... have discharged its mission, to have spoken its last word and be functus officio , crowned and complete in its office of mediation between the life of man and the spirit. The past dealings of Indian religion with life must be judged according to the stages of its progress; each age of its movement must be considered on its own basis. But throughout it consistently held to two perceptions that showed... conscious Spirit, every stage of that life a step in a pilgrimage. Every single action of man had its importance of fruit whether in future lives or in the worlds beyond the material existence. But Indian religion was not content with the general pressure of these conceptions, the training, the atmosphere, the stamp on the culture. Its persistent effort was to impress the mind at every moment and in each... characteristic spirituality of the Indian people. Page 219 The ancient idea of the adhikāra has to be taken into careful account if we would understand the peculiar character of Indian religion. In most other religious systems we find a high-pitched spiritual call and a difficult and rigid ethical standard far beyond the possibilities of man's half-evolved, defective and imperfect nature ...
... religious mind may oppose all pronounced or drastic change, still the core of Indian religion is a spiritual, not social discipline. Religions like Sikhism counted in the Vedic family although they broke down the old social tradition and invented a novel form. It is true that in all the four elements that constitute Indian religion, there are major and minor differences between adherents of various sects... Eternal Brahman. The Indian religion allowed the freedom to conceive an experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to approach and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal person, or even to conceive and have the experience of the highest spiritual reality as Non-Being. Differences of credal belief carne to be perceived by the Indian religion as nothing ore than... seems to come very close to the problem and solution of pluralism of religions that we find in the Indian experience of religion and spirituality. 39 If we study the development of pluralism in Indian religion and spirituality, we find that to the Indian "und 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 ...
... self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, sanātana dharma . It is only if we have a just and right appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian religion that we can come to an understanding of the true sense and spirit of Indian culture. Now just here is the first baffling difficulty over which the European mind stumbles; for it finds itself... some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal. Indian religion placed four necessities before human life. First, it imposed upon the mind a belief in a highest consciousness or state of existence universal and transcendent of the universe, from which all comes... spirit, of fundamental type and form and of spiritual temperament which creates in this vast fluidity an immense force of cohesion and a strong principle of oneness. The fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life ...
... remarkable changes in the forms of Indian religion and spiritual culture, even while maintaining the persistence of their spirit. And if we examine the changes that have occurred, we shall find in them a meaningful process of evolution and a certain Page 32 kind of logic. Right from the Vedic times, there has been a tendency in the Indian religion to provide suitable means for... necessary to go back to the Veda, which can be regarded as the luminous seed of the huge banyan tree of what in course of time came to be known as Hinduism. (It may be noted that the ancient Indian Religion that was developed from the Veda was known as Sanatana Dharma or Arya Dharma. The word Hinduism came to be used at a later stage when foreigners referred to the religion practised by the people... of the greatest seers, Vishwamitra, Vamadeva, Dirghatamas and many others touch the most extraordinary heights of mantric poetry. At the early stages of the Vedic tradition, the substance of Indian religion and spirituality came to be determined by the varieties of deepest psychic and spiritual experiences shared and expressed by hundreds of the Vedic seers. It can be seen that the post-Vedic and ...
... Upanishads has remarkable changes in the forms of Indian religion and spiritual culture, even while maintaining the persistence of their spirit. And if we examine the changes that have occurred we shall find in them a meaningful process of evolution and a certain kind of logic. Right from the Vedic times, there was a tendency in the Indian religion to provide means for the individual and collective... Significance of Indian Yoga Appendix Significance of The Veda in The Context of Indian Religion And Spirituality The four Vedas (Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda and Atharva Veda) are samhitas, collections or compilations of selections made by Veda Vyasa. There was evidently at that time a larger body of compositions, and since they spoke of the old and... utterances of the greatest seers, Vishwamitra, Vamadeva, Dirghatamas and many others touch the most extraordinary heights of mantric poetry. At the early stages of the Vedic tradition the substance of Indian religion and spirituality came to be determined by the varieties of deepest psychic and spiritual experiences shared and expressed by hundreds of the Vedic seers. It can be seen that the post-Vedic and ...
... religious mind may oppose all pronounced or drastic change, still the core of Indian religion is a spiritual, not social discipline. Religions like Sikhism counted in the Vedic family although they broke down the old social tradition and invented a novel form. It is true that in all the four elements that constitute Indian religion, there are major and minor differences between adherents of various sects... Eternal Brahman. The Indian religion allowed the freedom to conceive an experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to approach and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal Person, or even to conceive and have the experience of the highest spiritual reality as Non-Being. Differences of credal belief came to be perceived by the Indian religion as nothing more than... seems to come very close to the problem and solution of 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 ...
... any you have reached in the past or can dream of in the present." The hostile critic feels that he must deny this claim at its roots. He tries to prove Indian philosophy to be unspiritual and Indian religion to be an irrational animistic cult of monstrosity. In this effort which is an attempt to stand Truth on her head and force her to see facts upside down, he lands himself in a paradoxical absurdity... sympathise; but to the average occidental content with his first raw natural impressions all is a repellent confusion. Indian philosophy is an incomprehensible, subtly unsubstantial cloud-weaving; Indian religion meets his eye as a mixture of absurd asceticism and an absurder gross, immoral and superstitious polytheism. He sees in Indian art a riot of crudely distorted or conventional forms and an impossible... its entire raison d'être , is the knowledge of the spirit, the experience of it and the right way to a spiritual existence; its single aim coincides with the highest significance of religion. Indian religion draws all its characteristic value from the spiritual philosophy which illumines its supreme aspiration and colours even most of what is drawn from an inferior range of religious experience. But ...
... philosophy in Europe; it is the organised intellectual theory of the intuitive ordering perception of all that is the soul, the thought, the dynamic truth, the heart of feeling and power of Indian religion. Indian religion is Indian spiritual philosophy put into action and experience. Whatever in the religious thought and practice of that vast, rich, thousand-sided, infinitely pliable, yet very firmly structured... IV A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - 4 A right judgment of the life-value of Indian philosophy is intimately bound up with a right appreciation of the life-value of Indian religion; religion and philosophy are too intimately one in this culture to be divided from each other. Indian philosophy is not a purely rational gymnastic of speculative logic in the air, an ultra-subtle... these things have done duty for spirituality and religion, has hardly a record which would entitle it to cast this reproach in the face of the East. But, we are told, this gravitation afflicts the Indian religion more than any other creed. Higher Hinduism can be scarcely said to exist except in certain small reforming sects and current Hinduism, the popular religion, is the cult of a monstrous folk-lore ...
... sides and rich variations of effort and teaching and discipline can receive their full reconciling unity and be understood in the light of its own most intrinsic purpose. Now the spirit of Indian religion and spiritual culture has been persistently and immovably the same throughout the long time of its vigour, but its form has undergone remarkable changes. Yet if we look into them from the right... other; their interaction, whatever loss there might be of the earlier deep harmony and large synthesis, yet by their double pull preserved something still of the balance of Indian culture. Indian religion followed this line of evolution and kept its inner continuity with its Vedic and Vedantic origins; but it changed entirely its mental contents and colour and its outward basis. It did not effectuate... with the native flexibility, manysided susceptibility and rich synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high creed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the people. Indian religion absorbed all that it could of Buddhism, but rejected its exclusive positions and preserved the full line of its own continuity, casting back to the ancient Vedanta. This lasting line of change ...
... Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living figures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarian ism, the large cosmic universalism of the Vedic scriptures. "Indian religion founded itself on the conception of a timeless, nameless and formless Supreme, but it did not feel called upon like the narrower and more ignorant monotheisms of the younger races, to deny or abolish... pale vague transcendental Theism was not its beginning, its middle and its end. The one Godhead is worshipped as the All, for all in the universe is He or made out of His being or His nature. But Indian religion is not therefore pantheism; for beyond this universality it recognises the supracosmic Eternal. Indian polytheism is not the popular polytheism of ancient Europe; for here the worshipper of many... stressed by Vaishnavism and Shaivism as the most dynamic Truth; but that is not the whole of these religions, and this divine Personality is not the limited magnified-human personal God of the West. Indian religion cannot be described by any of the definitions known to the occidental intelligence. In its totality it has been a free and tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experiences. Observing ...
... lofty heights of knowledge which we find in the Vedas serve as the elements of continuity, and we find them or some of them in the same or different terms in all the succeeding developments of Indian religion and spirituality. Upanishads which were nearest to the Vedas have been acknowledged as the crown and end of the Veda; that is indicated in their general name, Vedanta. In the stress of the seeking... literature, beginning of art and science, and evolution of vigorous and complex society. Also there emerged Buddhism, which seemed to reject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic roots. And yet, Indian religion, after absorbing all that it could of Buddhism, preserved the full line of its own continuity casting back to the ancient Vedanta. Indeed, there was still a great change, but this change moved... time between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism. But this was not the last possibility of the evolution of religion in India. It appears that there is a hidden design in the development of Indian religion. It certainly aims to mediate between God and man, but it wants to train all aspects of man all sections of human society, and all ranges of the potentialities so that God can manifest in all His ...
... Landmarks of Hinduism Gods in the Vedas and Puranas History of Indian religion and spirituality has an inner continuity, even though forms and atmosphere have changed from time to time in the course of millennia. The Vedic beginning was so vast and so lofty, so comprehensive in its seed-form that the later developments could be considered to be growing forms... people with a basis of generalised psycho-religious experience from which man could rise to the highest absolute status. The Purano-Tantric stage is the second stage of the development of Indian religion and spirituality. The first stage was that of the Vedic age, which makes possible the preparation for the natural external man for spirituality; the second stage of Puranic and Tantric age takes... to be centred on the way in which the spiritual wealth of the Vedic age and the Puranic age as also of the subsequent third age could be assimilated so as to fulfil the higher aims, not only of Indian religion and spirituality, but of all religion and spirituality as such, the highest aim of which is the spiritualising of life on the earth. Page 88 ...
... all its standards are denied, exceeded or belittled; all that it honours is given a second place, all that it has rejected is still held in honour". 12 There is "the still surviving force of Indian religion, thought, culture" that laves in the Infinite, sees the Divine behind the phenomenal play, dares the great adventure of invading the Invisible and makes a mighty science of the experiences of Yoga... of individual and collective life. For the Hindu, then, "all life and thought are in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and God-realisation". 17 And one particular feature of Indian religion has been the periodic occurrence of "messengers of the Spirit" - Nammalvar, Andal, Manikkavasagar, Tukaram, Kabir, Mira, Sankara Deva and Nanak - who were minstrels of God and ambassadors of the... its essential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo." 18 Man has a soul, and it is one with the Divine; to awaken man to this Truth and help him to realise it is the whole aim of Indian religion and spirituality. The Veda with its symbol-pointers and seer-wisdom, the Upanishads with their lightning flashes and leaps of thought, the Gita with its high-arching reasoning and culminating ...
... Yoga to strangling your fellow man and relieving him of the worldly goods he may happen to be carrying with him. It would therefore take too long to enumerate everything that can be included in Indian religion. Briefly, however, it is dharma or living religiously, the whole life being governed by religion. But again what is living religiously? It means, in ordinary practice, living according to authority... sannyasin. The latter is liberated from the ordinary dharma, but only if he does nothing but beg and vegetate. All work must be according to custom and the Brahmin. The one superiority of average Indian religion is that it does really reverence the genuine Bhakta or Sannyasin provided he does not come with too strange a garb Page 492 or too revolutionary an aspect. The European almost invariably ...
... Yoga to strangling your fellow-man and relieving him of the worldly goods he may happen to be carrying with him. It would therefore take too long to enumerate everything that can be included in Indian religion. Briefly, however, it is dharma or living religiously, the whole life being governed by religion. But again what is living religiously ? It means, in ordinary practice, living according to authority... sannyasin. The latter is liberated from the ordinary dharma, but only if he does nothing but beg and vegetate. All work must be according to custom and the Brahmin. The one superiority of average Indian religion is that it does really reverence the genuine Bhakta or Sannyasin provided he does Page 69 not come with too strange a garb or too revolutionary an aspect. The European almost ...
... Christianity came to India early in the. first century A.D. and there came also several other influences, all of which were welcomed and given a place in the large and developing field of the Indian Religion. All this rich growth gave rise to a further development through the third stage. But it was arrested as it synchronised with a period of general exhaustion, and, in the eighteenth century, which... resolved at the level of dogmas. For dogmas are themselves unquestionable, and if the unquestionables are in conflict, there can be no issue and no answer. It is only if we go behind the dogmas, as Indian religion has always attempted to do, in search of the living experience which are at the core of various religions, that there can be a hope of the resolution of the conflict. Not, therefore, the synthesis ...
... themselves from dogma, rituals, outward ceremonies so as to enter into the kingdom of the spirit and experience of the Infinite Reality in thousand different ways. Like all great religions, Indian religion nourished in the mind a belief in a highest consciousness or state of existence, universal and transcendent of the universe, and it laid also upon the individual life the Page 37 need... but the spirit behind and the justifying spiritual experience. Hinduism is the worship of one Godhead as the All, for all in the universe is That; godheads are made out of that being. The Indian religion is not therefore pantheism, for beyond universality, it recognises supra-cosmic Eternal. Hindu polytheism is not popular paganism. In Hinduism, the worshipper of many gods still knows that all ...
... began his reformist movement, really, when at the age of 13; seeing the rats going over the image of Shiva on a Shivratri night, he ran away from his house in Saurashtra in search of the truth of Indian religion. Becoming a Sannyasi, he studied the Vedas and courageously founded the Arya Samaj on the basis of the Veda, the first book of humanity, and the fountainhead of Indian Culture. He gave a new i... Vedic Aryans. The attempt has not succeeded in overcoming the stress of modern European culture on the minds of Indians even after freedom, perhaps because of its insistence on the externals of Indian Religion. Rammohan Roy may be called an imitative reformer, if Dayanand is a protestant reformist. He was among the first to oppose the blind orthodoxy of Hindu Religion and to found the Brahmo Samaj ...
... not able to fill. [A] The Gods of the Veda— An enquiry into the true significance of the hymns of the Rigveda. The Vedas are the roots of Indian civilisation and the supreme authority in Indian religion. For three thousand years, by the calculation of European scholars, for a great deal more, in all probability, the faith of this nation, certainly one of the most profound, acute and intellectual... Europeans, there is a historical truth at the basis of the old persistent tradition, but a historical truth only, a truth of origin, not of present actuality. The Vedas are the early roots of Indian religion, of Indian civilisation; but they have for a long time past ceased to be their present foundation or their intellectual substance. It is rather the Upanishads & the Puranas that are the living ...
... eastern and western coast were not fleets of invaders missioned to annex those outlying countries to an Indian empire but of exiles 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... as to produce so considerable a consequence. It is farther rendered improbable by the fact that in one or two or three generations the invaders were entirely Indianised, assumed completely the Indian religion, manners, customs, culture and melted into the mass of the Indian peoples. No such phenomenon took place as in the countries of the Roman empire, of barbarian tribes imposing on a superior civilisation ...
... Christianity came to India early in the first century A.D. and there came also several other influences, all of which were welcomed and given a place in the large and developing field of the Indian Religion. All this rich growth gave rise to a further development through the third stage. But it was arrested as it synchronised with a period of general exhaustion, and, in the eighteenth century, which... resolved at the level of dogmas. For dogmas are themselves unquestionable, and if the unquestionables are in conflict, there can be no issue and no answer. It is only if we go behind the dogmas, as Indian religion has Page 29 always attempted to do, in search of the living experience which are at the core of various religions, that there can be a hope of the resolution of the conflict. Not, therefore ...
... profound and potent meaning; it is a perfect interpretation of the still and intense Godward feeling, seized in one deep mood, in one fixed moment of it, which was the soul of the great ages of Indian religion. There is here a perfection of form with a perfection of significance. This restraint in power, this contained fullness opening an amplitude of infinite suggestion, is not rare or exceptional, ...
... have been lost) [ note ] - situations requiring textual explication; all such information is printed in italics Chapter I Prefatory The philosophy of the Upanishads is the basis of all Indian religion and morals and to a considerable extent of Hindu politics, legislation and society. Its practical importance to [our] race is therefore immense. But it has also profoundly [affected] the thought ...
... this spiritual being and our own poor imperfect nature. Something of the kind has happened in later times; the current Western impression about the exaggerated asceticism and otherworldliness of Indian religion and philosophy is founded on the growing gulf created by a later thought between man's spiritual possibilities and his terrestrial status. But we must not be misled by extreme tendencies or the ...
... Life The Renaissance in India X Indian Spirituality and Life - 4 I have dwelt at some length, though still very inadequately, on the principles of Indian religion, the sense of its evolution and the intention of its system, because these things are being constantly ignored and battle delivered by its defenders and assailants on details, particular consequences ...
... power. No one now feels the weight of the Page 62 religious assault from Europe which was very powerful at the outset, because the creative activities of the Hindu revival have made Indian religion a living and evolving, a secure, triumphant and self-assertive power. But the seal was put to this work by two events, the Theosophical movement and the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at Chicago ...
... thinker, the sentimental idealist, the man at the mercy of his sensations and emotions agree in twisting away from the sterner conclusions, the harsher and fiercer aspects of universal existence. Indian religion has been ignorantly reproached for not sharing in this general game of hiding, because on the contrary it has built and placed before it the terrible as well as the sweet and beautiful symbols ...
... surprise to me that you should bring in Jesus and Christianity, even if you don't belong to any Church proper, to support David Jones's notion of the "incarnational". I don't think he knew much of Indian religion and spirituality, but you do sufficiently not to fall into the trap of believing that all in them points beyond earth and towards a bodiless Nirvana, as compared to Christianity's alleged emphasis ...
... theories and follow a clear chain of philological, historical and psychological arguments. Sri Aurobindo demands, as a background to the Upanishads and to the later developments of Indian religion and philosophy, an Age of the Mysteries such as preceded in European antiquity ¹. No. 4, 1952, pp. 312-36. Page 198 the emergence of systematic and ...
... Sri Krishna and Radha, all of which are based on the life of Sri Krishna when he was in exile in Brindavan. The greatest significance of that life in Brindavan lies in the special form of the Indian religion of divine love that has developed and flourished through the life of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. In the next few pages we have given a few extracts from the literature related to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu ...
... and we feel unfailingly that this call of the Veda defines best the Indian identity. It is remarkable that these essential elements of Indianness have inspired the complex structure of Indian religion and spirituality, Indian philosophy and ethics, Indian sociology and polity, Indian art and literature, — indeed, Page 451 every aspect of Indian life. In every field of culture great ...
... discovery but has a history running back to a remote antiquity. And this idea had many components such as geography, culture and religion. There are many proofs to show that the great founders of Indian religion, culture and Page 156 civilization were themselves fully conscious of the geographical unity of their vast mother country. For indeed, India, shut into a separate existence ...
... games. A programme for value-oriented education at the tertiary level should also include a special study of Indian culture and Indian system of values. It should also include the study of Indian religion and spirituality, Indian ethics and Indian concept of dharma, Indian literature, Indian art, Indian architecture, and Indian polity. It may be suggested that these programmes can be spread ...
... to determine as to, in which among various religions lies the right way, is not to compare doctrines but to compare spiritual experiences which lie at the roots of religions. In the history of Indian religion, the effort to compare the nature and contents of underlying spiritual experiences has been very prominent. There are, however, religions which, although founded on spiritual experiences ...
... according as they produce a psychological or vital effect on human beings. If we look for a more general definition, we shall perhaps catch a Page 426 glimpse of it in the symbolic idea of Indian religion which attributes each of these qualities respectively to one member of the cosmic Trinity, sattwa to the preserver Vishnu, rajas to the creator Brahma, tamas to the destroyer Rudra. Looking behind ...
... established system and detail, to work out all possible branches and ramifications, Page 355 to fill the intelligence, the sense and the life. The grand basic principles and lines of Indian religion, philosophy, society have already been found and built and the steps of the culture move now in the magnitude and satisfying security of a great tradition; but there is still ample room for creation ...
... stain across the religious history of Europe. There has played ever in India the saving perception of a higher and purer spiritual intelligence, which has had its effect on the mass mentality. Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments, the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual ...
... fail. Akbar's effort to create a new dharma for the Indian nation by his enlightened reason was a brilliant futility. Asoka's edicts remain graven upon pillar and rock, but the development of Indian religion and culture took its own line in other and far more complex directions determined by the soul of a great people. Only the rare individual Manu, Avatar or prophet who comes on earth perhaps once ...
... towards perfection by the law of one's own nature, dharma . This liberty it will give to all the fundamental parts of our being. It will give that freedom to philosophy and science which ancient Indian religion gave,—freedom even to deny the spirit, if they will,—as a result of which philosophy and science never felt in ancient India any necessity of divorcing themselves from religion, but grew rather ...
... alism of which Theism, Pantheism, polytheism are all single circumstances & carefully harmonised factors. It is doubtful whether pure Pantheism can be discovered anywhere in Indian thought or Indian religion—for even when the Vedantist sees the flame as God, he is able to do so because he regards the flame not as a flame but as intrinsically something else, a supra-material presence which has the ...
... must insist on all three in one, for delight of existence is their highest power and without consciousness delight cannot be possessed. That is the sense of the supreme figure of the intensest Indian religion of love, Sri Krishna, the All-blissful and All-beautiful. The intelligence can also follow this trend, but it ceases then to be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its ...
... Indian mentality as the highest object of the soul, has replaced the enjoyment of a heaven beyond fixed in the mentality of the devout by many religions Page 268 as their divine lure. Indian religion also upheld that earlier and lower call when the gross external interpretation of the Vedic hymns was the dominant creed, and the dualists in later India also have kept that as part of their supreme ...
... godhead to satisfy the desire and need of the individual soul according to its own nature and personality. It is for this reason that the normal European mind finds it so difficult to understand Indian religion as distinct from Vedantic or Sankhya philosophy, because it cannot easily conceive of a personal God with infinite qualities, a personal God who is not a Person, but the sole real Person and the ...
... in pre-Harappan (Early Dynastic) times in Baluchistan, as unmistakably as in the scene of bull-worship on another scarlet-ware pot we have testimony to a Baluch custom of that age, affined to Indian religion then no less than in later centuries, but "a religious rite not illustrated elsewhere in Sumer." 118 Under the conditions of Baluch life, less fitted by its 115. Ibid., p. 117. ...
... and we feel unfailingly that this call of the Veda defines best the Indian identity. It is remarkable that these essential elements of Indianness have inspired the complex structure of Indian religion and spirituality, Indian philosophy and ethics, Indian sociology and polity, Indian art and literature, — indeed, every aspect of Indian life. In every field of culture great and noble ideals have ...
... of subsequent Indian thought and spiritual experience. This suggestion is further strengthened by what Sri Aurobindo Page 65 has written in his "Foundation of Indian Culture”, on Indian religion and spirituality as also on the Veda, Upanishads and on the subsequent Indian literature. Sri Aurobindo's "Essays on the Gita” helps us also in coming closer to the original sense of the ...
... touch, to caress. She seeks for the Spirit, not as an object of worship, but as her lover by whom she wants to be embraced. One is not very far here from the subsequent development in Indian Page 16 religion when the relation between the human soul and the Supreme will be seen and experienced as the love of a woman for her lover. In these religions of bhakti, the emotional being of man ...
... c fake, not an honest critical production." 15 (Paragraphing ours) (5) "These irrational half-savages!" "... when this Western mind is confronted with the still surviving force of Indian religion, thought, culture, it finds that Page 388 all its standards are denied, exceeded or belittled; all that it honours is given a second place, all that it has rejected is still held ...
... Civilisation and Culture; (2) Indian Rationality; (3) Indian Aesthetics (Literature, Art, Music, Dance, Drama); Page 211 (4) Indian Ethics and Dharma; . (5) Indian Religion and Spirituality; (6) Distinctive Features of Indian Culture; (7) Indian Renaissance. In the second component, it will provide a possibility of choosing any two or three of ...
... supraphysical existence between the consciousness of the physical world and the ineffable superconscience of the Absolute. 3. The third idea of the strongest consequence at the base of Indian religion is the most dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is that while the Supreme or the Divine can be approached through a universal consciousness and by piercing through all inner and outer Nature ...
... founded, the static half of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power,—Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Master using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which... ly the vital and material parts of our nature; it is they that pull down the mind which has accepted and even when it has long lived in the joy and peace and oneness. That, I suppose, is why the religions and philosophies have had so strong a leaning to the condemnation of Life and Matter and aimed at an escape instead of a victory. But the victory has to be won; the rebellious elements have to be ...
... Art - Addresses and Writings Some Extract from Sri Aurobindo's "Significance of Indian Art" I "Indian architecture, painting, sculpture are not only intimately one in inspiration with the Central things in Indian philosophy, religion, yoga, culture,-but a specially intense expression of their significance". II "The great artistic... character and emotion and action. This is a common form of aesthetic work in Europe; but in Indian art it is never Page 82 the governing motive. The sensuous appeal is there, but it is refined into one and not the chief element of the richness of a soul of psychic grace and beauty which is for the Indian artist the true beauty, - Lavanya: the dramatic motive is subordinated and made only... a direct intuition of some truth of life or being, some significant form of that truth, some development of it in the mind of man. And so far there is no difference between great European and great Indian work. " III "The highest business of art is to disclose something of the self, the Infinite, the Divine to the regard of the soul, the self through its expressions, the infinite through ...
... Tantra, the philosophical schools and the great Indian religions do go back in their source to Vedic origins. We can see there in their original seed or in their early or even primitive forms the fundamental conceptions of later Indian thought. Thus a natural starting point will be provided for a sounder study of Comparative Religion in the Indian field. Instead of wandering amid insecure speculations... the material worship of external Nature-Powers in the Veda from the developed religion of the Greeks and from the psychological and spiritual ideas we find attached to the functions of the Gods in the Upanishads and Puranas. We may accept for the present the theory that the earliest fully intelligent form of human religion is necessarily,—since man on earth begins from the external and proceeds to the... number of Sciences, unhappily still young and still largely conjectural in their methods and shifting in their results,—Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology and the Science of Comparative Religion. It is my object in these chapters to suggest a new view of the ancient problem. I do not propose to use a negative and destructive method directed against the received solutions, but simply to ...
... The Veda and Indian Culture _____________Appendix II____________ Important Landmarks of Indian History (Relevant to Indian Spirituality, Religion and Philosophy) The ancient dates of Indian history are quite uncertain. The earliest records of Indian history are the Vedas, but the period, when they were composed, has been a matter of controversy... the Indian spirit was so much endangered during this period that even today India suffers from a tremendous Inertia and obscurity. Even then, the Indian spirit began to re-assert itself from the middle of the 19th century which marks the begimiing of what has come to be called the Indian Renaissance. The period, beginning from 1800 A.D., when the British established the supremacy in India... of the vast Indian movement of the past and infused it with a new spirit and motivation, and while fulfilling the promises of the early effort, it has broken a new ground for the fulfillment not only of the Indian spirit but of the deepest aspirations of mankind. It is this new movement which makes India so relevant to the modern world. It is that which makes the story of Indian culture so s ...
... and we enter into those ranges of cosmic existence which to the old Vedic seers were the worlds of illuminated divine existence and the foundation of what they termed Immortality and which later Indian religions imaged in figures like the Brahmaloka or Goloka, some supreme self-expression of the Being as Spirit in which the soul liberated into its highest perfection possesses the infinity and beatitude ...
... getting exhausted, a kind of rejuvenation with the birth of a number of Indian languages and new religions Page 437 of Bhakti and submission to Divine Love and Will. We must examine these periods and arrive at our own impartial judgement of India's Indianness. In broad terms, it can be stated that Indian spirit and Indian temperament have manifested themselves, broadly speaking, on five lines:... chief characteristic of India, namely, metaphysics, religion, and the sense of Maya or illusoriness of the world; and by metaphysics, they meant an abstract and clouded tract of thought; by religion, they meant a system of ceremonies and rituals; and by Maya, they meant dreaminess, unpracticality and inefficiency to deal with life. For a time, Indians submissively echoed Page 436 their new... master-word of Indianness is spirituality, and this word has to be understood in its distinct clarity and fullness. For although the spiritual is associated with religion and morality and refinement of mental or aesthetic sensitivity, it still transcends them all and fulfils them all, and acts as a sovereign and liberating and integrating power. Although India developed a number of religions like a banyan ...
... would have goggled. Perhaps you will say that I am so enthusiastic about the Indian spiritual phenomenon because I am an Indian born to it. Actually I am not such a dyed-in-the-wool Indian: I was born a Parsi Zoroastrian, brought up in a single-truth religion like any Christian or Muslim or Jew. I arrived at the Indian synthesis by a partly natural and partly willed process. And, having been sing... attributes. For, here is an all-inclusive harmonising vision instead of an outlook which sees itself in opposition to other outlooks. I would expect none of these single-truth religions to even arrive at an adequate idea of the Indian spiritual phenomenon - except where a particular facet of the latter's complex Kohinoor corresponds to its own slanted seizure of the inner light. What I wrote struck a s... single-truthed for nearly 20 years, I am not oblivious of the several fine attributes of an early creed like mine. Each of the non-Indian religions develops to an exquisite point one or another aspect of the Universal Reality. These points are worth appreciating but their essence can be caught without our being limited to them. To go beyond them is not to run them down. To run them down would signify that ...
... while getting exhausted, a kind of rejuvenation with the birth of a number of Indian languages and new religions of Bhakti and submission to Divine Love and Will. We must examine these periods and arrive at our own impartial judgement of India's Indianness. In broad terms, it can be stated that Indian spirit and Indian temperament have manifested themselves, broadly speaking, on five lines: ... spread Indian arts, and epics, and creeds in the Archipelago; Indian religions conquered China and Japan and spread westwards as far as Palestine and Alexandria. In the ancient architecture, sculpture and art, India laboured to fill every rift with ore, occupy every inch with plenty. This was because of the necessity of India's super-abundance of life, of the teeming of the infinite of the Indian soul... characteristic of India, namely, metaphysics, religion, and the sense of Page 62 Maya or illusoriness of the world; and by metaphysics, they meant an abstract and clouded tract of thought; by religion, they meant a system of ceremonies and rituals; and by Maya, they meant dreaminess, unpracticality and inefficiency to deal with life. For a time, Indians submissively echoed their new Western ...
... the static half of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power, - Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Master using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which... greatest simplicity to save yours, though he never told you before he loved you in such a profound and unselfish way .... ... The true Japanese ... are perhaps the least selfish .... For here religion is not a rite or a cult, it is a daily life of abnegation, obedience, selfsacrifice. 15 In the traditional Japanese homes, the children were taught that life was a duty and not an opportunity... great ideas, the more they are sought to be Page 162 translated into physical realities, the more are they apt to become mockeries and absurdities: Whether he be the founder of a religion or a political reformer, he who acts becomes a petty little stone in the general edifice, a grain of sand in the immense dune of human activities. If that's the case, where is the point in ...
... Knowledge; Part Two: The Supreme Secret. Volume 14 — The Foundations of Indian Culture AND THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA: Is India Civilised?; Page 819 A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture; A Defence of Indian Culture (Religion and Spirituality, Indian Art, Indian Literature, Indian Polity); Indian Culture and External Influence; The Renaissance in India. Volume... Man (1960); translated by Nemard Wall. Tagore, Rabindranath. The Religion of Man (1931) Toynbee, Arnold. Civilisation on Trial (1948) Vama, V P. The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1960) Walker, Kenneth. A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching (1957) Wasti, Syed Razi. Lord Minto and the Indian Nationalist Movement: 1905-1910 (1964) Whitehead, A.N. Process... Process and Reality (1929) Younghusband, Sir Francis. Dawn in India: British Purpose and Indian Aspiration (1930) Yun-Shan, Tan and Sisirkumar Mitra. Sri Aurobindo: A Homage (1941) Zacharias, H. C. E. Renascent India (1933) Zaehner, R. C. Evolution in Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1971) Page 825 Creative Writing ...
... Catholic Church. Likewise they are, as it were, eager to discover a revolt in the religious history of India. It is not that such a spirit of antithesis is altogether absent in the history of Indian religions, but it is utterly meaningless to say that this antithesis exists as between the Veda and the Upanishad as well. In fact, the Upanishad has always approached the Veda most reverentially and hardly... looked upon the fire as the chief Deity of their worship. So far we have dealt with the Western approach to the Veda. Now let us turn our attention to the Indian view of the Veda. Acharya Sayana is the foremost scholar to whom the current Indian view owes its origin. He made a commentary on the whole of the Rigveda. But for his commentary it is doubtful if the European scholars would have succeeded... passages in support of their views or interpret the Vedas in their own light or at least declare that the Vedas neither refute nor confirm their views. Hinduism is the most catholic of all the religions. It is the most complex and diverse. It has housed peacefully a good many different creeds. And for all these esoteric mysteries the Vedas are solely to be credited. The message of the Vedic Rishi ...
... founded, the static half of our work is done but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power, - Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Maser using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which... lightning revelations of intuitive experience. The journal would give, not merely studies in speculative philosophy, but also translations of ancient texts and commentaries on them, essays in comparative religion, and practical suggestions regarding "inner culture and self-development". In choosing the name Arya for his journal, Sri Aurobindo couldn't of course have wanted to convey any suggestions... August 1916 respectively. Even what first commenced as a mere book-review sometimes spanned out into a treatise on the instalment plan: for example. The Future Poetry, Heraclitus and A Defence of Indian Culture. Among the shorter works that first appeared in the journal were Ideals and Progress, The Superman, Evolution, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-Determination, and the commentaries ...
... much failure of understanding; but in the attack on Indian art, his is the last and shrillest of many hostile voices. This aesthetic side of a people's culture is of the highest importance and demands almost as much scrutiny and carefulness of appreciation as the philosophy, religion and central formative ideas which have been the foundation of Indian life and of which much of the art and literature is... painting, sculpture are not only intimately one in inspiration with the central things in Indian philosophy, religion, Yoga, culture, but a specially intense expression of their significance. There is much in the literature which can be well enough appreciated without any very deep entry into these things, but it is comparatively a very small part of what is left of the other arts, Hindu or Buddhistic... A Defence of Indian Culture A Defence of Indian Culture Indian Art The Renaissance in India XII Indian Art - 1 A good deal of hostile or unsympathetic Western criticism of Indian civilisation has been directed in the past against its aesthetic side and taken the form of a disdainful or violent depreciation of its fine arts, architecture, sculpture and ...
... Two: The Supreme Secret. Volume 14 The Foundations of Indian Culture AND THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA: I s India Civilised? ; A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture; A Defence of Indian Culture (Religion and Spirituality, Indian Art, Indian Literature, Indian Polity); Indian Culture and External Influence; The Renaissance in India. ... from the Arya, March 1919. The original text was revised slightly by the author. The sections on Indian art and Indian polity were published separately as The Significance of Indian Art ( See 77) and The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity ( See 83). SABCL: The Foundations of Indian Culture, Vol. 14 24 . THE FUTURE POETRY Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953... FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN CULTURE Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, 1953 First appeared serially in the Arya under the titles: "Is India Civilised?", December 1918 to February 1919, "A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture", February 1919 to July 1919 and "A Defence of Indian Culture", which was left incomplete, August 1919 to January 1921. The Appendix, "Indian Culture and External ...
... carrying on his Yoga. Religion and spirituality, these to them were a mere subterfuge. They thought they knew what Sri Aurobindo was - the one most dangerous man in all India, the source of all the trouble. Pondicherry was the place from where were supplied the necessary instructions and advice and perhaps even the pistols and other weapons. Here was the brain-centre of the Indian independence movement... founded, the static half of our work is done but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power, - Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Master using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which... extremist towards the Government and change for the better all existing political relations. "But it is equally necessary that we Indians should begin to think seriously what part Indian thought, Indian intellect, Indian nationhood, Indian spirituality, Indian culture have to fulfil in the general life of humanity. The humanity is bound to grow increasingly on. We must necessarily be in it and ...
... founded, the static half of our work is done but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power, – Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Master using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which... the interior and exterior development proceeded, the spiritual and psychic relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent; and although I knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions at that time I was led to call him Krishna, and henceforth I was aware that it was with him (whom I knew I should meet on earth one day) that the divine work was to be done. "In the... possible harmony of individual freedom and social unity. "This is our ideal and our search in the Arya . ... "Philosophy is the intellectual search for the fundamental truth of things; religion is the attempt to make the truth dynamic in the soul of man. They are essential to each other . . . . "Our first preoccupation in the Arya has therefore been with the deepest thought that we ...
... songs, and her school teaches both classical music and devotional music. And, besides, it allows every student to take up a course in Indian culture; and one can specialise in a number of other courses for specialisation in any particular aspect of Indian culture, - religion, spirituality, ethics, dharmashastra, yoga, art, architecture, polity. But the question is how to join that school." "But where... professors in my search of a satisfactory answer. I read a number of books also. I spent days and months of deep contemplation. I studied the history of religions, I studied philosophy of religion, and I also studied a good deal of psychology of religion. I made a special study of the ontological argument, cosmological argument, teleological argument, historical argument; I studied Deism, Pantheism, Theism... labour to study Jainism and Islam. But, in due course, he began to be influenced by my mother's train of catholic arguments. My mother's argument was that although different religions did not teach the same thing, each religion taught something that was very valuable, which should be learnt for the enrichment and perfection of the human spirit. She believed that even atheism has some valuable lessons ...
... you say about using Sri Aurobindo's terms in a way not intended by him. The reason for this is that when I read The Life Divine, I found in it concepts which seemed to me to be absent from all Indian religions but which had for Page 36 me an astonishing resemblance to Christian doctrines. There were three especially: 1) the descent of the Supermind, 2) the descent not only into... Birth is an inalienable part. I consider this doctrine the most beautiful component of the ensemble, bringing into the new religion the vision of God the Mother in a deeper fashion than the various Mother-cults of the time had done and with a finer and closer approach to the Indian insight of the Adya Shakti, the Para-Prakriti, whom Sri Aurobindo, as I have said before, addresses in his Savitri: ... from his position vis-à-vis Oriental religions. That is why your Christianity has strong shades of both panpsychism and pantheism in their real sense which will hardly find favour with the Vatican if it is really in a mood to sit in judgment on you. Your Christianity is miles removed from the established creed. It is through and through coloured by the Indian vision in general and the Aurobindonian ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.