Mahabharata : by Vyāsa; presently comprises a lakh shlokas in 18 Parvas.
... beautiful slave of God! That alone existed." 3 The Mahabharata and Savitri Although the manuscripts go back only to 1916, Sri Aurobindo's interest in the theme of Savitri can be traced to the turn of the century, when he was in Baroda and was reading the Mahabharata in Sanskrit In his essay "Notes on the Mahabharata", written around 1901, he explained why, on stylistic grounds... 4 The Mahabharata, besides being the source of the legend of Savitri and Satyavan as it has come down to us, influenced the style of Sri Aurobindo's epic and his characterisation of the heroine. The strength and directness of the language Vyasa uses to depict Savitri are matched by Sri Aurobindo's portrayal of her sweet but indomitable personality. In the Mahabharata, for instance,... draft of the poem. Savitri and Love and Death We can only guess when Sri Aurobindo's reinterpretation of the tale he had read in the Mahabharata began to take shape in his mind. His passing comments in "Notes on the Mahabharata" are concerned with style rather than with substance. They only suggest that for him the essence of the story lay not in the intellectual and ethical content ...
... a valuable inquiry into "The Problem of the Mahabharata", some very stimulating "Notes on the Mahabharata" and a luminous fragment on "The Genius of Valmiki"; besides all this body of prose, the volume included also translations of selections from the bala and Ayodhya Kandas of the Ramayana and from the Sabha and Udyoga Parvas of the Mahabharata - a total of about 2000 lines of blank verse... translation. VI Sri Aurobindo may have loved the Ramayana more, but he was more inescapably gripped by the Mahabharata. His narrative poems, Urvasie and Love and Death, and the great symbolistic epic, Savitri, were all quarried in the first instance from the Mahabharata. He commented on the Gita (which has a central place in the epic) in a long series of luminous essays. He translated... poem Urvasie (1896). During Sri Aurobindo's editorship of the Bande Mataram and later of the Karmayogin, some of his poems including Baji Prabhou and translations like Vidula (from the Mahabharata) and his original play Perseus the Deliverer appeared in those papers or in the Modern Review. Songs of the Sea, Sri Aurobindo's translation of C.. R. Das's Sagar-Sangit, was published ...
... used by the ancient critics to distinguish the Mahabharata and the Ramayana from the later literary epics. The Itihāsa was an ancient historical or legendary tradition turned to creative use as a significant mythus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious or ethical or ideal meaning and thus formative of the mind of the people. The Mahabharata and Ramayana are Itihasas of this kind on a large... Sri Rama Appendices I Sri Aurobindo on 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... certain strain of philosophic idea runs through these poems and the whole ancient culture of India is embodied in them with a great force of intellectual conception and living presentation. The Mahabharata has been spoken of as a fifth Veda, it has been said of both these poems that they are not only great poems but Dharmashastras, the body of a large religious and ethical and social and political ...
... dozen and more versions amounting to thousands of manuscript pages..." "On Editing Sri Aurobindo", Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research , TV.2, p. 201. 30 The Mahabharata, 3.61.1. 31 "Notes on the Mahabharata", SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 157. See also Savitri , p. 815. 32 Savitri, p. 385. 33 Meghaduta, 86. Page 447 which Sri Aurobindo renders as: A flickering... the thinking mind only, for they are concrete realities to the experiencing soul. ii) Vyasa and Sri Aurobindo The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, says Sri Aurobindo, "are built on an almost cosmic vastness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in their scope." 53 Vyasa's epic is "representative throughout of the central ideas and ideals of Indian... terseness as in Sanskrit. When Death exhorts Savitri to go back, she replies: yataḥ patiṃ naṣyasi tatra me gatih. 19 76 Savitri, p. 562. 77 The Mahabharata, 3.281.63. 78 Savjfn',p.717. 79 The Mahabharata, 3.281.28. Page 458 Wherever you lead my husband there I go. This line has become: Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue ...
... already ancient at the time of the Mahabharata events, for it was one of the stories that Rishi Markandeya narrated to Yuddhishtira during the year of his exile to console him and fortify his spirits. Several of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems or fragments — Love and Death, Vidula, Chitrangada, Uloupy, Nala — were based on, or translated from, the Mahabharata, yet the fascination was inexhaustible... his complete retirement that it was up to him to attempt this "song of greatest flight"? The hand-picking of the Savitri legend out of the ocean of stories that is the Mahabharata is no less significant. The Mahabharata is about the sanguinary strife between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. This 'brother against brother' theme appears with numberless variations in the course of the epic. In... Immortality. We might, on a superficial view, look upon Savitri as the account of something that happened long ago — "in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened." In the Mahabharata, it is the story of an individual victory over death; or rather, the story of Yama's boon of her husband's life to a chaste and noble wife. Surely, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is much more than that ...
... already ancient at the time of the Mahabharata events, for it was one of the stories that Rishi Markandeya narrated to Yudhishthira during the years of his exile to console him and fortify his spirits. Several of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems or fragments - Love and Death, Vidula, Chitrangada, Uloupy, Nala - were based on, or translated from, the Mahabharata, yet the fascination was inexhaustible... his complete retirement that it was up to him to attempt this "song of greatest flight"? The hand-picking of the Savitri legend out of the ocean of stories that is the Mahabharata is no less significant. The Mahabharata is about the sanguinary strife between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. This 'brother against brother' theme appears with numberless variations in the course of the epic. In... and Immortality. We might, on a superficial view, look upon Savitri as the account of something that happened long ago - "in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened". In the Mahabharata, it is the story of an individual victory over death; or rather, the story of Yama's boon of her husband's life to a chaste and noble wife. Surely, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is much more than that ...
... The Mahabharata especially is not only the story of the Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a national tradition but on a vast scale the epic of the soul and religious and ethical mind and social and political ideals and culture and life of India. It is said popularly of it and with a certain measure of truth that whatever is in India is in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the... used by the ancient critics to distinguish the Mahabharata and the Ramayana from the later literary epics. The Itihasa was an ancient historical or legendary tradition turned to creative use as a significant mythus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious or ethical or ideal meaning and thus formative of the mind of the people. The Mahabharata and Ramayana are Itihasas of this kind on a large... of society, a high and clear thought to govern it and at the end of life a great spiritual 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 ...
... the Yamuna), the name Dvaipayana. He was a Rishi himself and is traditionally cited as the author of the Mahabharata and many other works, but he is best known as the compiler of the Vedas (Veda-Vyasa means "the one who arranged the Vedas"). No one knows exactly how many verses the Mahabharata originally contained. Some speak of 4400 verses, some others of 8800, still some others of 26400. What... carefully, we shall see in the Nala abundant proof of the severe touch of Vyasa, just as in his share of the Mahabharata fleeting touches of wonder and strangeness, gone as soon as glimpsed, evidence a love of the supernatural, severely bitted and reined in. Especially do we see the poet of the Mahabharata in the artistic vigilance which limits each supernatural incident to a few light strokes, to the exact... restraint of phrase is perfect, the verse is clear, equable and unadorned, yet hardly has Valmiki himself written a truer utterance of emotion than this: ________ The Mahabharata, Vanaparva, 64.12. ** The Mahabharata, Vanaparva, 64.19. "Ah Nala, my pure Lord! I am destroyed! Why dost thou not answer thy wife in this terrible forest?" Page 69 "Ah my lord! Ah my king! Ah ...
... Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, vol. 13. Pondicherry, 1971. Lai, P. The Mahabharata of Vyasa. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980. Mukherjee, Radha Kumud. Ancient Indian Education. London: Macmillan, 1951. Rajagopalachari, C. Mahabharata. New Delhi; The Hindustan Times, 1950. Roy, Biren. The Mahabharata. The Indian Airman [Calcutta] 1958. 1. According to pragmatism, tile truth... literally that which one lays hold of and which holds things together, the law, the norm, the rule of nature, action and life. Page 73 NOTES Learning in the Mahabharata According to the Mahabharata, the great epic of action, Bhishma was the guardian of the Pandu and Kuril princes committed to his care. He had appointed Drona as their preceptor. The Pandu princes were five:... attitude. A good pupil is a constant learner. One striking example of the acceptance of discipleship in the midst of a terrible crisis is the story of Arjuna at Kurukshetra that we find in the Mahabharata. This momentous episode provides the occasion for the teaching of the Gita, and its importance derives from the fact that Arjuna can be looked upon as a representative man. The crisis he faces ...
... s of the Savitri Upakhyana The story of Savitri narrated by Rishi Markandeya to Yudhishthira appears as a minor episode or upākhyāna in seven cantos of the Book of the Forest in the Mahabharata (Pativrata Mahatmya, Chapters 293-299, Vana Parva, Gita Press, Gorakhpur). The immediate purpose of the narration seems to be the alleviation of grief of the eldest of the Pandavas, afflicted... the morning of his genius," it is a "maturer and nobler work, perfect and restrained in detail, with the glow of the same youth and grace over it." We already begin to see in it the Poet of the Mahabharata proper with his austere and unomamented features, the verses lifted up by a robust and unerring intellect and the substance carrying the quiet compact strength of his style and diction. Whatever... has entered in, which does not permit the revelatory truth in its dynamics to emerge. In any case, this is a much better presentation than Kamala Subramanian's hurried assessment in her digested Mahabharata wherein she depicts Savitri as someone "who was able to outwit Yama the god of death by her wise talk and her devotion to her husband." Poor Yama! Nor does this make Savitri great. But why indeed ...
... path to reach an end which may be deemed good. Touching on the Mahabharata, you have asked: "If the Dharmaraja is allowed to tell a lie (about the death of Drona's son Aswatthama) at what point does he forfeit the right to be called King Dharma?" It is true that Yudhisthira let Drona believe his son was dead, but the Mahabharata Page 228 depicts this circumstance with greater subtlety... softly adds, "The elephant called Aswatthama." Yudhisthira has not only uttered a verbal truth: he has expressed the true sense as well, though in a whisper which Drona is too distraught to hear. The Mahabharata has brought out a subtle shade in the falsehood which converts what would otherwise be a direct lie into that delicate hoverer between straight truth and straight falsehood: equivocation - and a... irrevocable step towards the nihil was taken. You in India take long views and I hope your faith in 'evolution' may be justified; but having reached that section in my bad American translation of the Mahabharata where the last phase of the kali-yuga is described, I wonder if that is not where we are. Would that Kalki, the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus, etc., be at hand. But 'what rough beast/Slouches towards ...
... his Savitri. Sri Aurobindo held in high esteem the two Indian epics, the Page 485 Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In his Foundations of Indian Culture, he has passed valuable remarks about these two great epics. About the Mahabharata he says: "The Mahabharata especially is not only a story of the Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a national tradition... popularly of it and with a certain measure of truth that whatever is in India is in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single individual mind but of the mind of a nation." And about the Ramayana he says: "The Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and... comparison between the Ramayana and Mahabharata on the one hand and Savitri on the other. The spirit of the languages, Sanskrit and English, would itself bring in many incommensurate elements. And yet it is possible to consider them as an expression of the Indian spirit in poetry separated by a period of at least two thousand years. Both the Ramayana and Mahabharata are "products of inspired intelligence ...
... once so colossal, so minute and so consistent in every detail. No number of poets could do it without stumbling into fatal incompatibilities either of fact or of view, such as we find defacing the Mahabharata. This is not the place to discuss the question of Valmiki's age and authorship. This much, however, may be said that after excluding the Page 156 Uttarakanda, which is a later work, and... chivalry, the Kshatriya caste, in its pride of strength was asserting its own code of morals as the one rule of conduct. We may note the plain assertion of this stand-point by Jarasandha in the Mahabharata and Valmiki's emphatic and repeated protest against it through the mouth of Rama. This ethical code was like all aristocratic codes of conduct full of high chivalry and the spirit of noblesse oblige... with the high-strung intellectual gospel of a high and severe Dharma culminating in a passionless activity, raised to a supreme spiritual significance in the Gita, which is one great keynote of the Mahabharata. Had he known it, the strong leaven of sentimentalism and femininity in his nature might well have rejected it; such temperaments when they admire strength, admire it manifested and forceful rather ...
... ideas and notions. Sri Aurobindo himself says that originally the Mahabharata story was symbolic, but later it became socio-religious. Now the story is narrated to project Savitri as a role-model of an ideal woman, with fidelity in conjugal relations as its chief and foremost concern. The Savitri-tale appears early in the Mahabharata, in the third of the 18 parts of the monumental work. It is placed... compose his Savitri-story? Sri Aurobindo remarks that it belongs to the poet's early days, still fresh "with the glow of the youth and grace over it". It looks as though the later compilers of the Mahabharata neatly incorporated the tale in the main sequel of the Great Epic. It does certainly fit in very well in one of the story-sessions we have in the Book of the Forest when the Pandavas stayed as exiles... given to Savitri get fulfilled. [Note 9, p. 548.] Part III: The Tale of Satyavan and Savitri A Letter of Sri Aurobindo The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine ...
... After his morning tea he would open his notebook of poetry. He was then translating from the Mahabharata. Although he did not understand Bengali that well, he understood very well the Sanskrit Ramayana and Mahabharata. He did not translate systematically, but would take up a legend or an episode from the Mahabharata and render it into English verse. He wrote in various 1. Raja Subodh Kumar... misdirected) all his energies to writing Bengali poetry. He is at present engaged on an epic (inspired I believe by Michael Madhusudan) on the subject of Usha and Aniruddha." This legend is found in the Mahabharata. Pictures rose in D. K. Roy's mind. "He wrote his poems first on the Gray-Granite writing pad; seldom did he cross out anything he had written. He would puff at his cigar and think awhile, then... with his poetry. Now and then he would read it out to me. To make me understand whether or not his translation was faithful to the original he sometimes read aloud from the original Ramayana or the Mahabharata." Then "lunch was served around eleven o'clock. He read the newspapers during his lunch." And the cigar would be by his side even at mealtimes. We shall take up again the subject of food ...
... On the Mahabharata Early Cultural Writings Notes on the Mahabharata It was hinted in a recent article of the Indian Review, an unusually able and searching paper on the date of the Mahabharata war that a society is about to be formed for discovering the genuine and original portions of our great epic. This is glad tidings to all admirers of Sanscrit... is the clear political story of the Mahabharata. I have very scantily indicated some of its larger aspects only; but if my interpretation be correct, it is evident that we shall have in the disengaged Mahabharata not only a mighty epic, but a historical document of unique value. What I wish, however, to emphasize at present is that the portions of the Mahabharata which bear the high, severe and heroic... creditable to European scholarship that after so many decades of Sanscrit research, the problem of the Mahabharata which should really be the pivot for all the rest, has remained practically untouched. For it is not exaggeration to say that European scholarship has shed no light whatever on the Mahabharata beyond the bare fact that it is the work of more than one hand. All else it has advanced, and fortunately ...
... from it altogether or carry it through to its inexorable completion. It matters little whether or no, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a later composition inserted into the mass of the Mahabharata by its author in order to invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of the great national epic. There seem to me to be strong grounds against this supposition for which, besides, the... historical teacher and leader of men. In seeking the kernel of the thought of the Gita we need, therefore, only concern ourselves with the spiritual significance of the human-divine Krishna of the Mahabharata who is presented to us as the teacher of Arjuna on the battle-field of Kurukshetra. The historical Krishna, no doubt, existed. We meet Page 15 the name first in the Chhandogya Upanishad... Upanishad we find mention of King Dhritarashtra son of Vichitravirya, and since tradition associated the two together so closely that they are both of them leading personages in the action of the Mahabharata, we may fairly conclude that they were actually contemporaries and that the epic is to a great extent dealing with historical characters and in the war of Kurukshetra with a historical occurrence ...
... very different from the others. Well, probably there must be several versions of the Ramayana. And still more versions of the Mahabharata—that indeed is amazing! (Nolini) Of the Ramayana also. Then texts have been added later. Did it exist, Mother, the Mahabharata? I suppose something did exist. In all these things, there is "something" that's true and then what has been made of it.... several versions? (Nolini) No. But the Gita is a part of the Mahabharata. (Nolini) Yes. Is the Ramayana more recent? (Nolini) No. Is it of the same period? And is the author known? (Nolini) Valmiki. Yes, and this has not changed so much. (Nolini) Not as much as the other. Not so much as the Mahabharata. But there are differences. There is one tradition which says... outer expression is absolutely identical with the inner; that is, the corporeal manifestation truly becomes a manifestation of the divine essence. Is that all? Aren't the incidents of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana true? True, in what sense? Whether it all really happened on earth like that? Hanuman and the monkeys and the?... ( laughter ) I can't tell. I have the feeling that it is symbolical; ...
... posed: could this ware belong to the Mahabharata War period? Lal and all the subsequent writers, including myself and Dr. Vibha Tripathi, think that the culture represented by the Painted Grey Ware and the things so far found with it suggest that it was at most a village culture with "advanced economy". This conclusion goes against our assumed view of the Mahabharata War Period, when there were several... , p. 95. Page 239 as a village culture we shall have to revise our opinion about the Mahabharata time. However, when I was preparing this work, it occurred to me that Painted Grey Ware could very well be described as a culture which flourished in the wake of Mahabharata, after the destruction of the kings of Northern India, with their armies, in Northern India - Punjab, Northern... Northern Rajasthan, Haryana, U.P. and Bihar. Thus, the Painted Grey Ware could very well be regarded as a post-Mahabharata culture. If PGW is 'post-Mahabharata', the war concerned might reasonably be placed around the date - c. 1400 B.C. -recently suggested by the excavations of a submerged Dwaraka which could be identified with the Dwaraka reported by tradition as having been drowned in the ...
... the basic Rama can be taken to be as historical as the Krishna of the Mahabharata . You have mentioned Dr. Kanaiyalal Munshi as "calling the Ramayana a great literary work while expressing no opinion about the Mahabharata ". When the archaeologist B.B. Lai excavated the various sites listed in the Mahabharata and, finding there the ceramic known as Painted Grey Ware, dated the... well with the drowned Dwaraka of the Mahabharata story. Other researchers have postulated times different from mine, but I don't believe anybody has really suggested, as you say, 250 B.C. as the date. You draw my attention to the article "The Pandyas and the date of Kalidasa" in the March 1994 Mother India, p. 191. But you are mixing up the poem Mahabharata and the Bharata War whose story it... Upanishad we find mention of King Dhritarashtra son of Vichitravirya, and since tradition associated the two together so closely that they are both of them leading personages in the action of the Mahabharata, we may fairly conclude that they were actually contemporaries and that the epic is to a great extent dealing with historical characters and in the war of Kurukshetra with a historical occurrence ...
... and "music that can immortalise the mind" (as Savitri somewhere puts it). Your mention of the Mahabharata prompts me to compliment you on your power of persistence and endurance face to face with the whole text of it translated by some totally unpoetic American. Even otherwise the total Mahabharata is not what its traditional author Vyasa actually composed. Of course it is all interesting and i... Baroda -long before he came to Pondicherry: "All that we know of the Mahabharata at present is that it is the work of several hands and of different periods... Yet to extricate the original epic from the mass of accretions is not, I believe, so difficult a task as it may at first appear. One is struck in perusing the Mahabharata by the presence of a mass of poetry which bears the style and impress... love. Yet many people loved and revered him. As to the Mahabharata, I am most interested in Sri Aurobindo's description of Vyasa as a supremely masculine writer. Certainly Valmiki has more flowers of beauty, yet dramatically and psychologically Vyasa is extraordinary. I am going with friends to the dramatized version of the Mahabharata by Peter Brook, now playing in Glasgow (Brook failed to receive ...
... of life as emanating from the Mahabharata is often ambiguous, depending upon individual interpretation of events, of motives of characters and of the ideals pursued. We often meet people drawing diametrically opposite conclusions about the significance of the Mahabharata. So far as Savitri is concerned it is free from such possible ambiguity. In the Mahabharata man suffers, struggles, tries to... to popularise high philosophic and ethical ideas and cultural practice." Sri Aurobindo has given an estimate of the two Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in his Foundations of Indian Culture which is quoted here: The Mahabharata especially is not only the story of the Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a national tradition but on a vast scale the epic... religious and ethical mind and social and political ideals and culture and life of India. It is said popularly of it and with a certain measure of truth that whatever is in India is in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single individual mind, but of the mind of a nation; it is the poem of itself written by a whole people. It would be vain to apply to it canons ...
... It is not like writing a small poem in a fixed metre with a limited number of modulations. If you take the poem simile, it is the Mahabharata of a Mahabharata that has to be done. And what, compared with the limited Greek perfection, is the technique of the Mahabharata? Next, what is the use of vic ā rabuddhi in such a case? If one has to get a new consciousness which surpasses the reasoning... ā restu tritīyah panth ā . 1 All for the Divine, but all one in the ____________________ 1. Thereby hangs a tale. Jaimini was an important disciple of Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata. Among other works he authored the Mimamsa Sutra , a Vedic exegesis. Over the centuries people forgot the meaning of the Vedas, and the meaning of the commentaries as well. Then around 4 BC one... s—if this letter is to go at once—I will try to make time tonight or tomorrow. Page 353 August 30, 1933 To answer the one question in your last letter would need a Mahabharata—for you raise at one fell swoop the whole problem of life along with the whole problem of Yoga. But you have more faith than you imagine, otherwise you would not be so hard on the Divine. I did not ...
... Savitri III 'The Wonderful Poem' Such is the Mahabharata 'legend'. No summary or paraphrase, no attempt at translation, can do adequate justice to the bareness and strength and utter self-sufficiency of the original. Not a word is wasted, and as one reads the poem one feels that what needs to be said has been said; one accepts the... the story as something primordial and permanently significant like the Sun itself. There are other 'episodes'—the Nala and the Sakuntala, for example—in the Mahabharata that have also won the affections of many generations of men, but the Savitri stands apart even among them, verily a star. "The 'story of Savitri' is the gem of the whole poem", wrote Alfred Wallace, 5 "and I cannot recall anything... instructed more and more, feels awakened to his true role as Dharma, and so it is with relief that he releases Satyavan's life and takes leave of Savitri. As Winternitz remarks,...in the whole of the Mahabharata the idea prevails that Yama, the god of death, is one with Dharma, the personification of Law. But nowhere is the identification of the King of the realm of death with the lord of law and justice ...
... on his typewriter the Mahabharata into English poetry. One day, Sri Aurobindo told Sudhir-da that unless one read the Mahabharata, it was impossible to know anything about India. And he asked Sudhir-da to go and buy a copy to read to the others. Sudhir-da took the money from Sri Aurobindo and went to a bookshop. He found there that the best version of the Mahabharata by Kaliprasanna Sinha... "After all, this too is the Mahabharata,” he said to himself, "it should serve their purpose." They were going through a severe financial crisis at that time. So that was the justification. Page 255 When Sudhir-da gave the book to Sri Aurobindo he did not like it at all. He told him that it was not possible to learn the essence of the Mahabharata from that book And so he asked ...
... drawn my inspiration from western, often Greek, sources. But now the literature of my country - the Mahabharata, the dramas of Kalidasa and other Sanskrit masterpieces - opened up new creative possibilities for me. For example. Love and Death, Urvasie, Savitri are all drawn from episodes in the Mahabharata." "Did you then spend all your time working, reading and writing? Did you never take part in... Bose and, indeed, he did look like a Rishi, a sage, with his flowing white hair and beard and his eversmiling face. And he was so learned and wise. He told us stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Sometimes he used to take us out for long walks. One evening, on our way home, it had grown quite dark when suddenly we found that Grandfather had disappeared. 'Grandfather, Grandfather,' we called... are different from their very birth, as were Arjuna and Abhimanyu. You surely know Abhimanyu's story?" The children looked at one another, some said yes, many said no. "Have you not read the Mahabharata?" Some children excitedly shouted, "We watched it on the TV." "You must have seen how in the battle of Kurukshetra the boy Abhimanyu found himself surrounded by enemy kings and fought single-handed ...
... the Saurashtra coast in Gujarat and radiocarbon dating have fixed the date as 1400 B.C. when Dwaraka of Sri Krishna was submerged by the rising sea. Thus confirming the facts as given in the epic Mahabharata. 1 The Maurya empire (approx. 322-182 B.C.) brings us into historical period. Takshila and Benares were 1. A team of archeologists, led by Dr S.R. Rao, began in 1979 off- and onshore... major port specialising in overseas trade, metal, shell and other crafts, defence architecture, etc., and served as a gateway to the Indian subcontinent. This discovery may well one day mean to the Mahabharata Page 26 renowned international universities, where students came from far-flung countries like China. The Maurya emperors took great care to spread learning among their subjects... bomb against the British rulers. -Romesh Chandra Dutt (1848-1909), that many-sided Bengali, is perhaps best remembered for his English renderings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which familiarized the average readers in England with the stories of these epics. — Rakhaldas Banerjee (1886-1930), the renowned numismatist and archaeologist. It was he who discovered ...
... On the Mahabharata Early Cultural Writings Vyasa; Some Characteristics The Mahabharata, although neither the greatest nor the richest masterpiece of the secular literature of India, is at the same time its most considerable and important body of poetry. Being so it is the pivot on which the history of Sanscrit literature, and incidentally the history... The sloka itself says no more than this that much of the Mahabharata was written in so difficult a style that Vyasa himself could remember only 8800 of the slokas, Suka an equal amount and Sanjaya perhaps as much, perhaps something less. There is certainly here no assertion such as Prof. Weber would have us find in it that the Mahabharata at any time amounted to no more than 8800 slokas. Even if we... first wrote the Mahabharata in 24,000 slokas and afterwards enlarged it to 100,000 for the world of men as well as a still more unconscionable number of verses for the Gandhurva and other worlds. In spite of the embroidery of fancy, of a type familiar enough to all who are acquainted with the Puranic method of recording facts, the meaning of this is unmistakeable. The original Mahabharata consisted of ...
... On the Mahabharata Sri Aurobindo wrote these essays and notes on the Mahabharata around 1902. He did not publish any of them during his lifetime. Notes on the Mahabharata. Circa 1902. Sri Aurobindo wrote this essay shortly after September 1901, when the "recent article" mentioned in the first paragraph, Velandai Gopala Aiyer's "The Date of the Mahabharata War", was published... material on the Mahabharata was first published in book-form in Vyasa and Valmiki by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1956 and 1964. In 1989 all the material on the Mahabharata, augmented and reorganised, was published in volume 13 of Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research . In 1991 and 1996 these texts were republished, in a slightly reorganised form, under the title On the Mahabharata by the Sri Aurobindo... writers"; (4) a long passage beginning "It was hinted in a recent article in the Indian Review", dealing, among other things, with the political story of the Mahabharata; and (5) a short incomplete passage headed "Mahabharata", concerned mainly with linguistic matters. Passages (1) to (4) were written in that order in one notebook; passage (5) was written independently in another notebook around ...
... track down a particular edition of the Mahabharata in the Ashram library which Nolini-da confirmed to be the one containing markings indicating the original text as identified by Sri Aurobindo. I wonder where this copy lies now. Unfortunately, no one has pursued the course Amal suggests to identify the Ur-epic. You want to interpret the Mahabharata in the light of Sri Aurobindo's revelation... passages he gives as characteristic of Vyasa and, using them as a touchstone, set about reaching the true Mahabharata. Possibly several parts which you have wished to explain a la Sri Aurobindo will get excluded. But, if your aim is not to deal with Vyasa's own composition but with the Mahabharata as it has finally come down to us, there is no need to bother about the authorship-question: you can go... offering interesting insights apropos my question regarding the symbolic meaning of the Page 221 Utanka and the Ocean-churning episodes which were the subject of my Secret of the Mahabharata that was serialised in M.I. The distinction Amal draws between the double significance of the turtle is quite unique: I have no particular solution to give for the problem you have posed ...
... At present it has gone beyond limit and taken an exaggerated form which seems so unnatural.” The Mahabharata — is it all true? Seeing Sri Aurobindo absorbed in his work on the Mahabharata, I asked him one day, rather with a motive, “Do you really believe everything that is written in Mahabharata? I have heard that there is much in it that was added later.” That day I was caught quite off my guard... and found a Mahabharata by Sourendra Mohan Tagore, a neat and smaller edition for seven and a half rupees. I bought it and read it. A few days later when the topic of the Mahabharata came up again I brought out the book with some diffidence and placed it in Sri Aurobindo’s hands. Seeing the book he glanced at me and said with a little smile, “There is no profit in reading this Mahabharata. It is written... stress and anguish for awakening. Read the Mahabharata Out of Sri Aurobindo’s remuneration for the post of principal of National College, which was 75 rupees, 23 rupees had to be paid for house rent; the rest of the amount was spent for the maintenance of four or five persons in the family. One day he suddenly told me that I should read the Mahabharata translated by Kaliprasanna Sinha. The price ...
... the Mahabharata is so intolerable to European scholars that they have been forced to ease their irritation by conjuring up the phantom of an original ballad-epic more like their notions of what an epic should be, an epic in which the wicked characters of the present Mahabharata were the heroes and the divine champions of right of the present Mahabharata were the villains! The present Mahabharata is ...
... On the Mahabharata Early Cultural Writings Notes on the Mahabharata in Detail Udyogapurva Canto I. 1) कुरुप्रवीराः.. स्वपक्षाः. This may mean in Vyasa's elliptic manner the great Kurus (i.e. the Pandavas) & those of their side. Otherwise "The Kuru heroes of his own side" i.e. Abhimanyu's which is awkward 3) वृद्धौ this supplies the reason... Slokas 78 .. 83. Sense that the ethical & historical is the main drift of the poem . Repeated statements that the Mahabharata is a popular exposition of the teaching of the Veda & Vedanta (श्रुति). General (passim): Application of "Puran" & "Itihas" to Mahabharata. Ancient idea of the universality of the poem. Mahabharat - Dronapurva 1) उदीर्ण.. व्यावृत्तेऽर्यम्नि आत्ययिकः In ...
... started with the three great divisions of the body politic, King, Lords and Commons, which have been the sources of the various forms of government evolved by the modern nations. In the period of the Mahabharata we find that the King is merely the head of the race, possessed of executive power but with no right Page 943 to legislate and even in the exercise of his executive functions unable to... the Western writers Oriental, though it existed for centuries in Europe and has never been universal in Asia. The Council of Chiefs is a feature of Indian polity universal in the time of the Mahabharata. That great poem is full of accounts of the meetings of these Councils and some of the most memorable striking events of the story are there transacted. The Udyoga Parva especially gives detailed... arbiter and responsible for the decision, except in nations like the Yadavas where he seems to have been little more than an ornamental head of an aristocratic polity. Finally, the Commons in the Mahabharata are not represented by any assembly, because the times are evidently a period Page 944 of war and revolution in which the military caste had gained an abnormal preponderance. The opinion ...
... Kalidasa, Bharavi and others have all achieved epic heights. NIRODBARAN: Has your own epic Savitri anything to do with the Mahabharata story? SRI AUROBINDO: Not really. Only the clue is taken from Mahabharata. My story is symbolic. I believe that original Mahabharata story was also symbolic, but it has been made into a tale of conjugal fidelity. NIRODBARAN: What is your symbolism? SRI ... succeeded in Epic. He has excellent movement, form and swing, but the substance is poor. It is surprising that he could write an epic, for Bengalis haven't got an epic mind. The Bengali Ramayana and Mahabharata are not worth much. But I believe he got his inspiration from Homer and Virgil whom he read a lot. NIRODBARAN: What exactly do you mean by "an epic mind"? SRI AUROBINDO: The epic mind is something ...
... 107ff, 119, 174, 177, 185, 647; source in Mahabharata, and Hellenic parallel, 108; paradisal, infernal, terrestrial, 110; descent into Hell, 112ff; the Temptation Scene, 112-13; Love's labour's won, 114 Lucas, F.L., 71 Macaulay, Lord, 13, 42-3, 491 Macdonald, Ramsay, 205,216, 369 Madgaokar, G. D., 208 Mahabharata, The, 5, 50, 63, 68, 69, 80ff, 88, 108,147... from Horu Thakur, 76; from Jnanadas, 76; on Bande Mataram, 76; translation from Dwijendralal, 77; Sagar, Sangit, tr. of, 77ff, 411; on Vyasa & Valmiki, 79ff; tr. from the Ramāyāna, 8 1ff; from the Mahabharata, 84ff; on Nala and Savitri, 85-6; Vidula, 87; translation from Bhartrihari, 88; from Kalidasa, 90ff; The Birth of the War-God, 92ff; The Hero and the Nymph, 94ff; on Vikramorvasie, 98fn; Urvasie... 503; the adoration group of Mother & Child, 503; the Great Renunciation, 503; on Indian literature, 503ff; "a mass of absurdities" 504; Veda and Upanishads, 504ff; unparalleled legacy, 505; the Mahabharata & Ramayana, 505; Kalidas, 505; regional literatures, 50'6; Radha Krishna cult, 506; ancient Indian polity, 508; self-poised and balanced, 508; balance upset in later times, 508; organisation of ...
... On the Mahabharata Early Cultural Writings Mahabharata The problem of the Mahabharata, its origin, date and composition, is one that seems likely to elude scholarship to times indefinite if not for ever. It is true that several European scholars have solved all these to their own satisfaction, but their industrious & praiseworthy efforts [ incomplete... of a very early date. There is therefore no reason to doubt that an actual historical event is recorded with whatever admixture of fiction in the Mahabharata. It is also evident that the Mahabharata, not any "Bharata" or "Bharati Katha" but the Mahabharata existed before the age of Panini, and tho' the radical school bring down Panini [ incomplete ] Page 344 ... the earlier parts of the Mahabharata they are known only as a strong barbarian power of the Northwest; there is no sign of their culture being known to the Hindus. It is therefore quite possible that the word Yavana now grown familiar may have been substituted by the later reciters for an older name no longer familiar. It is now known beyond reasonable doubt that the Mahabharata war was fought out in ...
... notions are present in the Mahabharata, brought out from an inner plane to an outer plane (ideas, ethics, politics), although in the tale of Nala and Damayanti (which is probably a very old story), they still keep their ancient and inner significance. Indeed this is how the story is presented to us in the _________ *Adiparva, 2.20. Page 13 Mahabharata: as an ancient tale containing... excellent story will get everything that his heart desires, there is no doubt about it." (Mahahharata, Vanaparva, 79-16)* A Lesson on Life The story of Nala and Damayanti, as told in the Mahabharata, seems to begin and end like a fairy tale. Yet what happens in between is anything but a fairy tale — if we give to this word the meaning of something remote from real life. On the contrary, this... contains great knowledge. The poets who wrote them did not intend merely to tell a tale in a beautiful or noble manner or to create an interesting poem, although they did this with great success. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are itihasa, that is to say, they are "an ancient historical or legendary tradition turned to creative use as a significant mythus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious ...
... strength, endurance and agility fill the pages of Mahabharata. These heroes are not abstract images, their bodies are not less praised than their commitment to dharma, their loyalty , their devotion or their generosity. What was the secret of this superhuman force of body and mind which we see pulsating in the heroes of Ramayana and Mahabharata? What was, it that stood behind a civilization which... broad as a door panel, and a full broad neck, Raghu was above his father by the excellence of his body, and yet through his modesty he looked smaller. Let us think of Arjuna, as described in Mahabharata: Without him whose arms are long and symmetrical, and stout and like unto a couple of iron maces and round and marked by the scars of the bow-strings and graced with the bow and sword and... Firstly, it is interesting to point out that the teachers of Dhanurveda (like Dronacharya, the teacher of the Pandavas and the Kauravas) were specifically from the brahmana class. Secondly, the Mahabharata refers to the acquisition of knowledge about war and weapons for all the four varnas. Kautiliya also approves of the participation of vaishyas and shudras in the army. Therefore the popular ...
... exceptional mastery of Sanskrit at once opened to him the immense treasure-house of the Indian heritage. He read the Upanishads, the Gita, the Puranas, the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the poems of Bhartrihari, the dramas of Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti etc., Page 27 etc. Ancient India, the ageless India of spiritual culture and unwearied creative vitality, thus... was a transforming revelation. Ancient India furnished him with the clue to the building of the greater India of the future. Sri Aurobindo translated some portions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, some dramas of Kalidasa, the Nitishataka of Bhartrihari, some poems of Vidyapati and Chandidas etc. into English. Once, when R. C. Dutt, the well-known civilian, came to Baroda at the invitation... for he was by nature shy and reticent about himself), and Dutt was so much struck by their high quality that he said to Sri Aurobindo: "If I had seen your translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata before, I would not have published mine. 19 I can now very well see that, by the side of your magnificent translations, mine appear as mere child's play." Sri Aurobindo wrote many English ...
... , even in the presence of ubiquitous death. It is to do this that Savitri comes here. She comes here as the Observer of the Vow of the Lord. She comes as pativratā. In the story of the Mahabharata Savitri is committed to the joyous husbanding of the Truth, that in the evolutionary way this mortal creation be an expression of multifold divinity. This is the significance of the legend of Savitri... eventful story shows Savitri not only firm-minded. She is shown as one having exceptional qualities, qualities which put her apart from everybody around. In the narrative we have in the Mahabharata Savitri is presented as a radiant daughter, kanyd tejasvini; she is beautiful like a damsel of heaven, devarupini; she is dhyānayogaparāyaṇā, an adept in the Yoga of Meditation; she is one... seem to have the colouring of an ethical illustration, the story is spiritually charged. Even in the simple 2 R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, p. 55. narrative of the Mahabharata we see a purpose behind the story. In it we notice the seeds of a brighter world taking birth. This birth of a bright world may not be in the immediate context, but it is bound to occur in ...
... PERSPECTIVES OF THE SAVITRI UPAKHYANA The story of Savitri narrated by Rishi Markandeya to Yudhishthira appears as a minor episode or upakhyana in seven cantos of the Book of the Forest in the Mahabharata (Pativrata Mahatmya, Chapters 293-299, Vana Parva, Gita Press, Gorakhpur). The immediate purpose of the narration seems to be the alleviation of grief of the eldest of the Pandavas, afflicted as... the morning of his genius", it is a "maturer and nobler work, perfect and restrained in detail, with the glow of the same youth and grace over it". We already begin to see in it the Poet of the Mahabharata proper with his austere and ""ornamented features, the verses lifted up by a robust and unerring intellect and the substance carrying the quiet Page 95 compact strength of his style... the dead go. And she persuaded him to release the soul of Satyavan. Satyavan was revived and they went back home." This may be a good story but it is not Vyasa's story as present in the original Mahabharata. It seems that the lecturer did not use the Sanskrit text but went by some secondary source when he introduced the legend to his American audience. Similarly, let us hear a part of another such ...
... battlefield. That the Mahabharata , the great war of the Bharatas, has been a historic event is not in doubt, but the date of the war is still under discussion. In the introduction to his Search for the Historical Krishna , Navaratna S. Rajaram writes: “It is beginning to be seen that even the chronology of ancient India based on the so-called Kali Date (3102 BC) for the Mahabharata period is not lacking... beginning of what we now call the Harappan Civilization. The Kali Age – especially its harbinger, the Mahabharata War – may be seen as marking the end of the spiritual age of the Vedas to be replaced by the materialistic age in which we live. Its origins go back some 5 000 years. The Mahabharata War stands at the threshold of this transition.” The historic significance of this war was therefore... 4: What Arjuna saw: the Dark Side of the Force 1. Kurukshetra: The Field of the Kurus The Bhagavad Gita , a part of the ancient Indian epos Mahabharata , is one of the great creations of the human spirit, if not the greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , the works of ...
... Aswapati from the character in the Mahabharata story, whoever the latter may have been. ‘His name was Aswapati. Performer of Yajnas [ceremonial offerings], presiding over charities, skilful in work, one who had conquered the senses, he was loved by the people of his kingdom and he himself loved them.’ 6 Thus read the verses about Aswapati in the Mahabharata. Let us now read Sri Aurobindo’s d... back as far as Sri Aurobindo’s Baroda period. No less than eleven and maybe twelve versions and revisions have been found. Originally a rather short narrative poem based on a story from Vyasa’s Mahabharata (one of the greatest literary works in the world qua content as well as extent) it gradually expanded by way of experiment into a poetic epic which reaches far ahead in the future. ‘I used Savitri... Savitri is an incarnation of the Great Mother, descended upon Earth to save that soul from the night of suffering and death. In other words, Sri Aurobindo has transposed the popular story from the Mahabharata into a symbol of the Work of the Mother and himself. By which character in the poem is he then represented? The commentators are unanimous: by Aswapati, Savitri’s father and Lord of the Horse Sacrifice ...
... the sacred language of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana... These remarkable poems contain almost all the history of ancient India, so far as it can be recovered, together with such inexhaustible details of its political, social and religious life, that the antique Hindu world really stands epitomized in them." Arnold translated portions of the Mahabharata, and in particular the story of ... wild things do at noise of coming rain.... Page 91 Bibliography — Arnold, Edwin. Indian Idylls of the Mahabharata. Boston: 1907. — Sri Aurobindo. The Problem of the Mahabharata, in Centenary Edition, Vol. III. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972. — Sri Aurobindo. The Foundations of Indian Culture, Centenary Edition, Vol. XIV... Naisadhacharita and the Kangra paintings a) The Naishadhacharita It is perhaps proper to add here a few words about one of the most famous poems on Nala's story after the Nalopakhyana of Mahabharata, upon the early part of which it is clearly based: the great kavya of the XIIth century, the Naishadhacharita by Sriharsa. Sriharsa was a poet at the court of the King of Kanyakubja. Innumerable ...
... again is characteristic of the Hindu spirit not in its best and most self-realising epochs. They were written in an age of decline, and their present form is the result of a literary accident. The Mahabharata of Vyasa, originally an epic of 24,000 verses, afterwards enlarged by a redacting poet, was finally submerged in a vast mass of inferior accretions, the work often of a tasteless age and unskilful... great artists have blossomed into dramas and epics of the most delicate tenderness or the most noble sublimity. One who glances at the dead and clumsy narrative of the Shacountala legend in the Mahabharata and reads after it Kalidasa's masterpiece in which delicate dramatic art and gracious tenderness of feeling reach their climax, at once perceives how they vary with the hands which touch them. ... gratified; if otherwise, I shall at least have the consolation of having failed where failure was more probable than success. The story of Ruaru is told in the very latest accretion-layer of the Mahabharata, in a bald and puerile narrative without force, beauty or insight. Yet it is among the most significant and powerful in idea of our legends; for it is rather an idea than a tale. Bhrigou, the grandfather ...
... been fortunate enough even to have a glimpse of this mighty work. But the fate of the Bible has been otherwise in Europe. The common run of people in India were satisfied with the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas. And the learned few concerned themselves with the Upanishads and the six systems of philosophy. Even Rammohan Roy who infused the Hindus with a new spirit and light could not go... it will not prove an obstacle to the apprehension of the fundamental truths of the Veda provided we can rightly focus the attention of our intelligence on it. Can we not have any access to the Mahabharata because of Vyasakutas¹ (the knotty expressions devised by Vyasa)? Besides, if we admit the esoteric basis of the Veda, we will get a reasonable clue to the fact as to why the Veda is held in such... Nature-worship when the Rishis were making prayers to the presiding Deities of Nature some expressions of philosophical ¹When the sage Vyasa made a request to Ganesh to record his version of the Mahabharata, the latter agreed to do so on condition that he must not be made to stop his writing. The sage agreed provided Ganesh would not only write but understand his words. It is said that in order to gain ...
... the previous ages. The great poets and writers are secular creators and their works have no chance of forming part of the intimate religious and ethical mind of the people as did the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The stream of religious poetry flows separately in Purana and Tantra. The great representative poet of this age is Kalidasa. He establishes a type which was preparing before and endured after... sufficiently high ideal kind, and it is quite sincere but only intellectually sincere, and therefore there is no impression of the deeper religious feeling or the living ethical power that we get in the Mahabharata and Ramayana and in most of the art and literature of India. The ascetic life is depicted, but only in its ideas and outward figure: Page 363 the sensuous life is depicted in the same... 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 of the Indian temperament and imagination ...
... archaeology (which on the contrary clearly refutes it—see next footnote), but is also in head-on contradiction with two mainstays of Indian tradition: l. The one that regards the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as based on historical tradition (Itihasa), considerably embellished, to be sure, but still with a kernel of historicity: we find depicted in these epics a highly developed civilization spanning... Dwaraka and Bet-Dwaraka have put one more spanner in the well-greased works of the Aryan invasion theory, as they corroborate the submergence of Krishna's city, regarded till now as a "myth" from the Mahabharata. Although the Dwaraka findings, carbon-dated to about 1500 BC, do not as yet fit with the traditional date ascribed to Krishna's time (let us however venture to suggest that further exploration will... formularists of all the religions and the parrots of free thought, they are dead souls who follow a death that they call living. ________________ of a physical existence) with the "Aryan" Mahabharata? Could this self-inflicted puzzle be the reason why S. R. Rao's rediscovery of ancient Dwaraka has not attracted the degree of attention which that of ancient Troy by Schliemann did? Such ...
... there are poets greater in their range. The Mahabharata is from that point of view a far greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either spreads its strength and its achievement over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare; both are built on an almost cosmic vastness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in Page 367... language and the expression of poetic beauty—Vyasa and Valmiki are not inferior , but also not greater than the English or the Greek poet. We can leave aside for the moment the question whether the Mahabharata was not the creation of the mind of a people rather than of a single poet, for that doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer. You once spoke of Goethe as not being one of the world's ...
... with such ease and rapidity before or after.... I don't think there was any falling of the seed of the idea or growth and maturing of it; it just came—from my reading about the story of Ruru in the Mahabharata; I thought, 'Well, here's a subject', and the rest burst out of itself..." An earlier note—recently found among Sri Aurobindo's Page 341 papers and dating itself to about... Pramadvura—I have substituted a name [Priyumvada] more manageable to the English tongue —her death in the forest by the snake and restoration at the price of half her husband's life is told in the Mahabharata. It is a companion legend to the story of Savitri but not being told with any poetic skill or beauty has remained generally unknown. I have attempted in this poem to bring it out of its obscurity... Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian Patala and hells. The central idea of the narrative alone is in the Mahabharata; the meeting with Kama and the descent into Hell were additions necessitated by the poverty of incident in the original story." In the lines, occurring in the passage where the God of Love ...
... many-sided multicoloured carving out, in word-music, of the gigantic secrets of his "Supramental Yoga". With the Mahabharata it has a direct link too. For, it is based on a story, in that epic, of a victorious fight by love against death. But the Savitri of the Mahabharata, fighting Yama the God of Death who took away her consort Satyavan, becomes here an Avatar of the eternal Beauty and Love... lines to the place of runner-up. Among the world's epics which can in general be compared with it in sustained poetic quality, only the Shah-Nameh of Firdausi, the Ramayana of Valmiki and the Mahabharata of Vyasa exceed it in length — three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Page 127 Savitri stands with the masterpieces of Valmiki and Vyasa in more than ...
... his death as a deity; this is apart from the story in the Mahabharata and the Puranas. There is no reason to suppose that the connection of his name with the development of the Bhagavata religion, an important current in the stream of Indian spirituality, was founded on a mere legend or poetic invention. The Mahabharata is a poem and not history, but it is clearly a poem founded on... accepted the historicity of Krishna as I accept the historicity of Christ. Page 189 The story of Brindavan is another matter; it does not enter into the main story of the Mahabharata and has a Puranic origin and it could be maintained that it was intended all along to have a symbolic character. At one time I accepted that explanation, but I had to abandon it afterwards; there ...
... in books like The Secret of the Veda , The Upanishads, The Foundations of Indian Culture 92 and Essays on the Gita. Even the framework of his magistral epic Savitri is a story from the Mahabharata. In fact, his whole work is permeated with the living presence of the perpetual Indian values. ‘India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word,’ he wrote, ‘she lives... drafts for half a century, from the last years in Baroda till a few weeks before his leaving the body. Sri Aurobindo called Savitri ‘a legend and a symbol.’ The legend is a story from the Mahabharata that briefly summarized goes as follows: Savitri, daughter of King Aswapati of Madra, chooses Satyavan, son of King Dyumatsena of Shalwa, for her husband. Satyavan lives in the forest to which his... comparable to his Love and Death , in which he stuck to the original legend. Gradually, as his yoga widened and particularly after the coming of the Mother, he saw a symbolic parallel between the Mahabharata story and their own avataric effort. Savitri came to stand for an incarnation of the universal Mother and Satyavan for an incarnation of the soul of the Earth which the Mother, in her Love for it ...
... Sequel, written originally in present-day Greek and running into 33,333 lines. Among epics which can be compared with it in general poetic quality, only the Shah-Nameh, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata exceed it in length - three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Savitri stands with the masterpieces of Valmiki and Vyasa in more than one respect. It has been conceived... A cosmic sweep is Savitri's and Sri Aurobindo wanted his poem to be a many-sided multi-coloured carving out, in word-music, of the gigantic secrets of his "supramental Yoga". With the Mahabharata it has a direct link too. For, it is based on a story, in that epic, of a victorious fight by love against death. Such a fight is a theme that haunted Sri Aurobindo from his very youth, as is proved... speech that Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as one in which the vision, the word, the rhythm are born with an intense wideness and un fathomable massiveness from the Overmind. Here Savitri of the Mahabharata fighting the God of Death who had taken away her consort Satyavan became more and more an Avatar of the eternal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome ...
... more importantly, he plunged into the mainstream of Indian life and literature even as he learnt several native languages including classical Sanskrit. Not only did he study the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas, works of Kalidasa and other authors; he also mastered Vedic, Upanishadic and other Scriptural writings to the extent that he wrote extensively on these subjects and issues concerned... describe the prospects of a transformed life upon the earth. In a letter explaining the symbolism of the Savitri-legend Sri Aurobindo writes: "The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the... thirties now and then, and of course the last eight years of the forties. The first draft perhaps belongs to the Baroda-period when Sri Aurobindo was writing poetry picking up themes from the Mahabharata. In 1936 he recalls in a letter that Savitri was "originally written many years ago before the Mother came." 62 This "many years ago" before 1914 could therefore correspond only to the period ...
... by any characteristic find here, a certain blurring suggestion which has long lingered may seem strengthened. When PGW was first reported in 1954-55 at several spots linked traditionally with the Mahabharata War as well as in the locale where the Rigvedic Aryans had lived, it was put substantially in line with the ceramic of the Shahi Tump cemetery in South Baluchistan which archaeologists had assigned... Dani's capable hands. "The literary evidence, as B.B. Lai among others has shown, is there. The Rig-veda, the earliest account, tells of the coming of new people to the north-west; the Mahabharata stories record the movement to the middle Ganges Valley; the Ramayana is the final episode, which sees Bengal, Orissa, and Ceylon within the geographical bounds of the Vedic tradition however defined... again, be of borderland Indians peacefully passing. One has to look entirely to the literary account to prove it a genuine invader. But does this account really help Fairservis's claim? Here the Mahabharata and the Ramayana have no true bearing: they have nothing to do with a movement into India from outside. We have to attend solely to the Rigveda, "the earliest account", in which Fairservis and his ...
... XI Savitri and the Commedia Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, in its earliest version, 106 must have approximated much closer to the 'legend' in the Mahabharata than to the present epic. The power of Savitri's radiant purity of purpose and fiery chastity confronts Yama; and Yama who is both the Lord of Death and the upholder of Dharma, being irresistibly... old Persian literature—to say nothing of the descents of Ulysses and Aeneas", 109 to say nothing again of the wanderings of Rama, Sita and Lakshmana in the Ramayana and of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. Aswapati's spiritual peregrination, described at considerable length in Book II (The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds), has a similar scheme, and can almost be detached from the rest of Savitri... Love and Goodness, the struggle between them is more in the nature of the struggle between Ravana and Rama in the Ramayana for the rescue of Sita, or between the Kauravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata for the righting of a wrong. In the 'legend' Savitri solves her own personal problem, and in the process of regaining her Satyavan she also brings an accession of happiness to her ...
... them shared the little that Sri Aurobindo earned. During this time Sri Aurobindo was translating the Mahabharata into English verse. While typing it out, he was also teaching English to my father. So my father asked him how he could do both simultaneously, teaching and translating the Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo told him that if one cultivates all one’s faculties, one can do many things at the same... Yes, it is very interesting. Mona: There are many other anecdotes. Once, my father was unwell and he could not control himself: he spewed on Sri Aurobindo’s papers, on his translations of the Mahabharata. Without saying a word Sri Aurobindo cleaned up everything. He did it without uttering a word. Not even an exclamation, like “Oh all my papers are spoilt”. And then he nursed my father. The Mother: ...
... explorations of immeasurable value. Then follow five chapters on Indian literature, the first three being devoted to the Veda, the Upanishads and the two great epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - respectively; the fourth, to Kalidasa and the poets of the Classical age, and the last, to Purana and Tantra, to the Tamil poets, and the minstrels of God all over the country. What Sri Aurobindo... and religion, but of all Indian art, poetry and literature. 42 Then intervened the age when the Shastras were formulated or codified, but more important were the two great epics, the Mahabharata (containing the Gita as well) and the Ramayana - which are not primitive edda or saga, nor just heroic epics, but itihāsas, chief instruments of popular education and culture that have been... Battle of Dharma, and the chief characters are not just human beings but apocalyptic projections of spiritual visions and psychic ecstasies. Great substance is wedded to equally great style - the Mahabharata with a sustained manliness of its own, the Ramayana with its silken flow and grace and strength and warmth - and perennial indeed is their appeal, and truly inexhaustible their power for shaping ...
... translations, Sri Aurobindo wrote some 'Notes' on the Mahabharata as well as comments on the poetic genius of Vyasa and Valmiki. Also, he drew on the Mahabharata for a number of his own narrative poems of which Love and Death is the most outstanding. And, of course, for his supreme creation Savitri , the story was taken from the Mahabharata. In addition to poems, both short and long, Sri Aurobindo... to make up for the deficiency for, if he were ignorant of his country's culture, civilization and religion, how would he serve her? So he started learning Sanskrit and studying the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, Gita, Kalidasa's plays and other Sanskrit works. He learnt the language all by himself — no doubt the start he had made in England for his ICS studies as well as his proficiency... found,' he said, 'for it was well done.' This makes the loss all the greater, for he seldom spoke of his own achievements. At about this time Sri Aurobindo was also immersed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata and experimented with translations from these epics. When Ramesh Chandra Dutt, the well-known poet, novelist and historian, saw some of these during a visit to Baroda, he is said to have remarked: ...
... but for millennia, and some of the high points of Page 24 achievement of this culture are to be found in the ancient literature of India, particularly that of epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata). But since the 6th century. B.C., there was introduced a current of culture which created confusion and a disbalancement in the vast organization of the balanced growth rooted in the teachings... frolic among friends. No feeling of rigidity is portrayed in this beautiful drama. There is, rather, restrained charm, joy and beauty. Other accounts, too, such as those in the Ramavana and the Mahabharata, describe the color and warmth of the interplay of the forces of human nature, and give examples of how the teacher dealt with this interplay with gentle firmness guided by mature experience and... times the task of the teacher was to awaken more than to instruct. It was understood that true knowledge depended on the cultivation of powers of concentration, which in turn depended "In the Mahabharata (i.70), there is a description of Kanva's hermitage. It was situated on the banks of the Malini, a tributary of the Sarayu River. Numerous hermitages stretched round the central hermitage At this ...
... Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, however, defy easy description. They are more than epics, they are really called itihasas, reservoirs of traditional knowledge from which people can drink deep, and significantly form their minds and shape their lives. Their massiveness itself gives them a place apart: the Ramayana with its 44,000 lines and the Mahabharata with its 2,20,000... of a harmonious impression: a vast plenty of things has been accepted as a single version of the ideal world, as a unity of significance." 4 In both, but much more so in the Mahabharata than in the Ramayana, the personal, national and racial perspectives and the human, social and religious slants mingle and fuse to achieve a unity and universality of varied significance. Bowra... a greater and completer national and cultural function... 6 Devout Hindus to this day look upon these poems as scriptures, as dharma śā stras (Codes of Righteous Action); and the Mahabharata is often referred to as the fifth Veda. Together these two epics form a Book of Origins for much of the later literature in India, and classical dramatists like Bhasa, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti ...
... something at stake, not land and money and property, nothing material. It is that which gives it the epic height. The Mahabharata war, for Page 5 instance, was fought for only 18 days and it must have turned out one-tenth of a million persons at the most. But the Mahabharata war has given rise to an epic because the war was fought for, or at least the poet saw it as a fight for, the... as the Mahabharata, the epic of India. He has borrowed the legend from the epic of India. Before I go into the story I will give you the opinion of one of my friends, the respected writer Dr. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, whose opinion counts in the world of letters today. He says that in its final form Savitri is a poem with hardly a parallel in the world's literature: The Mahabharata story of... or, as we say in India, Tapasya. He performed penance in order to get a child, for eighteen years he performed penance, sacrificed and gave charity. The whole original legend is contained in the Mahabharata in four chapters, from chapter 248 onwards, in very simple verse. There the King performs penances and the goddess whom he is trying to propitiate, is pleased and comes out of the sacrificial fire ...
... famous works. Most of these tongues have felt the cultural necessity of transferring into the popular speech the whole central story of the Mahabharata or certain of its episodes and, still more universally, the story of the Ramayana. In Bengal there is the Mahabharata of Kashiram, the gist of the old epic simply retold in a lucid classical style, and the Ramayana of Krittibas, more near to the vigour of... spiritual culture. Another part of the literature is devoted to the bringing of something of the essence of the old culture into the popular tongues through new poetic versions of the story of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana or in romantic narrative founded on the ancient legends; and here again we have work of the very greatest genius as well as much of a lesser but still high order. A third type presents... another seems to derive its first shaping and motive from the classical poems of Kalidasa, Bharavi and Magha. A certain number take for their subject, like that earlier poetry, episodes of the Mahabharata or other ancient or Puranic legends, but the classical and epic manner has disappeared, the inspiration resembles more that of the Puranas and there is the tone and the looser and easier development ...
... in the epics. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata provide a clear example of how the various regions of India were linked by a common culture and awareness. Al-Biruni, writing about India from a place west of the Indus, was aware of the centrality of Vasudeva and Rama to the Indian tradition. All over India, we find local versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. They may disagree on the details,... 'Great' tradition of the Sanskrit epics is mirrored in the 'little' traditions, which are local in their form and yet global in their scope. Besides this intimate knowledge of the parts, the Mahabharata presents a conception of the whole of India as a single geographical unit. In the famous passage in the Bhismaparva the shape of India is described as an equilateral triangle, divided into four smaller... of the external and political unity. Page 162 This external and political unity also India has tried to realize and manifest in her life. This is the significance of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; it is also the truth behind the unification attempt of Chandragupta Maurya, the later Gupta emperors like Harshavardhan and even some of the Mogul emperors. In addition to all this ...
... spiritual experiences. Mahabharata, of which Gita is a very important part, is the product of an age where intellectuality had begun to preponderate, and we find in the Mahabharata intellectual discussions of what, how and why of varieties of subjects. Mahabharata is Page 241 decidedly philosophical, when it deals with a number of intellectual subjects; and yet, Mahabharata is not a book of ...
... Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1956 Essays, notes and translations from the author's Baroda period. Vyasa: "Notes on the Mahabharata", "The Problem of the Mahabharata" and translations (done in 1893) from the Sabha Parva and Udyoga Parva of the Mahabharata. Valmiki: "The Genius of Valmiki" and translations from the Bala Kanda, Ayodhya Kanda and Aranya Kanda of the Ramayana. ... Abelard; The Devil's Mastiff; The Golden Bird. Juvenilia. Volume 8 Translations , FROM SANSKRIT AND OTHER LANGUAGES: From Sanskrit: passages from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita , Kalidasa; The Century of Life (the Nitishataka of Bhartrihari) ; etc. From Bengali: Songs of Bidyapati; Bande Mataram (Hymn to the Mother); thirteen chapters from ...
... Pratap Chandra Roy [Tr.], The Mahabharata Vol II, p. 629 fn. Also John Brough Selections From Classical Sanskrit Literature p. 148 (Notes to II. 301-8). 5. Letter dated 8 March 1899 Romesh Chunder Dutt (Quoted in J.N. Gupta's Life and Work of Romesh Chunder Dutt, C.I.E.,1911, p. 268), Romesh Chunder included Savitri in his verse rendering of the Mahabharata (1898) but portrayed her as... 11. "tishtanthi chaiva S ā vitri koshtabh ū teva lakshyate : And Savitri, who was fasting, looked (unperturbed) like a block of wood." (From 'Savitri Upakhyana' in the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata). 12. Savitri,p. 14. 13. ibid, p. 14. 14. Cf. Fr. D'Arcy : "Without struggle... the ascent of Man is almost impossible." (The Pain of this World and the Providence... p. 64. 114. Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. I, p. 76. 115. ibid.,p. 82. 116. Sir Edwin Arnold gave this title, Love and Death, to his verse translation of the Mahabharata story of Savitri. It is an interesting coincidence that Sri Aurobindo should have followed up his Love and Death with his own first version of Savitri. 117. Collected Poems and Plays ...
... Faust, or a stupendous epic like the Mahabharata, poses the same basic problem of paradigmatic expression and effective communication, yet the poetic technique involved cannot be the same everywhere. So too with the older Yogas and Sri Aurobindo's integral and supramental Yoga: If you take the poem simile, it is the Mahabharata of a Mahabharata that has to be done. And what, compared with... with the limited Greek perfection, is the technique of the Mahabharata? 29 The technique has accordingly to be "multiform, sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself, and one has to be ready to face unexpected variables and possibilities: The spiritual life is not a thing that can be formulated in a rigid definition or bound by a fixed mental rule; it is a vast field of ...
... head-on contradiction with Indian tradition. To begin with, no Sanskrit (excuse me, 'Aryan') scripture makes any reference to an original homeland outside India; quite the contrary, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas depict a highly developed civilization growing on Indian land and spanning several millennia, and a Great War waged around 3100 B.C. It is hard to imagine that the Vedic people, who... course several times before drying up completely around 1900 B.C. As it happens, its location, its physical characteristics, even the stages of its drying, are all described in the Rig-Veda, the Mahabharata and several Puranas —scriptures which the invasion theory forcibly dates later than 1000 B.C., nearly a thousand years after the Saraswati went dry! Moreover, hundreds of Harappan sites have been... major ancient port which served as a gateway to the subcontinent. This corroborated the story of the submergence of Krishna's city, regarded till now as a 'myth' Page 245 from the Mahabharata. Although the Dwaraka findings, carbon-dated to about 1400 B.C., do not as yet fit with the traditional date ascribed to Krishna's time (let us however venture to suggest that further exploration ...
... On the Mahabharata Early Cultural Writings On the Mahabharata: Notes Notes on the Mahabharata of Krishna Dwypaiana Vyasa prepared with a view to disengage the original epic of Krishna of the island from the enlargements, accretions and additions made by Vyshampaian, Ugrosravas & innumerable other writers. -Aurobind Ghose Proposita. An epic ...
... and a springing forward. Its very conception shows this double movement. In the Mahabharata the story of Savitri depicts a fight between love and death somewhat similar in outward intention to the episodes of Priyumvada and Ruru as well as Urvasie and Pururavus which Sri Aurobindo had already poetised. The Mahabharata relates that when Savitri chose Satyavan for her bridegroom she was told of the... untransmutable into a luminous and immortal vehicle. Consequently, Sri Aurobindo, while reading the Vedic and Upanishadic sense in the term Death, does not overlook its common physical sense which the Mahabharata kept in view. Unlike the old scriptures, he refuses to recognise the physical breaking-up as an unescapable destiny. The Aurobindonian Yogi does more than transmute his Page 102 ...
... Sanskrit epic the Ramayana, is the supreme singer; Veda-Vyasa coming after him, the author of the Mahabharata, is the supreme poet-thinker. Anyone versed in Sanskrit would sing the Ramayana in poetic transport and ease, carrying the listeners along with him, but when one turns to the Mahabharata one is simply awed at its immensitude (twenty-five thousand couplets without accretions and one hu... Daemon. No harm if he did not blot out a thousand words: he was no artist, he was a creator. Others might be greater as artists, one might recall Racine; greater in his range, the poet of the Mahabharata, for instance; Milton a greater music-maker; but none approaches Shakespeare in word-magic. The "easily-come" word rather than the play was the thing for him. Sri Aurobindo, though regarding himself ...
... Sequel, written originally in present-day Greek and running into 33,333 lines. Among epics which can be compared with it in general poetic quality, only the Shah Nameh, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata exceed it in length — three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Savitri stands with the masterpieces of Valmiki and Vyasa in more than one respect. It has been conceived... earth. A cosmic sweep is Savitri's and Sri Aurobindo wanted his poem to be a many-sided multi-coloured carving out, in word-music, of the gigantic secrets of his supramental Yoga. With the Mahabharata it has a direct link too. For, it is based on a story, in that epic, of a victorious fight by love against death. Such a fight is a theme that haunted Sri Aurobindo from his very youth, as is... speech that Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as one in which the vision, the word, the rhythm are bom with an intense wideness and unfathomable massiveness from the Overmind. Here Savitri of the Mahabharata fighting the God of Death who had taken away her consort Satyavan became more and more an Avatar of the eternal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome ...
... their essential poetic force and beauty—not of their work as a whole. The Mahabharata is a greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either reigns over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare—both are built on an almost cosmic greatness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in their scope and touch too the things which... masters of rhythm and language and the expression of poetic beauty—Vyasa and Valmiki are not inferior, but also not greater than the English or the Greek poet. I leave aside the question whether the Mahabharata was not the creation of the mind of a people rather than of a single poet, for that doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer. September 12,1931 Sri Aurobindo's comments on ...
... and a springing forward. Its very conception shows this double movement. In the Mahabharata the story of Savitri depicts a fight between love and death somewhat similar in outward intention to the episodes of Priyumvada and Ruru as well as Urvasie and Pururavus which Sri Aurobindo had already poetised. The Mahabharata relates that when Savitri chose Satyavan for her bridegroom she was told of the... untransmutable into a luminous and immortal vehicle. Consequently, Sri Aurobindo, while reading the Vedic and Upanishadic sense in the term Death, does not overlook its common physical sense which the Mahabharata kept in view. Unlike the old scriptures, he refuses to recognise the physical breaking-up as an unescapable destiny. The Aurobindonian Yogi does more than transmute his inward instruments: he conquers ...
... sensitivity if you could feel even a little of the gigantic inspiration that has given us this epic which can rank in value with creations like the Ramayana and the Page 140 Mahabharata on the one hand and on the other the Rigveda and the Upanishads. What I regret more is that even in the present letter you do not quite rest with stating that Sri Aurobindo does not appeal... to be weak-spined for most purposes. But there is a real attempt towards moulding a new verse form, and there is an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story in the Mahabharata. The failure of a Titan is still cause for sorrow and awe, and in such failure, as distinct from petty losses, lie seeds of fruition later. Savitri is the work of a poet steeped in the Greek... Sri Aurobindo alone among modern Indian poets has attempted the large philosophical poem but also that "there is an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story in the Mahabharata? One seems to move through sludge trying to grasp all that roundabout talk on death in one's own dharma being better than life in another's and on Savitri's being such a death rather than the ...
... worshipped after his death as a deity; this is apart from the story in the Mahabharata and the Puranas. There is no reason to suppose that the connection of his name with the development of the Bhagavata religion, an important current in the stream of Indian spirituality, was founded on a mere legend or poetic invention. The Mahabharata is a poem and not history, but it is clearly a poem founded on a great... the incarnation as a fact and accepted the historicity of Krishna as I accept the historicity of Christ. The story of Brindavan is another matter; it does not enter into the main story of the Mahabharata and has a Puranic origin and it could be maintained that it was intended all along to have a symbolic character. At one time I accepted that explanation, but I had to abandon it afterwards; there ...
... It is not like writing a small poem in a fixed metre with a limited number of modulations. If you take the poem simile, it is the Mahabharata of a Mahabharata that has to be done. And what, compared with the limited Greek perfection, is the technique of the Mahabharata? Next, what is the use of vicārabuddhi in such a case? If one has to get to a new consciousness which surpasses the reasoning ...
... Sri Krishna is not supposed to have written anything. The Gita is part of the Mahabharata which is attributed to the sage Vyasa, the contemporary of Krishna. But in its present form the Mahabharata seems to be of later origin and many scholars say that the Gita was composed afterwards by someone and put into the Mahabharata. In any case whoever wrote it was a great Yogi and certainly received his ...
... it is needed for the printing. Live as simply as you can so as to save money for the Mahabharata." He died full of love for India and her great poem. His widow, Sundari Bala Rai, faithfully carried out his great wish. One year later the translator completed his work, and the eleven volumes of the Mahabharata were presented to the European public who could now know and admire the eighteen Parvas... learning as in years. He became a guru, and remained true to his great work of teaching philosophy to the very end of his wonderful life. All who love India know the beautiful poem of the Mahabharata. It was written in Sanskrit many hundreds of years ago. Until recent times, no European could read it unless he knew Sanskrit, and that was rare. A translation into one of the European languages ...
... Perfect Master, or with as mystical a vision as dear AE, who was only occasionally a poet even approaching Yeats). And in Yeats's poem Vacillation this is clearly stated. What after all would the Mahabharata have been without the Great Battle? Is it not the record rather of our quest than of its term that makes poetry? Again, I could be wrong - this, dear Dr. Sethna, is a possibility of which India... whom I am prepared to believe may be a poet equal to Yeats. And even in translations, Kalidasa; and Valmiki, and many other Indian poets. I have searched in vain for a complete translation of the Mahabharata but I am prepared even from the several abridgements I know to believe it surpasses Homer as the Himalayas overtop the Alps. But even there, the Bhagavad Geeta is spoken on the field of the Great... as they were meant to be. Or Tagore's Bengali peasant girls; or Kunti, like a wreath of faded lotuses' pleading with her disowned son Radheya; or the fiery Draupadi; or the Savitri of the Mahabharata rather than Aurobindo's superwoman. It's unimaginative (in the poetic sense) to need Utopias and superwomen and super-birds and a superworld reached through 'evolution' and to miss the daily celebration ...
... called the Vedic age or age of intuition. The Vedas, Brahmanas and Upanishads correspond to that age. The second period is the age of Reason. The great epic literature (mainly the Ramayana and Mahabharata), great philosophical systems, codes and ethics, codes of statecraft, as also great sciences and arts, began to develop during this period. Valmiki and Vyasa are the great representatives of that... were of fairly ancient origin, to whatever date we may assign their development; physical Yoga processes existed almost from the first, and the material development portrayed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata is hardly less splendid than that of which the Raghuvamsha is so brilliant a picture. Page 39 But whereas before, these were subordinated to more lofty ideals, now they prevailed and... Kumarasambhava and the Puranas The legend is an ancient one in Hindu mythology. The story of the conception of Kumara is found in the two epics (Ramayana, Balakanda, chap. 36-37 and Mahabharata, Vanaparva, chap 223-231). The marriage of Shiva and Parvati is related in a few Puranas, particularly in the Brahma-Purana, the Skanda-Purana and in the Shiva- Purana. The version in the Shiva-Purana ...
... aspiration. Fittingly, the Book University's first venture is the Mahabharata, summarised by one of the greatest living Indians, C. Rajagopalachari; the second work is on a section of it, the Gita by H. V. Divatia, an eminent jurist and a student of philosophy. Centuries ago, it was proclaimed of the Mahabharata: " What is not in it, is nowhere." After twenty-five centuries, we can... can use the same words about it. He who knows it not, knows not the heights and depths of the soul; he misses the trials and tragedy and the beauty and grandeur of life. The Mahabharata is not a mere epic; it is a romance, telling the tale of heroic men and women and of some who were divine; it is a whole literature in itself, containing a code of life, a philosophy of social and ethical relations ...
... in that field, unequalled monuments of religious and philosophic poetry, a kind in which Europe has never been able to do anything much of any great value, but that vast national structure, the Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle the poetic literature and expressing so completely the life of a long formative age, that it is said of it in a popular saying which has the justice if also the exaggeration... 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 in the calm and collected heroism ...
... constant urge towards its realisation is evident throughout the whole course of Indian history from earlier Vedic times through the heroic period represented by the traditions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata and the effort of the imperial Mauryas and Guptas up to the Mogul unification and the last ambition of the Peshwas, until there came the final failure and the levelling of all the conflicting forces... strong uniting hand of the Indian dharma, the right functioning of the spiritual, religious, ethical and social culture of India. The full flowering of the ideal is seen in the great epics. The Mahabharata is the record of a legendary or, it may be, a historic attempt to establish such an empire, a dharmarājya or kingdom of the Dharma. There the ideal is pictured as so imperative and widely acknowledged ...
... Sanskrit. He translated his plays Meghaduta and Vikramorvasie, later published under the title The Hero and the Nymph. And it is self-evident that he read and reread the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the epics that even today remain alive in the heart and feed the imagination of the Hindus of all ages. He also started translating them – an interest which he retained over the course of many... wrote the long poem Love and Death practically at one go, and courteously dedicated it to his poet-brother Manmohan. And he embarked upon the first draft of Savitri, based on a story from the Mahabharata, which would, as the years went by, unfold into the magnificent masterwork of nearly twenty-four thousand lines as we know it today. In 1897 Aurobindo Babu, though still frequently called on ...
... from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an interpretative light on the world-pageant through a rich packed poetry could very well be true of ancient epics like Valmiki's Ramāyana and Vyasa's Mahabharata or mediaeval ones like Kalidasa's Kumārasambhava and Raghuvamsa. The last phrase about man's word being upraised to neighbour a divine utterance, rather than itself becoming such, is a pointer... earlier quotation are like the masterpieces of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa rather than like the Vedic hymns, the Upanishadic slokas or that super-Vyasan rarity - the Gita - in the midst of the Mahabharata. But these too, in Sri Aurobindo's imagination, have their own sound-waves of sight: through their metrical movement "the ocean's voice" is heard in them no less than in the mighty compositions ...
... and suffering, the mount of repentance and self-chastisement, the free spaces of ecstasy and epiphany. I will take up this theme and erect the lucent structure of a new epic. A tale from the Mahabharata of a fight between Love and Death is apt to my purpose. Basing myself on it I will write a new Divine Comedy. Everywhere I will take help of a Dantesque scaffolding and bring my own spiritual... an organic and inevitable manner. I go to the length of asserting that even if Dante had never lived and his epic had never reared its "towering fantasy" the tale of Love and Death out of the Mahabharata would have been taken up by Sri Aurobindo and metamorphosed into almost the very same super-epic of the Spirit that is Savitri. I say "almost", for what would have been missing are lines here ...
... 375 inspiration of 2 Shakespearian 367 soul and 134,160 transformation 83 Longinus 161 Lucas, F.L. 192 "lustrous lid" 36,37,307 M Mahabharata 60,61,141,182,183, 211,214 mahimā 89 Mallarmé 201 Mandukya Upanishad 99 Mantra 51,177,270,341 Sri Aurobindo's letter on 200 Marlowe 216 Milton52,102,132,186,205... evolution and 71 full of knowledge 208 function of 349 growth of consciousness 286 how to read 286 human element 18 last dictated lines 266 length of 60 Mahabharata story 4 Mother on 281,286 Mother's experiences in 330 new dimension of poetic expression 367 original form 287, 328 parallels with poems 98 philosophy and 220 ...
... intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold" or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty... conscious attempt to write Overhead poetry with a mind aware of the planes from which this inspiration comes and seeking 16 Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper. 17 Ibid. 18 The Mahabharata, Vana Parva, 641. 19 The Gita, IX.33. Page 42 always to ascend to those levels or bring down something from them, would probably result in a partial success; at its lowest ...
... way, evolution that has its beginning in Inconscience. There is a long spiritual tradition which carries in its experience this esoteric sense of the story. The story appears early in the Mahabharata and is charged with the dynamism of the Dharma, the Path of Righteousness. The word dharma has the sense of the inner law of conduct natural to one's soul and one's spiritual build-up, one's... nature of the problem and the difficulty that stands in the way. He is convinced that only if the supreme divine Power shall take birth here that this issue of mortality will be resolved. In the Mahabharata story Aswapati is a follower of the dharma and is firmly established in the truth. He rules over his kingdom with love and has concern for its citizens. But he is issueless. Therefore with the ...
... three books with as many as twenty-four cantos. This book has been entitled by the author The Book of Beginnings. One who has read the Mahabharata in its entirely is apt to compare it with its Adi Parva. As in the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata, the subsequent elaboration has been put in a nutshell in this Book of Beginnings. The background of Savitri is a legend, an ancient story ...
... relates how this Creatrix of Boundless Love and Wisdom-Splendour comes down to Earth to transform Darkness into Light, the Unreal into the Real, and Death into Immortality. The famous Mahabharata legend of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Love Conquers Death is made the basic symbol of this mystic scripture of Divine Life on Earth. The legend tells of the noble and virtuous king Aswapati... one is no more drugged by Matter, what powers develop are part of the spiritual romance related. 1 From the Pativratā Mahātmya, Chapters 291-294 of the Aranyaka or Vana Parva in the Mahabharata. 2 Savitri, pp. 1-10. 3 Ibid., pp. 11-21. Page 421 Then we are told how "these wide-poised upliftings" whose peace the "restless nether members tire of are ...
... the circumstances, even in the presence of ubiquitous death. It is to do this that Savitri comes here. She comes here as the Observer of the Vow of the Lord. She comes as pativratā . In the Mahabharata story of Savitri we see that she is committed to the joyous husbanding of the Truth. Perhaps the suggestion is that in an evolutionary way this mortal creation can eventually become an expression... functionally the merit of the path of righteousness. Although it may seem to have the colouring of an ethical illustration, the story is spiritually charged. Even in the simple narrative of the Mahabharata we see a purpose behind the story, of Page 82 the foundation of life based on truth. In it we notice the seeds of a brighter world taking birth. This birth of a bright world may ...
... writings of the other Savitri admirers, a passage from Mangesh Nadkarni's Savitri: A Brief Introduction must suffice. It says: "Sri Aurobindo's Aswapati is not the sorrow-stricken King of the Mahabharata story, who performs austerities for the sake of having a child. Sri Aurobindo's Aswapati is a seer-king, a representative and a leader of enlightened humanity... His quest is for that creative... belongs to the world of the legend and the past, Sri Aurobindo to the world of the symbol and the future. No Aurobindonian will show a lack of respect towards the world of the Rishis, of the Mahabharata and of Veda Vyasa but, however great, they belong to the "lower hemisphere" just like all the rest of the bygone history of humanity. In the first three Books of Savitri Sri Aurobindo, "in the ...
... explain the rich and marvellous Scripture in its many shades and nuances. But there is something more to it than just that. He has to expound the yogic philosophy of the Great Dialogue the sage of the Mahabharata has given to us in majesty of the classical diction and speech. He is also quite conscious of the fact that Vyasa’s work is not an ordinary dialogue at all; it is the supreme Word, the benedictive... in it. ( Jnaneshwari : 7.208-09) Vyasa the sage of boundless wisdom, aprantamati , has put the Gita in the Bhishma Parva or the Book of Bhishma of the Mahabharata and it is in the form of a dialogue between Arjuna and Sri Krishna. It is that dialogue which Jnaneshwar is presenting to us in the metrical composition of owi in his Marathi tongue. The narrative ...
... It is given as an episode in an epic history of India and of a great war fought in it. This episode focuses on a critical moment in the soul of one of the leading personages of this epic history, Mahabharata. It is also a moment of the crowning action of his life, where he faces a work which is terrible, violent and sanguinary. And he is confronted with a critical choice when he must either recoil from... outer actualities of man's life and action. The relevance of the a has been in a sense perennial right from the time it Page 157 first appeared or was written into the frame of the Mahabharata. But considering that humanity is passing today through a grim and unprecedented crisis, we are bound to look into this great book with fresh eyes and compelling concern. It has been said sometimes ...
... "It was the soul, the temperament, the ideal mind formed and expressed in them which later carved out the great philosophies, built the structure of the Dharma, recorded its heroic youth in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, intellectualized indefatigably in the classical times of the ripeness of its manhood, threw out so many original intuitions in science, created so rich a glow of aesthetic and vital... broke down in course of time, and there arose a period of the development of specialized systems of yoga. That there was a sharp conflict between the Jnana Yoga and Karma Yoga at the time of the Mahabharata can be clearly seen in the colloquy between Arjuna and Sri Krishna in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The Jnana Yoga as developed in Sankhya and the Karma Yoga which was to be found in what Sri ...
... Devayani. Devayani's father Sukracharya was Kacha's teacher. She fell in love with Kacha, but he had taken the vow of brahmacharya and refused to enter into marriage with her. One passage in the Mahabharata gives Kacha's description of the life he lived in that retreat of learning: 'Carrying the burden of sacrificial wood, kusha grass, and fuel, I was coming towards the hermitage and feeling tired,... and sacrifice, and this put him into intimate touch with Nature and subjected him to the influence and educational processes of Nature working through 'silent sympathy' as Wordsworth put it. The Mahabharata gives the full traditional story of Kacha and Devayani. A number of books on the Upanishads are available. We have taken the extract from the Katha Upanishad from Sri Aurobindo's book 'The ...
... frolic among friends. No feeling of rigidity is portrayed in this beautiful drama. There is, rather, restrained charm, joy and beauty. Other accounts, too, such as those in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata , describe the colour and warmth of the interplay of the forces of human nature, and give examples of how the teacher dealt with this interplay with gentle firmness guided by mature experience and... Ashram along with her husband, providing material care for the pupils. The Ashram was a veritable Gumkula, where the pupils were loved and cared for as members of the Guru's family. 1. In the Mahabharata (i.70), there is a description of Kanva's hermitage. It was situated on the banks of the Malini, a tributary of the Sarayu river. Numerous hermitages stretched round the central hermitage. At this ...
... innumerable warriors who could clear the ground for the manifestation of divinity that is always concealed in the highest peaks of manhood. Valmiki's Ramayana is comparable to Homer's Iliad and Vyasa's Mahabharata; all the three are great epics and all the three stand out as great hymns of heroism; each has its own excellence and Page 13 even superiority over the others, but the Ramayana alone... personal experience, can adopt for personal experimentation and personal verification. These methods are available in great works such as the Bhagavadgita, which is a well known episode in the Mahabharata, and in the Page 25 latest scientific work on Yoga, entitled The Synthesis of Yoga presented to contemporary 'humanity by Sri Aurobindo. What more can be suggested for the aid of the ...
... daily life of Indians; (c) Veda and Indian Culture; (d) Indian Natya Shastra; (e) Lessons of Ramayana; (f) Lessons of Mahabharata; (g) Significance of Puranas; (h) Significance of Ramayana and Mahabharata; (i) Indian Women; (k) Problems of Hindu-Muslim Unity; (1) Masterpieces of Indian Art; (m) Masterpieces of Indian Ar ...
... . Such an interpretation would have helped the case considerably. Hence he was asking eargerly: 'What did Drona do? What did Drona do?'* At first the witness * In the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata Drona or Dronacharya is a preceptor of the royal princes. Norton and others, ignorant of the reference, took him to be a contemporary character, in fact a conspirator. Page 287 was... that perhaps the witness did not know what Drona had done. At this Sri Karan went wild with anger and wounded pride. 'What,' he shouted, 'I, I do not know what Drona had done? Bah! Have I read the Mahabharata from cover to cover in vain?' "For half an hour a battle royal was waged between Norton and Karan over Drona's ghost. Every five minutes, shaking the Alipore judge's court, Norton hurled his ...
... can do here is to introduce you briefly to it. It was probably at Baroda that Sri Aurobindo first thought of writing a long poem based on the well-known story of Savitri and Satyavan from the Mahabharata, but the earliest draft that we have goes back to August 1916. It began as 'a Tale and a Vision'. Sri Aurobindo used to work on the poem whenever he could find some time for it from his other pressing... containing a varying number of cantos which again are of varying length. Sri Aurobindo describes the poem as 'A Legend and a Symbol' and explains: 'The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the ...
... level, the true hero is the manor woman who is able to make the complete surrender to the Divine. A brief comparison of Achilles and Arjuna Nowadays it is an undisputed fact that the Mahabharata and the Iliad are two of the world's greatest epics. In these times of a growing global consciousness it may be of interest for students and teachers of East and West to compare the two splendid... Although both poems are literary expressions of a particular people, it is clear that they are founded on actual historical events that have assumed great importance in the life of mankind. The Mahabharata gave us the great spiritual teaching of the Gita which it is said will yet liberate mankind; the Iliad led to the creation of Hellas and modern western civilization. Both epics have put before ...
... under the wheels with the belief that they will get immediate liberation. × According to the Mahabharata , Yudhishthira, the eldest of the four brothers of Arjuna, was the only person to reach Heaven alive in his mortal body. He was accompanied by a dog which he had found on the way. It is said that... of disciples who often repeated the same points again and again. × Son of Vyasa (the author of Mahabharata), was famous for his purity. Even the Apsaras (dancers of Heaven), when they were bathing, did not feel the need to cover themselves before him, but they quickly covered themselves when Vyasa passed ...
... Savitri SECTION C 'THE BOOK OF THE DOUBLE TWILIGHT' Already, in Book IX, while the dramatic situation derives from the Mahabharata original, the dialectic in which Savitri and Death (Yama) engage begins increasingly to assume a distinctly Aurobindonian hue and cast. In Vyasa's epic, Savitri is the pure wife whose deathless love... making her drop her demand and go back to her home on the earth. It is the perfect stalemate. Page 207 Savitri, being more than the 'legend' that it is in the Mahabharata and, in Sri Aurobindo's conception, a 'symbol' besides, the human and the symbolic figures, worlds and actions, generally run parallel; but sometimes either the legend or the symbol monopolises ...
... again, from Sri Aurobindo's early experiments in lyric and narrative poetry— Songs to Myrtilla, Urvasie, Love and Death and follow his career as a poet; his renderings from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata —the fragments, Nala and Chitrangada, the 'heroic' Vidula and Baji Prabhou, the blank verse dramas, the many philosophical poems culminating in Ahana —the numerous 'mystical' pieces included... epic narratives of other times and of our own time. Thus we may start with the Veda, follow the symbolism of Ahana, Usha, Savitri, Aswin, the lost herds and their ultimate recovery, linger on the Mahabharata story of Savitri and Satyavan, linger too near the field of battle where Krishna and Arjuna enact the dialectic of the Bhagavad Gita, and find ourselves at last in the world of Savitri wherein ...
... help in preparing themselves to take this approach. And for such people Nolinida, in my view, is the best help I can recommend. The story of Satyavan and Savitri is at least as old as the Mahabharata; in fact, it first appeared many thousand years earlier as a Vedic myth. Sri Aurobindo's main intention in taking up the story of Satyavan and Savitri was to use it as a framework for projecting... Part I (Books 1, 2, and 3, pages 1 to 348) of Savitri which extends almost over half the length of the epic and deals with Aswapathi's yoga. What corresponds to this in Vyasa's narration in the Mahabharata is the description of Aswapathi's sacrifice, described in 10 verses! Particularly Book II, which describes Aswapathi's exploration of the various worlds of consciousness, is probably the hardest ...
... stability of a rock. This is the difference between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised Page 101 for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, ādi-kavi. In the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of poetic form as ...
... sculpture, the stability of the hill. This is the difference between .the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and, Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, a di-kavi. In the Mahabharata we find not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of knowledge ...
... the health and physical fitness of the body for a very long period - to stop or slow down the process of deterioration. 2. Ichha Mrityu - death only when wished - Example of Bhishma in the Mahabharata - He must have reached the first step also. 3. Physical Immortality. The Process 1. The psychic Contact - this is the very first step. 2. Putting the whole being under the psychic... have kept in store for me: "Mantra-sadhan or the body's dissolution." (82) Soul-Searching In childhood I used to hear from my Burodidi stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. There, rishis and munis used to undertake tapasya of a thousand years in order to win some boon from the Divine. In my child-like way I used to imagine that these rishis and munis certainly ...
... of sculpture, the stability of a rock. This is the difference between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, a di-kavi. In the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of knowledge ...
... cottage to cottage and popularising the Ramayana. By the way, there is a point made by someone about Vyasa and his Mahabharata. He says that Vyasa was greater than Sri Krishna because he had universal sympathy: Vyasa expresses his sympathy with every character he created in the Mahabharata. SRI AUROBINDO: Where does Vyasa say that? This looks like Valmiki's intention to write for the masses. Both poets ...
... delve into the treasures of Sanskrit literature, and presently to familiarise himself with Marathi and Gujarati as well. He was thus able by and by to read and appreciate the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the masterpieces of Kalidasa, the shatakas of Bhartrihari, not to mention the classics of modem Bengali literature. Sri Aurobindo was in this manner happily restored to his great cultural heritage... terraced roofs of private houses, young men would meet to hear about the lives of Mazzini and Garibaldi, to read exhortations from Swami Vivekananda, to listen to the warlike incidents of the Mahabharata and to comments on the Bhagavad Gita. The number of samitis increased daily. 42 In Maharashtra, under Lokamanya Tilak's unparalleled leadership, political education came to be imparted during ...
... spiritual civilization, India did not divorce spirituality and materialism. From very early times she evolved a happy blend of material resources with spiritual values. In the Veda, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, one finds a well-formulated system of governance. From olden times several systems of rule were known: monarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy were all in vogue. Of these, hereditary monarchy was the more... men and animals. The State employed caretakers for this purpose. That our ancients were well versed in civic administration of towns and villages, becomes clear from a simple perusal of the Mahabharata. Vyasa, its author, through the mouths of Bhishma and Vidura, explained in detail the intricacies of Statecraft. Our later kings were no less experts in administration. For example, at the time ...
... however, taken from other sources besides the Tantras. Many of them are from the considerable body of devotional hymns attributed by tradition to the philosopher Shankaracharya, a few from the Mahabharata and the Puranas. Most are well-known stotras addressed to the various forms and names of the female Energy, Mother of the worlds, whose worship is an important part of that many-sided and synthetic... and an understanding of what Hindu worship is and means, absurd mistakes are likely to be made. I have thus, in addition to such oral aid, availed myself of the Commentaries of Nilakantha on the Mahabharata, of Gopala Page 569 Chakravarti and Nagoji Bhatta on Chandi, and of Nilakantha on the Devibhagavata. As regards the Tantra, the great Sadhana Shastra, nothing which is both of an und ...
... of Ruru and Pramadvura–I have substituted a name more manageable to the English tongue–her death in the forest by the snake and restoration at the price of half her husband's life is told in the Mahabharata. It is a companion legend to the story of Savitri but not being told with any poetic skill or beauty has remained generally unknown. I have attempted in this poem to bring it out of its obscurity... Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian Patala and hells. The central idea of the narrative alone is in the Mahabharata; the meeting with Kama and the descent into Hell were additions necessitated by the poverty of incident in the original story. Page 142 ...
... work of ancient and mediaeval and modern Europe. The people and the civilisation that count among their great works and their great names the Veda and the Upanishads, the mighty structures of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti and Bhartrihari and Jayadeva and the other rich creations of classical Indian drama and poetry and romance, the Dhammapada and the Jatakas, the Panchatantra... in physical images transmuted by the stress of a psychic significance and impression and line and idea colour; and its third tendency is to image the terrestrial life often magnified, as in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, or else subtilised in the transparencies of a larger atmosphere, attended by a greater than the terrestrial meaning or at any rate presented against the background of the spiritual ...
... an imposing temple is built using the unlimited supply of this construction material. From the quarried Page 5 stones of life is raised a fortification around the edifice of the Mahabharata. The architectural minutiae, and the magnificence, are planned by the great Seer and the Upanishads are the mine of that imagination and the Vedas its mountain of gems. The dialogue between the Lord... bhagawati , the Goddess Parvati expounding and firming up the might of the Supreme in a delightful revelatory manifestation. The Gita appears in the Book of Bhishma, Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata, and begins with a description of the battle-scene. Two formidable armies are standing face to face and are poised to engage themselves in the War of Destruction of the World. Dhritarashtra’s hundred ...
... and suffering, the mount of repentance and self-chastisement, the free spaces of ecstasy and epiphany. I will take up this theme and erect the lucent structure of a new epic. A tale from the Mahabharata of a fight between Love and Death is apt to my purpose. Basing myself on it I will write a new Divine Comedy . Everywhere I will take help of a Dantesque scaffolding and bring my own spiritual... an organic and inevitable manner. I go to the length of asserting that even if Dante had never lived and his epic had never reared its "towering fantasy" the tale of Love and Death out of the Mahabharata would have been taken up by Sri Aurobindo and metamorphosed into almost the very same super-epic of the Page 270 Spirit that is Savitri . I say "almost", for what would have ...
... S.R. Rao, archaeologist of the NIO, he added." What Rao considers to have been found in the first place is that the Mahabharata story of the submergence of Dwaraka is correct. This submergence he dates on firm archaeological grounds to about 1400 B.C. The Mahabharata associates the submergence with the time of the traditional Krishna who took part in the Bharata War which that epic recounts ...
... upon the whole thing as Maya and it may not exist for you. But I believe in Brahman siding against Brahman—that the Brahman, I think, has always been doing.... Krishna took sides openly in the Mahabharata and Rama also. September 3, 1943 (From a letter to a disciple.) We [Sri Aurobindo and Mother] made it plain in a letter which has been made public that we did not consider the... the Divine, abandoning ego and desire even in the midst of action or of any kind of work or all kinds of work demanded from us by the Divine.... The Indian scriptures and Indian tradition, in the Mahabharata and elsewhere, make room both for the spirituality of the renunciation of life and for the spiritual life of action. One cannot say that one only is Page 240 the Indian tradition ...
... this point of view— let it be. With love and blessings. 4 February 1966 Mother, I had planned to give "Stories from Sri Aurobindo" as we have stories from the Upanishads or the Mahabharata, with the idea that your full approval was there. X studies the original and writes it in Hindi; then I retouch the whole thing. Now I fear that you did not like it very Page 277 much... messages to the school emphasising the future: As a language teacher I have been laying great stress on the Ramayana and the songs of Kabir, Mira, etc. and the stories of the Upanishads and the Mahabharata. Please tell me what to do. If I stop them as belonging to the past, how to replace them? If I continue them, shall I not be going against your current? Not at all. It is the attitude that is ...
... optimist & I hope he may be right, but the possibility of a different outcome looks very real. And so it is foretold in the Bible, the Koran and other Islamic texts, I understand, and in the Mahabharata, most vividly. (19.4.1989) From Kathleen Raine You keep me hard at work. I have now read most of the "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" book and again admire your skill in setting... them and others of their kind in all parts of the globe not as desperate fighters for a lost cause in a time which, according to "the Bible, the Koran and other Islamic texts" as welt as the Hindu Mahabharata, is the beginning of the end, a Gotterdammerung, a Pralaya, a universal holocaust. I look upon them as scattered harbingers of the Day Sri Aurobindo has prophesied of earth's fulfilment - not ...
... Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Society, April 1991. Page 349 12. Robbins, Stephen P. Organizational Behavior. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1994. 13Ganguly, KM. The Mahabharata New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981, p. 202. 14Sri Aurobindo; The Ideal of the Karmayogin. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1974, p.60. 15.Swami Vivekananda; The Complete Works... learns to work independently with the apparatus, he also develops beauty, calm and sensitivity through his actions. The school also gives a lot of importance to story telling from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Pancatantra, and the Jataka. These are a great source of inspiration and help the children understand and internalise deeper life values. To further facilitate our endeavour in "making the ...
... Devayani. Devayani's father Sukracharya, was Kacha's teacher. She fell in love with Kacha, but he had taken the vow of brahmacharya and refused to enter into marriage with her. One passage in the Mahabharata gives Kacha's description of the life he lived in that retreat of learning: "Carrying the burden of sacrificial wood, kusha grass, and fuel, I was coming towards the hermitage and feeling tired... and sacrifice, and this put him into intimate touch with Nature and subjected him to the influence and educational processes of Nature working through "silent sympathy" as Wordsworth put it. The Mahabharata gives the full traditional story of Kacha and Devayani. A number of books on the Upanishads are available. We have taken the extract from the Katha Upanishad from Sri Aurobindo's book The ...
... affranchise the body from the obligation of death. One must reach a state of consciousness involving even the consciousness of the body when one would be able to exclaim with the mystic of the Mahabharata: "No time ripens for me, time is not my Lord." 1 It is worth noting in this connection what the Mother has pronounced on the subject of indefinite durability of a physical body: "What... Kālas na pacyate tatra Na kālas tatra vai prabhuḥ. 2 Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Vol. XIX, No. 1, p. 75. 3 The Ramayana. 4 The Mahabharata, Adiparva, 14.50. 5 Genesis, 3.24. Page 409 "The physical being could only endure, if by some means its physical causes of decay and disruption could be overcome ...
... with a number of stories of Bodhisattvas illustrate a number of psychological elements that are at work in the development of human personality. Arjuna's hesitation at the beginning of the war of Mahabharata can easily illustrate the distinction between thought, will, emotion, impulse, sensation, perception, and even involuntary and reflex functions of the body. The story of Socrates can illustrate the... clearly through the life and thought of Socrates. Stories of adventure and courage such as we find in the life of Sri Rama and Sri Krishna as also in the lives of great personages in Ramayana and Mahabharata provide deep insights into the psychological depths, which become manifest in the conquest of deep-seated ambitions by powers of valour and will-force, of purity of character and of the powers of ...
... Experience: 1. Introspection: distinction between thought, will, emotion, impulse, sensation, perception, and functions of the body. 2. Story of Arjuna at the beginning of the Mahabharata War to illustrate the above distinctions (other similar stories) 3. Determination of the aim of life: The Meaning of an idea Ideals of truth, beauty and goodness Ideal... and development of English in India: famous Indian authors and famous works of Indian authors in English. Part II Two greatest works of India in Sanskrit: The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. An outline of the contents of there two works. Part III Definition of Culture. What is Indian Culture? Spirituality, brilliance of intellectuality and profusion ...
... constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer, if more incalculable, guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence. In the epic literature of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, we find a strong and free intellectual and ethical thinking; there is an incessant criticism of life by the intelligence and ethical reason. We find in it a multisided curiosity... psychic plane or in physical images transmitted by the stress of a psychic significance and impression. The tendency to image the terrestrial life often magnified, as Page 22 in the Mahabharata and in the Ramayana, reflects the Vedic influence. In the field of collective life, Indian society developed its communal coordination of the mundane life of interest and desire, kama and ...
... of the general trend of the development of Indian philosophy, we may notice that four systems of philosophy, Vedavāda, Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta, were prominent at the time when the war of the Mahabharata was fought and the perplexities arising from the conflict between Sankhya and Yoga bewildered and disabled Arjuna at the crucial moment of the commencement of the war to such an acute point of crisis... great psychological sense of sacrifice that was emphasized in the yoga of the Veda and the Upanishads was greatly lost in course of time, and the word sacrifice had come to mean, at the time of the Mahabharata, the practice of ritual sacrifices which was propagated as the effective means for securing the fulfillment of desires. Hence, Sri Krishna, as a revolutionary teacher opposed the current sway of ...
... caused what is called mahābhiniśkramana. We see a similar upheaval in the life of Arjuna when he underwent a sudden crisis where in search of the right at the commencement of the great war of the Mahabharata, he found all standards of conduct which were so far his staff of the journey crashing down so as to cast him into a deep depression (vishāda) from which he felt he could come out only by escaping... described in the Bhagavad Gita in one of its most powerful poetic passages, in his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo describes the Supreme form of the world spirit in which Arjuna, the hero of the Mahabharata sees God magnificence and beautiful and terrible, and in that vision the divine will is made manifest. Appendix X (p. 162) ___________________ 1 Rig Veda. l 10.1,2 2 Rig Veda, ...
... records and are typified in the ideal of Samarat, Chakravarty Raja and the military and political use of the ashwvamedha and rajsuya sacrifices. Ramayana and Mahabharata, the two great national epics, illustrate this theme. Mahabharata recounts the establishment of a unifying dharmarajya or imperial reign of justice. Ramayana starts with an idealised description of such a rule pictured as one ...
... It is given as an episode in an epic history of India and of a great war fought in it. This episode focuses on a critical moment in the soul of one of the leading personages of this epic history, Mahabharata. It is also a moment of the crowning action of his life, where he faces a work which is terrible, violent and sanguinary. And he is confronted with a critical choice when he must either recoil from... realisation to the outer actualities of man's life and action. The relevance of the Gita has been in a sense perennial right from the time it first appeared or was written into the frame of the Mahabharata. But Page 31 considering that humanity is passing today through a grim and unprecedented crisis, we are bound to look into this great book with fresh eyes and compelling concern. It ...
... to justify employment of violent means. He, however, wanted a greater clarity on that question. His question was: Is violence justified, as it was in the context of the situation that led to the Mahabharata war? And if so, to what extent? Page 102 Balwant said that when he met Brahmadev ji, he experienced such an inexpressible peace that the idea of war had no standing-ground in it. He said... creed of the Aryan fighter. 'And even when Sri Krishna asked Arjuna to take up arms, he insisted that he should fight without anger, without wrath and without any sense of revenge. If you read Mahabharata carefully, you will find that Sri Krishna made an extraordinary effort to avoid a war; it was only when no other alternative was available that he came to advocate war, and that, too, as a means ...
... the great rivers that the sacred stream of Indian culture flowed all over the land. In addition, there were the legends of the gods and the two great epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata -, which were read and moved people in every part of India. These legends were known by every Indian family and created a deep psychological bond among the people. A very important factor... uniting hand of the Indian dharma, the right functioning of the spiritual, religious, ethical and social culture of India. The full flowering of this ideal is seen in the great epics. The Mahabharata is the record of a legendary or, it may be, a historic attempt to establish such an empire, a dharmarajya or kingdom of the Dharma. There the ideal is pictured as so imperative and widely acknowledged ...
... a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence. In the epic literature of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, we find a strong and free intellectual and ethical thinking; there is an incessant criticism of life by the intelligence and ethical reason. We find in it multi-sided curiosity... taken from the inner psychic plane or in physical images transmitted by the stress of a psychic significance and impression. The tendency to image the terrestrial life often magnified, as in the Mahabharata and in the Ramayana, reflects the Vedic influence. In the field of collective life, Indian society developed its Page 93 communal coordination of the mundane life of interest and ...
... the s loka, which is very familiar to Sanskrit. We may call it the basic form of Sanskrit verse and its backbone as it were. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are composed for the most part in this metre; the Gita (which forms part of the Mahabharata) is almost wholly in this metre, as in the opening lines, dharma-ksetre kuruksetre samaveta yuyutsavah mamaka pandavas-caiva kim-akurvata ...
... Life". In the poem King Aswapathy is the symbol of the aspiring soul of man as manifested in life on earth. III THE LEGEND The story woven in this epic is based upon the Mahabharata (Aranyak Parva, Ch. 248). This is the story. Aswapathy, the king of Madra, was childless. In order to have a child he resorted to austerities and a life of celibacy, fasting every sixth day. Sim... him that he granted her several boons, the last of which was the restoration of the life of Satyavan. Thus Savitri triumphed over Death as well as Fate and returned to her hermitage. In the Mahabharata legend, Satyavan afterward recovers his father's kingdom and rules happily over it. This legend has been kept almost intact in its story-part by the poet. But the legend itself can be interpreted ...
... first puzzling in the extreme to me. But repeated re-readings enabled me to complete this Part which is more or less a critical synopsis of the poem. I now turned to the original legend in the Mahabharata and made my own rendering, though I found the prose versions of Pratap Chandra Roy and John Brough as also the verse renderings of Sir Edwin Arnold, Romesh Chunder... of his strength, and not just the 'weaker' sex; not frailty but strength is the mark of woman: such is the inspiring Hindu conception of the role of woman as wife as it finds expression in the Mahabharata story. The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, explaining the whole 'meaning and purpose' of his Malte Laurids Brigge, once asked in the course of a letter: .. .how is it ...
... 386,421-423,458 Lowes.J.L. 315 Machen, Arthur 317 MacLeish, Archibald 390,391 Madhusudan 40 Maeterlinck, Maurice 377 Mahabharata, 12,21,45,46,135,200,201, 209,210,242-244,252,254,256,261,279, 375-377,416,418,419,448,458,460 Maharaja of Baroda 8 Maitra, S.K.33,34 Mallarme317 Marlowe, Christopher 337 ... 390 Savage, D.S. 34 Savitri - Need for the reverent study of, 56-57; summary of, 61-238; publication dates of, 242; context of the original upakhyana, 240-244; the Mahabharata story, 244-251; character of Savitri as seen by other writers, 252-253; Vyasa's Savitri, 254-255; Nala and, 256; comparative analysis of Vyasa's tale and, 257-259; Sri Aurobindo's contribution in ...
... no particular emphasis even on the title-page. Savitri remains a 'legend' and a 'symbol', for so Sri Aurobindo wrought it throughout. For the 'legend', Sri Aurobindo went to the Mahabharata. In the Vana Parva (The Book of the Forest), Rishi Markhandeya tells many stories to Prince Yudhishtira, partly to instruct him and largely to console him. One of the tales so narrated covers... But Savitri's role is essentially dynamic; she braves Fate and fights Death, she saves her husband and redeems his and her father's families. The Savitri upakhyana or episode in the Mahabharata is the most dearly cherished of such stories; indeed it is more than a mere story, for Savitri to this day is deeply imbedded in the Hindu woman's consciousness as the pure virgin awaiting her future ...
... the original Mahabharata has already been transformed by Sri Aurobindo into the vast dimensions of 'The Book of Yoga', which describes Savitri's realisations of her secret self, of cosmic consciousness, and, finally, of supracosmic or transcendent consciousness. The events of the fateful day from dawn to evening are compressed into a few pregnant verses in the Mahabharata, and nothing ...
... an outline of an idealised non-rakshasic Rakshasa! Bengalis in those days were very fond of weeping. I think it was Romesh Dutt who translated "Savitri'' from the Mahabharata and portrayed her as weeping, whereas in the Mahabharata there is no trace of it. Even when her heart was being sawed in two not a single tear appeared in her eyes. By making her weep he took away the very strength of which ...
... recall; One simple girl breathes sweeter than you all. 101 At Baroda naturally his interests first hovered round Sanskrit and Bengali poetry Renderings from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, from Chandidas, Vidyapati, Horu Thakur, Nidhu Babu and others, from Bhartrihari, from the Sagar-Sangit of C.R. Das, from the Vedas and the Upanishads, from Bankim Chandra and Dwijendralal Roy—... period, and perhaps not revised for publication (it is from a posthumously published volume), but the touch is light, and the sentiment is sugary. Vidula (1907) from the Udyog-Parva of the Mahabharata has a deeper voice as befits the theme, and Songs of the Sea (which belongs to an even later period) are more satisfying still.There are forty pieces in diverse stanza forms and ranging over a ...
... up. She was to leave her body a few years later. × 42 The place of the great battle in the Mahabharata epic, which brought into conflict the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the five brothers supported by Krishna. × ... × 72 The Pandavas were the five brothers who fought by Krishna's side during the Great War of the Mahabharata. × 73 Narad is a demi-god who often comes on earth to deliver the messages of heaven or reveal ...
... and perceptive comments were perhaps a catalytic that helped the progress of the poem during the next few years. IV That Savitri was the great upākhyāna or tale imbedded in the Mahabharata, now being rendered anew in the light of the Aurobindonian vision and packed in its every rift with the ore of his own spiritual experiences, made the poem important enough. Some had a shrewd... Aurobindo's intimacy with the occult increased day by day; and there were the experiences of the Mother too. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri has doubtless the bone-structure of the tale in the Mahabharata, but the tissues and the cells, the blood-streams and the pulse-beats, all derive from the Mother's and the Master's inner experiences and yogic realisations. In the Mother's prayer of 24 November ...
... illustration, the Mother tells the life of Pratap Chandra Rai whose untiring efforts were to result in the publication of the first English translation of the Mahabharata; and there was likewise M. V. Ramanujachari who brought out the Tamil Mahabharata. To undertake some great and worthwhile task is verily to compel the answering response of Grace to see the task through to a successful end. "In this wide ...
... recognition of any merit they have for another strong change." Sri Aurobindo set forth in a letter the symbolism of his epic poem, Savitri. "The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering Page 200 death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan... Sri Aurobindo very early. We have seen that at the age of twenty-seven, while at Baroda Sri Aurobindo wrote Love and Death. It is a stirring poem in blank verse; this plot also is taken from the Mahabharata. Ruru descends into Hades to bring back to Earth and life his beloved Priyumvada —snatched untimely away by Death —in exchange for half his life span. "The poem itself was written in a white heat ...
... of human speech so that a new Nirukta can be formed and the new interpretation of the Veda based upon it." Yaska was the author of the original Nirukta, an etymological text, mentioned in the Mahabharata. Page 365 Sri Aurobindo worked on Nirukta over a period of time. The work progressed, a little hesitatingly at first, then more surely. Even on 28 December 1912, when a certain... the dictionary. Yet although an unknown tongue, although no particular attention was paid 1 Panchali's Vow. Panchali or Draupadi was the wife of the five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata. Page 367 to the words or their order everything remains in the mind even after several days. Formerly even a verse of Latin, English, Sanskrit carefully studied & committed to memory ...
... speech in self-revelation and the comparative inadequacy of acts, except as a corroboration or a check. The only epics which have creations equal to dramatic creation in their nearness to us are the Mahabharata and the Ramayan; and the art-form of those far more closely resembles the methods of the modern novel than those of epic poetry as it is understood in Europe; they combine, that is to say, the dramatic ...
... more effective form and with a more modern organisation. What was the secret of that gigantic intellectuality, spirituality and superhuman moral force which we see pulsating in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in the ancient philosophy, in the supreme poetry, art, sculpture and architecture of India? What was at the basis of the incomparable public works and engineering achievements, the opulent and exquisite ...
... the historical novels, were rather pieces of successful journalism than literature. Still, even where it was most defective, his work was always useful to the world. For instance, his Ramayana and Mahabharata, though they are poor and commonplace poetry and do unpardonable violence to the spirit of the original, yet familiarised the average reader in England with the stories of the epics and thus made ...
... between the Deva in human form and the incarnate Rakshasa, between the representative of a high culture and Dharma and a huge unbridled force and gigantic civilisation of the exaggerated Ego. The Mahabharata, of which the Gita is a section, takes for its subject a lifelong clash between human Devas and Asuras, the men of power, sons of the Gods, who are governed by the who are out for the service of ...
... It was the soul, the temperament, the ideal mind formed and expressed in them which later carved out the great philosophies, built the structure of the Dharma, recorded its heroic youth in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, intellectualised indefatigably in the classical times of the ripeness of its manhood, threw out so many original intuitions in science, created so rich a glow of aesthetic and vital ...
... in the world in a close companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and divine Self in humanity. There is a method of explaining the Gita in which not only this episode but the whole Mahabharata is turned into an allegory of the inner life and has nothing to do with our outward human life and action, but only with the battles of the soul and the powers that strive within us for possession ...
... been not the Lord of Brindavan and Mathura and Dwarka or a prince and warrior or the charioteer of Kurukshetra, but only one more great anchorite. The Indian scriptures and Indian tradition, in the Mahabharata and elsewhere, make room both for the spirituality of the renunciation of life and for the spiritual life of action. One cannot say that one only is the Indian tradition and that the acceptance of ...
... Lenin, 192 literature, 73, 80 love, 14, 91,153 gospel of, 45,46, 144 M machinery , 103 , 127 , 135, 136, 141 exaggerated importance of, 51,52, 71, 79 ,81 of the State, 104 , 177 Mahabharata, 46, 98(fn), 1oo(fn), 238, 240 Mahomed, 190 Mahomedans, see under Muslims Malaviya, Madan Mohan, Pandit, 166 man/mankind, 44.45,65,67,94, 112, 115,118,119,120,125,127,128,129, 134,135, 136 ...
... explorations. One is never too careful with books which have the most pernicious effect. Blessings. 17 April 1967 I have been laying great stress on the stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata and on the songs of Kabir, Mira, etc. Is it against your way to continue these old things? Not at all—it is the attitude that is important. The past must be a spring-board towards the future ...
... some trouble to show it. On the other hand, if they are demoralised, if they are suffering from sinkings and searchings of the heart, they ought to take some trouble to hide it. The words of the Mahabharata apply with particular force. "Never should a prince and leader bow his haughty head to fear, Let his fortune be however desperate, death however near. If his soul grow faint, let him imprison ...
... while the fight for Swaraj seems to have ceased or passed away from us into worthier hands. Madras has taken up the herol out of our hands, and today it is over Tuticorin that the gods of the Mahabharata hover in their aerial cars watching the chances of the fight which is to bring back the glorious days of old. Gallant Chidambaram, brave Padmanabha, intrepid Shiva defying the threats of exile and ...
... they too have their cosmic field in which they exercise their function and authority and some of them were once divine Powers (the former gods, pūrve devāḥ , as they are called somewhere in the Mahabharata) who have fallen towards the Darkness by revolt against the divine Will behind the cosmos. The word "Appearances" refers to the forms they take in order to rule the world, forms often false and always ...
... sadhak on the physical plane , however successful it might have been for the inner life. Krishna did great things and was very clearly a manifestation of the Divine. But I remember a passage of the Mahabharata in which he complains of the unquiet life his followers and adorers gave him, their constant demands, reproaches, their throwing of their unregenerate vital nature upon him. And in the Gita he speaks ...
... got into the very blood and mind and life of the race and made itself the fountain-head of all that incessant urge to spirituality which has been its distinguishing gift and cultural motive. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana revealing to it in forms of noble beauty and grandiose or beautiful or telling types of character the joy of its forms of life, the significance of its spiritual, ethical and aesthetic ...
... lived ten lives since then and don't remember. I don't think there was any falling of the seed of the idea or growth and maturing of it; it just came—from my reading about the story of Ruru in the Mahabharata ; I thought, Well, here's a subject, and the rest burst out of itself. Mood and atmosphere? I never depended on these things that I know of—something wrote in me or didn't write, more often didn't ...
... illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Page 47 Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold" or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty ...
... woman in the next life—except when they become animal, but even then I think the male becomes a male animal and the female a female animal. There are only stray cases quoted like Shikhandi's in the Mahabharata for variations of sex. The Theosophist conception is full of raw imagination, one Theosophist even going so far as to say that if you are a man in this birth you are obliged to be a woman in the ...
... Adwaitavadin Acharyas, Sri Shankara and the rest. THE GURU It is not opposed to the teaching of Srikrishna who is the greatest of all teachers and the best of Jagatgurus. For he tells Sanjay in the Mahabharata that between the creed of salvation by works and the creed of salvation by no works, that of salvation by works is the true creed and he condemns the other as the idle talk of a weakling; and again ...
... The greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race, the most perfect system of Karmayoga known to man in the past, is to be found in the Bhagavad Gita. In that famous episode of the Mahabharata the great basic lines of Karmayoga are laid down for all time with an incomparable mastery and the infallible eye of an assured experience. It is true that the path alone, as the ancients saw it ...
... - and the traditional woman may do so before her husband in whom she feels the presence of the Divine. Of course in modern times much has changed, but Sri Aurobindo is dealing with a tale in the Mahabharata, filling out imaginatively what is merely hinted at there in a few lines. The sex-act, which you misread here, comes 16 lines later as a climax - and what a climax in a phrase at once forceful and ...
... does not agree with my realisations which are of the actuality of unalterable bliss and strength and knowledge in the midst of desireless phenomenal action. I am of the mind of Sri Krishna in the Mahabharata when he says, "Some preach action in this world and some preach inaction; but as for those who preach inaction, I am not of the opinion of those weaklings." Na me matam tasya durbalasya . But ...
... superior poetry but poetry from a level of being which has spiritual superiority - a superiority that does not add to the purely poetical quality: You have said somewhere that, in spite of the Mahabharata and Ramayana being greater, wider and deeper creations than the Iliad and Shakespeare's work, Vyasa and Valmiki, though not inferior, are not superior poets. Doesn't this amount to saying ...
... of the royal dynasties, examines them for internal consistency, compares them to accounts from Greek, Chinese, Arabic and other sources, shows them to reach back to 3138 B.C. to the end of the Mahabharata war, points out a flaw in the conventional correspondence accorded to the different lists as it pertains to Sandrocottus in circa 320 B.C., and reconciles them by pushing back the correspondence ...
... with Bhima and General Montgomery with Arjuna? After all, were even the Pandavas virtuous without defect, calm and holy and quite unselfish and without passions? There are many incidents in the Mahabharata which seem to show the contrary, that they had their defects and failings. Page 100 And in the Pandava army and its leaders there must have been many who were not paragons ...
... Mother is the only platform that is high enough. History shows that the birth of something new always creates a period of confusion and bewilderment. Krishna was on Earth at the time of the Mahabharata war ; before him, the Avatar Rama had to do battle with the asuric Ravana of Lanka and his legions; around the Mediterranean and especially in the Middle East the time of Christ was a whirlpool ...
... well as his coming causes the crisis. Rama, the Avatar of the rational mind, fought his great battle with the ten-headed asura Ravana, king of Lanka. 17 Krishna incarnated at the time of the Mahabharata war, when the world of the peoples who participated in that war was in peril of perdition because of the Kauravas. The Buddha came at the time of the calcification of the Vedic ritual; so important ...
... of his symbol is that of Solomon. A disciple of whom some incarnations are common knowledge was Nolini Kanta Gupta, a great yogi. He himself has said that he was Yuyutsu in the war on which the Mahabharata is based; Virgil, the Roman poet and friend of Caesar Augustus; Pierre de Ronsard, the French poet of the Pleiade and friend of Francois Clouet; Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s councillor and s ...
... began needing it for his political activities; before long, he would be able to write articles and deliver speeches in Bengali. And he learned Sanskrit, the language that gave him access to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , to the plays of Kalidasa, to the Upanishads and the Bhagavat Gita — to the age-old wisdom of India and its sanatana dharma , ‘the eternal religion’. Up until then Aurobindo ...
... the other two lead to Adwaita which is the highest truth on the spiritual plane. I am not competent to say anything about the teachings of different Philosophies but I shall only quote from Mahabharata the answer of Yudhisthir to Yaksha about— कः पन्था (What path to follow?) Yudhisthir answer, घेदा घिमिन्ना घिमिन्नाः नासौ मुनियस्य मत न भिन्नम् | घर्मस्य तत्चं निहितं गुहाया ...
... mean by this wish is that you may never forget the constant source of happiness which is so near but which you mistakenly think to be "still so far away". You most probably know the story from the Mahabharata which I once recounted in a "Talk" of mine. Let me remind you of it. Draupadi was dragged to the court of Duryodhana and threatened that her clothing would be taken off. Strip-tease had ...
... Sarnudragupta flourished in the 4th century A.D .'The moment we put this Gupta emperor in the 3rd century B.C. we have to pay attention to other facts noted by Sircar 8 himself: "In one context the Mahabharata places the Ābhīras in Aparānta; but in another it associates the people with the Sudras, and assigns both the tribes to the land near vinaśena where the Sarasvatī lost itself in the sands of ...
... common eye a rather farfetched folly. Actually it is just the opposite. To drive that point home I cannot do better than bring in Sri Krishna again and make a small digression to an episode in the Mahabharata. You know that Draupadi was dragged to the court of Duryodhana and threatened that her sari would be taken off. Strip-tease had not yet come into fashion and so Draupadi was quite ...
... 103 paths of, 115, 116 spiritual, 116 L Lele, Vishnu Bhaskar, Yogi, 141 liberation, 23, 40-42, 65, 120, 144, 146, 147 Lila, concept of, 83, 84 M Mahabharata , 20, 107 Page 170 Mayavada (Illusionism) doctrine, 82 meditation, 55, 117, 118, 142, 151 mental being, 101 mental noise, 12,13 forms of ...
... earlier quotation are like the masterpiece; of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa rather than like the Vedic hymns, the Upanishadic slokas or that super-Vyasan rarity — the Gita — in the midst of the Mahabharata. But these too, in Sri Aurobindo's imagination, have their own sound-waves of sight: through their metrical movement "the ocean's voice" is heard in them no less than in the mighty compositions ...
... inspiration has an exquisite blending of the Greek and Elizabethan, but Sri Aurobindo's poetry, epic in range, is almost entirely Greek. Sanskrit literature, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti, may have opened a new world of vision and taste and supplied him with new subject-matter to transmute and make his own, but in flawless power and self-sufficiency, specially ...
... felicitous prosperity. To discover Savitri is to transform our mortality. If we have to characterize Sri Aurobindo's Savitri by suitable epithets, we may very well go to Vyasa's tale in the Mahabharata and use his descriptions of Aswapati's daughter Savitri. She is a radiant daughter, kanyā tejasvīni , she is a damsel of heaven, devakanyā , she is heavenly and radiant in form, devarūpiṇi ...
... bringing out thereby the broad lines of its "drama of integral self-realisation" through judicious and eloquent quotes. The question of the original content of Vyasa's story in the Mahabharata and Sri Aurobindo's modifications thereof is dealt with in several of these approaches, but most completely in Deshpande's essay. The biographical context, equating Savitri with the Mother and ...
... The Birth of Savitr The Tale* The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ...
... is from the author's A Study of Savitri. The book also discusses other aspects of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. ROMESH CHANDRA DUTT: The well-known translator of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata rendered the Savitri-tale, Pativrata Mahatmya (pages 492-506), in the Locksley Hall metre with great vigour and fluency. Sri Aurobindo had dinner with him once. T.V. KAPALI SASTRY: ...
... composition of Savitri has a long history; definitely it has a history of thirty-four years, beginning with August 1916 till mid-November 1950. The poem started as a narrative tale picked up from the Mahabharata. It had in the beginning some eight hundred lines. Eventually it grew into a full epic and consists of twelve books running into twenty-four thousand lines. In the process it acquired the significance ...
... to the entire passage which must be seen in the totality of the context. This passage is from the Book of Fate, Canto Two, in which Narad is letting know the Queen—Savitri’s mother, Malawi in the Mahabharata narrative—that it is wrong to complain about death and fate in this world when she herself has chosen its lot, that she herself is the author of her pain, a harsh truth to tell to the emotionally ...
... appearance of Savitri in 1950.) Vyasa's Savitri : R Y Deshpande (This is a verse-by-verse rendering into English of the tale of Savitri as we have in the Book of the Forest of the Mahabharata. The original Sanskrit text is also given.) Page 94 ...
... "The greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race, the most perfect system of Karmayoga known to man in the past, is to be found in the Bhagavad Gita. In that famous episode of the Mahabharata the great basic lines of Karmayoga are laid down for all time with an incomparable mastery and the infallible eye of an assured experience. It is true that the path alone, as the ancients saw it ...
... man's inner mind and life to the Divine in the universe were attempted through the development of great religious movements, philosophies, 3 many-sided epic literature (particularly Ramayana and Mahabharata), Page 21 systems of Puranas and Tantras, 4 and even through art and science. An enlarged secular turn was given, and this was balanced by deepening of the intensities of psych ...
... is called mahābhiniśkramaṇa. We see a similar upheaval in the life of Arjuna when he underwent a sudden crisis where in search of the right action at the commencement of the great war of the Mahabharata, he found all standards of conduct which were so far his staff of the journey crashing down so as to cast him into a deep depression (vishāda) from which he felt he could come out only by escaping ...
... C., during which a balanced structure of society and human life was constructed under the ideals presented in the Veda. In the ancient Upanishads and in ever-living epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, we have glimpses of that society and its ideals, its heroism and its law of harmony and dharma. This was the stage when the people of India, covering the entire land from the Northern Himalayas ...
... horrified to see the state of my torn books. I lifted these books to put them in good order. These were my favourite books,—books of Tagore and Whitman, of Shakespeare and Kalidasa, Ramayana and Mahabharata. And beneath them all were a few torn pages of the Gita. As I took these pages in my hand, I tumbled and sat down in my chair. I felt exhausted and, in no time, went to sleep. I do not know ...
... reality; xiv.Intelligence in animals and birds; xv.Consciousness in matter; xvi.Sincerity; xvii.Introspection; Page 631 XVIII. Story of Arjuna at the beginning of the Mahabharata was to illustrate distinction between thought, will, emotion, impulse, sensation, perception, and functions of the body; XIX. Pursuit of beauty; XX. Pursuit of goodness; XXI. Meaning ...
... accent, was a matter of supreme importance to Vedic ritualists. The sanctity of the text prevented such interpolations, alterations and modernising versions as have affected the text form of the Mahabharata. There does not seem to be much doubt that the Samhita has substantially remained unaltered, after it Page 49 was arranged by the great sage and compiler Vyasa. Thanks to the fidelity ...
... our own times. In any case Sri Krishna is a living reality for teeming millions in India and elsewhere, and it is that reality which is read by devotees in the accounts of Sri Krishna given in the Mahabharata and in the Puranas and in various other accounts. Like millions in India, we simply love Sri Krishna, and we do not enter into debate about the object of our love. The stories that we have read ...
... endurance is strength; strength is the fundamental Page 347 Bhima ready to lift his family on his shoulders (Jatugriha Daha: Nandalal Bose). This refers to an episode of the Mahabharata when the Pandavas escape from "the house of lac" which has been set on fire. Bhima is shown here as carrying his mother Kunti. (Courtesy: NGMA, New Delhi) force behind speed; ...
... ciousness and Experience: Introspection: distinction between thought, will, emotion, impulse, sensation, perception, and functions of the body. Story of Arjuna at the beginning of the Mahabharata War to illustrate the above distinctions (other similar stories). Determination of the aim of life: The meaning of an ideal Ideals of truth, beauty and goodness Ideal of perfection ...
... remains stored in a non-germinated seed-form to be effective in future lives. If the deeds done are of an extreme character, they generally produce fruit in the same life, so it is claimed. Thus, the Mahabharata declares: "Atyugra-puṇya-pāpānām ihaiva phalam aśnute." Have we not seen in our own times how the Nemesis of Karma has violently overtaken the fates of Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and their compeers ...
... beings act on different planes of consciousness. Their functions vary and they are more or less powerful depending on their respective fields of activity. Some are Asuras of a very high order. The Mahabharata calls them 'p ū rve dev ā h', the 'former gods'. They were godly in nature at one time but subsequently revolted against the Divine and became Asuras. The Asuras are generally found on the mental ...
... Page 384 himself solely with a sublime and confident ignorance, and "lumped together all her greatest achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass of unspeakable barbarism." 11 Sri Aurobindo wrote a sufficiently big book of almost four hundred pages to repudiate and smash to ...
... ness and Experience 1. Introspection: distinction between thought, will, emotion, impulse, sensation, perception, and functions of the body. 2. Story of Arjuna at the beginning of the Mahabharata War to illustrate the above distinctions (other similar stories). 3. Determination of the aim of life: -The meaning of an ideal -Ideals of truth, beauty and goodness -Ideal ...
... (even after being told in a prediction that he would live only for a year after the marriage), succeeded in bringing back his soul from Death and reviving him. This story or legend narrated in the Mahabharata served as a symbol of the inner story of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Speaking of this poem, Mother has said: This analogy between the ancient form of spiritual revelation and Savitri ...
... the great rivers that the sacred stream of Indian culture flowed all over the land. In addition, there were the legends of the gods and the two great epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - which were read and moved people in every part of India. These legends were known by every Indian family and created a deep psychological bond among the people. Finally, there was the ...
... further and announced that it was open to any private publisher to issue Bharati's writings without paying a copyright fee. In the meantime the phenomenal success of the cheap edition of Rajaji's Mahabharata in Tamil (otherwise known as Vyasar Virundhu) emboldened Mr. V. Govindan of Sakti Karyalayam to issue in April 1957 the Complete Poetical Works of Bharati in a single handy volume of over 600 ...
... of a primitive humanity with all its unbridled licence. A picture is presented with fullest possible detail of the vital impulses in their natural primitive unrefined state. Our Ramayana and Mahabharata too, no doubt, are replete with instances of this type of mentality. But it has been characterised there as being typical not of man, but of the titan, the demon and the ogre, it is not truly human ...
... Savitri II The Legend In the Mahabharata, the Savitri story is told in the course of seven cantos (291 to 297 in the Vana Parva). Aswapati, the King of the Madra, is pious, virtuous, high-souled, a good giver, the protector of his people, and therefore the well-beloved. But he is sorrow-stricken, being old and childless. For eighteen ...
... ultimately, this "small passage" came to be replaced by a whole Book, in fifteen cantos. 11 In fact, Aswapati's Yoga and the promise of the Goddess Savitri, which take about ten lines in the Mahabharata, occupy almost half of Sri Aurobindo's entire epic, which means more than a thousand-fold expansion! The second key event is Narad first uttering a grave warning against Savitri's ...
... Savitri X ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE LEGEND The Mahabharata version has, no doubt, provoked divers allegorical interpretations. There is the simple, obvious, and in its own way satisfactory view that it is an allegory of Love triumphant over Death. A more ingenious view has been offered by Narayan Aiyangar: ...
... heart of things. One may begin a story in two ways. One way is to begin at the beginning, from the ādikānda and Genesis, and then develop the theme gradually, as is done in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bible. The other method is to start suddenly, from the middle of the story, a method largely preferred by Western artists, like Homer and Shakespeare for instance. But it was not found ...
... important than any question of personal honour or indignities, or a parading of one's capacity or virtue, was the work to be done and its success. He would cite the example of Sri Krishna in the Mahabharata story; Sri Krishna had no intention of being caught by Jarasandha and he fled to Dwarka in order to make ready for the adversary. That is why Sri Aurobindo did not consider a retreat to be a bad ...
... the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and ...
... Kronos 4 Kumbhodara 17 Kutsa 8 L Lalan the Fakir 84 Laocoon 18 London 10 Lombards 50 M Macbeth 19 Madhuchchanda 8 Madhyama 13 Mahabharata 103, 104 Mamata 9 Manmohan Ghose, Prof. 92,102 Mantra 25 Manu 5 Marcellus 23, 24 Matthew Arnold 102 Medhatithi Kanwa 8 Michael Angelo 19 Milton 9, 16 ...
... the beginnings of it might be traced even in some of the earliest of the Vedic Riks. A serious and persistent attempt for this liberation was made later, in the age or rather ages of the Gita, the Mahabharata, the Darshanas. It was the rational spirit that impelled and inspired the Buddhist consciousness and in Europe it had its heyday in the age of Socrates and Plato. Those were intellectual ages and ...
... clear sunshine of the normal wakeful state. The first burgeoning of the Rational Mind proper, the stress of intellect and intellectuality started towards the end of the Upanishadic Age with the Mahabharata, for example and the Brahmanas. It flowered in full vigour, however, in the earlier philosophical schools, the Sankhyas perhaps, and in the great Buddhist illumination – Buddha being, we note with ...
... name: for example, Utthapana Yoga. SRI AUROBINDO: And Kalelkar Yoga? (Laughter) Nobody has so far tampered with the text of the Gita. PURANI: No, they have done so with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata but not the Gita. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. EVENING PURANI: America and Russia will check Japan in her imperialist policy in the East. SRI AUROBINDO: It seems they are not willing to go to ...
... of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and ...
... Rakshasic Rakshasa, He makes Ravana weep profusely. That is highly amusing. Bengalis at one time were very fond of weeping. I think it was Romesh Dutt who translated the story of Savitri from the Mahabharata and portrayed her as weeping whereas in the original epic there is not a trace of tears. Even when her heart was being sawn in two, not a single tear came to her eyes. By making her weep, he took ...
... if a powerful and inspired artifice. Yet very great poets and writers have used them, so great a poet as Aeschylus or so great a prose stylist as Tacitus. Then there are the famous "knots" in the Mahabharata. I think one can say that these condensations are justified when they say something with more power and depth and full, if sometimes recondite, significance than an easier speech would give, but ...
... sins of mankind. According to the Hindu Shastras, four generations suffer for the sins of the father. SATYENDRA: That is hereditary syphilis. ( Laughter ) SRI AUROBINDO: And according to the Mahabharata, the king is responsible for the sins of his subjects. In that case, Mustapha Kemal would be responsible for the earthquake because he abolished the Caliph, religion, etc. If the headache is due ...
... Sir, by which gods can be recognised. Their feet don't touch the ground, their eyes don't blink, the garlands around their necks don't dry up. SRI AUROBINDO: You will find those signs in the Mahabharata also. There is one more sign. The gods have no shadows. DR. MANILAL: And they don't perspire. Is that true, Sir? SRI AUROBINDO: Ask the gods. DR. MANILAL: You are above the gods, Sir. ...
... DR. MANILAL: Of course you yourself have said somewhere that all these stories are true. SRI AUROBINDO: Where have I said that? What I have said is that the Gita was recorded as a fact in the Mahabharata, intended to be a fact of life, not an allegory. But do you mean that Hanuman's taking the sun under his armpit and jumping into Lanka and burning Lanka by his tail-fire were all facts? DR. MANILAL: ...
... IX is mostly filled with the ambience of her prowess and personality. The bold "unwomanly" woman, woman as uncompromising Shakti, had been sketched earlier by Sri Aurobindo in Vidula (after the Mahabharata), in Chitrangada, in Cleopatra of Rodogune, in Aslaug of Eric, in Cassiopea of Perseus the Deliverer; and Andromeda was the portrait of a woman fearless as well as compassionate, her Shakti ...
... Kapali Sastry, and has been there since. A Sanskritist like Sastry, Madhav's consecration to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is as unflinching as it is unblemished. "Just as the Master Flutist of the Mahabharata attracted the choicest souls to his feet for his great work and master plan," says one writer, "so also Sri Aurobindo, the Master of the Supramental Age, has drawn this choicest instrument (Madhav ...
... Hour; The Door at Abelard; The Devil's Mastiff; The Golden Bird. Juvenilia. Volume 8 — Translations, From Sanskrit and Other Languages: From Sanskrit Passages from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita, Kalidasa; The Century of Life (The Nitishataka of Bhartrihari); etc. From Bengali: Songs of Bidyapati; Bande Mataram (Hymn to the Mother); thirteen chapters from Anandamath ...
... unfamiliar with Indian mythology. There are eighteen major Puranas and as many minor ones. They were written at different epochs. The earliest one is attributed to Vyasa, the author of the epic Mahabharata, which would take us back several thousand years; a few were composed during the first Page 40 millenium A.D. Etymologically, the word purana means ancient or old. To the discerning ...
... political, philosophical and literary exposition. Some of his poetry and translations were published—the five-act blank verse drama, Perseus the Deliverer, Vidula or "The Mother to her Son' (from the Mahabharata) in Bande Mataram, and Baji Prabhou in Karmayogin. At the time of publication, all these had a pointed political appeal. In the play the stress was on the word 'deliverer'; Vidula exhorts ...
... maintenance of health and physical fitness of the body for a very long period- to stop or slow down the process of deterioration. 2.Ichha Mrityu - death only when wished - Example of Bhisma in the Mahabharata - He must have reached the first step also. 3.Physical Immortality The Process 1.The psychic contact - this is the very first step. 2.Putting the whole being under the psychic ...
... The passion of a single woman in its dreadful silence and strength pitted against Death, 20 He said in a letter to His brother. The Story of Mother and Sri Aurobindo. It is the legend of the Mahabharata, Orpheus and Eurydice reversed, but with all the knowledge of the invisible worlds and a fabulous geography of what people call “death.” He corrects The Book of Fate, the last He would revise ...
... a wicked and sinful race, but as an indicator it has a primary importance.... 19 Then, adverting to Nolini's reference to Kurukshetra, Sri Aurobindo said that the parallel between the Mahabharata war and the war initiated by Hitler should not be pushed too far. At Kurukshetra, the side favoured by the Divine (Krishna) triumphed, "because the leaders made themselves His instruments". The ...
... earlier versions of the poem were revised and considerable portions were added to it until, when finally published, it had developed from a short narrative based directly on an episode of the Mahabharata into an epic of cosmic dimensions running to almost 24,000 lines of blank verse. Savitri appeared in book-form in two parts in 1950 and 1951. Before this it had been brought out canto ...
... possible, the authentic in our ancient education: What was the secret of that gigantic intellectuality, spirituality and superhuman moral force which we see pulsating in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in the ancient philosophy, in the supreme poetry, art, sculpture and architecture of India? What was at the basis of the incomparable public works and engineering achievement, the opulent and ...
... but worsts her father's plans. The mind schemes, but the heart scores. "The action of the romance", writes Sri Aurobindo in a prefatory Note, "takes place a century after the war of the Mahabharata". A scion of the house of Parikshit, young Vuthsa Udayan rules at Cowsambie, flanked by Magadha in the east and by Avunthie (ruled by the ambitious Chunda Mahasegn) in the west. Cowsambie, ably sustained ...
... myriad needs of the relatives and guests who were constantly dropping in, in the evening this lady would tell the women of the house who sat crowding round her, stories from the Rama-yana and the Mahabharata, and recite from memory long passages from them. All the same, she was sad in her heart, for she was childless. Then an aunt-in-law living in Benares called her there. At Benares, with great devotion ...
... nityaḥ tasmai sarvātmane namaḥ.83 Om! In whom all are, from whom all are, who is all and who is everywhere, who is full of everything and eternal, salutations to Him who is the Self of all. Mahabharata Shantiparva 47.83 तामुपैहि शरणं परमेश्वरी सर्वरूपमयी मीरा सर्वं मीरामयं जगत्॥ tāmupaihi śaraṇaṁ parameśvarīṁ sarvarūpamayī mīrā sarvaṁ mīrāmayaṁ jagat. Take refuge in that supreme ...
... Stream flowed on. Down the bed of Time it flowed, ever widening, ever enriched. Of the few epics that have come down to us, two are written in Sanskrit: the Ramayana of Valmiki, and the Mahabharata of Vyasa. In the hands of Kalidasa at a later age, it became a thing of grace. But Sanskrit was not the language of poets only, of philosophers only, it lent itself equally well to the needs of ...
... as Saraswat Brahmins. The Portuguese made their base at Goa. As they settled down, they began to show their true colours. Goa, in the antiquities was known as Gomantaka, as mentioned in the Mahabharata. "At least from 1540 onwards," writes T. R. de Souza, a Christian, "and in the island of Goa before that year, all the Hindu idols had been annihilated or had disappeared, all the temples had been ...
... Bengal as his province began to learn Bengali." He took Hindustani as optional. Sanskrit was the classical Indian language he chose: "I learnt Sanskrit by reading the Nala-Damayanti episode in the Mahabharata . . . with minute care several times." Actually, so well did he master the Sanskrit language that one day he was to unveil the secrets of the Veda for us. "I don't remember having any teacher ...
... Mother's Chronicles - Book Five Prologue "In the times of the Mahabharata," Sri Aurobindo wrote* "the earth was reeling under the weight of demoniac might.... If Sri Krishna had not destroyed that might and established a kingdom of the Law of Truth ... India would have fallen untimely into the hands of barbarians. "We must remember that the ...
... moksha. Page 338 years had made possible this 'sudden opening.' Remember how already at Baroda R.C. Dutt had admired Arabindo Babu's English rendering of some segments of the Mahabharata? It was also at Baroda that Arabindo Babu had taken up translations of some Upanishads. Let us continue with Sri Aurobindo's notations of 1912, and find out how not only Sanskrit but his general ...
... servile name of Bundhumathie, the captive Princess of Sourashtra, serving Vasavadutta. A KIRÂTHA WOMAN. Page 621 The action of the romance takes place a century after the war of the Mahabharata; the capital has been changed to Cowsamby; the empire has been temporarily broken and the kingdoms of India are overshadowed by three powers, Magadha in the East ruled by Pradyotha, Avunthy in the ...
... poem might be dated. Judging from the hand-writing, it was composed towards the end of the second decade of the century. It obviously is based on the story of Nala, as recounted in the Mahabharata and later texts, but does not seem to be a translation of any known Sanskrit work. The passages separated by a blank line were written separately and not joined together. The ...
... enjoyment. This life side of the Indian idea is stamped in strong relief over the epic and the classical literature. It is amazing indeed that anyone with an eye or a brain could have read the Ramayana, Mahabharata, the dramas, the literary epics, the romances, and the great abundance of gnomic and lyric poetry in Sanskrit and in the later tongues (to say nothing of the massive remains of other cultural work ...
... profound understanding of its right conditions and a native perfection. The more ancient sculptural art of India embodies in visible form what the Upanishads threw out into inspired thought and the Mahabharata and Ramayana portrayed by the word in life. This sculpture like the architecture springs from spiritual realisation, and what it creates and expresses at its greatest is the spirit in form, the soul ...
... when the clans and tribes were developing into nations and kingdoms and were still striving with each other for hegemony and overlordship, seems to be indicated in the traditions preserved in the Mahabharata and recurred in a cruder form in the return to the clan nation in mediaeval Rajputana: but in ancient India this was a passing phase and the predominance did not exclude the political and civic influence ...
... sublime and confident ignorance, assailed the whole life and culture of India and even lumped together all her greatest achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass of unspeakable barbarism. It was argued by many at the time that to reply to a critic of this kind was to break a butterfly, or it might ...
... extraordinarily well and it is almost as fresh and still in its real substance quite as new, because always renewable in experience, as when it first appeared in or was written into the frame of the Mahabharata. It is still received in India as one of the great bodies of doctrine that most authoritatively govern religious thinking and its teaching acknowledged as of the highest value if not wholly accepted ...
... PS. I have mentioned Lalubhai and my calling him "Lullaby" because of his own "creative" reading of words. Let me give you some instances. When reading with me Sri Aurobindo's comments on the Mahabharata, Lalubhai stopped and asked me: "Why does the poet say that King Yudhish-thir's crown was full of germs?" I said, "Lullaby, look again at the text." He looked and exclaimed: "Oh, it is 'gems', not ...
... lives and deeds of Rama and Krishna. Particularly Krishna has given orthodoxy pause, it is finally through his strategems — contrary to the traditional warriors' code — that, according to the Mahabharata, the Pandavas destroyed their enemies and Yudhishthira became Emperor. By insisting on transformation of the physical existence and not merely a purification as a step towards transcendence ...
... Savitri , conceived with something of the antique temperament which rejoiced Page 438 in massive structures - especially the temperament of the makers of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which take all human life and human thought in their spacious scope and blend the workings of the hidden worlds of Gods and Titans and Demons with the activities of earth. A kind of cosmic sweep ...
... Mlechchha is itself of foreign origin applied by the Harappans to their own language - a term that later became a derogatory term in the Indian literature. It is worth noting that according to the Mahabharata, in conveying a secret message to Yudhishtira, Vidura used the language of the Mlechchhas. The Sutras seem to have borne in mind the Satapatha Brahmana's point about language. The Vasistha ...
... in Dani's capable hands. "The literary evidence, as B.B. Lal among others has shown, is there. The Rig-veda, the earliest account, tells of the coming of new people to the north-west; the Mahabharata stories record the movement to the middle Ganges Valley; the Ramayana is the final episode, which sees Bengal, Orissa, and Ceylon within the geographical bounds of the Vedic tradition however defined ...
... spend the whole day in his company. He used to keep a dhuni [a sacred fire tended with pungent herbs etc.] constantly lit in front of him. His massive physique reminded one of Bhimasen of the Mahabharata but his loving and carefree personality captivated everyone. As we were already concentrated on Sri Aurobindo's yoga, his personality did not touch us to that extent, but had I nor already come in ...
... that stands by itself outside the epic too, an incandescent prayer of the Rishi placed within the framework of epic action. There are such wonderfully articulated prayers in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata 26 Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 73. 27 Ibid., p. 314. Page 193 and the Bhagavata. Stotras like Aditya Hridayam, Vishnu Sahasranamam and Gajendra's Prayer ...
... kingdom is polished further with the participal adjective "jewelled". All the three examples given here portray gold and jewels as semantemes of perfect harmony and exquisite beauty. In the Mahabharata too the Gandharva Kingdoms are depicted as equally resplendent. 28 Ibid ., p. 190, 29 Ibid ., p. 235. 30 Ibid ., p. 234. 31 Ibid ., p. 233. Page 495 It is ...
... it will be shaped destiny. It will be therefore worthwhile if we can get some idea about this very significant meditation of Savitri. In the story of Vyasa, as given in Vana Parva of the Mahabharata, Savitri is described as one who was an adept in the Yoga of Meditation, dhyānyogaparayaṇā. Just before going to the forest on the fated day she pays her obeisance to the Rishis and receives their ...
... surrender. If a complete surrender is not possible in the beginning, it follows that personal effort is necessary. 65 Page 106 To recall again the four aids spoken of in the Mahabharata, Shastra—the teaching—comes first; next to Shastra is Utsaha, zeal or force of personal effort. Regarding zeal in spiritual practice, Sri Aurobindo writes: The development of the experience ...
... processes and principles by which one's ordinary nature can be transformed so as to manifest a higher level of consciousness. The reader may recall the four aids on the spiritual path mentioned in the Mahabharata alluded to earlier (p. 20). The first of the four aids—Shastra—which consists of "the knowledge of the truths, principles, powers, and processes that govern the realization"—is usually the mental ...
... Lila includes the idea of Maya and exceeds it; nor has it that association of the vanity of all things, useless to you who have elected to remain and play with Sri Krishna. ... 15 (The Mahabharata portrays Krishna as playing with the cowherd-eases, the Divine engaged in a play with human souls.) Eckhart does see the aspect of Lila, a divine game, which God seems to be playing by creating ...
... these bounds, She must take our mortal birth and alter fate. The word was spoken and the new era began. 16 May 2002 Savitri: In the story by Vyasa as we have in the Mahabharata, the issueless king Aswapati offers daily a hundred-thousand oblations to Goddess Savitri. He performs the Yajna for eighteen years. Page 26 Canto Twenty-Five Year is the body ...
... Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2 PART VI The Legend of Savitri According to the Mahabharata Page 515 Page 516 Page 517 Page 518 Page 519 Page 520 Page 521 ...
... Publisher’s Note The composition of Savitri has a long history, starting from August 1916 till mid-November 1950. The epic began as a short narrative based on the Mahabharata tale and grew from about eight hundred to twenty-four thousand lines. In the process it developed into a symbolic transformative legend which is also the luminous medium for presenting experiences ...
... obstacle to enlightenment. All negativity and suffering, which indicate a state of non-enlightenment, have their rootss in rime, says Eckhart. Stating the Hindu perspective, a discourse in the Mahabharata, alluded to by Sri Aurobindo, speaks of Time as one of the four aids on the path leading to Self-realization: Yoga-siddhi, the perfection that comes from the practice of Yoga, can be best ...
... the Gita —short form of Bhagavad Gita, "the Song of the Blessed Lord", being the spiritual teachings of Sri Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra; it occurs as an episode in the Mahabharata. Gnosis — a supreme totally self-aware and all-aware Intelligence; the Divine Gnosis is the Supermind. Gradations between Mind and Supermind —higher ranges of Mind overtopping ...
... remarkable tale given to us by Vyasa. The poet acknowledges the gift of the Rishi. Now, as if zooming his camera, Jnaneshwar comes to the Gita proper which is a part of the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata. Churned from the ocean of eternal literature, shabdabrahmabdhi , by the genius of Vyasa, it is the cream of spiritual experiences which the ascetics long to have, the saints perceive and get, and ...
... our power of speech because we come to know our minds truly through expressions. Dilip Kumar has on many occasions given me the joy of discovering my own thoughts." Page 12 In the Mahabharata, Arjuna was the recipient and became the channel through whom the Lord poured out the essence of Upanishadic wisdom of Sanatan Dharma in the form of the Bhagavad Gita. The modern-day intellectuals ...
... and the hominids), Dwarf (first hominids), Rama-with-the-Ax ( homo habilis ), Rama-with-the-Bow, the hero of the Ramayana (the mental being, the human as we are), Krishna, protagonist of the Mahabharata (representing the Overmind, the world of the gods and religion), Buddha (shooting straight up to the indefinable Absolute) and Kalki (the future Avatar who represents Supermind). The fundamental ...
... like Meister Eckhart, Margarete Porete, Hadewych, St. John of the Cross; or the heritage of the Zen Masters, whose poetry is truth and truth poetry; or the Indian mystics; or the Ramayana and Mahabharata , the most voluminous epics in the world, filled to the brim with spiritual lore. John Horgan has the following anecdote about Bernard McGinn, theologian and author of a multi-volume history of Christian ...
... of their setting become one furious egoistic savage and the other a cruel and cunning the savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into the spirit, significance, atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, a and identify myself with their time-spirit before I Page 89 can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer actions. As for ...
... provide for me? I shall make you provide for me"?] Page 154 the inner life. Krishna did great things and was very clearly a manifestation of the Divine. But I remember a passage of the Mahabharata in which he complains of the unquiet life his followers and adorers gave him, their constant demands, reproaches, their throwing of their unregenerate vital nature upon him. And in the Gita he speaks ...
... Dark death nor life I hymn, but wait Like time upon His guidance still: I bow to what He would dictate, Like servants doing their masters' will. _____________ * Mahabharata, Shanti Parva. Page 369 ...
... not the Lord of Brindavan and Mathura and Dwarka or a prince and warrior or the charioteer of Kurukshetra, but only one more great anchorite. The Indian scriptures and Indian tradition, in the Mahabharata and elsewhere, make room both for the spirituality of the renunciation of life and for the spiritual life of action. One cannot say that one only is the Indian tradition and that the acceptance ...
... couple. Sarala was a good tailoress. 100. "Urvasie": one of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems. The theme, love of King Pururavas of the lunar dynasty and the nymph Urvasie, is taken from the Mahabharata. 101. Nishkriti: a Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chatterji, translated by Dilip and revised by Sri Aurobindo. 102. Goloka is the Vaishnava heaven of eternal Beauty and Bliss. Page ...
... P.S. Have you seen the latest issue of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual? It contains an early essay of Sri Aurobindo's, entitled Vyasa: Some Characteristics and part of his Notes on the Mahabharata proposing to disengage almost in its entirety the original epic of Vyasa in about 24,000 slokas from the present mass of 100,000. 1, The phrase "no trace of human weakness to conquer" ...
... discovered with Nirodbaran's help in the period after Sri Aurobindo had left his body, its predecessor had been called Sâvithrî: A Tale and a Vision. Here not only the name of the heroine from the Mahabharata-story but also those of the two other leading characters (the heroine's father and her elected bridegroom) were spelled differently from their forms in 1936. Instead of Aswapati and Satyavan, they ...
... never puts one's hand on one's head or one's belly but always instinctively on the middle of one's chest. Apropos of the subject in hand I may recount a little episode from the Indian epic Mahabharata. Once when Draupadi, the heroine, was about to be disgraced in public by her enemies, she appealed inwardly to Sri Krishna for Page 105 help. "O Sovereign of the Highest Heaven ...
... intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the 1 In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has brought in Vyasa's line thus: some lone tremendous wood Ringing ...
... of their setting become, one a furious egoistic savage, and the other a cruel and cunning savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into the spirit, significance, atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, Ramayana and identify myself with their time-spirit before I can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer action. As for the Avatarhood, I accept ...
... Kindly mention all the epic writers in all the languages—it is good to know, at least. In English Paradise Lost and Keats' Hyperion (unfinished) are the two chief epics. In Sanskrit Mahabharata, Ramayana, Kalidasa's Kumarsambhava, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante's Divine Comedy and Tasso's (I have forgotten the name for the moment) are in the epic cast ...
... perfect; the conception of the first ideal state of mankind as a harmonious felicity of free and natural living in which no social law or compulsion existed because none was needed, is as old as the Mahabharata. But even this theory has to recognise a downward lapse of man from his natural perfection. The fall Page 216 was not brought about by the introduction of the social principle in the ...
... accuracy of the ancient Indian memory is also notorious. And the sanctity of the text prevented such interpolations, alterations, modernising revisions as have replaced by the present form of the Mahabharata the ancient epic of the Kurus. It is not, therefore, at all improbable that we have the Sanhita of Vyasa substantially as it was arranged by the great sage and compiler. Substantially, not in ...
... after Brahman and that salvation cannot come by works. For we have Page 198 a greater authority than any to set against them, the teaching of Srikrishna himself. He tells Sanjay in the Mahabharata that as between the gospel of action and the gospel of inaction, it is the former that is to his mind and the latter strikes him as the idle talk of a weakling. So too, in the Gita, while laying ...
... head is a violent egoism, and by those who represent and strive to satisfy it. This is the war of the Gods and Titans, the symbol of which the old Indian literature is full, the struggle of the Mahabharata of which Krishna is the central figure being often represented in that image; the Pandavas who fight for the establishment of the kingdom of the Dharma, are the sons of the Gods, their powers in ...
... written beneath the heading: "Studies in the Mahabharat—/ The Book of the Woman." Evidently the passage printed here was meant to be an introduction to a discussion of the eleventh book of the Mahabharata, the Stri-Parva or Book of the Woman. Sri Aurobindo broke off work on the piece without reaching the proposed subject. The title has been supplied by the editors. China ...
... sonnets stiff and laboured, I suppose. Yet very great poets and writers have used them, so great a poet as Aeschylus or so great a prose stylist as Tacitus. Then there are the famous "knots" in the Mahabharata, the recurrence of lines so compressed in thought and speech (although the normal style of the poem is of a crystal clearness,) that even the divine scribe Ganesha, lord of wisdom and learning who ...
... What shall we learn? What shall we teach? Shall we try to learn everything that has happened throughout the ages? Shall we attempt to learn every word that man can pronounce? In the poem of the Mahabharata, the following words are used to describe the various kinds of arrows shot by the Pandava brothers and other warriors: sara, ishu, sayaka, patri, kanda, vishikha, naracha, vishatha, prushatka, bhalla ...
... question: is the artist appointed by the Divine or self-appointed? But if one does Yoga can he rise to such heights as Shakespeare or Shelley? There has been no such instance. Why not? The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work of men who were Rishis and had done Yogic tapasyā. The Gita ...
... appointed by the Divine or self-appointed? Page 105 But if one does Yoga can he rise to such heights as Shakespeare or Shelley? There has been no such instance. Why not? The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work of men who were Rishis and had done Yogic tapasya, The Gita which ...
... messages to the school emphasising the future: As a language teacher I have been laying great stress on the Ramayana and the songs of Kabir, Mira, etc. and the stories of the Upanishads and the Mahabharata. Please tell me what to do. If I stop them as belonging to the past, how to replace them? If I continue them, shall I not be going against your current? Not at all, it is the attitude that is ...
... Divine Mother, both being one but in different poises, and both turn to the Seigneur or Divine Master. This kind of prayer from the Divine to the Divine you will find also in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. 21 August 1936 ...
... without Shivaji. To maintain justice and prevent the strong from despoiling and the weak from being oppressed is the function for which the Kshatriya was created. Therefore, says Sri Krishna in the Mahabharata, God created battle and armour, the sword, the bow and the dagger. 8 * ________________ * This passage and the preceding one are from unpublished articles which the police seized at ...
... the path. 13 January 1965 Page 311 Sweet Mother, Does Your message for this year announce an Age of Truth—what is called the Satya Yuga in the ancient Scriptures (the Mahabharata)? An age of truth is sure to come before the earth is transformed. 21 January 1965 Sweet Mother, What does this extraordinary Asuric attack on the Ashram mean? 18 Are we responsible ...
... intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda have this inspiration. It is a poetry 'thick inlaid with patines of bright gold' or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty ...
... beings. Similarly, Krishna, though appreciated, is cut down in comparison to Christ and also relegated to the world of myth. Krishna is obviously historical in the Chhandogya Upanishad. In the Mahabharata he is depicted fully as a human being who is the Divine Incarnate. Even in the Brindavan story the substratum of reality is clear in the midst of the poetry and the symbolism. And why does Griffiths ...
... this sense Sri Aurobindo is not a poet, he does not think in images and symbols, his characters are as vague and abstract as his discourse. In the Vedic Hymns there is the poetry of images, in the Mahabharata what vivid Shakespearean characters Draupadi and Savitri are, and one can see the mysterious smile of the Lord Krishna and the mocking raised eyebrow of Duryodhana, and Kunti 'like a faded lotus-wreath' ...
... lordly, a leisurely labour was Savitri, conceived with something of the antique temperament which rejoiced in massive structures -especially the temperament of the makers of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which take all human life and human thought in their spacious scope and blend the workings of the hidden worlds of Gods and Titans and Demons with the activities of earth. A kind of cosmic sweep ...
... Editor of Mother India: I have been in correspondence with Dr. K. K. Nair (Krishna Chaitanya), the eminent philosopher and litterateur, apropos his comment apropos the Peter Brook film on the Mahabharata, "Anticipating Buber, he (Vyasa) saw history as the encounter of the temporal and the eternal, the empirical and the transcendental; and anticipating Berdyaev, he saw in history a divine programme ...
... become each of them and to believe that I 'was' some Divinity or Devil. And I did. Most of the characters we enacted came out of those classics that every Hindu is versed in, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. When it got too hot at a little past midday we would retire for yet another bath. By way of a change I would plunge into the cool waters of a running stream or rivulet. Then a light lunch eaten ...
... whose exemplary virtues and life have been recounted most admirably in Page 43 Valmiki's Ramayana, one of the greatest epics of India, which along with another equally great epic, Mahabharata, has determined the value-system of Indian culture. His exile, ordained by his father under compulsion, his renunciation of his right to Ayodhya's throne, his love for his wife, Sita, who chose to ...
... were of fairly ancient origin, to whatever date we may assign their development; physical Yoga processes existed almost from the first, and the material development portrayed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata is hardly less splendid than that of which the Raghuvamsha is so brilliant a picture. But whereas, before, these were subordinated to more lofty ideals, now they prevailed and became supreme, occupying ...
... Krishna's killing of Kamsa and the liberation of Vasudeva and Devaki from prison. The chapters of Sri Krishna's life are numerous, but they should be read in the Puranas and in the great story of the Mahabharata. How can that great story of the life of Sri Krishna be contained in this small monograph, the purpose of which is only to depict Sri Krishna's exile to Brindavan? That episode of Sri Krishna's life ...
... are five immortals, they say. Hanuman is one. SRI AUROBINDO: That may be possible considering the length of his tail which even Bhima could not raise! Here Purani brought in the topic of the Mahabharata, mention G. Ram's interpretation of that poem as symbolic, Bhima symbolising military genius and Draupadi... SRI AUROBINDO: Nonsense! It is something like Byron's joke on Dante's Divine Comedy ...
... being almighty, will be on his side, he thinks. DR. MANILAL: On which side would Krishna be, Sir, in this war? On the British? SRI AUROBINDO: But his army might be on the other side as in the Mahabharata. Send a letter of enquiry to his chief secretary. (Laughter) DR. MANILAL: I was telling Nirod that when a medicine has both good and bad effects, it is the good aspect that acts in a disease ...
... representatives. Then came the wave of Kshatriya culture which found a broader scope among a larger community. In India, after the age of the Veda and the Upanishad, came the age of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which was pre-eminently an age of Kshatriya-hood. In Europe too it was the bards and minstrels, sages and soothsayers who originally created, preserved and propagated the cultural movement: next ...
... this solid pragmatism does not avail him much in the end. The crisis in Hamlet reminds us of another somewhat similar one, that is the basis and starting-point of the great episode in the Mahabharata – the Gita. Arjuna, the ideal hero and man of action, in absolute self-confidence and certitude, with no doubt or hesitation about anything in the world, advances into the very thick of the bloody ...
... 125 Leo X, 207 Leonardo da Vinci, 120 Lewis, Cecil Day, 195 Louis XIV, 207 Lucifer, 267 MACBETH, 186 Madhusudan Dutt, 120, 197 Mahabharata, the, 188,217,222 Mahalakshmi, 275 Mahasaraswati,271 Mahashakti, 327 Maheshwari, 275 Maitreyi, 160 Manchester Guardian, the, 163n Mao-tse-Tung ...
... asked similar questions by the children of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. She started answering these questions but with the following witty introduction: 'Oh, you are asking me to write an entire Mahabharata! For the same destiny does not lie before every departed being. There is infinite variation in this matter, depending on his state of consciousness, stage of development, his psychological disposition ...
... learning Sanskrit for personal conversation and learning Sanskrit for understanding Sanskrit books written in earlier times. Even there we can identify such compositions such as Nalopakhyana in Mahabharata which are not very difficult. It is seen that in the discussion document issued by the NCERT concerning national curriculum framework for school education, a remark has been made that the three ...
... outlined: A Rapid View of Indian History Part I . (i) The question of India's antiquity (ii) Mohenjodaro and Harappa Page 195 (iii) Upanishad; Ramayana and Mahabharata (iv) Vasistha, Vishwamtira, Lopamudra, Yajnavalkya, Maitreyi Part II (i) Buddha and Mahavira (ii) Buddhism and Jainism (iii) Invasion of Alexander the Great ...
... man's inner mind and life to the Divine in the universe were attempted through the development of great religious movements, philosophies, 3 many-sided epic literature (particularly Ramayana and Mahabharata), systems of Puranas and Tantras, 4 and even through art and science. An enlarged secular turn was given, and this was balanced by deepening of the intensities of psycho-religious experience. ...
... his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo describes that vision in which the Supreme form of the World-Spirit is made visible to the inner divine eyes gifted temporarily to Arjuna, the hero of the Mahabharata, where he sees God, magnificent and beautiful and terrible, and in that vision the divine will is made manifest. Appendix X (p. 162) (e) Yogic Experiences in Jnana Yoga Jnana yoga ...
... multi-sided intellectuality burst out as the demands of Reason began to assert themselves at the close of the age of Intuition that marked the Upanishads. This intellectuality is evident in the Mahabharata of which the Gita constitutes an important or even a crucial episode. As a result, the Gita is largely intellectual, ratiocinate, and philosophical in its method. It is, indeed, founded on the Truth ...
... for founding it on this [...] 172 , it can't be done. ...There are situations when one is faced with either telling a lie or the truth, and one can't decide which. Sri Krishna says in the Mahabharata that lies are permitted at times, and that they are as good as truths, e.g. a truthful Muni, by showing the robbers the hiding place of travellers and causing their death, went to Hell. What's your ...
... during Sri Aurobindo's tenure as the editor of the above-mentioned two papers, he used to analyse the characters of his co-workers and find out what resemblance they bore to the characters of the Mahabharata. One day he was supposed to have said that at the end of the Dwapara Yuga he had been born as Sri Krishna's grandson Aniruddha and Mrinalini as his wife Usha (the daughter of a Titan king). One can't ...
... recognised as modern classics and have been published and reprinted several times. After his break with politics, he started on the massive task of translating the Hindu Scriptures, Ramayana and Mahabharata from Sanskrit to Tamil and later into English. He received rave reviews from scholars and religious seers alike. He translated Upanishads and Bhaja Govindam into English. His novels and short stories ...
... sankirtan is - kirtan, bhajan, devotional songs woven around the figures of Sri Krishna and Radha and other gopis, 127 etc., 123Bhima was one of the five Pandava brothers in the epic Mahabharata. He was a brave warrior and physically a very strong man. Here Nirod-da is comparing Pranab to Bhima because Ptanab was also physically very strong. 124Mace-bearer. 125Mace. 1 ...
... from it. Each religion or sect says something different about the creation of the earth. The Buddhists declare it as from nothingness; some from the Shabda (original word), the Mahabharata as from the Egg. What is actually the truth of this subject? For the physical creation it is best to look to the knowledge Science gives. The egg is only an image — if we accept the ...
... learn of the great things that were done in China and Egypt long ago when the countries of Europe were full of savage tribes. We shall learn also of the great days of India when the Ramayana and Mahabharata were written and India was a rich and powerful country. Today our country is very poor and a foreign people govern us. We are not free even in our own country and cannot do what we want. But this ...
... representatives. Then came the wave of Kshatriya culture which found a broader scope among a larger community. In India, after the age of the Veda and the Upanishad, came the age of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which was pre-eminently an age of Kshatriya-hood. In Europe too it was the bards and minstrels, sages and soothsayers who originally created, preserved and propagated the cultural movement: next ...
... Lamartine, 54 Laocoon, 170 Lao Tzu, 132 Lawrence, D. H., 88 London, 127, 163 Lucifer, 5, 125 Lucretius, 52, 70, 101 -De Rerum Natura, 52 Luther, 273 HUCHCHANDA, 162 Mahabharata, the, 73, 235 Maitreyi, 105 Malebranche, 286 Mallarme, 66, 88, 152 -"Les Fleurs", 66n Mamata, 163 Manchester Guardian, 239n Manu, 159 Miira, 5 Marcellus, 173-5 ...
... myself in the very heart of a mighty forest. It is a wild, grim, frightful place – selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte. Some of you may remember the description of the Dandaka forest in the Mahabharata, quoted so often by Sri Aurobindo, picturing the vast horror of the forest: vanam pratibhayam sunyam jhillikagananinaditam.¹ Likewise Dante also says that even now when he remembers the scene ...
... rien n'attendrit, Vous ne pouvez avoir de subites clemencies Qui dérangent le monde, Ô Dleu, tranquille esprit!" – Victor Hugo Page 253 may recall here the famous Mahabharata story: it is the swayamvara of princess Damayanti. Damayanti is to choose (that is to say, find out) her hero Nala from among the assembled gods who all aspired for the hand of the beautiful Damayanti ...
... faith that the Page 185 right solution will open up if one sincerely aspires to get the needed help. One should remember how Arjuna in his moment of crisis at the battlefield of Mahabharata approached Sri Krishna and asked for his advice. His humility led him to declare to Sri Krishna: "Rule over me", shādhi mām. In the moment of crisis, one must turn to the wisest advice that ...
... Arjuna of the Bhagavadgita was seized by a similar horror of physical death because of the same type of delusion vis-a-vis the phenomenon of death. Lord Krishna had to expound before the Hero of the Mahabharata the real truth of the matter so that the latter's rationality could assert itself in full strength and clear the heart and mind of Arjuna of all anxiety and misgiving about death. Here is a short ...
... the heart of things. One may begin a story in two ways. One way is to begin at the beginning, from the adikada and Genesis, and then develop the theme gradually, as is done in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bible. The other method is to start suddenly, from the middle of the story, a method largely preferred by Western artists, like Homer and Shakespeare for instance. But it was not found possible ...
... one time was a leader. It may be said that to a great extent in the East the whole of Sanskrit literature was founded on intuition. In the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana and even in the Mahabharata, very often we find instances where the rein of knowledge has prevented the emotion and the zeal of the heart from running riot. In fact the speciality of Indian art does not lie so much in the play ...
... we find a complete picture of the household life of Bengal also in Kavi Kankan's works. When Krittivasa and Kashirama Das digressed from the high and noble narrations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to indulge in household topics, they seemed to breathe their own atmosphere. In the works of Bankimchandra and Sarat Chandra, it is this picture of household life that has fascinated the Bengali ...
... lichi, coconut trees surrounding the entire area made the place beautiful, quiet and peaceful, a place fit for sadhana. One felt as if we were in an ashram straight out of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata period learning the dharma of the student. But then trouble came knocking once again. One day on arriving at the club I saw that the roof of the room had been broken and a lot of expensive ...
... spirit of freedom and impatience of servitude, which were inspiring Sri Aurobindo's thoughts, writings and activities in Bengal at that time. "There are few more interesting passages in the Mahabharata than the conversation of Vidula with her son. It comes into the main poem as an exhortation from Kunti to Yudhisthir to give up the weak spirit of submission, moderation, prudence, and fight like ...
... On Savitri Appendix The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; ...
... effective form and with a more modern organisation. What was the secret of that gigantic intellectuality, spirituality and superhuman moral force which we see pulsating in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in the ancient philosophy, in the supreme poetry, art, sculpture and architecture of India? What was at the basis of the incomparable public works and engineering achievement, the opulent and exquisite ...
... temple today and don't forget." (31) Let me tell you the story of my finding Sita. When I was young, my grandfather's mother used to tell me stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and I would always listen to her with great wonder, utterly spellbound. In my child's imagination Rama, Lakshmana, Bhishma, Drona all came to life to create a fairy-tale .world. And like all young ...
... brooch. She could not hold back her tears. (9) At night, I used to sleep with my Burodidima (great grand-mother). She would tell me all sorts of fairy-tales, stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in order to put me to sleep. Burodadu used to sleep in another part of the room. Early in the morning he would wake up and sit in yogasana on his bed. I would then quietly ...
... Roy, Dilip Kumar. Among the Great (Nalanda Publications, Bombay, 1946). Sri Aurobindo Came to Me (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1952). Roy, Pratap Chandra. The Mahabharata, Vol. II, Vana Parva, English Translation (Datta Bose & Co, Calcutta). Rudd, Margaret. Divided Image : A Study of William Blake and W. B. Yeats (Roudedge, London, 1953). ...
... pronunciation of Bengali. In the year 1895 the first collection of Sri Aurobindo's poems, Songs to Myrtilla , was published "for private circulation". Sri Aurobindo used to read Homer, Dante, the Mahabharata, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti, during this period. He instructed the Bombay firms Messrs Radhabai Atmaram Sagun and Messrs Thacker Spink & Co. to send him catalogues of new publications from which he ...
... During the first year of his stay in Baroda, has a vision of the Godhead surging up from within ' him when in danger of a carriage accident. March-April Works at translations from the Mahabharata. Juue 26 Contributes an article, "India and the British Parliament", to the Induprakash, Bombay. August 7 - March 5, 1894 Contributes a series of articles. New Lamps for Old, to the ...
... almost harks back to Book I, mentions the same details though from a rather lesser height of poetic inspiration, before continuing the story. In the present version we have the bare bones of the Mahabharata story transformed into the flesh and blood of a spacious narrative poem like Urvasie and Love and Death of Sri Aurobindo's Baroda period; what is lacking in Book VIII is the epic amplitude, ...
... Savitri II 'The Growth of the Flame' Vyasa is succinctness itself when he records in the Mahabharata: "And, in course of time, the girl (Savitri) attained maidenhood". Just that. But Sri Aurobindo is nothing if not elaborate, richly yet relevantly elaborate. The child grows into the girl, and the girl becomes a young woman. A common enough ...
... every time. Her attitude and concentration were incredible. She stood immobile and totally one-pointed as She put one ball after another into the basket. I could not help thinking of Arjuna in the Mahabharata hitting the target. * We also did marching with the Mother in the Playground for some time: Minnie-di, Milli-di, Gauri, Violette, Vasudha, Kakima (Bina-di, Pranab’s Kakima) and I. We were ...
... would be mixed with a vegetable on a very large plate and then each child would be fed a morsel one after the other. And even as we ate, we listened to wonderful stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. What eagerness and excitement there used to be while listening to these stories. We would listen to the Mother’s words also with the eagerness and excitement of childhood. Even though the Mother ...
... future epoch evolve, reach upward, to his level, who can say?" 39 In the past there had been great yogis in India. The Bhagavad Gita itself, which is as old as the Mahabharata, is a great manual of yoga; and many would say that the Raja Yoga of Patanjali, which tries to mobilise psycho-vital, psycho-mental and physico-mental processes on the issue of a rise to a higher ...
... but the significance of the event which is seen and felt by the poet. We saw Aswapathy's history yesterday, and found that Aswapathy is not the childless king that he is in the legend of the Mahabharata , the Indian epic, but he is here a representative of the human race, engaged in the cultural activity of humanity trying to evolve higher and higher values of life. That is Aswapathy. He is a ...
... Savitri is admittedly a legend and a symbol, answers the Siddhantin. But there is no jugglery about it: Savitri is the human character, and Savitri is the symbol; one goes back to the Mahabharata, the other goes back to the Veda, and both are as contemporaneous as the Sun that is shining today. The human and the cosmic action, too, centre in Savitri. "The great human appeal of idealism" ...
... the circumambulatory space adequate. And so in this way gods and goddesses would come to the Mother and tell Her about their various difficulties. I feel as though I am writing a story from the Mahabharata. In our small, ordinary lives we had the privilege of witnessing so many different marvellous forms of the Mother! And now during the puja we had the Mother Herself in Her Durga aspect right here ...
... devastated. I would sneer in disbelief then. How many yagnas and austerities were necessary to bring the gods back onto our side! We have read about so many yagnas in Puranic stories or in the Mahabharata and heard so many stories from the elders ever since our childhood. But it is only after seeing the Mother make arrangements for invoking the god Indra through prayer that I understood that all ...
... learn these languages from Mr. Falke. 3. It is asserted that one "Bhasker Shashtri Joshi gave him lessons in Sanskrit and Gujarat." He did not learn Sanskrit from any one at Baroda. He read the Mahabharata by himself and also read works of Kalidasa and one drama of Bhavabhuti as well as the Ramayana. 4. It is stated that his patriotism got the religious colour by his contact with one Swami Hamsa ...
... influence with some well-known people in Madras on Amrita's behalf. Amrita was able to take his matriculation. Sri Aurobindo sometimes used to read to him from Browning, Kalidasa, Shakespeare and the Mahabharata. At times he read his own poem Savitri and his drama Eric . Moni, Nolini and Saurin went to Bengal in February 1914. They returned in September. On 29 March 1914 at 3.30 p.m., the Mother ...
... 2. He says that Sri Aurobindo learnt Sanskrit from one Bhasker Shashtri Joshi. In fact Sri Aurobindo began Sanskrit in England and continued his studies at Baroda where he read the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, works of Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti by himself. If he talked with anyone on the subject it was to get information and compare notes – not to learn the language. 3. He mentions ...
... During the first year of his stay in Baroda, has a vision of the godhead surging up from within him when in danger of a carriage accident. March-April Works at translations from the Mahabharata. June 26 Contributes an article, "India and the British Parliament", to the Indu Prakash, Bombay. August 7 — March 5, 1894 Contributes a series of articles. New Lamps/or Old ...
... distributed food, etc., for the whole community. × 82 The battlefield of the great war in the Mahabharata . × 83 The Gold-Digger . A French novel by Satprem. ...
... well-being such was the fool-proof sequence of inner and outer "mastery, inner realisation and outer fulfilment. In the next Age — the Indian "Heroic Age" imaged in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — there was a further significant development. It is of course difficult (if not impossible) to dissociate mythic from historic truth, but mythic truth — the truth of Rama's fight with the Rakshasa ...
... inspiration during 14 days of continuous writing - in the mornings, of course"; and he adds: "I never wrote anything with such ease and rapidity before or after." 23 The story is taken from the Mahabharata, Adi Parva, but Sri Aurobindo has changed the name of the heroine from Pramadvura to Priyumvada. The story has its affiliations also with the Hellenic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But Sri Aurobindo ...
... between nations, collaboration for the good of all, and I was compelled by a force greater than mine to wage war and to triumph by unscrupulous means and uncharitable decisions. Every war is a Mahabharata replayed under altered circumstances, and Truth is ever the first casualty. What thrives is only duplicity and inhumanity and criminal stupidity. Yet, in the end, when the Statesman had safely ...
... 321, 419 Lord of Falsehood, The (The Lord of Nations) see in The Mother - (3) Madanlal Himatsingka 816 Madhav P. Pandit 257, 321, 596, 691, 707-8, 815-6 Magre, Maurice 63, 369-70 Mahabharata 389, 577 Mahavira 180, 317 Maitland, Miss 255, 296-7 Maitra, Somnath 534 Mali (Rafael Corona) 778 Manilal, Dr 398-401 Manoj Das Gupta 677 Manubhai Patel 496 Mao Tse-tung 459, 463, 772 Marx ...
... Devayani; a young Augustus at Baroda, imposing his empire on the "realms of gold"; a Perseus or Prometheus of 'Bhavani Mandir'; an Arjuna surrendered to Krishna at Alipur; a Vyasa doing a neo-Mahabharata in the Arya, a neo-Vishvamitra giving us a new Gayatri in The Mother; a Yogishwara Krishna doubled with a Yogishwara Shiva playing an invisible hand in world happenings; and on 5 December ...
... undoubtedly to his brother Manmohan. In 1899, after six years in Baroda during which he had delved deep into Sanskrit literature, he wrote his long poem Love and Death based on a theme from the Mahabharata, and dedicated it to his brother. He sent him an accompanying letter in which he tried to soften Manmohan's indictment of Hindu legend, which he found 'lifeless' compared to the 'warm' Greek myths ...
... with malarial fever. He was lying in a large room where many of them slept on a durries [cotton carpet] spread on the floor. Sri Aurobindo had his foolscap typescripts of the translations from the Mahabharata scattered round him. Sudhir violently threw up, spattering those papers. Not a word of reproach. Not even art exclamation of annoyance. "Sri Aurobindo got up, and calmly began cleaning up the ejected ...
... the facts and figures quoted above can be found in Romesh Dutt's Economic History of India. Romesh Dutt —remember him? —met Sri Aurobindo in Baroda in 1899 and praised his translations of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. After his death in 1909, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the course of an article about him in The Karmayogin : "Without the Economic History and its damning story of England's commercial ...
... Philosophers were there, four in number, who were wisely guiding the people. That little kingdom was ruled by on old king. He was intelligent and wise. One day, as it happened in the Mahabharata's story of Savitri, the king called his son, Meotha, and asked him if he had by then found a partner or a companion for himself because, soon, he was to take the reigns of the kingdom. And the law ...
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