made for... Plutarch, and he did manage to communicate it in the chapter on Alexander. Ancient Greece and Alexander: A brief outline A civilisation appears to have emerged on mainland Greece about 1600 BC. This came to be known as the Mycenaean civilisation. Feudal warrior leaders ruled their districts from hilltop fortresses, the principal fort being Mycenae itself. Minoan Crete exercised a strong ...
... of course especially by the still expanding European Union. “Some form of European federation, however loose, is therefore essential if the idea behind these suggestions of a new order is to be made practically effective, and once commenced, such a federation must necessarily be tightened and draw more and more towards the form of a United States of Europe.” 66 In a “Postscript Chapter” to his... that its vastest kingdoms seem now no more than the provinces of a single country.” 72 “The earth is in travail now of one common, large and flexible civilisation for the whole human race into which each modern and ancient culture shall bring its contribution and each clearly defined human aggregate shall introduce its necessary element of variation.” 73 “Perhaps liberty and equality... was in principle intended for the transformation of humanity, and must therefore have had global consequences in their lifetime and afterwards. India has become free; Asia has woken up; in Europe the European Union has been founded; the world is becoming one; Indian spirituality is penetrating the West; the supramental transformation of the world is under way. Each of these momentous changes in history ...
... therefore at liberty even on the ground of European science & knowledge to hesitate before the conclusions of philological scholarship. But for my own part I do not hold myself bound by European research&European theories.My scepticism of nineteenth century results goes farther than is possible to any European scepticism. The Science of comparative religion in Europe seems to me to be based on a blunder... to fill. [A] The Gods of the Veda— An enquiry into the true significance of the hymns of the Rigveda. The Vedas are the roots of Indian civilisation and the supreme authority in Indian religion. For three thousand years, by the calculation of European scholars, for a great deal more, in all probability, the faith of this nation, certainly one of the most profound, acute and intellectual in the... conclusion. Great masses of men, great nations, great civilisations have an instinct in these matters which seldom misleads them. In spite of forgetfulness, through every misstatement, surviving all cessation of precise understanding, something in them still remembers their origin and holds fast to the vital truth of their being. According to the Europeans, there is a historical truth at the basis of the ...
... instance, the caliphs realised the wealth of Greek culture surviving in Syria, and soon translations were made into Arabic of many Greek books, especially in philosophy, medicine and mathematics and made possible further studies on these subjects. Baghdad became soon the centre of an intellectual effervescence which has been compared to the one of the European Renaissance. Much was learned from Persian and... the old cultures of the conquered were eagerly absorbed by the quick-witted Arabs; (and the conquerors showed such tolerance that of the poets, scientists, and philosophers who now made Arabic one of the most learned and literary tongues in the world only a small minority were of Arab blood.) The result of this borrowing was not mere imitation but the flourishing of a rich and unique culture. For instance... stretch in every direction. The nights cool down to 38 degrees Fahrenheit; the daily sun bums the face and boils the blood. Along the coast an occasional torrent of rain brings the possibility of civilisation, most of all on the western littoral, in the Hejar district with the cities of Mecca and Medina. Aside from some petty kingdoms the political organisation of Pre-lslamic Arabia was a primitive ...
... Disciple : Has European civilisation nothing good in it? Sri Aurobindo : It has lowered the moral tone of humanity. Of course, it has brought hygiene, sanitation etc. Even nineteenth-century civilisation with its defects was better than this. Europe could not stand the last war. The ancients tried to keep to their ideals and made an effort to raise them higher, while Europe lost all her... to follow. But these things perhaps belong to the past. It is a great pity that people who have carried such ideals into practice are losing them through contact with European civilisation. That is a great harm that European vulgarising has done to Japan. Now you find most people mercantile in their outlook and they will do anything for the sake of money. Nakashima's mother when she returned... of the desert. What business has he to go through the desert? Disciple : The idea is that Italy will bring a new culture to Abyssinia, – roads and other features of modern civilisation. Sri Aurobindo : You think the Abyssinians and Negroes have no art and no culture? Of course, if you walk into a Negro den they might kill you. But the same thing is being done in Germany! How many ...
... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Literature The Renaissance in India XIX Indian Literature - 4 The classical age of the ancient literature, the best known and appraised of all, covers a period of some ten centuries and possibly more, and it is marked off from the earlier writings by a considerable difference, not so much... and deliberate poetic representation and criticism of thought and life and the things that traditionally interested an aristocratic and cultured class in a very advanced and intellectual period of civilisation. The intellect predominates everywhere and, even when it seems to Page 362 stand aside and leave room for pure objective presentation, it puts on that too the stamp of its image. In... much in substance, as in the moulding and the colour of its thought, temperament and language. The divine childhood, the heroic youth, the bright and strong early manhood of the people and its culture are over and there is instead a long and opulent maturity and as its sequence an equally opulent and richly coloured decline. The decline is not to death, for it is followed by a certain rejuvenescence, ...
... mosaic that constitutes Sri Aurobindo's writings. I would also ask you to read the series of essays he wrote during the closing years of the Arya on the foundations and main-springs of Indian culture and civilisation. Through these interpretations he has given us a vision of India which needs to be shared by his countrymen, if India is to help and play her rightful role in the advancement of humanity.... Superficially, it represented a meeting of the East and West but Sri Aurobindo himself was an embodiment of the East-West synthesis and the Mother a living expression of the finest flower of European culture along with spiritual affiliations with the East. No, the significance runs deeper. Once we asked Sri Aurobindo, 'The Mother's coming must have greatly helped you in your work and in your sadhana... November 1918 Is India Civilised? — December 1918 to February 1919 A Rationalistic Critic of Indian Culture — February 1919 to July 1919 A Defence of Indian Culture — August 1919 to January 1921 The last three series were later published under one title as The Foundations of Indian Culture. In 1918, at the end of the fourth year of the Arya, Sri Aurobindo reviewed all that had appeared ...
... Maurice Schumann, the leader of a cultural mission from the French Government in France, visiting Pondicherry with a proposal to set up there an institute for research and study of Indian and European cultures with Sri Aurobindo as its head. Sri Aurobindo's prediction to Mother that India would recover her integrity within ten years. 1948 December II: Message... At St. Paul's School in London. Learnt Greek. In I886, started writing English poetry Wrote also Latin and Greek poetry. Learnt European languages to study their lite-ratures. Made a thorough study of European history. Won all Classics prizes. 1885 Had an inner perception of his future work for India's freedom. 1885-86... of The Life Divine, Published in 1940. 1940 Septemper : Joint declaration by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother supporting the cause o f the Allies who stood, fol the defence of civilisation and its highest values against the threatened domination of the Nazis who were out to destroy them and frustrate the preparation for the new creation started by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. ...
... statement but emerges powerfully, aided by vivid images that capture this feeling of oneness while retaining the uniqueness of each civilisation as well: Fire-cult that neighboured the Greek world of thought Burns through my Persian blood to Europe's large Earth-richness; India's infinite Unknown Lures up the same fire-cry ~ both stay uncaught. My country's... different cultures of the world. In this sense "neighbouring" is more than an appropriate geographical expression. Linking all the lines of the second stanza is the dominant allusion to the "fire cult". Fire is the emblem of life and aspiration . "Persian blood" is physically most apt (the persona is a Parsi) just as "Europe's earth-richness" and "India's infinite... infinite unknown" are the quintessential qualities of these civilisation. The face that "both stay uncaught" adds of course to the elusive character of the personal search. The search is no longer agonizing however, for there is the happy vision of a country "where all dream-lights merge". Underlying this and similar poems of Amal Kiran is the realization of the power of poetic language ...
... One, "Shed fear." Vivekananda preached that India must seek freedom by the aid of Shakti, the Mother of Strength. "Oh India, wouldst thou, with these provisions only, scale the highest pinnacle of civilisation and greatness? wouldst thou attain, by means of the disgraceful cowardice, that freedom deserved only by the brave and heroic Oh thou Mother of strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanlinness... the work of those who followed him did more for India than a hundred London Congress sessions could have effected. He showed the nations that Indians were a people with a great past and ancient civilisation who still possess something of the genius and character of their forefathers, have still something to give the world and therefore deserve freedom. "That is the Page 564 true way... Follow it and it leads to glory. Give it up and you die." Vivekananda in his lifetime was the most powerful exponent of a freer dealing with past and present—respecting the forms of the ancient culture yet not hesitating to remould and reject the outworn. India needed to dip in the Fountain of Strength. "This Self," says the Upanishad, "cannot be won by any who is without strength." Gather strength ...
... thanks" — tried absurdly to assume the god, affect a superior nod, and seemed to shake the spheres of indigenous life and culture. Sri Aurobindo was different; a stay of fourteen years in England had enabled him, not only to observe the variegated lineaments of European culture, but also to see through them and discriminate between what was good and what was evil. Returning to India, he found to... in the asuric world, the lore of the West, but who had rejected (as Kacha did Devayani's) the blandishments of Western civilisation; they saw him as a scholar steeped in Greek, Latin, English and French classics but who nevertheless incarnated the spirit of Indian culture, the oneness in the Mother. They could sense that Sri Aurobindo's words were more than words; they were pointers to action... "irrational" phenomenon that saved India! The Paramahamsa himself but lived "what many would call the life of a madman, a man without intellectual training, a man without any outward sign of culture or civilisation, a man who lived on the alms of others, such a man as the English-educated Indian would ordinarily talk of as one useless to society...." What could such a man know that is relevant to the ...
... .. the plans and methods he has written of in the book are the same as those carried out now [by Hitler] .... He [Richard] said there that the present civilisation was to be destroyed, but really it is the destruction of the whole human civilisation that is aimed at, and already in Germany Hitler has done it .... 19 Again, in her talk to the children on 8 March 1951, the Mother said that it was... transcended. Nevertheless, with their sunny disposition and profound faith in Sri Aurobindo, they had been carrying on gallantly for years. Page 210 But this sudden 'invasion' by two European ladies - however unavoidable under the circumstances - was a jolt to the kind of unconventional camp-life they had been living so far. They were excited, they were also puzzled. What would the ladies... pulses (dal), and Bejoy the curry and the vegetables. There was a Pariah cook, perhaps, for part of the time, and what he prepared was not to their taste. And in such a situation, to have to feed two European ladies too! It was not surprising that uneasiness crept in in the wake of their coming. As Purani comments: This [the Mother's joining the rest] had created a sense of dissatisfaction in the ...
... surroundings and machinery. Properly treated, I do not think these are wanting in power and beauty of poetic suggestion. Ruaru, the grandson of Bhrigou, takes us back to the very beginnings of Aryan civilisation when our race dwelt and warred Page 133 and sang within the frontier of the five rivers, Iravatie, Chundrobhaga, Shotodrou, Bitosta and Bipasha, and our Bengal was but a mother of wild... sacred clans of a prehistoric antiquity, Barghoves, Barhaspaths, Gautamas, Kasyapas, into which the descendants of the Aryan are to this day divided. Thus has India deified the great men who gave her civilisation. On earth the Rishies, in heaven the Gods. These were great and shining beings who preserved the established cosmos against the Asuras, or Titans, spirits of disorder between whom and the Hindu... Gods, took to himself a Daitya maiden Surmishtha, child of imperial Vrishopurvan (for the Asuras or Daityas, on the [terrestrial] 3 plane, signified the adversaries of Page 135 Aryan civilisation), and Bhrigou's wife, Puloma, was of the Titan blood. Chief of the Gods were Indra, King and Thunderer, who came down when men sacrificed and drank the Soma wine of the offering; Vaiou, the Wind; ...
... fight the battle to the end. It is the British Navy alone that keeps the war from our gates and confines it to European lands and seas and a strip of North Africa. If there were defeat and the strength of Britain and her colonies were to go down before the totalitarian nations, all Europe, Africa and Asia would be doomed to domination by three or four Powers all anti-democratic and all pushing for... and, wherever the Nazi idea spreads, a violent racialism denying the human idea; outside Europe what is promised is the degradation of the coloured peoples to helotry as an inferior, even a subhuman race. Hitler, carrying with him everywhere the new idea and the new order, is now master of almost all Europe minus Great Britain and Russia. There would be then nothing that could stand in his way except... calamity. One can hold that, so long as life and mankind are what they are, there can be such a thing as a righteous war,—dharmya yuddha. No doubt, in a spiritualised life of humanity or in a perfect civilisation there would be no room for war or violence, —it is clear that this is the highest ideal state. But mankind is psychologically and materially still far from this ideal state. To bring it to that ...
... quirk of fate, all this was to synchronise with momentous happenings on the European and world stage. On 28 June 1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir-apparent of the Hapsburg Empire, and his consort were assassinated by a twenty-year old Serbian youth. July 1914 was a hectic month for the chancellories of Europe, and the issue of peace versus war was debated with mounting anxiety but diminishing... Undoubtedly, that of man himself. The harmony of his faculties is the condition of his peace, their mutual understanding and helpfulness the means of his perfection. The ailment at the heart of civilisation was the rift between reason and faith, the logical mind and the intuitive heart. But only a higher and reconciling truth could dissipate their mutual misunderstandings and lead mankind to its integral... explication. The word figured on the cover page in big Devanagari characters, and non-Indian readers might have mistaken it for a hieroglyph. Even Indians had lost track of its original sense, and many European philologists had reduced it to a racial term. Sri Aurobindo was therefore to take some pains to bring out its native and ancient and true significance in the September 1914 issue in his article "The ...
... that he had more than faith and had realised God. He was a man who lived what many would call the life of a madman, a man without intellectual training, a man without any outward sign of culture or civilisation, a man who lived on the alms of others, such a man as the English-educated Indian would ordinarily talk of as one useless to society; even if he does not call him a bane to society, he will... change? What has made the Bengali so different from his old self? One thing has happened in Bengal, and it is this, that Bengal is learning to believe. Bengal was once drunk with the wine of European civilisation and with the purely intellectual teaching that it received from the West. It began to see all things, to judge all things through the imperfect instrumentality of the intellect. When it was... of Him who is within you? Courage is then a necessity, courage is natural and courage is inevitable. If you rely upon other forces, supposing that you are a Nationalist in Page 828 the European sense, meaning in a purely materialistic sense, that is to say, if you want to replace the dominion of the foreigner by the dominion of somebody else, it is a purely material change; it is not a religion ...
... the leading elements of their consciousness obviously belong to another. I have met some born in Europe who were Page 192 evidently Indians; I have met others born in Indian bodies who were as evidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were Indian, others who were European. 8 The accident of birth should neither make for slavery to something local, tmporal or transient... century, the world had gone past that sort of stupid parochialism. With the advance of science and technology, with the advance in historical knowledge, especially knowledge of comparative civilisation culture and religion, there was surely no room for the old dogmatism. In our time, humanity is caught in a process of convergence towards the Future, and all past thought, all yesterday's ideologies... his monumental prose sequences - The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Psychology of Social Development, The Future Poetry, A Defence of Indian Culture - and, all by himself, publishing them serially, and more or less simultaneously, in the pages of the Arya . When the War came to an end at last, his apocalyptical "Uttarpara Speech" of 1909 and ...
... Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe—he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in its life-aspects but in its in... who took up again the work and summarised in himself the seeds of modern Europe. Never heard before of my declaring or anybody declaring such a thing [ that a divine descent was attempted during the Renaissance with Leonardo da Vinci as its centre ]. What Leonardo da Vinci held in himself was all the new age of Europe on its many sides. But there was no question of Avatarhood or consciousness... sovereignty of Ravana, the Rakshasa menace. All this he did with such a divine afflatus in his personality and action that his figure has been stamped for more than two millenniums on the mind of Indian culture and what he stood for has dominated the reason and idealising mind of man in all countries—and in spite of the constant revolt of the human vital is likely to continue to do so until a greater Ideal ...
... life, creative exponents, fashioners of significant forms of the national thought and religion and ethics and culture. A profound stress of thought on life, a large and vital view of religion and society, a certain strain of philosophic idea runs through these poems and the whole ancient culture of India is embodied in them with a great force of intellectual conception and living presentation. The Mahabharata... noble thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind and a high social and political ideal, the ensouled image of a great culture. As rich in freshness of life but immeasurably more profound and evolved in thought and substance than the Greek, as advanced in maturity of culture but more vigorous and vital and young in strength than the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned to serve... dominant emotion or conflicting feeling of the speaker; they palpitate and are alive with the vital force from which they have sprung. Though belonging to a more thoughtful, gentle and cultured civilisation than Homer's, they have, like his, the large utterance which is not of primitive times, but of the primal emotions. Vyasa's have a powerful but austere force of intellectuality. In expressing character ...
... deeply divided. For some, postmodernism connotes the final escape from the stultifying legacy of modern European theology, metaphysics, authoritarianism, colonialism, racism, and domination. To others it represents the attempt by disgruntled left-wing intellectuals to destroy Western civilisation. To yet others it labels a goofy collection of hermetically obscure writers who are really talking about... highly (and more beautifully) about reason. And as we have tried to show previously: reason (the mind, the intellect) has played a crucial role in the development of humanity by subjecting the whole civilisation of the Middle Ages to rational examination, by constructing an instrument for the rational investigation of nature, 18 and above all by developing the humanistic values and the realisation of... political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ...
... the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion. It has been said very justly that Graeco-Europeo- American culture as a whole, and in particular its brilliant flowering in the Italian Renaissance, which put an end to the stagnation of medieval Europe, is based on the liberation and comparative isolation of the individual. Let us now consider the times in which we live.... take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilisation ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent non-sense that goes by the name of patriotism — how I hate them! War seems to me a mean... the scientific community. He lectured at Bonn University and soon became a professor at Zurich University, and then in Prague, before receiving a professorship in Berlin which was then the centre of European science. Here Einstein remained for several years, devoting most, of his time to scientific research. When the first world war broke out in 1914, he quietly continued his work, but eventually suffered ...
... possibility of opening an Institute at Pondicherry for the study of Indian and European culture. In the course of his talk, Sri Aurobindo told the French visitors that, next to India, he loved France most, and the proposed Institute might afford facilities to students from all over the world to study the Indian civilisation with its many elements in creative interactions. On the political front,... Future Man" was thus opened on 21 February in the University Library; on 24 April, the exhibition on "Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia", and on 15 August, an exhibition on the significance of Indian culture. It was also on 15 August, Sri Aurobindo's eighty-second birthday, that the Ashram children constructed on their own small sand-pit, in sand and fossil, a three-dimensional representation of the Mother's ...
... forms now current, and I am not altogether in love with the European kind, however great an improvement it may be on the past. I hold that India having a spirit of her own and a governing temperament proper to her own civilisation, should in politics as in everything else strike out her own original path and not stumble in the wake of Europe. But this is precisely what she will be obliged to do, if she... "According to ancient tradition, the Rishi Agastya came to the South to spread the Vedic lore and the Aryan discipline. His seems to have been the first project for the infusion of Aryan culture into the Dravidian civilisation." * "I have said that this cemetery that was Pondicherry had been infested by ghouls and goblins. These had a special Page 366 category known ordinarily... easy way. Our forefathers dived into a sea of vast thought and gained a vast knowledge and established a mighty civilisation. As they went on in their way, fatigue and weariness came upon them. The force of thought diminished and with it also the strong current of Shakti. Our civilisation has become acalayatana,35 our religion a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a ...
... an early issue of the journal, Sri Aurobindo said: ...the word in its original use expressed not a difference of race, but a difference of culture. For in the Veda the Aryan peoples are those who had accepted a particular type of self-culture, of inward and outward practice, of ideality, of aspiration.... In later times, the word Arya expressed a particular ethical and social ideal... than all that have gone before, how marvellous a glory and light would be needed to draw these beings out of the horrible aberration in which they are plunged by the life of cities and so-called civilisations! What a formidable and, at the same time, divinely sweet puissance would be needed to turn aside all these wills from the bitter struggle for their selfish, mean and foolish satisfactions, to snatch... the future.... No, it is not in any of the old formal activities, but deeper down that I find signs of progress and hope. A nation of 300 millions, a meeting-place in the past of great civilisations, a vast country full of rich material and unused capacities, should give up acting like "the inhabitants of an obscure and petty village". India had to go beyond the cribbing movements of little ...
... The earlier stage of culture represented an old poise between two extremes. On one side, there was the crude or half-trained naturalness of the outer physical man; on the other side, there was an inner and secret psychic and spiritual life for the initiates. But this poise was disturbed because of the necessity of a large-lined advance. In its developing cycle of civilisation, India called for a more... drift of Indian religion and spirituality towards a wide and many-sided culture. It is true that on its more solitary summits, at least in its later periods, Indian spirituality tended to a spiritual exclusiveness, which was, whatever its loftiness, quite impressive and excessive. Actually this exclusiveness imposed on Indian culture a certain impotence to deal effectively with the problems of human existence;... function, is one godhead with the others. Each holds in himself the universal divinity; each god is all the other gods. This complex aspect of the Vedic teaching and worship has been given by the European scholar the title of henotheism. Beyond, there is, according to the Vedas, triple Infinite, and in this Infinite, the godheads put on their highest nature and are Names of the one nameless Ineffable ...
... forms now current, and I am not altogether in love with the European kind, however great an improvement it may be on the past. I hold that India having a spirit of her own and a governing temperament proper to her own civilisation should, in politics as in everything else, strike out her own original path and not stumble in the wake of Europe. Sri Aurobindo was thinking, not of a mere change... The war and the first after-war years in Europe were a period of agonising self-appraisal for sensitive young men and women. And in India too the situation was not very different, thought not for quite the same reasons. In externals, the world still seemed a pitiful prey to the forces that were engineering conflict and chaos. Industrial civilisation and urban rattle and strife seemed a danger and... bleached and empty men and women of the war-weary West, but Indian youths too - recoiling from the death-stare of political, economic and spiritual frustration or writhing under the vulgarity of "civilisation" or maddened by the politics of selfishness and communalism - felt the invasion of cynicism and desperation, and found in Eliot the laureate of their moods and musings: This is the dead ...
... The earlier stage of culture represented an old poise between two extremes. On one side there was the crude or half-trained naturalness of the outer physical man; on the other side, there was an inner and secret psychic and spiritual life of the initiates. But this poise was disturbed because of the necessity of a large-lined advance. In its developing cycle of civilisation, India was called for a... the drift of Indian religion and spirituality towards a wide and many-sided culture. It is true that on its more solitary summits, at least in its later periods, Indian spirituality tended to a spiritual exclusiveness, which was, whatever its loftiness, quite excessive. Actually this exclusiveness imposed on Indian culture a certain impotence to deal effectively with the problems of human existence;... ancient spiritual knowledge by immense effort, and the spiritual edifice created by the Upanishads guided, uplifted and penetrated into the wide and complex intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and social culture that came to be developed during the ages that followed the age of the Vedas and the Upanishads. IV. Post-Vedic Age: Robust Intellectuality and Vitality During the post-Vedic age, which ...
... against India, 495; heyday of Indian culture and civilisation, 495-6; decadence & renaissance, 496; facet-by-facet study, 496ff; essentials of Hinduism, 496-7; messengers of the Spirit, 497; Veda, Upanishads, Gita, 497; roads to Realisation, 497; "India has lived and lived greatly", 497; positive ideal of Indian culture, 498; Western charge against Indian culture, 498; India and Western Art, 498-9;... 514, 516, 751 Ferrer, H. N., 325, 639, 695 Fitzgerald, Edward, 164 Flecher, Justice, 369,377 Foundations of Indian Culture, The, 490ff; image of Tree of Indian Culture, 490-1; denigrators & apologists of Indian culture, 491; Archer's incomprehension and insolence, 491-2,494; his political axes, 491; "a journalistic fake", 492; "Western" & "Indian", 492; insufficiency... 474; collectivist backlash, rise of the god-state, 474; rise of 'subjectivism, 475; subjectivism and objectivism, 475-6; 'community' the middle-term between individual and humanity, 476; barbarism, civilisation, Philistinism, 477; the sensational man, 477; role of religion, 477; beyond the ethical and aesthetic man, 477; infrarational, rational, suprarational, 477; totalitarian swing away from rationalism ...
... sphere of national life. Never before had nationalism been preached in such prophetic, spiritual accents. Never before had Indians been told that they were destined to be the architects of a culture and civilisation which would lead humanity to a new dawn of creative glory. Never before, in the history of the world, had nationalism been lifted to the sublime heights of such a spiritual passion, and invested... ... I know that in some parts of Europe it is considered a component of civilised custom to have the water-closet adjacent to one's bedroom, but to have in a small cell, bedroom, dining room and water-closet all together - well, this is called too much of a good thing. We, superstitious Indians, find it very difficult to attain to such a high level of civilisation. "...As a result of my long and... Hinduism admits relative standards, a wisdom too hard for the European intelligence. Non-injury is the highest of its laws, ahimsa paramo dharmah; still it does not lay it down as a physical rule for the warrior... and so escapes the unpracticality of a too absolutist rule for all life." — Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture. Page 238 Bande Mataram woke him up and gave ...
... and a brother in the Yoga, but he wishes like myself, and in his own way works for a general renovation of the world by which the present European civilisatio!1 shall be replaced by a spiritual civilisation .... He and Madame Richard are rare examples of European Yogins who have not been led away by Theosophical and other aberrations. I have been in material and spiritual correspondence with them... earth, though it was destined.8 III Sri Aurobindo too, on his side, was impressed by Richard's background and personality, and his genuine sympathy for India and admiration for Indian culture. In the months that followed, he maintained a correspondence both with Richard and Mirra. Sri Aurobindo told the young men then living with him at the time about this "French lady from Paris who... them for the last four years. 10 In the same letter Sri Aurobindo described Richard as "practically an Indian in belief, in personal culture, in sympathies and aspirations, one of the Nivedita type". In a later letter, Sri Aurobindo authorised Motilal Roy to make it known that "Richard is a Hindu in faith, a Hindu in heart and a man whose whole life is devoted to the ideal of lifting up humanity ...
... she went farther than any country before the modern era, and even Europe owes the beginning of her physical science to India as much as to Greece, although not directly but through the medium of the Arabs. And, even if she had only gone as far, that would have been sufficient proof of a strong intellectual life in an ancient culture. Especially in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry, the chief elements... The Foundations of Indian Culture, Centenary Edition, Vol. 14, pp. 185,6,7.) It is essential that the students of our country get the right and the great picture of India, even though they should also get the right and great picture of other countries. It is also essential that the students of our country understand properly how to arrive at the synthesis of the cultures that have flourished in... administrators, soldiers, conquerors, heroes, men with the strong active will, the mind that plans and the seeing force that builds. She has warred and ruled, traded and colonised and spread her civilisation, built polities and organised communities and societies, done all that makes the out ward activity of great peoples... The modern Indian revival, religious, cultural, political, called now sometimes ...
... while man's fulfilment consists in spreading himself out like branches, through growth, adventure and activity. But in order that his activity may find fruition in lasting contributions to our civilisation, his roots must be strongly embedded in firm soil, otherwise his growth becomes top-heavy." A still more suggestive remark soon follows: "Just as in the physical plane the germ of man... fascinated by a man who is so much at home in a hundred matters — bringing to each a penetrating word. Among the letters, those treating of poetic values, Frank Harris and Shaw, Anatole France, European philosophy, art and spirituality, the inner meaning of the war with Hitler are perhaps the finest. If not anything else, Among the Great is worth buying for these discourses. Roy... subject of interview in the book, attempts to drive home. Gandhi wants art to be always universal in appeal, to reach the masses and never to need any specialisation, a certain high level of culture, for its appreciation. Page 99 Rolland is certainly against pretentious high-browism, against punditism putting on airs, but he cannot for all his passionate admiration ...
... while man's fulfilment consists in spreading himself out like branches, through growth, adventure and activity. But in order that his activity may find fruition in lasting contributions to our civilisation, his roots must be strongly embedded in firm soil, otherwise his growth becomes topheavy." A still more suggestive remark soon follows: "Just as in the physical plane the germ of man works in the... absolutely fascinated by a man who is so much at home in a hundred matters - bringing to each a penetrating word. Among the letters, those treating of poetic values, Frank Harris and Shaw, Anatole France, European philosophy, art and spirituality, the inner meaning of the war with Hitler are perhaps the finest. If not anything else, "Among the Great" is worth buying for these discourses. Roy is nothing... next subject of interview in the book, attempts to drive home. Gandhi wants art to be always universal in appeal, to reach the masses and never to need any specialisation, a certain high level of culture, for its appreciation. Rolland is certainly against pretentious high-browism, against punditism putting on airs, but he cannot for all his passionate admiration of Gandhi share Gandhi's Tolstoyan view ...
... and personality of her individuals finely subservient to the life of the nation is an instance of a fundamentally rajaso-tamasic nation which has acquired by its assimilation of Indian and Chinese civilisation the immortalizing strength of sattwa. Sattwa is present indeed in all communities as a natural force, for without it nothing could exist; but as a conscious governing strength, it exists only... though sorely abused and pressed into the service of rajasic selfishness and tamasic materialism, has yet been so powerful an agent to humanize and illuminate that it has given the world's lead to the European. But these two great Oriental civilizations are not likely to perish; always they have conquered their conquerors, asserted their free individuality and resumed their just place in the forefront of... strove even to give the religious sanction to all its own ideas, traditions, demands, sanctions. In the older races and nations Mongolian, Dravidic, Mediterranean the subtamasic stage of social culture was of long duration and has left its impress in the only civilizations which have survived unbroken from that period, the Indian and Chinese. In the younger races, Aryan and Semitic, the development ...
... in its nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spite of all differences of intellectual development ranging from the poverty of the Bushman and negroid to the rich cultures of Asia and Europe, and the whole race has, as the human totality, one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approaches in the cycles of progression and retrogression it describes through the Page 66... within. No State or legislator or reformer can cut him rigorously into a perfect pattern; no Church or priest can give him a mechanical salvation; no order, no class life or ideal, no nation, no civilisation or creed or ethical, social or religious Shastra can be allowed to say to him permanently, "In this way of mine and thus far shalt thou act and grow and in no other way and no farther shall thy ...
... by an artificial growth of complicated and iniqui-tous externalities miscalled civilisation and that, if the exter-nalities could be removed and free spontaneous expression allowed to man's core of being, all problems would be solved. The truths may be summed up in the cry which Rousseau subsequently evoked all over Europe: "Back to Nature" - and they may be interpreted to mean a return from the rigidly... rigidly and intricately patterned outward consciousness to some inward and basic soul-simplicity and from the mazy over-develop-ment of the arts and sciences of civilisation to a poetic primitiveness, a simple and uncorrupted life in imaginative accord with elemental earth, in which there is utter freedom of the individual and yet a collective harmony, a blissful blend of anarchy and order, the establishment... philosophy in Germany he is the original inspirer and he has in him, amidst much miasma, some vague breath of An ampler ether, a diviner air Page 96 that came into the world of European poetry with Wordsworth. But before we turn our gaze to this key-figure we may distinguish a trend of mind which ran parallel with Rous-seauism and contributed to the Romantic Movement a nuance ...
... rich in knowledge, self-lost in meditation. You can nowhere find his like in all the three worlds. In order to free the land from her chains, Aurobindo has broken through the glamour of western civilisation, renounced all worldly comfort, and now as a son of the Mother, he has taken charge of the 'Bande Mataram'. He is the Bhavananda, Jivananda, Dhirananda of Rishi Bankim, 190 all in one. ... will vanish like an evil dream. True, he has had his education in England, but he has not succumbed to its bewitching spell. An efflorescence of the glory of his country's swadharma and culture, Aurobindo is now at the feet of the Motherland, as a fresh-bloomed lotus of autumn, aglow with the devotion of his self-offering. Oh, was there ever its like? Aurobindo is no fop sprung from the ... is. Have you ever seen the spotless all-white lotus? The hundred-petalled lotus in full bloom in India's Manasarovar! No lily or daffodil this, growing in odd and obscure corners of a European dwelling, scentless, mere play and display of colour! Of no use in worship of the gods, of no need in a sacrificial celebration. Sheer pomp and vanity in the western way. Our Aurobindo is a rare ...
... store of ethical coin rifled by rationalism from the coffers of Christianity on which European civilisation is precariously living at the present day. One trembles to think of the day when that coin shall be exhausted—already we see some signs of growing moral vulgarity, coarseness, almost savagery in the European mind, which, if it increases, if the open worship of brutal force & unscrupulous strength... political ecclesiastics & resurgent knowledge. Again Asia came to the rescue of Europe and from the liberal civilisation of the Arabs, Science was reborn into her mediaeval night, and the light of Science, persecuted & tortured, struggled up until the darkness was overpowered & wounded to death. The intellectual history of Europe has outwardly been a struggle between Science & the Church, with which has... with European barbarism and surely in the end it shall conquer. Already Europe does homage to humanity with her lips and in the gateways of her mind; perhaps some day she will do so with her heart also. At any rate the millennium of Tertullian is out of date. But still it is the Christian ideal, the Syrian interpretation of the truth and not the truth itself, which dominates the best European thought ...
... memories; but in its action it was covered up in a great smoke of confusion." It was at this moment of confusion that the European wave swept over India. India's creative spirit which lay in torpor felt the Page 32 pressure of a superimposed European culture. And the reawakening became necessary. A giant Shakti awakened into a new world. For long the eyes were not clear. For... failure of the great endeavour which is the whole meaning of Indian culture, a falling short in the progress towards the perfect spiritualisation of the mind and the life. The beginnings were superlative, the developments were great, but at a certain point where progress, adaptation, a new flowering should have come in, the old civilisation stopped short, partly drew back, partly lost its way. The essential... And Suzanne Karpeles, an authority on Indo-Chinese culture, whom Mother called Bharatidi, remained a life-long friend of Pratima Debi Tagore. AND.... And in 1916, Rabindranath Tagore had met Mirra. Page 77 4 Mirra among the Artists In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, European consciousness and sensibility were radically changed ...
... greater preoccupation must be to find himself as a mental being in a material life—both individual and social—as perfected as possible. This was the direction which the Hellenic idea gave to European civilisation, and the Roman reinforced—or weakened—it with the ideal of organised power: the cult of reason, the interpretation of life by an intellectual thought critical, utilitarian, organising and c... present human Page 1067 existence there is a physical collectivity held together by the common physical life-fact and all that arises from it, community of interests, a common civilisation and culture, a common social law, an aggregate mentality, an economic association, the ideals, emotions, endeavours of the collective ego with the strand of individual ties and connections running through... by Buddhism and other ancient disciplines to the coasts of Asia and Egypt and from there poured by Christianity into Europe. But these motives, burning for a time like dim torchlights in the confusion and darkness created by the barbaric flood that had submerged the old civilisations, have been abandoned by the modern spirit which has found another light, the light of Science. What the modern spirit ...
... in its outlook upon the world that environed it. The modem theories are in harmony with the scientific theories of early human culture and of the recent emergence from the mere savage. But they do not accord well with the recent discoveries of the remarkable civilisations that existed in China, Egypt, Chaldea and Assyria many thousands of years ago. These discoveries have also spoken of the Age of... According to Sri Aurobindo, the Veda is primarily intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture. The Veda is, therefore, primarily a book of yoga, and when we study this system of yoga, we find in it a complexity and a synthesis of many lines of enlightenment and self-culture that had developed earlier. In due course, the Vedic synthesis broke down in specialised lines of Jnana Yoga... significances and explanations. The Upanishads give their clue to the psychological and philosophical ideas of the earlier Rishis and hand down to us their methods of spiritual experience and intuition. European scholarship supplies a critical method of comparative research, yet to be perfected, but capable of immensely increasing the materials available and sure eventually to give a scientific certainty ...
... but some few lyrics apart a successful translation there has not been. Yet it cannot be that a form of effort so earnestly & persistently pursued and so necessary to the perfection of culture and advance of civilisation, is the vain pursuit of a chimera. Nothing which mankind earnestly attempts is impossible, not even the conversion of copper into gold or the discovery of the elixir of life or the power... would be a mere artificial conceit devoid of the original sublimity. It is the inability to seize the associations & precise poetical force of Sanscrit words that Page 254 has led so many European Sanscritists to describe the poetry of Kalidasa which is hardly surpassed for truth, bold directness & native beauty & grandeur as the artificial poetry of an artificial period. A literal translation... natural but deplorable mistake; this jargon is merely a disfigurement in English poetry. The cultured may read their work in spite of the jargon out of the unlimited intellectual curiosity natural to culture; the half-cultured may read it because of the jargon out of the ingrained tendency of the half-cultured mind to delight in what is at once unintelligible & inartistic. But their work can neither be ...
... voluntary fusion of cultures. Nationalism will have fulfilled itself and lost its militancy and would no longer find these things incompatible with self-preservation and the integrality of its outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. "Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America ... nations threatened with the world domination ¹ Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 38. Page 228 of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of the civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity. To this cause our support and sympathy will be unswerving whatever may happen; we look forward... is necessary for the greatness of India's future. "Another dream was for the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation. Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated: its other still subject or partly subject parts are moving through whatever struggles towards freedom ...
... every time they come. And they are not Europeans. Mother highly appreciated and praised the old Indian way of living, its simplicity, harmony and order when she saw it exemplified by Chandrashekhar Aiyar and his brother in the Ashram but that is not the way of living of most [people] [nowadays] which is a mixture. Chairs, tables, electric fans, etc. are European introductions, but I don’t suppose... that is, however, another matter than the question about the present human civilisation. It is not this which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine, or in the way that they imagine. The present civilisation must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new construction on the... dear Sotuda in his sattwic optimism specially after Mother’s thought-provoking letter to Prithwi Singh that she cannot promise anybody that “the Divine’s will is to preserve the present human civilisation. “ This she said a propos of the atomic bomb and this must mean, if it means anything, that our idea of human salvation may not square at all with the Divine’s plan. Page 166 ...
... that they, under the inspiration of the Asura , would level it to the ground. ‘Paris has been the centre of human civilisation for three centuries. Now he [i.e. Hitler] will destroy it. That is the sign of the Asura … Destruction of Paris means the destruction of modern European civilisation.’ 54 How many know that, at that moment, Paris was saved for the second time by the Mother and protected by... feel that not only is this a battle waged in just self-defence and in defence of the Nations threatened with the world-domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity.’ 32 Even in 1942 it was still necessary for Sri Aurobindo to explicitly formulate his ... therefore ‘objective’ historians sometimes write such ‘reasonable’ but inane psychological dissections of personalities like Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and of ancient cultures — in brief, of everything that really mattered on the wearisome and tortuous road of the human pilgrimage. The norms of rationalistic historical writing are always too superficial to explain the forces ...
... the occident are beginning to turn in their red evening for the hope of a new and more spiritual civilisation to the genius of Asia, and at that moment, it would be strange if we can think of nothing better than to cast away our own self and potentialities and put our trust in the dissolving past of Europe. The values of patriotism, the values of universal brotherhood and the values inherent in... janmabhumi, but it is also love for the people of the land. This philosophy goes even further and inspires love of the values of the culture that have been nourished and promoted through a long history of five thousand years and more. And beyond the values of this great culture, patriotism is in its heart-illumined worship of the smiling and beneficent and strong and powerful Shakti, which we call Mother ...
... quantities of potassium and argon present in a sample) can be used to date much older rocks. Nuclear techniques are used by museographers. Before being exhibited in a museum, the vestiges of past civilisations must be identified and analyzed. The authenticity of the objects is guaranteed by these analyses, which can also supply as much information as possible on their archeological and historical origins... institutions for research on and treatment of cancer. Marie Curie Fellowship Association: association of scientists (Marie Curie Fellows) who were awarded mobility research training grants by the European Community. Page 102 Curie Museum: Located at the Curie Institute in Paris, this museum was housed in the same laboratory where Marie worked up to her death. Pierre and Marie... Schuster, 1995. —Reid, Robert William. Marie Curie. New York: New American Library, 1978. —Woznicki, Robert. Madame Curie - Daughter of Poland. Miami: American Institute of Polish Culture, 1983. Page 107 Other monographs distributed by Auroville Press Publishers which are part of the programme of publications for Value-oriented Education by Sri Aurobindo ...
... middle classes, the tertiary classes, life in the countryside, the world of the labourer, marginalizes the regional languages and cultures, causes passivity, destroys the interpersonal relations within the family, eradicates the reading habit and all ‘difficult’ forms of culture, incites to violence, to vulgarity and pornography, prevents the children from becoming adults”, etc., for a whole page more.... is that; by its technological realisations which have become the normal environment of humanity at the present time, it is building a transitional world between the human being of the bygone civilisations and the new species in the making. This extremely important role of science, seen in the perspective of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, has not yet been generally perceived. Thanks to science every... uncommon and there are a fair number of persons who are as much or more citizens of the world as citizens of their own nation. The growth of knowledge is interesting the peoples in each other’s art, culture, religion, ideas and is breaking down at many points the prejudice, arrogance and exclusiveness of the old nationalistic sentiment. Religion, which ought to have led the way, but owing to its greater ...
... force of Truth. The Mother's answer to the danger posed by hectic scientific advancement was the transmuting power of Yoga, the discipline of soul-awakening and spiritual mastery. The future of civilisation, then, would depend on how soon, and how successfully, man acquired the necessary self-mastery and world-mastery through Yoga. Here, as the Mother saw it, was a positive role for the Ashram. ... for India in bitter disillusion indeed. VI Throughout 1946, the Ashram preserved a calm exterior, and the communal and spiritual life of the sadhaks as also the education and physical culture of the pupils in the School were sustained at a high level of harmony and efficiency. Page 447 But the Ashram, although it was a world apparently separate and secluded, could not be wholly... But despair was not the way out of the difficulty. Surely, if Hitler couldn't quite exterminate the Jews, the Muslim fanatics too wouldn't succeed in liquidating the Bengal Hindus. As for Hindu culture, it is not such a weak and fluffy thing as to be easily stamped out; it has lasted through something like five millenniums at least and is going to carry on much longer and has accumulated quite enough ...
... and a voluntary fusion of cultures may appear in the process of the change and the spirit of nationalism losing its militancy may find these things perfectly compatible with the integrity of its own outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race. The spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever ... order these: a revolution which would achieve India's freedom and her unity; the resurgence and liberation of Asia and her return to the great role which she had played in the progress of human civilisation; the rise of a new, a greater, brighter and nobler life for mankind which for its entire realization would rest outwardly on an international unification of the separate existence of the peoples... 130 The months following VOC's return from Surat were full of intense nationalist activity. The Swadeshi shipping enterprise grew from strength to strength. VOC led a major strike in the European-owned cotton Coral Mills of Tuticorin. Swadeshi meetings with fiery nationalist speeches, probably for the first time in the Tamil language, led to widespread nationalist mobilisation. Colonial ire ...
... light for ever". Stephen Spender also gives us remarkable touches of this in- ward subjective turn and of his perception of the worlds that are subliminal. Dissatisfied with the present European civilisation and condemning it to a well-deserved end, he rises to the vision of the collective soul in a world re-made. If some would say it is communism, it should be added that it is the perception of... realm of the subliminal and the occult to the present-day poetry. David Gascoyne brings in a symbolic sense of the natural phenomenon with great poetic success. In his 'Snow in Europe' the hush of death that fell on Europe during the last world-war is symbolised by snow and throughout the poem, the poet works out the symbol in such a way as to make the inert operations of Nature capable of carrying... Younger melts in fondness in his arms". — Leaves of Grass. In addition to the work of innovator of the new world here is an example from A. E. the Irish poet, inheritor of the old Irish culture: "Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress; Each chimney's vapour, like a thin grey rod, Mounting aloft through miles of quietness, Pillars the skies of God". — A. E. George Russel ...
... Cultural Commission, Maurice Schumann, met Sri Aurobindo with the French Indian Governor, M. Baron, to explore the possibility of opening an Institute in Pondicherry for the study of Indian and European culture. Sri Aurobindo's suggestion to the Indian and French Governments was that, while Pondicherry and the other French areas should certainly merge with India immediately, they should also have the... within ourselves. We have thus to change ourselves first before we can feel pure enough, or strong enough, to change others or change the environment. A civilisation in the process of breaking up could also be the raw material for a new civilisation in the making. One has to seize the moment of ripeness, one has to discover and know oneself, and then one may be able to look beyond the moment in a mood... and the Truth shall make thee free' is one common aspect of their message... he has created a synthesis between her past spiritual achievement and modem European thought, so that the future spiritual destiny of India and the future destiny of Europe are inescapably the same destiny.... We are at the turning-point in the spiritual history of man.... Because Aurobindo is in this world, the world ...
... little importance. There have always been periods when the mind of nations, continents, cultures turned towards materialism and away from all spiritual belief. Such periods came in ancient Europe in the first century A.D., in western Europe in the nineteenth century, but they are usually of short duration. Western Europe has already lost its faith in materialism and is seeking for something else, either... deceptive voice." He also spoke about the decline of nobility and tenderness in art: "I fail to see any further need for human beings either as creators or enjoyers of such 'art'; perhaps in an Asuric civilisation, men are anyhow superfluous and only 'incarnated Asuras' are required?"—Ed. × Mother India, ... is now dead or moribund; the scientists recognise, as you point out, the limits of their sphere. I may observe that the conflict between religion and science never arose in India (until the days of European education) because religion did not interfere with scientific discovery and scientists did not question religious or spiritual truth because the two things were kept on separate but not opposing lines ...
... him which he answered with his luminous clarity and charm. I often kept notes of these talks. Once he said : "Europe never forgets, Dilip, that bread is necessary; only she forgets, too easily, that man does not live by bread alone. But you, as a Hindu, should not adopt the European as your Guru for showing you the way, since it has been shown you by your own great ancestors ages ago. Remember... heart for such a touching faith. I can give it no other epithet than infantine. And if he feels that our present civilisation is going to be saved simply because his robust optimistic faith assures him to the effect, then why mustn't I retort, with equal conviction, that a civilisation which needs to be propped by such a puerile faith to be saved is hardly worth saving? Voila, qu'en dites-vous, 0... India. What I feel is that the wealth of tradition which is a nation is too precious a thing to be merged into a common hotchpotch from London to Yokohama. If we confine ourselves to Europe (at least Western Europe) the case is somewhat different as the traditions are more or less common; but can England and India, say, be mixed so philanthropically without doing vital injury to both? When the traditions ...
... contradiction: the lure of Earth and the call of Heaven. As a result, the human race has ever oscillated between two extreme and opposite ideals. On one side is the Hellenic ideal as taken up by Western civilisation and characterised by the cult of a critical and constructive rationality of which Science is the last outcome and which hopes to make individual men perfected social beings in a perfected economic... material existence of man leads inexorably to the rise in our midst of civilised barbarians so dangerous to the welfare of humanity itself; (ii)an exclusively rational-scientific secular-material culture creates a dangerous void and imbalance in the subjective sphere of man's existence, so much so that the man of our epoch, in spite of all possible material comforts and conveniences, has fallen a prey... ill-founded prejudices, cannot but lead the seeker to the door-step of the integral approach to Reality as propounded by Sri Aurobindo. We take up here a single case, the case of mathematical culture, to substantiate our point, and the following chapter will be devoted to its detailed consideration. Page 80 ...
... to the economic and social betterment of the whole society. This possibility dawned upon man with the seventeenth century and within two centuries Europe had become the scene of a great intellectual activity in the cause of general education and culture, in an effort at emancipation from tradition, convention and prejudice and with a keen interest in the theoretical and applied sciences. Page 167... the advent of progress has cut the course of history in two parts: 1. A period when society was almost static in its vision of things. There was little change from one generation to another. Civilisations and empires grew, bloomed and decayed, without affecting the ways of living and the outlook of the masses. Surprisingly little attention was given to alleviating the conditions of life and work... But, as it is drawing close to its realization, it is losing much of its inspiring power. It is no longer generating the same enthusiasm, as is evidenced by the decline of the socialist parties in We Europe. Moreover the capitalist society comes in the end to adopt much of what was originally purely-socialist, so that Page 169 both social orders are moving towards each other and seem likely ...
... peace with the triumphant Hitler. A shaken and battered Britain was now left alone to face the might of Hitler, with most of Western Europe under his grip. It was Hitler's expectation that, France thus humiliated and put out of action, all Northern Europe brought under the Nazi control or sphere of influence, and the East secured (as he thought) from Russian attack, Britain also would... towards the end of 1942 that the tide of war in Europe took an unmistakable turn against Hitler. The German army of 22 divisions near Stalingrad was surrounded, and on 31 January 1943 the Russian captured or annihilated what remained of the encircled army, and Field Marshal von Paulus was himself taken prisoner. The position of the Allies in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific steadily improved... possessed by the Asura, or perhaps was an incarnation of the Asura: "The Vital World has descended upon the physical. That is why the intellectuals are getting perplexed at the destruction of their civilisation, of all the values they had made and stood by." A week later, when the course of the war had taken a decisive turn against the Allies, he was asked what message should be sent to a ...
... of the old parochial & rotten politics of French India, with its following of interested local Europeans & subservience to their petty ambitions in favour of a politics of principles which will support one of our own men or a European like Richard who is practically an Indian in beliefs, in personal culture, in sympathies & aspirations, one of the Nivedita type. If also a certain number of votes can... like myself, & in his own way works for a general renovation of the world by which the present European civilisation shall be replaced by a spiritual civilisation. In that change the resurrection of the Asiatic races & especially of India is an essential point. He & Madame Richard are rare examples of European Yogins who have not been led away by Theosophical and other aberrations. I have been in material... the truth must be the same, but the formations may be different with advantage to the spirit. To insist on one form only might well bring in that rigidity which grew upon Indian society and its civilisation in the past and brought about an imprisonment and decline of the spirit. India was strongest and most alive when she had many variations of form but one spirit. And I think,—that at least was the ...
... man how to know and realise his God.... But how should the culture of the soul survive in the land where a shifting materialism was asserting itself under the aegis of foreign rule? Had not the fools and the Philistines, whose name was Legion - the monstrous products of a soulless education nourished on the rind of European thought - already begun to laugh at their country's past? And... to serve and save the Motherland, an impassioned appeal to their manhood to reinstate her in the greatness that was hers. Had she not once been the High Priestess of the Orient? Has not her civilisation left its ripple-mark on the furthermost limits of Asia? India still had a soul to save, which the parching drought of modem vulgarity threatened daily with death; she alone in a pharisaical... And dared to condemn the wisdom of their ancestors? Was India to deform herself from a temple of God into one vast inglorious suburb of English civilisation? Even beauty, the vernal Goddess enshrined in her hymns and her poetry, was feeling the country chased by a hungry commercialism pouring out its flood of ugly and worthless wares' owing naught to art or religion'. This doom that impended ...
... social structure? What supported the heroism and self-abandonment of the Kshatriya, the Sikh and the Rajput, the unconquerable national vitality and endurance? What was it that stood behind that civilisation second to none, in the massiveness of its outlines or the perfection of its details? Without a great and unique discipline involving a perfect education of soul and mind, a result so immense... means to the finality of fulfilment. Page 250 Between these two poles did the ancient Hindus raise their systems of knowledge, their methods of education and their experiments in civilisation. And yet Sri Aurobindo did not say that the old Brahmacharya-Yoga axis could be reproduced in all its details in twentieth century India. He contented himself, on the other hand, with setting... the pupils: Nothing that is useful or important is neglected in the scheme, and instruction is, as far as possible, imparted in the vernacular.... In profiting by our contact with Western civilisation, we should be careful not to cut ourselves adrift from our original moorings, but should at the same time imitate the Japanese in taking the fullest advantage of modem scientific discoveries. ...
... is the secret of our religion, our life & our literature, our civilisation. On the one side we spiritualise the material out of all but a phenomenal & illusory existence, on the other we materialise the spiritual in the most definite & realistic forms; this is the secret of the high philosophic idealism which to the less capable European mind seems so impossible an intellectual atmosphere and of the... but the poet & lover. The poet on a throne has been the theme of Shakespeare in his Richard II and of Renan in his Antéchrist; and from these two great studies we can realise the European view of the phenomenon. To the European mind the meeting of poet & king in one man wears always the appearance of an anomaly, a misplacement, the very qualities which have fitted him to be a poet unfit him to rule. A... family, the unveiled face of the Hetaira for the seclusion of the wife. This class both in its higher & lower type lasted late into the present century, but are now under the auspices of Western civilisation almost entirely replaced by a growing class of professional prostitutes, an inevitable consummation which it seems hardly worth while to dub social reform & accelerate by an active crusade. The ...
... others while adharma is that which causes suffering to others. Motivation, he added, refers to various situations such as personal situation, social situation, spiritual situation or even, civilisational situation. He felt that all these factors need to be taken into account while considering the concept of character. Smt. Savitri Sharma said that education for character development should... report when he said that "if you want to bring Rakshasa Raja, starve the soul and cater to the material needs of the individual." He said that the foreign rule had already played havoc with our culture; unfortunately, the same policy is being followed by our rulers since independence. He deplored the fact that in our curriculum there is no mention of upliftment of the soul. He added that we have... of higher values. He expressed his hope that with men and women who were present in the Workshop, there was a great possibility that the resurrection of the country would be possible. He added that European renaissance was brought about by the effort of about 100 enlightened individuals, and he felt that India is a vast country and would throw up 100 men and women to help regeneration of the country ...
... of the past but a potent love which gives me the pure heart of a child and the lightness and freedom of thought of a god.' 1920 Feb Writes 'Myself and my Creed': 'I belong to no nation, no civilisation, no society, no race, but to the Divine.' - Mar Departs for Pondicherry. The British instruct their embassies along her route to intern her on the slightest 'suspicion' of carrying messages... for what she gives.' 1940 Sep 19 With Sri Aurobindo, makes a declaration in support of the Allies and contributes to the War Fund: 'We believe that... this is a battle waged in... defence of civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity.' They put their spiritual force behind the Allies. 1942 Mar-Apr Sees 'the Divine Grace directly... accept Cripps' offer. 1943 Dec 2 Opens a small school with about 20 children of devotees. Takes some classes. 1945 May Opens the School's physical education department (P.E.D.). 'Physical culture is the process of infusing consciousness into the cells of the body.' Page 857 1946 Descent of the Divine Mother's Personality of Ananda, indispensable for the transformation of the body ...
... Greek and Latin, which had the place our Sanskrit has with us. If one knew these well, one could master the English tongue better. Actually, all European languages and civilisations are derived from Greece and Rome. In earlier centuries all European cultures used Latin as their written language. I was rather good at Latin as well as Greek. I wrote some poetry in them and won prizes. I remember once I... a very close study of western civilisation and culture, and found it akin to me. But I had till then never had the occasion to come close to what was genuinely mine - my language and my culture. So now I gave myself entirely to this pursuit. It is my knowledge of Sanskrit that has helped me write books like The Secret of the Veda and The Foundations of Indian Culture. I have already described to... I had no clear notion then as to the means or the ways of achieving this, I was at first preparing myself." "In what way?" "To begin with, I decided that I must know my country - her civilisation and culture, her religion, her literature and her history. Of all these I must have a close and intimate knowledge. To this end, I began to study Sanskrit." "But is it necessary to know Sanskrit in ...
... of restraint in their private ethics. Their idea of deity was confined to the beautiful and brilliant rabble of their Olympus. Hence the charm and versatility of Greek civilisation; hence also its impermanence as a separate culture. The Romans also confused the Eternal with His manifestations in physical Nature, but they read Him on the side not of beauty but of force governed by law; the stern and... purely devoted to the worship and culture of beauty like the Greeks and their art was not perfect, yet they had the sense of beauty & art in a greater degree than any other ancient people; unlike the Greeks they had a perfect sense of spiritual beauty and were therefore able to realise the delight & glory of Nature hundreds of years before the sense of it developed in Europe. On the ethical side they had... singleness aloof from phenomena, they saw Him in every one of His million manifestations in phenomena. God in Himself, God in man, God in Nature were the "ideas" which their life expressed. Their civilisation was therefore more manysided and complete and their ethical and intellectual ideals more perfect and permanent than those of any other nation. They had in Page 220 full measure the sense ...
... to capable persons for each farm, to one or two for each farm. Page 138 Mother agreed and advised, "But it is necessary that the Europeans who do it should first know the Indian conditions." "Should we have one Indian with one European ?" "Yes, yes." After a pause she mentioned Mercier's name. "But, Mother, he may not be having time." "Yes, and he is old... not equality. Equality is in the Divine unity where friends and enemies, known and unknown, all are in unity. Do they know about Tibetan culture? Each country has its culture and way of being. Tibetans have lost their country, they wish to preserve their culture naturally. Let them continue." "Another suggestion is that, when it is possible, they should be shifted from here to a separate boarding... reason why she should collaborate with him. It is needed." Constance has been engaged since ten years in research into the ancient Egyptian civilisation. He is able to find nether the nature of his connection with it nor the door to that civilisation. He asks for Mother's help. Mother's reply, Ancient Egypt belongs to the past, we are here to prepare the future. Page 202 ...
... and penetrating knowledge and with a mind fully modern at the same time that it is charged with an ever progressive spirituality: The Foundations of Indian Culture (your friend Raja Rao considers Sri Aurobindo the best expositor of Indian culture) - The Human Cycle, originally titled The Psychology of Social Development (about which the famous Dr. Schweitzer wrote to the Ashram that he found it... pain they brought you they have put your back up most unexpectedly. I cannot admire sufficiently the spirit in which you confront the decay of standards and the general prospect of your country's civilisation coming to an end. You say: "Would I not do better to live in a cottage with roses round the door etc. and write verse? Or leave this world where my task is alt but finished? However, Temenos 10... different levels. You must of course be free to illustrate such a paper at your own wish, and if by Aurobindo so be it; but I would ask you to use also other examples, especially from English or European poets who are known to our readers. That you would in any case do, of course. If your paper were to come within the next six or eight weeks it could go into the tenth issue, to be published ...
... forms now current, and I am not altogether in love with the European kind, however great an improvement it may be on the past. I hold that India having a spirit of her own and a governing temperament proper to her own civilisation, should in politics as in everything else strike out her own original path and not stumble in the wake of Europe. But this is precisely what she will be obliged to do, if she... he found only books and papers. On some of the papers Greek was written. He was very much surprised and asked if Sri Aurobindo knew Greek. When he came to know that he knew Latin, Greek and other European languages, his suspicion waned, yielding place to a great respect for Sri Aurobindo. He invited Sri Aurobindo to meet him in his chambers later and Sri Aurobindo complied with his request. Mayuresan... Supermind on the physical plane. 18 June. Talk on astrology and prophecy. 25 June. Talk on suffering and spirituality. 26 June. Talk on the Gods. 29 June. Talk on the difference between European and Indian politics. July (for a few days in the beginning of the month) Talks on Tirupati, the deranged sadhaka. 10 July. Remark in a talk: "Vivekananda came and gave me the knowledge of the ...
... Disciple : It is written in a book that the Japanese have given up their own instruments and have taken to European music. Is it true ? Sri Aurobindo : For that we must ask-X. Disciple : I think Japanese instruments are also found in plenty – you also find European instruments, orchestra etc. There are places where you find Japanese music and drama patronised and there are many... – the dynamic mind – are very crude. That is why I hesitate sometimes to give the yoga. In Europe the outer parts are very well developed – reason, expression, the dynamic mind etc. But then there the whole thing ends. There is a great poverty in the inner being. Some of the Europeans are, really, babies in spiritual life. To combine the inner development with the outer would be ideal... struggle between Capital and Labour is there and Socialism and Collectivism or Communism had to Page 129 be brought in to counteract the individualistic tendencies of the present-day civilisation. Assertion of the collective being is necessary for organisation and efficiency because the tendency of Capitalism was, and would be, to concentrate the power of.money in the hands of the few. It ...
... tribes and to encounter Dardanians and Cretans and Romans in Europe. But we cannot jump to the conclusion that these Indian tribes colonised Europe or that those European peoples came and settled in ancient India. Again, the mere absence of Brāhmanas and Śrāmanas in the country of Aśoka's subject Yonas is no pointer to Hellenic civilisation alone. In the borderland between India and Irān, where... towards Asia Minor and Europe. Going from the north-west frontier through Afghānistān to the territories beyond the Hindu-kush mountains, we can cover by 1,500 miles of winding road from Aśoka's north-west a terrain which could easily have been the field of his foreign missions. Majumdar 1 tells us: "We have evidence to show that Buddhism, and along with it Indian culture, was spread among the Parthians... where are not found those two religious orders, the Brāhmanas and the Śrāmanas. This exclusive distinction is precisely what we should expect if the Yonas had the Hellenic and not the Hindu Āryān civilisation. But, if thus they were definitely the Greeks, what more natural than that Aśoka should have reigned some time after Sandrocottus, as the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya? A still greater ...
... older than the historic culture to Page 1441 which the name of Puranic has been given. The present Puranas are very late creations with many ancient things imbedded in them and mixed with much of a recent creation. No, but the traditions they contain are often older than the extant Veda. I could hardly say. There is much that has survived from old civilisations that have perished, but... anything, I am ready to reply to you. Bolshevism is more distant to me, but it is part of the outer movement, only it has more force of reality than others I was thinking of. The movements of Europe have a potential or an actual violence of the power of execution in them which makes them press for realisation more rapidly; but it is the future which is preparing to arise in the East of which I... them in obedience to a previous idea, that will falsify the movement and produce something as artificial probably as the present system. Why? It seems to me the most practical process. In Asia. Europe will take, I think, a little time to adjust itself to a new impulse. It has been too much brought up to a sort of standstill or rather a circling round the same point by the disappointment of the hopes ...
... in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way.... Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering... Aurobindo and Mother went on testing day and night their experiments and results over decades and decades. Their programme of yogic research took within its sweep all the domains of life, all aspects of culture, and arrived at a synthesis of yoga based upon the discovery of the supermind resulting in an ever-growing methodised discipline for the transformation of man and the eventual transmutation into a... supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step forward in evolutionary Nature.¹ The emergence of Nazism was, in fact, the emergence of barbarism, a terrible threat to the advancement of culture and to the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It signalled even a possibility of an attack on the physical being of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Indeed, this possibility became a concrete event ...
... as regards cotton. The Rigvedics flourished in the very Indus Valley where the Harappa Culture cultivated cotton for nearly a thousand years. And yet the Rigveda which is commonly considered to have been composed from 1500 to 1200 or 1000 B.C. - that is, to have started immediately at the end of the Harappa Culture whose usually accepted date is 2500-1500 B.C. - has not the faintest reference to cotton... (as sheer Spinozism would) the status of the transcendent deity, the Super-Person, the absolute Purusha who, as the Vedas appreciatively quoted by you in your books say at the dawn of Indian civilisation, came down in one-fourth of himself and kept three-fourths above. The Catholic Church can never accept the immanence and omnipresence resulting from such a manifestation or "self-creation". And... which is natural to every Parsi, as well as out of the Christian soul-milieu which too was natural to me in another manner because of my education at St. Xavier's School and College in Bombay under European Jesuits. Perhaps I should say I was taken out of what seem to be sister religions. Zoroastrianism is fundamentally monotheistic but pragmatically dualistic with its powers of Light fighting those ...
... much like going back to the time of primitive man in the caves... We do not wish to live the artificial life of civilised society, but it would be better to climb up the ladder towards a greater civilisation, rather than fall backward to the rule of the blows... With blessings. 6 July 1963 Mother, On the 3rd July I finished 25 years of my stay. Usually I used to get a scolding from... clear. We do not fight against any creed, any religion. We do not fight against any form of government. We do not fight against any social class. We do not fight against any nation or civilisation. We are fighting division, unconsciousness, ignorance, inertia and falsehood. We are endeavouring to establish upon earth union, knowledge, consciousness, Truth, and we fight whatever opposes... it that the Ashram exists in this town for so many years and is not liked by the population? The first and immediate answer is that all those in this population who are of a higher standard in culture, intelligence, good will and education not only have welcomed the Ashram Page 251 but have expressed their sympathy, admiration and good-feeling. Sri Aurobindo Ashram has in Pondicherry ...
... 34 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 132. the ages of light it is arising again. The Rig Vedic Rishis were at the dawn of this cycle of civilisation and were mainly concerned with setting forth the seeds of the upcoming culture, particularly on a spiritual level, but also as the social order. It is hard to say whether physical transformation as Sri Aurobindo envisioned it was part... in Savitri? It depends upon one's approach towards it: there is philosophy in it, there is rich metaphysics, mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, science, literature, cosmogony, history of civilisation, history of evolution, everything that one wishes to have. But indeed it is the supreme revelation which brings divinity to our mortality in order to transform it into its own nature that draws... gracefulness. Any number of stories have grown around the orchids and it is said that they are special plants if for no other reason than the mystique that surrounds them. But as the Renaissance in Europe began to fade and the Age of Reason started making its appearance things took another turn. Nature became an object of investigation instead of an object of joyous amazement and admiration. The unfortunate ...
... To put it more soberly—accept once and for all that this thing has to be done, that it is the only thing left for yourself or the earth. Outside are earthquakes and Hitlers and a collapsing civilisation and, generally speaking, the jackal in the flood. All the more reason to tend towards the one thing to Page 27 be done, the thing you have been sent to aid in getting done. It is... Manifestation which seemed to me quite irrelevant to the reality. I put forward two propositions which appear to me indisputable unless we are to reverse all spiritual knowledge in favour of modern European ideas about things. First, the Divine Manifestation even when it manifests in mental and human ways has behind it a consciousness greater than the mind and not bound by the petty mental and... disposition. There are men like Nag Mahashoy 27 in whom spiritual experience creates more and more humility, there are others like Vivekananda in whom it erects a great sense of strength and superiority—European critics have taxed him with it rather severely; there are others in whom it [fixes?] a sense of superiority to men and humility to the Divine. Each position has its value. Take Vivekananda's famous ...
... the incapacity of their bombs, the incapacity of their machines and the dreadful and wonderful incapacity of all the Western or Eastern gods. And then, and then ... We are not at the end of a civilisation. We are at the Time of Man's imminent birth. We have played long enough with electric trains, penicillin and electronic chromosomes — what if it were time for another game, another discovery... that law, and such and such amino acid + such and such nucleotide + ... An infernal addition. Yes, the addition of all the habits we have contracted in order to move about in the first terrestrial culture medium. But “laws”, there are none! There are only fossilized habits. And one day in 1965, on a banal occasion, the picture became crystal clear. It concerned a disciple who had the beginning of a... more radically in the state of the first cell in the world, before it has wound any habits. She was at the beginning of the world! And she found it very difficult not to be scattered into the great culture medium. That is the first reaction of any living matter: self-protection, erecting walls. The vibration of the mantra in each cell made that “wall”: a vibratory network dense enough to withstand the ...
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