... Oriental music represents the oneness of the truth beyond Nature. Further, let us turn to the spiritual practices of the East and the West and their effects on life. What is the nature of European religion? Greece is the mother of modern Europe. The Europe of to-day is the outcome of Graeco-Roman culture. What was the conception of religion in Greece? Her religion surely consisted in all that is... legal. Forced by circumstances and for the sake of mutual interest they have set up a mode of moral standard, and this they want to impose on all peoples and countries. The utmost contribution of European religion has been a kind of temporising and understanding with the lower propensities of men and somehow presenting a smooth and decorous surface of life. Association, Arbitration, Federation, Co-existence ...
... to morality, coupled with a belief in God, sometimes as equivalent to a set of pietistic actions and emotions. Faith, works and pious observances, these are the three recognized elements of European religion. From works, however, the ordinary work of the world is strictly excluded. Religion and daily life are, in the European opinion, two entirely different things which it is superstitious, barbarous ...
... which is foreign to Indian thought. The personal God of the European religions is a Person in the human sense of the word, limited by His qualities though otherwise possessed of omnipotence and omniscience; it answers to the Indian special conceptions of Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma or of the Divine Mother of all, Durga or Kali. Each religion really erects a different personal Deity according to its own... forms of His infinite godhead to satisfy the desire and need of the individual soul according to its own nature and personality. It is for this reason that the normal European mind finds it so difficult to understand Indian religion as distinct from Vedantic or Sankhya philosophy, because it cannot easily conceive of a personal God with infinite qualities, a personal God who is not a Person, but the... maintained, we shall see a certain justification even for the dualist philosophies and Page 376 religions which seem to deny most energetically the unity of beings and to make an unbridgeable differentiation between the Lord and His creatures. If in their grosser forms these religions aim only at the ignorant joys of the lower heavens, yet there is a far higher and profounder sense in which ...
... appreciation of this art. And it has to be remembered too that the religious spirit here is something Page 272 quite different from the sense of European religions; and even mediaeval Christianity, especially as now looked at by the modern European mind which has gone through the two great crises of the Renascence and recent secularism, will not in spite of its oriental origin and affinities be... conventions of material life. That is why the Japanese with their fine sense in these things,—a sense which modern Europe with her assault of crowded art galleries and over-pictured walls seems to have quite lost, though perhaps I am wrong, and those are the right conditions for display of European art,—have put their temples and their Buddhas as often as possible away on mountains and in distant or secluded... is throughout rich, vital and joyous and there is more tragedy, terror, sorrow and gloom packed into any few pages of European work than we can find in the whole mass of Indian literature. It does not seem to me that Indian art is at all different in this respect from the religion and literature. The Western mind is here thrusting in its own habitual reactions Page 281 upon things in the ...
... [1] : Religion in Europe; Religion in India; The Real Minimum; The Maximum. 1910. CMS I: 1-2. A defective version of parts of this piece was published in The Standard Bearer on 13 March 1922 under the title "Hints and Clues". Passing Thoughts [2] : The Object of Government; The European Jail; European Justice. 1910. CMS II: 1-2. Around 1912 Sri Aurobindo revised and enlarged "European Justice" ...
... antirational by the positivist intelligence. But the European mind has failed to understand this plain necessity or has despised it. It insists on "purifying" religion, by the reason and not by the spirit, on "reforming" it, by the reason and not by the spirit. And we have seen what were the results of this kind of purification and reformation in Europe. The infallible outcome of that ignorant doctoring... government, Europe where these things have done duty for spirituality and religion, has hardly a record which would entitle it to cast this reproach in the face of the East. But, we are told, this gravitation afflicts the Indian religion more than any other creed. Higher Hinduism can be scarcely said to exist except in certain small reforming sects and current Hinduism, the popular religion, is the cult... with a right appreciation of the life-value of Indian religion; religion and philosophy are too intimately one in this culture to be divided from each other. Indian philosophy is not a purely rational gymnastic of speculative logic in the air, an ultra-subtle process of thought-spinning and word-spinning like the greater part of philosophy in Europe; it is the organised intellectual theory of the intuitive ...
... to be merely external or mechanical, but moral and spiritual. Salvation cannot lie in India trying to fabricate a toy model of European freedom, with bicameral legislatures, colourless societies, secularist postures and materialist panaceas. It is not as the "ape of Europe" that Indian society can achieve social renovation, for "it is the spirit alone that saves, and only by becoming great and free... varied activity in the divers fields of religion, politics, literature, science, philosophy, industry and commerce might prove to be activity at cross-purposes, and instead of strengthening the nation might actually weaken it and give its movement a wrong or even backward direction. India's political activity had "crept in a channel cut for it by European or Europeanised minds"; the other streams... In this supreme task of mobilisation of our faculties on the issue of taking resolute leaps towards the future, the urgent task was the awakening of our brahmatej, which was not what Europeans called "religion" but rather "spirituality": ...spirituality, the force and energy of thought and action arising from communion with or self-surrender to that within us which rules the world.... This ...
... these candidatures & the abandonment 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... him to come here. He is expected daily, but he does not arrive. He will, no doubt, be a good karmavira in time; but at present he is too rajasic, with intervals of tamas, has too much faith in European religions & the arms of the flesh & too little faith in Yoga & the arms of the spirit. He went northward on his own initiative; I could have told him his efforts there would be fruitless, but it is always... interpretation of the Veda based upon it. He has also shown me the meaning of all in the Upanishads that is not understood either by Indians or Europeans. I have therefore to reexplain the whole Vedanta & Veda in such a way that it will be seen how all religion arises out of it & is one everywhere. In this way it will be proved that India is the centre of the religious life of the world & its destined ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.