... the Indian mind not only prizes more from the ethical standpoint,—that is found everywhere,—but is more vividly interested in the calm, self-controlling or even the self-effacing personality; for the effacement of egoism seems to it to be not an effacement, but an enhancement of value and power of the true person and its greatness. Mr. Archer finds Asoka pale and featureless; to an Indian mind he is... are too virtuous, too ideal, too white in colour; but to the Indian mind even apart from all religious sentiment they are figures of an absorbing reality which appeal to the inmost fibres of our being. A European scholar criticising the Mahabharata finds the strong and violent Bhima the only real character in that great poem; the Indian mind on the contrary finds greater character and a more moving interest... form of the distinction made by the Indian mind itself, the interest of the one centres more in the rajasic, that of the other in the sattwic will and character. Whether this difference imposes an inferiority on the aesthetics of Indian life and creation, each must judge for himself, but surely the Indian is the more evolved and spiritual conception. The Indian mind believes that the will and personality ...
... THE GENIUS OF INDIA* What was this ancient spirit and characteristic soul of India? European writers, struck by the general metaphysical bent of the Indian mind, by its strong religious instincts and religious idealism, by its other-worldliness, are inclined to write as if this were all the Indian spirit. An abstract, metaphysical, religious mind overpowered... learners and imitators. Since then Europe has discovered that there was too an Indian art of remarkable power and beauty; but the rest of what India meant it has hardly at all seen. But meanwhile the Indian mind began to emancipate itself and to look upon its past with a clear and self-discerning eye, and it very soon discovered that it had been misled into an entirely false self-view. All such one-sided... will have an awakening, not of the same brutal kind, certainly, but startling enough, as to the real nature and capacity of the Indian spirit. Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning, — and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, — that life cannot ...
... spirituality. Not Buddha, not Christ, Chaitanya, St. Francis, Ramakrishna; these are either semi-barbaric Orientals or touched by the feminine insanity of an oriental religion. The impression made on an Indian mind resembles the reaction that a cultured intellectual might feel if he were told that good cooking, good dressing, good engineering, good schoolmastering are the true beauty and their pursuit the right... ideas fatal to that supreme spiritual thing, volitional individuality. This is a grotesquely exaggerated and false notion of Indian culture and philosophy, got up by presenting one side only of the Indian mind in colours of a sombre emphasis, after a manner which I suppose Mr. Archer has learned from the modern masters of realism. But in substance and spirit it is a fairly correct statement of the notions... development would hardly have been possible in a nation whose thinkers and men of learning were led by its metaphysical tendencies to turn away from the study of nature. A remarkable feature of the Indian mind was a close attention to the things of life, a disposition to observe minutely its salient facts, to systematise and to found in each department of it a science, Shastra, well-founded scheme and ...
... expressive of those truths restated, cured of defect, completed. What was this ancient spirit and characteristic soul of India? European writers, struck by the general metaphysical bent of the Indian mind, by its strong religious instincts and religious idealism, by its other-worldliness, are inclined to write as if this Page 5 were all the Indian spirit. An abstract, metaphysical, religious... learners and imitators. Since then Europe has discovered that there was too an Indian art of remarkable power and beauty; but the rest of what India meant it has hardly at all seen. But meanwhile the Indian mind began to emancipate itself and to look upon its past with a clear and self-discerning eye, and it very soon discovered that it had been misled into an entirely false self-view. All such one-sided... she will have an awakening, not of the same brutal kind, certainly, but startling enough, as to the real nature and capacity of the Indian spirit. Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning,—and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight,—that life cannot ...
... discovery was taken to the West by his disciple Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902). The newly emancipated Indian mind looked upon its past with a clear and discerning eye and saw that the past of India was not wholly or solely its spirituality. For, although it was the master key of the Indian mind, yet ancient India knew that "spirituality does not flourish on earth in the void, even as our mountain-tops... and immediately he would write a whole poem in the autograph book held out to him by Abhay. Page 65 We could say that Rabindranath Tagore epitomized the Indian mind as defined by Sri Aurobindo: "The Indian mind is not only spiritual and ethical, but intellectual and artistic ... it returns always towards some fusion of knowledge it has gained and to a resulting harmony and balance... public works, systems of politics and administration, trades, industries, fine crafts —the list is endless and in each item there was a plethora of activity. One thing is certain. The ideal of the Indian mind was not charity; it believed in human dignity. "It was the first to assert a divinity in the people and could Page 27 cry to the monarch at the height of his power, 'O king, ...
... itself, by the glare of a kind of crude and barbaric genius,—to affirm the eternal incompatibility of the East and the West. Let us see what strikes such a mentality as unique and abhorrent in the Indian mind and its culture: if we can put aside all sensitiveness of personal feeling and look dispassionately at this phenomenon, we shall find it an interesting and illuminative study. A certain objection... ancient Greek, full of disinterested intellectual curiosity and a flexible aesthetic appreciation, was in spite of his feeling of racial and cultural superiority to the barbarian much nearer to the Indian mind than a 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... then ineffective, by the very nature of the central ideas and motives, for any real good. This is a significant attitude. Of course there is the polemical motive. That which is claimed for the Indian mind and its civilisation is a high spirituality, high on all the summits of thought and religion, permeating art and literature and religious practice and social ideas and affecting even the ordinary ...
... literature have the same upward look; even the Indian social system is built upon this conception; her whole dharma or law of being is founded upon it. This is her conception of progress. To the Indian mind, the true meaning of progress is this spiritual progress, not merely the externally self-unfolding process of an always more and more prosperous and efficient material civilization. It is her founding... all other fields of human activity, such as art, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature, the aim has been ultimately to discover and express the Divine. 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 spiritual,... of Sri Aurobindo on the spirit and soul of India: "What was this ancient spirit and characteristic soul of India? European writers, struck by the general metaphysical bent of the Indian mind, by its strong religious instincts and religious idealism, by its other-worldliness, are inclined to write as if this were all the Indian spirit. An abstract, metaphysical, religious mind overpowered ...
... religion that divides the Indian mind and the normal Western intelligence. The difference is so great that it could only be bridged by a supple philosophical training or a wide spiritual culture; but the established forms of religion and the rigid methods of philosophical thought practised in the West make no provision and even allow no opportunity for either. To the Indian mind the least important part... and inhabitant of things. Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware Eternity and this conscious Eternal. But this Truth of being was not seized by the Indian mind only as a philosophical speculation, a theological dogma, an abstraction contemplated by the intelligence. It was not an idea to be indulged by the thinker in his study, but otherwise void of practical... truth of spiritual experience is that he is in the heart and centre of all existence and all existence is in him and to find him is the great self-finding. Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of seeing the one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing needful; to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after and discover ...
... A right knowledge of the facts and a right understanding of the character and principle of the Indian socio-political system disposes at once of the contention of occidental critics that the Indian mind, even if remarkable in metaphysics, religion, art and literature was inapt for the organisation of life, inferior in the works of the practical intelligence and, especially, that it was sterile in... or adventurers carrying with them to yet uncultured peoples Indian religion, architecture, art, poetry, thought, life, manners. The idea of empire and even of world-empire was not absent from the Indian mind, but its world was the Indian world and the object the founding of the imperial unity of its peoples. This idea, the sense of this necessity, a constant urge towards its realisation is evident... which the problem was or ought to have been envisaged and the actual turn given to the endeavour and in the latter a contradiction of the peculiar mentality of the people. The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn, its propensity to seek the things of the spirit and the inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as secondary, dependent, to be handled and determined ...
... out, "This is so," it is hard indeed for the average mind, and even minds above the average but inexpert in these special subjects not to acquiesce.... Nevertheless a time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the darkness that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second and third hand and reassert its right to judge and enquire in a perfect freedom into the ___... which holds pity to be a weakness and thinks like the Norwegian hero who thanked God because He had given him a hard heart ? But the teaching of the Gita springs from an Indian creed and to the Indian mind compassion has always figured as one of the largest elements of the divine nature.... It is this compassion in the Aryan fighter, the soul of his chivalry, which will not break the bruised reed... This is what Indian civilisation is now reprising to do as it has always done in the eternal strength of its spirit. 72 April, 1919 There is nothing in the most ascetic notes of the Indian mind like the black gloom of certain kinds of European pessimism, a city of dreadful night without joy here or hope beyond, and nothing like the sad and shrinking attitude before death and the dissolution ...
... time of Akbar,—but give form to a nobility, power and beauty which lay hold upon but do not wallow on the earth. There is not here indeed the vast spiritual content of the earlier Indian mind, but it is still an Indian mind which in these delicate creations absorbs the West Asian influence, and lays stress on the sensuous as before in the poetry of Kalidasa, but uplifts it to a certain immaterial charm... this mind form creates the spirit, the spirit depends for its existence and for everything it has to say on the form. The Indian attitude to the matter is at the opposite pole to this view. For the Indian mind form does not exist except as a creation of the spirit and draws all its meaning and value from the spirit. Every line, arrangement of mass, colour, shape, posture, every physical suggestion, however... describes man as a little soul carrying a corpse, psucharion ei bastazon nekron . The more ordinary Western outlook is upon animate matter carrying in its life a modicum of soul. But the seeing of the Indian mind and of Indian art is that of a great, a limitless self and spirit, mahān ātmā , which carries to us in the sea of its presence a living shape of itself, small in comparison to its own infinity, ...
... ideal mind of a people, an age, a culture, through the genius of some of its greatest or most sensitive representative spirits. And if we ask what in both these respects is the achievement of the Indian mind as it has come down to us in the Sanskrit and other literatures, we might surely say that here at least there is little room for any just depreciation and denial even by a mind the most disposed... of which it was the reflecting medium. The great and noble use made of it by poet and thinker did not fall below the splendour of its capacities. Nor is it in the Sanskrit tongue alone that the Indian mind has done high and beautiful and perfect things, though it couched in that language the larger part of its most prominent and formative and grandest creations. It would be necessary for a complete... essential build and character transmutations and extensions of the original vision and first spiritual experience and never an unconnected departure. There is a persistence, a continuity of the Indian mind in its literary creation in spite of great changes as consistent as that which we find in painting and sculpture. Page 318 The Veda is the creation of an early intuitive and symbolical ...
... folk-lore oppressive and paralysing to the imagination,—although here again one would think that if anything an excess rather than a paralysis of the creative imagination might be charged against the Indian mind. Animism and magic are the prevailing characteristics. The Indian people has displayed a genius for obfuscating reason and formalising, materialising and degrading religion. If India has possessed... and the practical environment and the truths and suggestions of physical Nature. There in its native form is the apparent gulf between the two mentalities and it looks unbridgeable. Or rather the Indian mind can understand well enough, even when it does not share, the positivist turn of the occidental intelligence; but it is itself to the latter a thing, if not damnable, at least abnormal and unintelligible... not only is the cult and belief of this people antiquated and mediaeval in kind, but it is not kept in its proper place. Instead of putting religion into an unobtrusive and ineffective corner, the Indian mind has the pretension, the preposterous pretension which rational man has outgrown for ever, of filling with it the whole of life. It would be difficult to convince the too positive average European ...
... Himalayan countries carry it forward at the other end as late as the twelfth century and help us to link it on to the later schools of Rajput painting. The history of the self-expression of the Indian mind in painting covers a period of as much as two millenniums of more or less intense artistic creation and stands on a par in this respect with the architecture and sculpture. The paintings that... and finer subtle body of an object which is the very expression of its own essential nature, svabhāva . The means by which this effect is produced is characteristic of the inward vision of the Indian mind. It is done by a bold and firm insistence on the pure and strong outline and a total suppression of everything that would interfere with its boldness, strength and purity or would blur over and dilute... tragic decision, the bitterness of renouncing a life of bliss blended with a yearning sense of hope in the happiness of the future, and that is singularly to misunderstand the spirit in which the Indian mind turns from the transient to the eternal, to mistake the Indian art motive and to put a vital into the place of a spiritual emotion. It is not at all his own personal sorrow but the sorrow of all ...
... freedom and perfection. It is this stage of which we get a remarkably ample and effective representation in the immediately succeeding period of Indian literary creation. This movement of the Indian mind is represented in its more critical effort on one side by a strenuous philosophical thinking crystallised into the great philosophic systems, on the other by an equally insistent endeavour to formulate... perfection and release. The pure literature of the period is represented by the two great epics, the Mahabharata, which gathered into its vast structure the greater part of the poetic activity of the Indian mind during several centuries, and the Ramayana. These two poems are epical in their motive and spirit, but they are not like any other two epics in the world, but are entirely of their own kind and subtly... smaller limits, a more easily fatigued eye and imagination and a hastier pace of life, but they are congenial to the spaciousness of vision and intent curiosity of circumstance, characteristic of the Indian mind, that spring as I have pointed out in relation to architecture from the habit of the cosmic consciousness and its sight and imagination and activity of experience. Another difference is that the ...
... powerfully creative both in the arts which interpret life and in society and politics. To realise intimately truth of spirit and to quicken and to remould life by it is the native tendency of the Indian mind, and to that it must always return in all its periods of health, greatness and vigour. All great movements of life in India have begun with a new spiritual thought and usually a new religious... thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, precipitated in India from the very first an attempt at religious reformation and led actually to the creation of new religions? The instinct of the Indian mind was that, if a reconstruction of ideas and of society was to be attempted, it must start from a spiritual basis and take from the first a religious motive and form. The Brahmo Samaj had in its inception... for a central and far-reaching discovery, but a young school of research which promises to count for something in the world's science. It is here therefore that we can observe the trend of the Indian mind and the direction in which it is turning. Especially the art of the Bengal painters is very significant, more so even than the prose of Bankim or the poetry Page 27 of Tagore. Bengali ...
... keep her essential spirit, will keep her characteristic soul, but there is likely to be a great change of the body... Her characteristic soul ? Spirituality is... the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning,... that the physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation to the supraphysical; she saw that the... sense of science and organised method which distinguished her mentality, she set forth immediately to find out the way. India of the ages... Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind... But that was not and could not be her whole mentality... When we look at the past of India, what Page 609 strikes us next is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life... The European eye is struck in Indian spiritual thought by the Buddhistic and illusionist denial of life. But... in itself that was simply one result, in one direction, of a tendency of the Indian mind which is common to all its activities, Page 610 the impulse to follow each motive, each specialisation of motive even, spiritual, intellectual, ethical, vital, to its extreme point ...
... 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 insisted, spiritual, intuitive and psychic: but this f... not broken up and expressed in opposition to each other as in the debates of the thinkers, but synthetised by a fusion, relation or grouping in the way most congenial to the catholicity of the Indian mind and spirit. This is done sometimes expressly, but most often in a form which might carry something of it to the popular imagination and feeling by legend, tale, symbol, apologue, miracle and parable... to the secular and outward this fathoming of vital Page 375 and sensuous experience might have led only to a relaxation of nerve and vigour, an ethical degeneracy or licence; but the Indian mind is always compelled by its master impulse to reduce all its experience of life to the corresponding spiritual term and factor and the result was a transfiguring of even these most external things ...
... socio-political construction lay in the successful application of its principle of a communal self-determined freedom and order to suit this growing development and new order of circumstances. The Indian mind evolved, to meet this necessity, the stable socio-religious system of the four orders. Outwardly this might seem to be only a more rigid form of the familiar social system developed naturally in... g the society and governing and exploiting it in the name of the commons or masses and, finally, the present turn towards a rule of the proletariate of Labour,—which we see in later Europe. The Indian mind and temperament less exclusively intellectual and vital, more intuitively synthetic and flexible than that of the occidental peoples arrived, not certainly at any ideal system of society and politics... father, a portion due to him in case of separation and division of the estate. This communal unity with the persistent separate right of the individual is an example of the synthetic turn of the Indian mind and life, its recognition of fundamental tendencies and its attempt to harmonise them even if they seemed in their norm of practice to be contradictory to each other. It is the same synthetic turn ...
... some miles on the road if you would have him follow it. But Mr. Cousins has done a great service to the Indian mind by giving it at all a chance to follow this direction with such a guide to point out the 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... question of the future of poetry in the age which is coming upon us, the higher functions open to it—as yet very imperfectly fulfilled,—and the part which English literature on the one side and the Indian mind and temperament on the other are likely to take in determining the new trend. The author is himself a poet, a writer of considerable force in the Irish movement which has given contemporary English... what is now deficient. The helpfulness of this suggestive work comes more home to me personally because I have shared to the full the state of mere blank which is the ordinary condition of the Indian mind with regard to its subject. Such touch as in the intellectual remoteness of India I have been able to keep up with the times, had been with contemporary continental rather than contemporary English ...
... the perilous drama of life without essentially ceasing to be both sides! Yes, without ceasing to be pantheos: this is important, this is what the non-Indian mind often forgets and what the Indian always remembers. By its remembrance, the Indian mind gets steeped in God's presence and not only feels most vividly the possibility of getting divinised but entertains the largest charity towards even that... The Indian Spirit and the World's Future Miracle THE Indian mind and the European have many points in common, but there is also a marked difference. The difference can perhaps be best brought to light by referring to the word "miracle". The non-Indian world is always prone to be startled by supernatural events: the mouth gapes, the eyes bulge out and the... so basic indeed that at a certain period of India's history the natural began to seem a miracle, an inexplicable wonder. How did the eternal One become the Many of Time? This question worried the Indian mind. And the answer was: Maya. The unexpected and the impossible are the teeming universe. Matter and not Spirit is the startling fact. This world of ours is a sudden incursion from "nowhere", its myriad ...
... between philosophical truth and truth of psychology and religion was not extended in the same degree to the truth of physical Nature. But from the beginning, starting from the thought of the Veda, the Indian mind has recognised that the same general laws and powers hold in the spiritual, the psychological and the physical existence. Page 21 Omnipresence of life was discovered, and there was... spirituality of Indian people was contained in the Veda in seed or in the first expression. The great force of intuition and inner experience, so evident in the Veda and the Upanishad, gave to the Indian mind the sense and reality of cosmic consciousness and cosmic vision. Perception of the One underlying reality, recognition of the perception of unity, as Vidya, and the necessity of the individual to... admission of the duality of the One and the distinction of the Spirit and Nature; and there was room also for various trinities and a million aspects of that One, tad ekam. This has created in the Indian mind aversion to intolerant and mental exclusions, and even when it concentrates some-times on single limiting aspect of the Divinity - and seems to see nothing but that - it still keeps instinctively ...
... restricted to a small area, but as life evolved, and the communities grew larger and the pressure of new circumstances came into existence, a new system was called for. To meet this necessity, the Indian mind evolved the stable socio-religious system of the four orders. And in ancient India, the four-fold order was at once and inextricably, the religious, cultural, social, political and economic framework... physically, from other countries by the seas and the mountains and from other nations by its strong sense of difference, its peculiar common religion and culture. The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn; its propensity has always been to seek the things of the spirit and the inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as secondary, dependent, to be handled... done in Rome or ancient Persia, by a conquering kingdom or the genius of a military and organizing people. It cannot justly be said that this was a mistake or a proof of the unpractical turn of the Indian mind and that the single political body should have been created first and afterwards the spiritual unity could have securely grown up in the vast body of an Indian national empire. In ...
... between philosophical truth and truth of psychology and religion was not extended in the same degree to the truth of physical Nature. But from the beginning, starting from the thought of the Veda, the Indian mind had recognised that the same general laws and powers hold in the spiritual, the psychological and the physical existence. Omnipresence of life was discovered, and there was the affirmation of the... Indian people was contained in the Page 101 Veda in seed or in first expression. A great force of intuition and inner experience, so evident in the Veda and the Upanishad, gave to the Indian mind the sense and reality of cosmic consciousness and cosmic vision. Perception of the One underlying reality, recognition of the perception of unity, as Vidya, and the necessity of the individual to... admission of the duality of the One and the distinction of the Spirit and Nature; and there was room also for various trinities and million aspects of that One, tad ekam. This has created in the Indian mind aversion to intolerant and mental exclusions, and even when it concentrates sometimes on single limiting aspect of the Divinity — and seems to see nothing but that,—it still keeps instinctively at ...
... 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,—add the demand for a national type of education, and in... spirit, the living and vital issue that we have to do with, and there the question is not between modernism and antiquity, but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future. It is not a return to the fifth century but an initiation of the centuries to come, not a reversion but a... human mind and scientific knowledge, to other knowledge more intimate to other and not less light-giving and power-giving parts of our intelligence and nature. And there the peculiar cast of the Indian mind, its psychological tradition, its ancestral capacity, turn, knowledge bring in cultural elements of a supreme importance. A language, Sanskrit or another, should be acquired by whatever method is ...
... the Ages, our eternal foundation. Yet the most fundamental and important part of this imperishable Scripture, the actual hymns and mantras of the Sanhitas, has long been a sealed book to the Indian mind, learned or unlearned. The other Vedic books are of minor authority or a secondary formation. The Brahmanas are ritual, grammatical & historical treatises on the traditions & ceremonies of Vedic... enshrined in the Vedas. Yet for some two thousand years at least no Indian has really understood the Vedas. Or if they have been understood, if Sayana holds for us their secret, the reverence of the Indian mind for them becomes a baseless superstition and the idea that the modern Indian religions are Vedic in their substance is convicted of egregious error. For the Vedas Sayana gives us are the mythology... well ask, if not from the Vedic forefathers, whence did the Aryan thinkers get these striking images, this rich & concrete expression of the most abstract ideas and persist in them even after the Indian mind had rarefied & lifted its capacity to the height of the most difficult severities & abstractions known to any metaphysical thinking? Our hypothesis of a Vedic origin remains not only a possible ...
... letter of the national past, which yet masked a movement of assimilation. The third, only now beginning or recently begun, is rather a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, but so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms... now spreading to all subjects of human and national interest and is applying itself with an increasing curiosity and a growing originality to every field it seizes. This is bringing back to the Indian mind its old unresting thirst for all kinds of knowledge and must restore to it before long the width of its range and the depth and flexible power of its action; and it has opened to it the full scope... culture, does not matter; the enforcement of a reconsideration, which even orthodox thought has been obliged to accept, is the fact of capital importance. The second period of reaction of the Indian mind upon the new elements, its movement towards a recovery of the national poise, has helped us to direct these powers and tendencies into sounder and much more fruitful lines of action. For the anglicising ...
... very well-spring and spiritual fountain of Indian artistic creation. There is therefore still a utility in fathoming the depths and causes of the divergence. That is especially necessary for the Indian mind itself, for by the appreciation excited by an opposing view it will be better able to understand itself and especially to seize what is essential in Indian art and must be clung to in the future... imaginative mind, but touch it over a smaller surface and with a lesser multitude of points of contact. But whatever the reason, it is less easy for a different kind of mind to appreciate. The Indian mind in its natural poise finds it almost or quite as difficult really, that is to say, spiritually to understand the arts of Europe, as the ordinary European mind to enter into the spirit of Indian painting... Life, action, passion, emotion, idea, Nature seen for their own sake and for an aesthetic delight in them, these are the object and field of this creative intuition. The something more which the Indian mind knows to be behind these things looks out, if at all, from behind many veils. The direct and unveiled presence of the Infinite and its godheads is not evoked or thought necessary to the greater greatness ...
... 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 by meeting these problems and by giving them a solution which will justify its own ideals and spirit... how they can work upon the present situation and possibilities in each of these provinces and lead to a new victorious creation. In such thinking it will not do to be too dogmatic. Each capable Indian mind must think it out or, better, work it out in its own light and power,—as the Bengal artists are working it out in their own sphere,—and contribute some illumination or effectuation. The spirit of ...
... 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, — add the demand for a national type of education, and... spirit, the living and vital issue that we have to do with, and there the question is not between modernism and antiquity, but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future. It is not a return to the fifth century but an initiation of the centuries to come, not a reversion but a... the human mind and scientific knowledge to other knowledge more intimate to other and not less light-giving and powergiving parts of our intelligence and nature. And there the peculiar cast of the Indian mind, its psychological tradition, its ancestral capacity, turn, knowledge bring in cultural elements of a supreme importance. A language, Sanskrit or another, should be acquired by whatever method is ...
... Evolving India Can Indians write English poetry? The Indian Mind and the English Language W. B. YEATS is said to have " pooh-poohed" the idea that an Indian could write English poetry of a high order. It is indeed true that the subtle inwardness one feels towards one's mother-tongue is likely to be missing .when an Indian attempts to express... us not forget that English has been domiciled here for two centuries now and is a compulsory element in all our education, constantly interspersing in daily life our vernaculars. Besides, the Indian mind has a marked faculty for assimilating languages, an innate responsiveness to diverse forms of significant sound. If this mind masters the English poetical technique and is receptive to that gift... own basic genius and tradition. At the first look one may tend to regard the general issue raised here as superficial and cry out : "what does it matter if it seems that an author has an Indian mind? so long as 10 was good poetry, who cares whether the the good pending so Page 19 English-minded?" I am afraid the real point was that if poetry written in English was not ...
... this positive turn was present in the most extreme philosophy of denial, it was still more largely present in the totality of Indian culture. "There has been indeed from early times in the Indian mind a strain, a tendency towards a lofty and austere exaggeration in the direction taken by Buddhism and Maya-vada s .... But the European critic very ordinarily labours under the idea that this exaggeration... Buddhism, though not without contracting an increased bias in this direction. That bias came to its height in the philosophy of Shankara, his theory of Maya, which put its powerful imprint on the Indian mind and, coinciding with a progressive decline in the full vitality of the race, did tend for a time to fix a pessimistic and negative view of terrestrial life and distort the larger Indian ideal. But... "The religious thinking of Europe is accustomed to rigid impoverishing definitions, to strict exclusions, to a constant preoccupation with the outward idea, the organisation, the form,... The Indian mind, on the contrary, is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for. a great force of intuition and inner experience has given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the West is only now ...
... in Europe. The reason is that the Indian mind is not only spiritual and ethical but intellectual and artistic, and both the rule of the intellect and the rhythm of art are hostile to the spirit of chaos. In every extreme, the Indian spirit seeks for a law in that extreme and its rule, measure and structure in its application. In the ultimate analysis, the Indian mind returns always towards some fusion... detail, and at the same time by a spirit of organisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonised knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Indian Page 446 mind was powerful, penetrating and scrupulously intelligent, — combined of the rational, ethical, and aesthetic mind at a height of intensity. As noted earlier, India has a tendency to ...
... the Ramayana The pure literature of the period is represented by the two great epics, the Mahabharata, which gathered into its vast structure the greater part of the poetic activity of the Indian mind during several centuries, and the Ramayana. These two poems are epical in their motive and spirit, but they are not like any other two epics in the world, but are entirely of their own kind and subtly... smaller limits, a more easily fatigued eye and imagination and a hastier pace of life, but they are congenial to the spaciousness of vision and intent curiosity of circumstances, characteristic of the Indian mind, that spring, Page 289 as I have pointed out in relation to architecture, from the habit of the cosmic consciousness and its sight and imagination and activity of experience... lifelessness and want of personality in the epic characters is equally unfounded: Rama and Sita, Arjuna and Yudhishthira, Bhishma and Duryodhana and Kama are intensely real and human and alive to the Indian mind. Only the main insistence, here as in Indian art, is not on the outward saliences of character, for these are only used secondarily as aids to the presentation, but on the soul-life and the inner ...
... But the turn given to the other and more direct spiritual operation of this culture is of a still greater importance. For it is that which, always surviving, has coloured permanently the Indian mind and life. It has remained the same behind every change of forms and throughout all the ages of the civilisation it has renewed its effectiveness and held its field. This second side of the cultural... still more high-pitched spiritual call, a standard of conduct still more perfect and absolute; but it did not go about its work with this summary and unreflecting ignorance. All beings are to the Indian mind portions of the Divine, evolving souls, and sure of an eventual salvation and release into the spirit. All must feel, as the good in them grows or, more truly, the godhead in them finds itself and... creation, but still Page 227 their highest work was reserved for the greatest spiritual side of the culture, and throughout we see them seized and suffused with the brooding stress of the Indian mind on the soul, the Godhead, the spiritual, the Infinite. And we have to note too that the aesthetic and hedonistic being was made not only an aid to religion and spirituality and liberally used for ...
... If this positive turn was present in the most extreme philosophy of denial, it was still more largely present in the totality of Indian culture. There has been indeed from early times in the Indian mind a certain strain, a tendency towards a lofty and austere exaggeration in the direction taken by Buddhism and Mayavada. This excess was inevitable, the human mind being what it is; it had even its... follows each to its extreme possibility, treats it even for a time as the sole truth, makes imperfect compromises, arrives by various adjustments and gropings nearer to the true relations. The Indian mind followed this method; it covered, as far as it could, the whole field, tried every position, looked at the truth from every angle, attempted many extremes and many syntheses. But the European critic... Buddhism, though not without contracting an increased bias in this direction. That bias came to its height in the philosophy of Shankara, his theory of Maya, which put its powerful imprint on the Indian mind and, coinciding with a progressive decline in the full vitality of the race, did tend for a time to fix a pessimistic and negative view of terrestrial life and distort the larger Indian ideal. But ...
... little extent justified by certain ascetic or religionist exaggerations, a distrust which is accentuated by a recoil from the excessive other-worldliness that has marked certain developments of the Indian mind and life, but yet is not justified, because it misses the true point at issue. Thus we are sometimes asked what on earth we mean by spirituality in art and poetry or in political and social life... static life without any great progressive ideals but only some aim which has nothing to do with earth or the collective advance of the human race. That may have been for some time a tendency of the Indian mind, but it was never the whole tendency. Nor does spirituality mean the moulding of the whole type of the national being to suit the limited dogmas, forms, tenets of a particular religion, as was often... to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not answer ...
... 1910-1913 Essays Divine and Human The Psychology of Yoga As the Indian mind, emerging from its narrow mediaeval entrenchments, advances westward towards inevitable conquest, it must inevitably carry with it Yoga & Vedanta for its banners wherever it goes. Brahmajnana, Yoga & Dharma are the three essentialities of Hinduism; wherever it travels &... karma) for the rational yet binding law of conduct. Therefore, because it has something by which humanity can be satisfied & on Page 64 which it can found itself, the victory of the Indian mind is assured. But in order that the victory may not be slow & stumbling in its progress and imperfect in its fulfilment, it is necessary that whatever India has to offer should be stated to the... has disadvantages. It leaves much room for inaccuracy, for individual error, for the violences of the ill-trained & the freaks of the inefficient. For this, among other more important reasons, the Indian mind has thought it wise to give a firm & absolute authority to the guru & to insist that the disciple shall by precept & practice make his own all that the master has to teach him & so form & train his ...
... wonder and Indians with a sort of obsequious pride, are on a level or almost on a level with the metaphysical ideas of Kant and Hegel! Apart, even, from these baser concessions of the subjugated Indian mind, it has been with a feeling of sincere relief and consolation that truly spiritual Indians, distressed by the clamorous pressure of Occidental scepticism, have found in the Upanishads a rock of refuge... type of thought. The Vedic mental type was fixed in the Indian race at an early period of its formation and throughout all external variations has never really changed. There is, therefore, in the Indian mind a predisposition to the recovery of the fundamental Vedic ideas; those directions of mentality which are most natural to the Vedic mental type, easily recur and a slight suggestion is all that is... served the purpose of flasks for keeping a little of the Soma wine of the Veda. But it is to those who have gone back most freely to the inner source that is due the perpetual reflooding of the Indian mind with Vedic truth and its immortal permanence and unfailing reappearance in philosophy, in religious teaching and observance and in personal spiritual experience and discipline. Page 93 ...
... in Europe. The reason is that the Indian mind is not only spiritual and ethical but intellectual and artistic, and both the rule of the intellect and the rhythm of art are hostile to the spirit of chaos. In every extreme, the Indian spirit seeks for a law in that extreme and its rule, measure and structure in its application. In the ultimate analysis, the Indian mind returns always towards some fusion... the same time by a spirit of organisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonised Page 73 knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Indian mind was powerful, penetrating and scrupulously intelligent, — combined of the rational, ethical, and aesthetic mind at a height of intensity. As noted earlier, India has a tendency to pursue most ...
... which less disciplined races are liable. The characteristic, the central action is the play of the intellectual mind and everywhere that predominates. In the earlier age the many strands of the Indian mind and life principle are unified and inseparable, a single wide movement set to a strong and abundant but simple music; here they seem to stand side by side related and harmonised, curious and complex... —for there can be dramatic creation of the greatest kind without a solution in death, sorrow, overwhelming calamity or the tragic return of Karma, a note that is yet not altogether absent from the Indian mind,—for it is there in the Mahabharata and was added later on to the earlier triumphant and victorious close of the Ramayana; but a closing air of peace and calm was more congenial to the sattwic turn ...
... Indian philosophy which comes nearest to the modern materialistic ideas and which carried the idea of a mechanical or unconscious Force in Nature as far as was possible to a seriously reflective Indian mind. Whatever its defects, its main idea was so indisputable that it came to be generally accepted. However the phenomenon of consciousness may be explained, whether Nature be an inert impulse or a conscious... movement. How then does this movement alien to its eternal repose come to take place in it? by what cause? by what possibility? by what mysterious impulsion? The answer most approved by the ancient Indian mind was that Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence may be at rest or it may be in motion, but when it is ...
... that have been echoed by Westernised Indians too (5-6). In order to do so he outlines three characteristics of ancient Indian society. He says that "spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind" (6); that ancient India is marked by "her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness" (7); and, finally, that the "third... letter of the national past, which yet masked a movement of assimilation. The third, only now beginning or recently begun, is rather a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains-supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, but so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms ...
... Indian philosophy which comes nearest to the modern materialistic ideas and which carried the idea of a mechanical or unconscious Force in Nature as far as was possible to a seriously reflective Indian mind. Whatever its defects, its main idea was so indisputable that it came to be generally accepted. However the phenomenon of consciousness may be explained, whether Nature be an inert impulse or a conscious... How then does this movement alien to its eternal repose come to take place in it? by what cause? by what possibility? by what mysterious impulsion? The answer most approved by the ancient Indian mind was that Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence may be at rest or it may be in motion, but when it is ...
... countries by the seas and the mountains and from other nations by its strong sense of difference, its peculiar common religion and culture. Page 115 The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn; its propensity has always been to seek the things of the spirit and the inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as secondary, dependent, to be handled... to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive and evolve out of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not answer ...
... dearth of things to which it is used and in which its Rajas can be indulged, the demoniac mind destroys itself like a tiger. There follows what the Western poets call “eating one’s own heart.” The Indian mind when in seclusion, though there be external suffering, turns through an eternal attraction to God. This is what happened with us too. A current, I do not know from where, just swept us all. Even... forget it nor can he acknowledge any other joy as comparable. This sattwic temperament is indeed the hope of the country. The ease with which brotherliness, self-knowledge and love of God possess the Indian mind and express themselves in action is not possible in the case of any other nation. What is necessary is the renunciation of Tamas, the control of Rajas and the manifestation of Sattwa. This is what ...
... fields of Indian Antiquity" is a welcome sign of the recent development towards a wider culture, a more flexible and strenuous scholarship and a more original thinking which promises to lift the Indian mind out of the rut of second-hand provincialism and sterile repetition of commonplaces into which the vices of its school and university education had betrayed it and to equip it for the important c... bound to the wheels of the analytical and intellectual mind. Still, it is to be noted that while the philosophers thus split the catholicity of the ancient Truth into warring schools, the general Indian mind was Page 606 always overpoweringly attracted by the synthetical tendency. The Gita seems to be in part the expression of such a synthetic reaction, the Puranas show constantly the same ...
... of gaining rights and privileges by what is known as constitutional agitation has been given up by one and all. It is a faded superstition which has no longer any hold on Page 566 the Indian mind. To warn us that the highly illiberal speech of Mr. Morley struck a responsive chord in every bosom in the House, is therefore labour wasted. As nobody now looks with wistful eyes to that quarter... admirably exposed the true relation between England and India and betrayed the hollowness of the so-called liberal professions which have so long exerted their poisonous influence on the unsophisticated Indian mind, displaced as it was from its own orbit by an unnational education. Mr. Morley's outspokenness was welcome to the House? Well, it was tenfold more welcome to his "enemies" in India. Mr. Lalmohan ...
... system; and perhaps to the end of the world different minds will construct from them a different mosaic. To the systematic intellect this inevitably detracts from their philosophic value, but to the Indian mind, flexible, illimitable, unwilling to recognize any finality in philosophy or religion, it enhances their claim to reverence as Scriptures for the whole world and for all time to come. Chapter... held in India to be a proved fact beyond all dispute; the Charvaka denial of it was contemned as mere irrational & wilful folly. Note however that survival after death does not necessarily to the Indian mind imply immortality, but only raises a presumption in its favour. × Of course I am not prepared, ...
... subordinate tenet of our early Vedantic philosophy and brought forward from the second to the first plane of our current metaphysical ideas, impressing it in the process so forcibly on the general Indian mind that it has left a dominant and indelible mark on all our subsequent thinking. In order, therefore, to recover the early thought of Vedanta, it is necessary to understand precisely the intellectual... sense of our later Indian spirituality has been with the conclusion of Shankara and against the conclusion of the early, the inspired, Page 501 the suprarational Vedanta. To the modern Indian mind unaffected by European pragmatism it has been untrue that action cleaveth not to a man,—na karma lipyate nare—; & it has been true that all action results imperatively in bondage,—yah karoti sa lipyate ...
... intolerant, immediate leap from one pole of existence to its opposite. Even the most extreme philosophies do not go so far. The workings of the Spirit in the universe were a reality to one side of the Indian mind, to another only a half reality, a self-descriptive Lila or illusory Maya. To the one the world was an action of the Infinite Energy, Shakti, to the other a figment of some secondary paradoxical... it was training, while not called away from its immediate aims, was never allowed to lose sight of the use of life as a discipline for spiritual perfection and a passage to the Infinite. The Indian mind whether in the government of life or in the discipline of spirituality kept always in sight two main truths of our existence. First, our being in its growth has stages through which it must pass: ...
... and greatness of the art of India. But we are concerned not only with the critical estimation of our art by Europe, but much more nearly with the evil effect of the earlier depreciation on the Indian mind which has been for a long time side-tracked off its true road by a foreign, an anglicised education and, as a result, vulgarised and falsified by the loss of its own true centre, because this hampers... examine the detail of the difference which we find not only in sculpture, but in the other plastic arts and in music and even to a certain extent in literature, but on the whole we may say that the Indian mind moves on the spur of a spiritual sensitiveness and psychic curiosity, while the aesthetic curiosity of the European temperament is intellectual, vital, emotional and imaginative in that sense, and ...
... alone to exercise an important role in evolving new basic ideas and effecting direct and immediate changes of the socio-religious ideas and customs of the people. It was a marked feature of the Indian mind that it sought to attach a spiritual meaning and a religious sanction to all, even to the most external social and political circumstances of its life, imposing on all classes and functions an ideal... therefore with the brilliant but ephemeral and troubled Greek city commonwealths, but this form of political liberty in India long outlasted the period of Greek republican freedom. The ancient Indian mind, not less fertile in political invention, must be considered superior to that of the mercurial and restless Mediterranean people in the capacity for a firm organisation and settled constitutional ...
... political progress or revolutionary experiment which has been so marked a feature of 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... organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State. The advantages of the idealising intellect were absent, but so also were the disadvantages of the mechanising rational intelligence. The Indian mind has always been profoundly intuitive in habit even when it was the most occupied with the development of the reasoning intelligence, and its political and social thought has therefore been always ...
... best intellectual responses that the Indian mind has made to Western literature and culture. Sri Aurobindo and Greece and "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal ": An Interpretation from India are two perfect examples of this kind. • Fourth, Sethna's contribution to the understanding of the intimate relationship between the English language and the Indian mind will have lasting value. His books ...
... clue has been found; a diction that is deliberately ambiguous, holds its secret much more obstinately and successfully, for it is full of lures and of indications that mislead. Therefore when the Indian mind turned again to review the sense of Veda, the task was difficult and the success only partial. One source of light still existed, the traditional knowledge handed down among those who memorised and... closes the period of original and living scholastic work on the Veda which Yaska's Nirukta among other important authorities may be said to open. The lexicon was compiled in the earlier vigour of the Indian mind when it was assembling its prehistoric gains as the materials of a fresh outburst of originality; the Commentary is almost the last great work of the kind left to us by the classical tradition ...
... writings hold enshrined we possess less than we do of the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians. Dabhram evapi twam vettha Brahmano rupam! I have said that the increasing intellectualisation of the Indian mind has been responsible for this great national loss. Our forefathers who discovered or received Vedic truth, did not arrive at it either by intellectual speculation or by logical reasoning. They attained... foundation for superstition or formed with some of its stones part of the building. But at any rate she clears the field for sounder work; she makes tabula rasa for a more correct writing. The ancient Indian mind felt instinctively—I do not say it realised or argued consciously—the necessity, as the one way to avoid such a reign of negation, of stating to the intellectual reason so much of Vedic truth as ...
... in its action it is covered up in a great smoke of confusion. The causes internal and external we need not discuss; but the fact is there. It was the fact of the momentary helplessness of the Indian mind in the face of new and unprecedented conditions." 72 72. The Renaissance in India by Sri Aurobindo. Page 67 Socially, the Nation, starving for the sap of a living sp... thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, precipitated in India from the very first an attempt at religious reformation and led actually to the creation of new religions? The instinct of the Indian mind was that, if a reconstruction of ideas and of society was to be attempted, it must start from a spiritual basis and take from the first a religious motive and form. The Brahmo Samaj had in its inception ...
... Seer-poets like Vishwamitra, Vasistha, Vamadeva, Dirghatamas, Madhuchchandas, Bharadwaja and Medhatithi were indeed ecstatics, diviners, poets, illuminants and law-givers rolled in one, and the Indian mind has always — and especially in times of perplexity or distress — turned back to the Vedic home of origins and its springs of perennial Truth. In the Upanishadic Age that followed, the marvellous... distinct from even the best reconstruction or the highest synthesis: The third, only now beginning or recently begun, is rather a process of new . creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers its truth, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modem idea and form, but so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms ...
... penetration and precision. Life, it has been held, cannot be rightly lived if its source is not discovered and its sense and significance are not properly grasped in the light of true knowledge. The Indian mind could not remain satisfied with the ordinary material interests of human life; it had an inborn intuition, a persistent divination of the Infinite and Eternal, stretching below it, behind it and... exploration was conducted and carried to its consummation crystallised themselves into different schools of Yoga. It would be fatuous to imagine that this spiritual hunger is peculiar to the Indian mind and this exploration of the recondite reaches of the human being a monopoly of the Indian Yogas. The vanguard of Spirit, the enamoured of the Infinite have been born in all countries and in all ...
... Early Cultural Writings The Brain of India The Brain of India - I The time has perhaps come for the Indian mind, long pre-occupied with political and economic issues, for a widening of its horizon. Such a widening is especially necessary for Bengal. The Bengali has always led and still leads the higher thought of India, because he has eminently ...
... profounder spiritual use and significance. This spiritual significance is the real kernel of the teaching of the Gita. The Gita found this system in existence and its ideal in possession of the Indian mind and it recognised and accepted both the ideal and system and its religious sanction. "The fourfold order was created by me," says Krishna, "according to the divisions of quality and active function ...
... the principle of Tyaga and their difference. The frequent harping, the reiterated emphasis of the Gita on this crucial distinction has been amply justified by the subsequent history of the later Indian mind, its Page 493 constant confusion of these two very different things and its strong bent towards belittling any activity of the kind taught by the Gita as at best only a preliminary to ...
... Indian Literature The Renaissance in India XVII Indian Literature - 2 The Upanishads are the supreme work of the Indian mind, and that it should be so, that the highest self-expression of its genius, its sublimest poetry, its greatest creation of the thought and word should be not a literary or poetical masterpiece of the ordinary kind, but a large flood ...
... effort well founded not upon speculation and imagination but on ascertained and tangible scientific truth, its laboriously increased riches of sure and firmly tested scientific organisation. An Indian mind faithful to its ideals would contend on the contrary that while reason and science and all other auxiliaries have their place in the human effort, the real truth goes beyond them. The secret of our ...
... 2 was lost afterwards in the intensity of ascetic illusionism and the fervour of world-shunning saints and devotees and is only now beginning to exercise its real and salutary influence on the Indian mind. Renunciation is indispensable, but the true renunciation is the inner rejection of desire and egoism; without that the outer physical abandoning of works is a thing unreal and ineffective, with ...
... centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian Page 26 mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I ...
... French is the cultural language of the world. The children can learn the Indian languages at a later stage. If more stress is laid upon Indian languages at present, then the natural tendency of the Indian mind will be to fall back upon the ancient literature, culture and religion. You know very well that we realise the value of ancient Indian things, but we are here to create something new, to bring down ...
... Ananda. The idea of beauty, the spontaneous satisfaction in it, the worship of it as in itself something divine, became more intellectually conscious afterwards, was a dominant strain of the later Indian mind and got to its richest outward colour and sensuous passion in the work of the classical writers, while the expression of the spiritual Page 255 through the aesthetic sense is the constant ...
... this applies only to Europeans,—for their native tradition, sentiments, expressions are not entirely alien to those of the English tongue and by education or adaptation they can acquire, but the Indian mind is of too alien a character, too far off and cut away by a gulf from the English to be able to write in that language. It may be said also that an Indian may succeed in writing correct English, but ...
... creative results, but this is being remedied by new influences. The entrance of the pure Celtic temperament into English poetry through the Irish revival is likely to do much; the contribution of the Indian mind in work like Tagore's may act in the same direction. If this change is effected, the natural powers of the English spirit will be of the highest value to the future poetry. For that poetry is ...
... bring in the large air and light of a living culture and education. Mr. Cousins deals here with the contemporary and recent English poets, a subject for the most part quite unfamiliar to the Indian mind. He treats it with an admirable sympathy, an illuminating power of phrase and a fine certainty of touch; but Page 311 for the purpose for which these essays were put together, his criticism ...
... on which the vital thought of modern Europe enamoured of the vigour of life, all the dance of God in Nature, puts so vehement and exclusive a stress and the eternal immutable Truth to which the Indian mind enamoured of calm and poise loves to turn with an equal passion for an exclusive finding, there is no such divorce and quarrel as is now declared by the partisan mind, the separating reason, the ...
... passed on the Veda & Vedanta by default in favour of the scholastic criticism of Europe which has alone been represented in the court of modern opinion. Nevertheless a time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the paralysis that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second & third hand & reassert its right to judge and inquire with a perfect freedom into the meaning of its ...
... all their gods into one, but they expanded each into the whole. Thus they established an universality of godhead which did the same elevating work as the Semitic monotheism and through which the Indian mind, released from materialistic religion, travelled towards the Vedanta. By following this line the Hindus missed monotheism; but they found henotheism and made it a halfway Page 14 house ...
... happening, the flow of clarifying light and the priest god pouring the clarified butter on the inner self-offering which brought the experience. This might seem strange to a Western mind, but to an Indian mind accustomed to the Indian tradition or capable of meditation and occult vision it would be perfectly intelligible. The mystics were and normally are symbolists, they can even see all physical things ...
... experience be a genuine one if the human soul is essentially different from God? A genuine experience of "identity" must imply oneness of fundamental being with God. Earlier you have the remark: "The Indian mind has never been content to know 'about God', it has always sought to know God, to 'realise' him, to experience his presence not in the imagination or in the intellect but in the 'ground' of the ...
... again despite the sad circumstances. This comes of not laying on the outer life such an enormous stress as falls on it in the West. Even bodily infirmities and accidents don't loom very large in the Indian mind. Provided the lesser looming does not render one passive, it tends to make for more of quiet happiness than elsewhere. Leprosy is still a big problem in our subcontinent. Pondicherry itself ...
... mine instead of letting me do so, you will have to take me by the scruff of my neck and push me out of your presence. But your own leave you can take gracefully. Perhaps there is a mix-up in the Indian mind with the idea in some such phrase as: "Will you give me leave to go?" To return to our story. My questioner went off. And, whatever he may have thought of me, I learned two things about his brain ...
... force and not of something alien to Self, some power other than this Spirit." 4 Sri Aurobindo tells us that it is such essence, Self, Spirit, one entirely real existence that the ancient Indian mind seized spiritually and philosophically. This mind declared: "Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence ...
... annulment than its fulfilment-and the world naturally acquires a tendency to fall away from thought of it. The glorious personality of Buddha and the great experience he embodied remained stamped on the Indian mind, so much so that he was included in the list of the Avatars and put beside Sri Rama and Sri Krishna, but after a few glowing centuries the religion he had propagated lost its grip and died out. ...
... about 400 A.D. rather than part of an old tradition. Even in the days of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India - c. 302 B.C. - Indian history had rightly or wrongly a hoary antiquity for the Indian mind. Pliny (VI.xxl.4-5), Arrian (Indica I.ix) and Solinus (52.5), 1 reporting Megasthenes, quote the Indians as saying that the line of kings in India - before Alexander and Sandroccottus - went back ...
... suggestions in it which I did not at all entertain when I framed it. Here is not merely a contrast between a huge labour and a small capacity: here is also a figuration of something that to the Indian mind looms with a superhuman grandeur, something rapt and remote, something ineffably godlike, and this deific presence is brought into relation with striving finitude. Further, a divine infinity of calm ...
... the immediate successors of the Achaemenids who had brought into fashion the formula "King of kings". Especially if an heir of Alexander ruled over the old Persian empire he would bulk in the Indian mind as the "Shāhānushāhi" par excellence. Such was Seleucus Nicator. After the battle of Gaza in 312 B.C. he not only recovered Babylon but brought all the eastern provinces of Alexander's empire ...
... writer in French. This is dangerous doctrine and not to be shouted from the teacher's chair — hardly even to be whispered without serious caveats to the Indian student lest the already luxuriant Indian mind run riot, forgetting that in English we cannot indulge in luxuriance with absolute impunity. Even to the English student it should be offered with care, for, where the writing of literature is concerned ...
... not altogether aesthetic: the ethical and the mythological are there the dominant factors; even the mythological is there at the service of the ethical. Nevertheless we should remember that the Indian mind attributed to him the origin of the awareness of aesthetic experience ( rasa ). Neither was Vyasa's aim aesthetic. He was the great thinker and the teacher of peoples. Kalidasa combines ...
... pluralism of religions that we find in the Indian experience of religion and spirituality. viii If we study the development of pluralism in Indian religion and spirituality, we find that to the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma, and what has been most important in India has been the religious spirit rather than the theological credo. A rigid stand on a fixed intellectual ...
... job in a factory that produces spectacles. The relationship of training with work and the relationship of work with the deeper spirit of the individual are hardly taken into account. And yet, the Indian mind, consciously or subconsciously, wants to arrive at some meaningful connection between the process of education and preparation for a work that might truly express the individual's inmost nature and ...
... not broken up and expressed in opposition to each other as in the debates of the thinkers, but synthesised by a fusion, relation, or grouping in a way most congenial to the catholicity of the Indian mind and spirit. This is mostly done in a form which might carry something of it to the popular imagination and feeling by a legend, tale, symbol, epilogue, miracle and parable. This method is, after ...
... Independence heralded the advent of the new age, and Indian spirituality reasserted itself. Page 54 India had begun to enter into its fourth stage of development. First of all, the Indian mind was obliged to reconsider its own past in the light of the new situation that was created by the influx of the European science, literature, critical thought and the Christian missionary work. Although ...
... House of Cosmic Spirit, an appeal and inspiration to the Infinite. Symbolism is the main characteristic of Indian architecture, and this is true even of the Indo- Muslim architecture, where the Indian mind has taken in much from the Arab and the Persian imagination. As Sri Aurobindo points out in regard to the Taj Mahal: Page 478 The Taj is not merely a sensuous reminiscence of an imperial ...
... integration of the individual and collective life on the earth with the supra-terrestrial life and the supra-cosmic existence. The Upanishads have been rightly looked upon as the supreme work of the Indian mind. They are a record of the deepest spiritual experiences, written in a language which is profoundly poetic, manifesting an unfailing inspiration inevitable in phrase, wonderful in rhythm and expression ...
... "A National System of Education", Sri Aurobindo points out that the question is not between modernism and antiquity, but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future. He pointed out that "the living spirit of the demand for national education no more requires a return to ...
... thought and beauty. It is here that we get the culmination of the movement which had the most important effects on the future, the evolution of the emotional and ecstatic religions of Bhakti. Indian mind is always compelled by its master impulse to reduce all its experience of life to the corresponding spiritual term and factor and the result was a transfiguring of even these most external things ...
... mind the master of the body and, in the course of time, the word came to be confined to the sense of ascetic practices having this object. It is also true that given the tendency of the ancient Indian mind to follow each pursuit of life to its farthest point and to sound its utmost possibilities, many were those who in later days sought the Eternal through extreme physical austerities (such as the ...
... spirituality. Not Buddha, not Christ, Chaitanya, St. Francis, Ramakrishna; these are either semi-barbaric Orientals or touched by the feminine insanity of an Oriental religion. The impression made on an Indian mind resembles the reaction that a cultured intellectual might feel if he were told that good cooking, good dressing, good engineering, good schoolmastering are the true beauty and their pursuit the right ...
... speaks of Indian national Page 16 education, it is then not a question between modernism and antiquity but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future, not a return to the fifth century but an initiation for the centuries to come, not a reversion but a break ...
... explored all over the world and also, in some measure, in India. As a result, it is becoming easier today to meet the greatest need of the problems of India's regeneration and revitalization. Indian mind needs to be global, universal. This is the time when India needs to spread within itself and in the world the message of ''vasudhaiva kutumbakam", the whole world is one family. In ...
... physically from other countries by the seas and the mountains, and from other nations by its strong sense of difference, its peculiar common religion and culture. The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn; its propensity has always been to seek the things of the spirit and the inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as secondary, dependent, to be handled ...
... flood of literary creativity." "All these realisations must be boons you have received because of actions in your previous birth!" Sri Aurobindo said, "That is typical of the orthodox Indian mind! Karma, everything is but a result of Karma! In that case, there is no use making any effort or doing Sadhana. Naturally, there is a past existence, a present one, a future one too. But if I had ...
... "a tennis-playing, silk-garmented lady of seventy-five, carrying a tenuous veil and blessing the Ashramites at the march past day after day was not exactly a symbol of spirituality to the normal Indian mind", Munshi himself felt no insurmountable mental barriers of that kind. As he put it simply: I believe that a God-realised person like Sri Aurobindo can do nothing for self-interested ends ...
... tennis-playing, silk-garmented lady of seventy-five, carrying a tenuous veil and saluting the Ashramites at the march past day after day was not exactly a symbol of spirituality to the normal Indian mind. Was she a miracle-worker or just an artist? Was she carrying forward the Master's work? Was this how it should be carried on? 6 At the Playground, where she sat on a high-backed chair ...
... highest goal, the sole Refuge of all. This is a truth that has to be Page 380 kept constantly in view in the Integral Yoga, if we are to conquer the strong, traditional penchant of the Indian mind for the unmoving peace and passivity of the aksara. The knowledge of the aksara is called vidyā (sā vidyā yayā tadaksaramadhigamyate ), and the knowledge of the ksara purusa or the phenomenal ...
... striking peculiarities fixed themselves, and gave a different stamp to the political, economic and social factors of Indian civilization. Because, as Sri Aurobindo says, "It was a marked feature of the Indian mind that it sought to attach a spiritual meaning and a religious sanction to all, even to the most external social and political circumstances of its life____" It imposed on all classes and ...
... mind taken the first step and tried to see things from the Indian standpoint, and acted accordingly, Page 353 most, if not all, of the difficulties might have been solved. "The Indian mind has not the Irish memory for past wrongs and discords," analyzed Sri Aurobindo, "it forgives and forgets easily. Only it must be made to feel that the approach on the other side is frank and who ...
... as the work undoubtedly is, it is so wholly an imitation of European workmanship that it establishes no claim to real artistic faculty. All that can be said for this painter is that he turned the Indian mind to our own mythology and history for the subject of art, and that he manifests a certain struggling towards outward beauty and charm which is occasionally successful in his women and children. But ...
... I have frequently employed in the Cloud Messenger, even when equivalent words exist in English, because many objects known in both countries are yet familiar & full of common associations to the Indian mind while to the English they are rare, exotic and slightly associated or only with one particular & often accidental characteristic. 3 A kindred method especially with mythological allusions is to ...
... essence of absolute adoration, submission, ecstasy, love, tenderness which is the Indian idea of bhakti . These are not figures of devotees, but of the very personality of devotion. Yet while the Indian mind is seized and penetrated to the very roots of its being by this living and embodied ecstasy, it is quite possible that the Occidental, not trained in the same spiritual culture, would miss almost ...
... 590 Mahabalipuram intended to convey at once the essential character and appeal of Indian sculpture by an example which offers no difficulty of understanding or appreciation even to a non-Indian mind or to an uninstructed knowledge, and it is accompanied by a brief but clear and sufficient article. This example from one of the great styles and periods shows, as is justly said, and shows very ...
... imposing castles in the air. Yet if this were an isolated instance of blindness, it might be allowed to pass without comment; but it is only one more example of a grave illusion that possesses the Indian mind. We constantly find it asserted that the English are a just people and only require our case to be clearly stated in order to redress our grievances. It is more than time that some voice should be ...
... countries, but which falls on our heads for the first time,—the punishment of exile. To speak Page 433 the truth, this is the one and only terror of deportation to Indian patriots. The Indian mind with its passionate attachment to the very soil of the mother-country, its deep reverent feeling that mother and motherland are more to be cherished than paradise itself, must feel the deprivation ...
... in the heart of every man, so that they may act with the same dynamical force as the ideas of the eighteenth century acted in France. To say that such teachings are too visionary for the average Indian mind is to forget that this is the country of Vedanta where the most ignorant have some idea of abstract Page 1000 truths which the European mind is too weak to cope with. If the movement ...
... and Yoga Andal: The Vaishnava Poetess The Vaishnava Poetess Preoccupied from the earliest times with divine knowledge and religious aspiration the Indian mind has turned all forms of human life and emotion and all the phenomena of the universe into symbols and means by which the embodied soul may strive after and grasp the Supreme. Indian devotion has ...
... many names, revealed in many aspects, approaching man in the mask of many divine personalities. Western scholars, puzzled by this religious attitude which presents no difficulty whatever to the Indian mind, have invented, in order to explain it, a theory of Vedic henotheism. The Rishis, they thought, were polytheists, but to each God at the time of worshipping him they gave pre-eminence and even regarded ...
... the formed Divinity & the aspiration to the Formless, the atomic structure of Vaisheshika & the cardinal principles of Yoga,—whatever has been afterwards strong in development & influential on the Indian Mind, finds here its authority & sanction. Not the unmanifested & unconditioned alone but the identity of the Transcendental & the phenomenal, their eternal relations, the play of their separation & the ...
... is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence. The same governing force kept its hold on all the other activities of the Indian mind and Indian life. The epic literature is full almost to excess of a strong and free intellectual and ethical thinking; there is an incessant criticism of life by the intelligence and the ethical reason ...
... assistance, and proceed to his own self-development with the best possible aid from the communal life. Birth was accepted in practice as the first gross and natural indicator; for heredity to the Indian mind has always ranked as a factor of the highest importance: it was even taken in later thought as a sign of the nature and as an index to the surroundings which the individual had prepared for himself ...
... —the refusal of the ascetic. It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian thought; there are other philosophical statements, other religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt at an adjustment between the ...
... were typical of a very general attitude of the European mind towards the Indian civilisation and its special character, forms and creations and to combat the self-depreciation awakened in the Indian mind by this hostile impact and to explain to it the meaning of its own civilisation and past achievements was the main object of Sri Aurobindo. Since then, there has been a radical change and Mr. Archer's ...
... itself from customary to higher values, from being blind heat to first a searching luminousness and then revelatory light, from retas to ojas and lastly tejas. All this is ingrained in the Indian mind and the pseudo-mystical cults leave always an uneasiness no Indian can wholly escape. An instinct of purity reigns also in the Roman Catholic world, though there a moral and ascetic revulsion ...
... He or she needs Beauty too. The attractive alternative to Gandhiji is, of course, Tagore. Tagore celebrated the senses and he represents for me the complement to Gandhiji in the modern Indian mind. Tagore's Brahmo background ensured that he would apprehend the unique and essential truths of Vedanta. But the poetry of the Vedic hymns and of the Upanishadic utterances convinced Tagore that the ...
... produce a satisfactory result. This is particularly so when there are too many missing data. We don’t have Jnaneshwar’s own composition with us and we do not know how Ekanath handled it. Nor was the Indian mind of those days scientific or meticulous enough to attend to minute particulars of any writing. It is well known that copyists made their own variations, their own departures which maybe at times ...
... where her torch throws no light Here nothing can exist.... She does not prize what is false but does not always perceive what is true!" That is why my English friend could never understand the Indian mind and condemned vairagya as "the sickly spawn of a morbid distaste for the world." Luckily for me, Chadwick happened to be on the spot; so I brought the two together, I shall never forget the ...
... problem of Evil in the world. It has led the human mind to spawn Hormuzd and Ahriman, Jehovah and Satan and, in less starkly ethical and more comprehensive terms, Brahman and Maya. The ingenious Indian mind got round the glaring antithesis further by declaring that Maya is really a non-existence that appears to exist. Sri Aurobindo does not gloss over the riddle of this world but says that the only ...
... surely she does not wish to repeat the old Christian asceticism which welcomes pain as the best imitatio Christi and therefore the quickest path to salvation. A welcome to suffering entered the Indian mind too during the last century - most probably owing to the influence of Christian missionaries. But it is no real part of Indian spirituality. You may ask: "Isn't there the term tapasya meaning 'penance' ...
... imposed that are unsuitable and where there is no meeting-point between husband and wife, of an environment hostile and intolerant of one's inner life and on the other hand the innate tendency of the Indian mind to seek a refuge in the spiritual or religious escape will sufficiently account for the new development. If society wants to prevent it, it must itself change. As to individuals, each case must be ...
... gods be a bondage? I suppose it is the Semitic idea (common in Europe) of God as a terrible gentleman upstairs, emperor, law-maker, judge and policeman who sends you to Hell at his pleasure. To the Indian mind the gods are friends and helpers. 2 June 1936 Page 529 Lowes Dickinson What would you say on the contrast between Lowes Dickinson's Modern Symposium (1905) and his post-war dialogue ...
... hardness which holds pity to be a weakness and thinks like the Norwegian hero who thanked God because He had given him a hard heart? But the teaching of the Gita springs from an Indian creed and to the Indian mind compassion has always figured as one of the largest elements of the divine nature. The Teacher himself enumerating in a later chapter the qualities of the godlike nature in man places among ...
... equally they may be false and replaceable by a more acceptable theory and riper conclusions. We ought at least to free our minds of one misconception which has a very strong hold of the average Indian mind and blocks up the way for free investigation & the formation of a strong & original school of Indian scholars better circumstanced than the Europeans for determining the truth about our past and ...
... not in the present But if the English mind would take the first step and try to see things from the Indian's standpoint—see their mind and act accordingly, all difficulties might be solved. The Indian mind has not the Irish memory for past wrongs and discords, it forgives and forgets easily. Only it must be made to feel that the approach on the other side is frank and whole hearted. If it once felt ...
... I shall be able to come to grips with your own literary mind in this sphere. Page 16 So far you have indulged in generalities and off-hand judgments. At times you say that the Indian mind, all the more the Indian spiritual mind, is alien to the genius of the English language and yet you have told us in your new book on Yeats "of the great Hindu scriptures, of which, with his Swami ...
... which they relate, Blake himself lacked such a vocabulary, but after all what a magnificent mythology he forged from such sources as were available to him. It is not surprising that it has taken an Indian mind (your own) to see the whole as a whole, and in context. I did my best, but in this match I must, as I said, concede you victory. A pity you can't add this to your appendix! Santosh Pal, by ...
... Ramakrishna's experiences of Sri Krishna and Radha. (a) Andal The Vaishnava Poetess Preoccupied from the earliest times with divine knowledge and religious aspiration the Indian mind has turned all forms of human life and emotion and all the phenomena of the universe into symbols and means by which the embodied soul may strive after and grasp the Supreme. Indian devotion has ...
... e Page 142 ethos of the Indian people. It is an acknowledged fact that India has laid a greater stress on the pursuit of knowledge rather than on the pursuit of power or wealth. The Indian mind considers purity to be worthier of reverence than anything else. That character is of supreme importance requires no debate in India. This value-system has grown up and developed from the life and ...
... He objects to our making even an experiment in English versification. How terrible! Then of course everybody must stop at once. I too must not presume to write in English—for I have an Indian mind and spirit and am that dreadful Indian thing, a Yogi! I can't say that he is absolutely wrong except in disfavouring even an experiment. Nobody ever is absolutely wrong. There is an infinitesimal ...
... shadow of the great Refusal' and laboured under the sense of the cosmic Illusion. A supposed metaphysical dualism between Spirit and Matter, Reality and Appearance, has created in the collective Indian mind a feeling of the vanity of earthly existence, of the unimportance of things in Time, of the essential illusoriness of human life and its terrestrial aims and the unreality of the phenomenal world ...
... true even of the Indo-Muslim architecture, where ' Sri Aurobindo: The Foundations of Indian Culture, Centenary Edition, Volume 14, p.208 Page 19 the Indian mind has taken in much from the Arab and the Persian imagination. As Sri Aurobindo points out in regard to the Taj Mahal: "The Taj is not merely a sensuous reminiscence of an imperial amour or a ...
... in which the Spirit, as is said in a phrase in Kathopanishad, discloses its very own body, reveals the very word of its self-expression. The Upanishads are estimated to be the supreme work of the Indian mind, a large flood of spiritual revelation, inspiration and intuition of a direct and profound character. The secret of the Vedic yoga becomes manifest increasingly in the Upanishads, and if yoga ...
... if India is to help and play her rightful role in the advancement of humanity. Let me give you just one quotation from The Renaissance in India: 'Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning, — and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, — that life cannot ...
... Who is this Keshub Chandra Sen? Bigger than a bull, smaller than a wren, Is this Keshub Chandra Sen? Twenty years later, much the same question passed and repassed in the Indian mind with regard to Aurobindo Ghose. Who and what is this wonderful young man ? Is he going to be somebody truly great or is he going to droop and wither like so many others ? And what did his ...
... but also in the fields of science, technology, aesthetics and sociology, polity and other fields of life, pragmatism and administration and conquest. Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind, and spiritual genius of Indian culture had moulded Indian pedagogy right from the beginning. India's first period of the known history was luminous with the discovery of the Spirit. Her second period ...
... first Battle of Independence heralded the advent of the new age, and Indian spirituality reasserted itself. India had begun to enter into its fourth stage of development. First of all, the Indian mind was obliged to reconsider its own past in the light of the new situation that was created by the influx of the European science, literature, critical thought and the Christian missionary work. Although ...
... A Scheme for The Education of Bengal IV. BRAIN OF INDIA (i) THE time has perhaps come for the Indian mind, long pre-occupied with political and economic issues for a widening of its horizon. Such a widening is especially necessary for Bengal. The Bengali has always led and still leads the higher thought of India, because he has ...
... discipline, of upward effort and aim, of the Ancient and the Modern world, of the West and the East". 69 A Western scholar, Charles A. Moore, writes: This, then, is the true wisdom of the Indian mind. It is truly comprehensive. It includes the insights of the East and the insights of the West. It combines their respective unique emphases.... Sri Aurobindo has thus arrived at a comprehensive and ...
... when it turns to the Divine for answer there comes always a comforting smile but no "precise answer", and so everything for it is "a constantly renewed cause for wonder"; a situation where the Indian mind would ask: Is it all divine māyā? Is it predestination? Then, on 20 December, Mirra meditates on Shakyamuni, the Buddha, in the evening, and there follows a conversation. She has the feeling ...
... these proud scholars could hardly accept that they owed their languages and civilization to a benighted India —it had to be the other way Page 240 round. 1 At the same time, the Indian mind had become largely subservient to the West (is it much better today?), and would rather listen to these worthy scholars led by the prestigious Max Muller (whose research work, interestingly, was ...
... has mulled over this and allied subjects— pointed out to me, "Though incomplete Sri Aurobindo's conclusions are still far in advance of present-day linguistics." We hope the time has come for the Indian mind to shake off its habit of holding opinions at second and third hand. It is time Indian scholars took up the work from where Sri Aurobindo left off. Archaeology uses many scientific disciplines ...
... with Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru. In other words, they may conclude, misled by our modem slogans, that the best minds among us may, like him, .achieve a lasting harmony only under the tutelage of the West. Such a view would be not only utterly unsound but demonstrably false. The best Indian minds, however effectually inseminated by the doctrines of Western materialism, can never find any true sustenance... encouraged my readers to form a somewhat wrong notion about the part the deeper spiritual forces had played in moulding their lives. From what I have written, those who do not know well the best Indian minds may think that there is, in the last analysis, hardly any basic difference between these and those others who have been successfully westernised and completely insulated from India's ancient spiritual... in the submerged depths of the authentic Indian soul which cannot open permanently to any gospel other than that of the spirit no matter how high the stakes are. Apropos, I am reminded of a striking remark of Lowes Dickinson, the famous rationalist who, after touring the Far East, wrote that neither Japan nor China was incomprehensible to the Western mind: it was only in India that he had been held ...
... Toussaint led an insurrection against the French. This re-minds us of what happened in our India. Our democratic inspira-tion, our desire to be free from British Rule drew strength from the same source — England — from which hailed the Imperialism that held us subject. With the growth of the English language in India there grew in Indian minds the liberalism of English political thought. It is Wordsworth... as well as on his own judgment Keats chose to let the poem go out into the world. The bell has rung. So we must leave the classroom and also go out into the world — some of us, let us hope, like Indian Endy-mions, or perhaps I should more imaginatively say: "like Indymions". Page 73 ... thinker named Wisdom is foolish enough to account for the Idealistic philosophy of Berkeley by the state of his bowels! Berkeley's Idealism holds that matter is not a reality independent of mind but a phenomenon of mind itself and that it is ultimately composed of perceptions from which it is logically impossible to disengage a material world in its own right. Wisdom studies the medical reports about Berkeley ...
... human cultures. A very important point that must be noted is that the vast mass of Muslims in India was, and is, Indian by race. Only a very small admixture of Pathan, Turkish and Mogul blood took place; and even the foreign kings and nobles became almost immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest. It was in the early part of the 14th century when Sadr-Al-Din became the first king to be converted... strife remained simmering just below the surface. With the advent of the Muslim rulers, a major change took place in the political set-up. The earlier Indian political system had in it a strong democratic element. No doubt there were monarchs but Indian monarchy previous to the Mohammedan invasion, was not in any way, a personal despotism or an absolutist autocracy. It had no resemblance to the ancient... Alain Danielou, as well as the Dutch scholar Koenraad Elst who has written a very interesting book called "Negationism in India" and finally from Sri Aurobindo, who was one of the very few amongst the Indian revolutionaries, who had the courage to speak the truth about what was then called "the Mahomedan factor ". From the time the Muslims started arriving, around 632 A.D., remarks Alain Danielou, the ...
... realise a dynamic divinity, a spiritual and mystical light turned towards the flowering of noble and beautiful world-values. Non-violence and humanitarianism are also not the last word of the Indian ethical mind: a manifestation of God in humanity is the main ideal. Humanity is not a supreme value in itself, and non-violence and compassionate fellow-feeling are fine virtues but they are not the utter... democracy is in realising the God who is the One Superhuman in all that is human, and ever to this high, rare, extraordinary realisation the common mind is to be called, and each altruistic action must spring from that luminously aristocratic experience. The true Indian democracy, therefore, must lay stress not on the mere common man, not on mankind as it is in the majority: it must lay stress on the man of... true inspired emblem which was hovering, so to speak, in the nation's inner mind but which through an insufficiently receptive imagination our leaders miscaught as Asoka's wheel. Here too is a wheel-like design, but suffused with a superb meaning attuned to the Rig-Veda which is hidden in the heart of man and which the Indian consciousness has heard down the ages. Foremost here of all suggestions by ...
... domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign rule. The vast mass of the Mussulmans in the country were, and are, Indians by race; only a very small admixture of Pathan, Turkish and Mogul blood took place, and even the foreign kings and nobles became almost immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest. If the race had really, like certain European countries, remained for many centuries passive... years. At a later date, Sage Vyasa compiled them and put them into writing. According to the Indian tradition, the Veda is the creation of an age anterior to our intellectual philosophies. In that age, the wisest-the Rishi-depended on inner experience and suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind's ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was... not of the Indian type, it was an empire of the Central Asiatic type. This was the beginning of the second phase, which put a tremendous pressure both on 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 ...
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