Puranas : constitute, according to the Upanishads, the fifth Veda; the Smṛti considers them commentaries on the Vedas. Traditionally a Purana treats five subjects: cosmogony, cosmology, cosmic cycles, gods & sages, & the principal human dynasties or rather lines of human development. They mix facts, tradition, psychic experiences as well as history in a poetic format, explained Sri Aurobindo in talks with disciples, does it matter, for instance, whether the personality it describes lived on the physical plane or not? The poet may be writing from a knowledge gained on the psychic or intuitive planes or from any other planes. Of those surviving, eighteen are major & eighteen ūpa-purana or minor ones.
... subtle significances, and if such a supersession becomes possible, it will itself be due very largely to the work done by the Puranas. The Puranas are essentially a true religious poetry, an art of aesthetic presentation of religious truth. All the bulk of the eighteen Puranas does not indeed take a high rank in this kind: there is much waste substance and not a little of dull and dreary matter, but... that had to be partly an expression of the higher spiritual truth and partly a bridge of transition between the normal religious and the spiritual mentality. The need was met by the Tantras and Puranas. The Puranas are the religious poetry peculiar to this period: for although the form probably existed in ancient times, it is only now that it was entirely developed and became the characteristic and the... supported by visual images and systematised in forms of Yogic practice. This element is also found in the Puranas, but more loosely and cast out in a less strenuous sequence. This method is after all simply a prolongation, in another form and with a temperamental change, of the method of the Vedas. The Puranas construct a system of physical images and observances each with its psychical significance. Thus the ...
... constructed in terms of physical images and observances each with its psychical significance. The geography of the Puranas is expressly explained in the Puranas themselves as a rich poetic figure; it is a symbolic geography of the inner psychical universe. As in the Vedas, so in the Puranas, the cosmogony which is expressed sometimes in terms proper to the physical universe has a spiritual and psychological... we must attribute, not indeed all the substance but the main bulk and the existing shape of the Puranic writings. Whatever may be our ultimate judgement on the significance of the Puranas, it can be observed that Puranas as also Tantras which belong to this age contain in themselves the highest spiritual and physical Page 94 truths derived from the lofty realisations of the Veda and the... to respond to a psycho- religious and psycho-spiritual appeal that prepared a capacity for highest things. Not all the Puranas contain high substance uniformly, but on the whole, the poetic method employed is justified by the richness and power of the creation. Some of the Puranas are, indeed, excellent both in substance and style. The Bhagavata, for instance, which is strongly affected by the learned ...
... from the grip of Matter, Ignorance and Death. However, one may not believe that whatsoever the Puranas say must be based on some truth or other. Nevertheless, we do not hesitate to assert that at the core of the teaching of the Puranas there lies a truth-secret - a Vedic or Upanishadic realisation. The Puranas too have an esoteric meaning based on the truth of the Vedic and Upanishadic realizations which... 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 beyond the domain... every word, every mantra of the Vedas is resonant could not be caught by the ears of the grammarians of our country or those of the European scholars. Not to speak of the Upanishads, even in the Puranas, the Mahabharata and such other scriptures we come across many peculiarities worth noticing. If we just carefully study these religious books of ours, we do learn that there are many names, places ...
... and Giants Indra and Python, Aryan and the Dasyu. In the Puranas and Tantras also life is conceived as a struggle and battle between Devas and Asuras, Devas and Rakshasas' between the armies of Gods and God- desses and the armies of Asuric, Rakshasic and Paishachik adversaries. The vedic goal of achieving immortality recurs also in the Puranas and Tantras, where we have symbolic story of the search... received the knowledge containing the Puranas from the Supreme Divine; Brahma transmitted it to his four mind-bom sons, one of whom Sanat Kumara transmitted it to Narada, who, in turn, transmitted it to Krishna Dwaipayana, Veda Vyasa. Veda Vyasa composed that knowledge in 18 books; each one of them is called Purana. There are also a number of Upapuranas. Puranas describe the creation of the universe... universe, development of the universe, and the dissolution of the universe. Apart from many legends, Puranas contain ideas relating to birth, death and the condition of the soul after the death of body. They also deal with the question relating to philosophic and yogic matters.Most importantly, Puranas are related to great deities, particularly of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. An important contribution of the ...
... still unable to rid our minds of the overpowering influence of the dismissal by western scholars of our own ancient records: The Puranas? They believe in the historicity of Homer and excavate Troy, but will not allow that same probability to the Puranas simply because they speak of a civilized antiquity in a colonized country when the western man was living in caves, and that is unacceptable... described as high adventure in his radical reconstruction of ancient Indian chronology in Ancient India in a New Light. 9 To summarise his findings in brief, Sethna marshalls evidence from the Puranas and archaeology to argue that the Sandrocottus of Megasthenes could not have been the Mauryan king, but was the founder of the Gupta Dynasty. I had pointed out to him after he had completed the... referring to the Saka Era of 78 A.D. According to modern historians, this is the time of the Gupta Empire, when this system of chronology was made up by the Puranic writers. Now, according to the Puranas the Guptas come around the last quarter of the 4th century B.C. If the modern dating of the Guptas is accepted, it means that the Puranics, face to face with the Gupta kings, placed them in antiquity ...
... gods praised the might of their leader. 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-... ends with Shiva and Parvati's marriage. However it is not certain that Kalidasa borrowed from the Puranas. It is more likely that the Shiva-Purana was the borrower. As to Kalidasa's specific sources they are unknown. As the reader might be interested to have a taste of the narration in the Puranas, we present here a short extract of Shiva-Purana describing Parvati's tapasya. 29. Discarding... performed penance and became dispirited by the pangs of separation. 34. Crying aloud "Alas 0 Siva", she, the daughter of the mountain, * It is a sacred place celebrated in the Matsya and Vayu Puranas where the river Ganga emerges from the Bindu Sarovara through visible outlets and subterranean channels. * The reader will note with dismay that fifty years after independence, when Indian scholarship ...
... the Veda, Vedic gods figured in the mantras conveying the mental shifting images; in the Puranas they yielded to more precise conceptual forms of the two great deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and all their Shaktis and their offshoots. It has been argued that the Trinity which became so dominant in the Puranas had minor importance in the Vedas. But while it is true that number of hymns addressed... Landmarks of Hinduism Gods in the Vedas and Puranas History of Indian religion and spirituality has an inner continuity, even though forms and atmosphere have changed from time to time in the course of millennia. The Vedic beginning was so vast and so lofty, so comprehensive in its seed-form that the later developments could be considered to be growing forms... Vedas can be understood through Upanishads, and Upanishads can be best understood through the Vedas. It is, however, argued that when we come to the post- Vedic age, and particularly the age of Puranas, the changes are so great and radical that one would be inclined to suggest some kind of discontinuity in the heritage derived from the Vedas. But a deeper study will show that there was no discontinuity ...
... brought more and more powerfully, widely and intensely home to the general mind and feeling of the people. Vedas and Puranas: Continuity and Change: The system of the hierarchy of the worlds that we find in the Veda was more intricate than the system found in the Puranas. In the Veda, the highest worlds constitute the triple divine principle; infinity is their scope, bliss is their foundation... Titans, Gods and Giants, Indra and Python, Aryan and the Dasyu. In the Puranas and Tantras also life is conceived as a struggle and battle between Devas and Asuras, Devas and Rakshasas, armies of Gods and Goddesses and those of Asuric, Rakshasic and Paishacik adversaries. The Vedic goal of achieving immortality recurs also in the Puranas and Tantras, where we have symbolic story of the search after the ...
... (Laughter) 27-2-1939 (conti.) "The Vishnu Purana" and Puranas in general Disciple : Are the incidents related in the Purana about Krishna’s life psychic representations created by the poet, or do they correspond to facts that had occurred in his life on earth? Sri Aurobindo : From the reading itself of the Puranas you can know whether the killing of the Asura is a physical fact... is only a shadow of the psychic. Disciple : I find the Vishnu Purana very fine. Sri Aurobindo : In the Vishnu Purana all the aspects of a Purana are nicely described. It is one of the Puranas I have gone through carefully. I wonder how it has escaped the general notice : it is magnificent poetry. There is a very fine and humorous passage in which a disciple asks the Guru whether the... must have been composed very late ! Disciple : Buddha lived about 500 B. C. Is it true ? Sri Aurobindo : This Purana is not so early as that. All Page 113 the Puranas, in fact, are post-Buddhistic. They are a part of the Brahmanic revival which came as a reaction against Buddhism in the Gupta period." Disciple : They are supposed to have been written in or ...
... but they have for a long time past ceased to be their present foundation or their intellectual substance. It is rather the Upanishads & the Puranas that are the living Scriptures of mediaeval and modern Hinduism. But if, as we contend, the Upanishads & the Puranas only give us in other language, later symbols, altered forms of thought the same religious truths that we find differently stated in the Rigveda... accustomed in obedience to Western criticism to base ourselves on the Upanishads & Gita and put aside Purana and Veda as mere mythology & mere ritual, yet in practice we live by the religion of the Puranas & Tantras even more profoundly & intimately than we live by & realise the truths of the Upanishads. In heart & soul we still worship Krishna and Kali and believe in the truth of their existence. N... hymn constitute the indicative passage. In Saraswati we have a deity with subjective functions—the first desideratum in our enquiry. Still, there is a doubt, a difficulty. Saraswati of the Epics & Puranas, Saraswati, as she is worshipped today throughout India is, no doubt, a purely subjective goddess and presides only over intellectual and immaterial functions. She is our Lady of Speech, the Muse, ...
... n was recorded in one of the Upanishads, and that he was traditionally regarded as a divine man, one 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... 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 is nothing in the Puranas that betrays any such intention. It seems to me that it is related as something that actually occurred or occurs somewhere; the Gopis are to them realities and not symbols. It was for them at the least... divine Gokul and which projected itself in Page 483 an earthly Brindavan and can always be realised and its meaning made actual in the soul. It is to be presumed that the writers of the Puranas took it as having been actually projected on earth in the life of the incarnate Krishna and it has always been so accepted by the religious mind of India. These questions and the speculations to ...
... worship of external Nature-Powers in the Veda from the developed religion of the Greeks and from the psychological and spiritual ideas we find attached to the functions of the Gods in the Upanishads and Puranas. We may accept for the present the theory that the earliest fully intelligent form of human religion is necessarily,—since man on earth begins from the external and proceeds to the internal,—a worship... not enough to say that this change was inevitable with the progress of human civilisation: the process also of the change demands inquiry and elucidation. We see the same revolution effected in the Puranas partly by the substitution of other divine names and figures, but also in part by the same obscure process that we observe in the evolution of Greek mythology. The river Saraswati has become the Muse... to be valid, will have three ad vantages. It will elucidate simply and effectively the parts of the Upanishads that remain yet unintelligible or ill-understood as well as much of the origins of the Puranas. It will explain and Page 8 justify rationally the whole ancient tradition of India; for it will be found that, in sober truth, the Vedanta, Purana, Tantra, the philosophical schools and ...
... n was recorded in one of the Upanishads, and that he was traditionally regarded as a divine man, one 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... 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 is nothing in the Puranas that betrays any such intention. It seems to me that it is related as something that actually occurred or occurs somewhere. The Gopis are to them realities and not symbols. It was for them at the least... always going on in a divine Gokul and which projected itself in an earthly Brindavan and can always be realised and its meaning made actual in the soul. It is to be presumed that the writers of the Puranas took it as having been actually projected on earth in the life of the incarnate Krishna and it has been so accepted by the religious mind of India. These questions and the speculations to which ...
... he may be in the silent Brahman unless the Brahman has sent him down. According to the Puranas he may be in Saptaloka. DR. MANILAL: The Puranas can't be believed! Plenty of unreasonable stories! SRI AUROBINDO: Why not? What about the Upanishads? There are also such stories. DR. MANILAL: Then the Puranas are true? SRI AUROBINDO: Except for the stories which are meant only to illustrate truths ...
... which also developed during this period, was entirely anti-Vedic. "There are 18 Puranas. Each Purana has five parts: (1) creation of the world, (2) destruction and recreation of the world, (3) reigns and periods of Manus, (4) geneology and Gods, and (5) dynasties of solar and lunar kings. While Puranas are Vedic, Tantras are Vedic only indirectly, and they are called Agamas. We do not... man's inner mind and life to the Divine in the universe were attempted through the development of great philosophies,* many-sided epic literature (particularly Ramayana and Mahabharata), systems of Puranas and Tantras,** and even art and science. An enlarged secular turn was given, and this was balanced by deepening of the intensities of psycho-religious experience. New tendencies and mystic forms ...
... 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 had such a strong... and forests and rivers, would not have carried into their culture the least memory of their supposed ancestral steppes in Central Asia. This is all the more strange if we remember that the Epics and Puranas are regarded as based on historical tradition (itihāsa), considerably embellished, to be sure, but still with a kernel of historicity. Of course, this historicity is all rubbish in the eyes of... 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 found along its course ...
... these Gods as Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva in the Puranas. What the Puranas describe as the Gopi Rasalila, the play of Krishna with the Gopis who are ¹. "Sri Aurobindo at Evening Talk", Mother India., Page 24 his devotees, is not a fact of the physical plane but of the higher and deeper planes. In the Puranas we have mental representations of truths about... universe and with it the Devas and Asuras - the Devas or Gods leading the manifestation towards its goal, and the Asuras or Demons obstructing it. It is their interaction that is described in the Puranas as the battle between the powers of Light and Darkness. The Ganas of the Gods are partial manifestations of them.... A positive pointer to the Overmind plane as other than the ...
... task is to recover the ancient spiritual knowledge in its fullness, in its amplitude — this is the first task. And this means of course, basically, the recovery of the Veda, Upanishads, the Gita, the Puranas and Tantras. This is, one might say, the basic stuff of what can be called the ancient spiritual knowledge of India. I underline the word "knowledge" because, usually, though this knowledge is contained... which were made once for all and have to be accepted unquestioningly. Therefore, philosophers do not accept them as bodies of knowledge. The Vedas are Scriptures; the Upanishads, the Gita, Tantra, Puranas are Scriptures; but they must still be considered as books of knowledge, because India does not regard them as revelations made for all times which cannot be repeated or which cannot be verified.... upbringing, it was only when I came to Sri Aurobindo that I really entered into the real portals of Vedic knowledge. Till that time, all that I knew of the Veda and the Upanishads and the Gita and the Puranas was that they were a real dense forest, difficult to penetrate; it was difficult to walk, even one mile, into that big terrain. When we recited the mantras of the Veda, the hymns of the Veda, we understood ...
... Part II On Puranic Literature A few extracts from Sri Aurobindo's "The Foundations of Indian Culture" The Puranas are essentially a true religious poetry, an art of aesthetic presentation of religious truth. All the bulk of the eighteen Puranas does not indeed take a high rank in this kind: there is much waste substance and not a little of dull and dreary matter, but on the... form in the Vaishnava religion centres round the mystic apologue of the pastoral life of the child Krishna. In the Vishnu Purana the tale of Krishna is a heroic saga of the divine Avatar; in later Puranas we see the aesthetic and erotic symbol developing and in the Bhagavat it is given its full power and prepared to manifest its entire spiritual and philosophic as well as its psychic sense and to remould... under the stress of temperamental variation the poetry of the Vaishnavas puts on very different artistic forms in different provinces. There is first the use of the psychical symbol created by the Puranas, and this assumes its most complete and artistic shape in Bengal and becomes there a long continued tradition. The desire of the soul for God is there thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical love ...
... slightest setback at the hands of the Asuras, and they run to Grandfather Brahma to be pulled out of their predicament. Mother's reference to the Puranas may be puzzling to those 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... lacking in Page 39 initiative." She half corrected herself, "They do have some, but ... I don't know how to put it. These gods have always seemed to me — not those described in the Puranas here, they are different . . . well, not so very different! But the way Théon presented them, they were much like a bunch of marshmallows! It's not that they had no power —they had a lot of power —... Etymologically, the word purana means ancient or old. To the discerning mind a deal of 'lost' Indian history is woven into the fabric of these books that cover such a vast period of time. The Puranas give mythical accounts of creation. They expound the theory of spiritual evolution. Stating that the material world is not an integral totality, but only a grade in a gradation, they describe through ...
... × Observe that in the Puranas the Yugas, moments, months, etc. are all symbolic and it is stated that the body of man is the year. × In the Upanishads and Puranas there is no distinction between Swar and Dyaus; therefore a fourth name had to be... world of bliss, the Satya, Tapas and Jana worlds of the Puranic system based upon the three supreme principles, Sat, Chit-Tapas and Ananda; their base is Swar of the Veda, Mahar of the Upanishads and Puranas, the world of Truth. 4 These four together make the fourfold fourth world and are described in the Rig Veda as the four supreme and secret seats, the source of the "four upper rivers". Sometimes ...
... mystic speculation to account for their perfect form & clearness. This psychology, this physics, this cosmology persist almost unchanged through the whole history of Hinduism. We meet them in the Puranas; they are the foundation of the Tantra; they are still obscurely practised in various systems of Yoga. And throughout, they have rested on a declared Vedic foundation. The Pranava, the Gayatri, the... the ideal world). The Pranava in its three essentialities rules over the three supreme worlds, the Satyaloka (divine being), Tapoloka (divine Awareness & Force), Anandaloka (divine Bliss) of the Puranas, which constitute Amritam, immortality or the true kingdom of heaven of the Vedic religion. These are the Vedic sapta dhamani & the seven different movements of consciousness to which they correspond... must mean another plane of consciousness. We have found the meaning of Mahas by consulting Purana & Vedanta as well as the Veda itself. Have we any similar light on the significance of Tuvi? Yes. The Puranas describe to us three worlds above Maharloka,—called, respectively, in the Puranic system, Jana, Tapas and Satya. By a comparison with Vedantic psychology we know that Jana must be the world of Ananda ...
... Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960 November 4, 1958 ( Concerning; the Agenda of August 9, 1958 , on the gods of the Puranas ) The gods of the Puranas are merciless gods who respect only power and have nothing of the true love, charity or profound goodness that the Divine has put into the human consciousness—and which compensate p... conception, the woman who worships her husband as a god, Page 215 which means that she sees the Supreme in her husband. And so this woman was much more powerful than all the gods of the Puranas precisely because she had this psychic capacity for total self-giving; and her faith in the Supreme's presence in her husband gave her a much greater power than that of all the gods. The story narrated ...
... recorded in one of the Upanishads, and that he was traditionally regarded as a divine man, one 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... 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 is nothing in the Puranas that betrays any such intention. It seems to me that it is related as something that actually occurred or occurs somewhere; the Gopis are to them realities and not symbols. It was for them at the... always going on in a divine Gokul and which projected itself in an earthly Brindavan and can always be realised and its meaning made actual in the soul. It is to be presumed that the writers of the Puranas took it as having been actually projected on earth in the life of the incarnate Krishna and it has been always so accepted by the religious mind of India. These questions and the speculations ...
... late. Disciple : Buddha was born about 500 B. C. Sri Aurobindo : It is not so early as that; all the puranas are posterior to Buddhism. They are a part of the Brahminical revival which came as a reaction against Buddhism in the Gupta period. Disciple : The Puranas are even the earliest, supposed to have been written about the 3rd or the 4th century A. D. Sri Aurobindo :... Disciple : Arjuna could not bear his sight and had to ask him to resume his human form. Sri Aurobindo : In the Vishnu Purana all the aspects of Vishnu are nicely described. It is one of the Puranas I have read through carefully. I wonder how it has escaped general notice because it is magnificent poetry. There is a humourous passage in it, where a disciple asks the Guru whether the king is ...
... different in principle from the evolution of the individual—a proceeding from the material, the emotionally and mentally inert man upwards [?through] the mental to [?our] spiritual fulfilment. The Puranas admit the creation of animal forms before the appearance of man and in the symbol of the Ten Avatars trace the growth of our evolution from the fish through the animal, the man-animal and the developed... d in detail, slowly & with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth for us in the symbols of the Puranas. It is for this reason that he assigned to his civilisation those immense eras and those ancient and far backward beginnings which strike the modern as so incredible. He may have erred; recent discoveries ...
... secrecies It burns for ever on the altar of Mind, Its priests the souls of dedicated gods, Humanity its house of sacrifice. 41 But who is this Yajna-Purusha, the Yajneshwara of the Puranas, the Fire of the Yogins, the Tapas of the doers of austerities, the God of worship of the ritualists, the sacramental divinity of the religious, the bringer of the heavenly riches to the terrestrial... heart which itself is the House of Flame? 42 To restate: the Yajna-Purusha is the transcendent Supreme himself, the Supreme in the poise of a great creative Action. In the language of the Puranas he is the creator Brahma and it was out of his Will or samkalpa that the creation ensued; out of his Tapas-Yajna or the force of concentration were the worlds bom. The metaphysicospiritual sense ...
... accompanying him was in the pursuit of immortality and not for disappearance. The Kutsa-Indra parable belongs to the set of the two Vedic-Upanishadic birds on the same tree, or of Nara and Narayana of the Puranas,. or of the later-day Aitihasic human Warrior and the divine Avatar on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Everywhere the soul, instead of losing itself in the oversoul, gets enriched in a shining and... also the exact hour and moment of death which Savitri reckons when Satyavan is about to die in the forest. But the year is symbolic and the hour is symbolic. About it Sri Aurobindo tells: "... in the Puranas the Yugas, moments, months etc. are all symbolic and it is stated that the body of man is the year." Therefore abandonment of the body, dehanyāsa, at the end of the year, samvatsara, is the abandonment ...
... essential in our modern ideas of evolution. From one side all forms of creatures are developed; some kind of physical evolution from the animal to the human is admitted in the Aitareya [Upanishad] … The Puranas admit the creation of animal forms before the appearance of man and in the symbol of the Ten Avatars trace the growth of our evolution from the fish through the animal, the man-animal and the developed... more ages than we can easily count … It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth for us in the symbols of the Puranas.” 4 What is evolution to the modern mind? The Oxford Dictionary of Biology gives this definition: “The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the ...
... entered into it for their cosmic functions. This is a clear parable of the creation of more and more developed forms until one was found that was capable of housing a developed consciousness. In the Puranas it is stated that the tamasic animal creation was the first in time. Tamas is the Indian word for the principle of inertia of consciousness and force... The animal, in whom there is this less developed... up the Indian theory of the "Incarnate Word", as Teilhard would phrase it, directly with his philosophy of Christogenesis along with cosmogenesis. Apropos of the Avatar-tradition preserved in the Puranas Sri Aurobindo 12 writes in a letter: "The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is..., as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal [Tortoise] between ...
... popularity of the new religion it was necessary to put forward instead of venerable but unintelligible texts Scriptures written in an easy form of a more modern Sanskrit. For the mass of the nation the Puranas pushed aside the Veda and the forms of new religious systems took the place of the ancient ceremonies. As the Veda had passed from the sage to the priest, so now it began to pass from the hands of... There is reason to suppose that Purana (legend and apologue) and Itihasa (historical tradition) were parts of Vedic culture long before the present forms of the Puranas and historical Epics were evolved. × Gita XV.15. ...
... them, and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas. I was helped in arriving at this result by my fortunate ignorance of the commentary of Sayana. For I was left free to attribute their natural psychological significance to many ordinary and current... the perfect bliss. Their separate functions emerged by means of their activities, their epithets, the psychological sense of the legends connected with them, the indications of the Upanishads and Puranas, the occasional side-lights from Greek myth. On the other hand the demons who opposed them, are all powers of division and limitation, Coverers, Tearers, Devourers, Confiners, Dualisers, Obstructers ...
... to the later Sachchidananda, the divine existence, consciousness and bliss, and secondly in the threefold mundane principle, Mind, Life, Body, upon which is built the triple world of the Veda and Puranas. But the full number ordinarily recognised is seven. This figure was arrived at by adding the three divine principles to the three mundane and interpolating a seventh or link-principle which is precisely... also, the seven rivers are conscious currents corresponding to Page 98 the sevenfold substance of the ocean of being which appears to us formulated in the seven worlds enumerated by the Puranas. It is their full flow in the human consciousness which constitutes the entire activity of the being, his full treasure of substance, his full play of energy. In the Vedic image, his cows drink of ...
... upper and the lower ocean. This Vedic imagery throws a clear light on the similar symbolic images of the Puranas, especially on the famous symbol of Vishnu sleeping after the pralaya on the folds of the snake Ananta upon the ocean of sweet milk. It may perhaps be objected that the Puranas were written by superstitious Hindu priests or poets who believed that eclipses were caused by a dragon eating ...
... 6 Writings, c. 1920 - XVII The traditions are symbolic, not exact. The system of the Puranas was not created by anybody, but was a development of very ancient traditions infinitely older than the historic culture to Page 1441 which the name of Puranic has been given. The present Puranas are very late creations with many ancient things imbedded in them and mixed with much of a recent ...
... knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return... knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, Page 168 a Scripture of ritual and of animal sacrifice, persisted in the popular mind even after the decline of Buddhism and the ...
... Page 197 Shyam has no qualities! The Vedas state Their negative, and Upanishads proposed The Self as absolute, Though seeming qualified Vedas, Puranas too have never found One quality; if all is qualified, Say, what supports the sky! O women of Braj? Has Shyam no qualities? Then how Are qualities formed, we'd like to know... have now come to initiate the process of chanting the holy names. For starting the sahkīrtanamovement, devotional service in ecstatic love, have I appeared in this age of Kali. All the Vedas and Puranas teach everyone to take my shelter. I always reside in the company of my devotees. There is no one dearer to me than my devotees. They are my father, mother, friend, son, and brother. ...
... 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. New tendencies and mystic... of materialism, which also developed during this period, was entirely anti-Vedic. × There are 18 Puranas. Each Purana has five parts: (1) Creation of the World, (2) Destruction and recreation of the world, (3) Reigns and periods of Manus, (4) Genealogy of Gods, and (5) Dynasties of solar and lunar kings ...
... "India, encircled as she is by seas and mountains, is indisputably a Page 157 geographical unit, and as such is rightly designated by one name." Indeed, in the Puranas and the epics, we find evidence of the existence of an "India", an ancient superstructure over the various distinct regions that now make up India. This superstructure was and is still known as Bharata... south of the Himalayas, and where the people are called "Bharati". But the Bharati peoples were not all similar and alike. They were distinct peoples and this was well known to the authors of the Puranas. Yet they used the term Bharata, thus indicating that in spite of differences, there was commonness and an underlying unity. We see this illustrated in the epics. The Ramayana and ...
... ion for life, the accused were perfectly unconcerned, some of them absorbed in reading Bankim Chandra's novels, some Raja Yoga, or the Science of Religion by Vivekananda, and some the Gita, the Puranas and Western Philosophy...." "PRISON AND FREEDOM" "Man is a slave to outer circumstances, bound to his experiences of the physical world. All his mental operations proceed on the basis... religion", "Maya", "Sannyas and Tyaga", "National Resurgence and National Hatred", "Egoism", "The Problems of the Past and a glimpse of the Future", "Motherland and Nationalism", "The Upanishads", "The Puranas", "The Eight Siddhis" etc., and a long sequence of essays on the Gita reveal an original approach to the ancient spiritual wisdom and philosophical thought. Some of these essays have been published ...
... Ignorance and revealed the Real, the Vast, the Truth. The need, then, was to get back to the Upanishads, and go beyond them too - to the Vedas. If Upanishad and Veda were the 'Sruti', the Puranas were the 'Smriti': The revelation of the Rishis who were accomplished in Yoga and endowed with spiritual insight, and the Word which the Master of the Universe spoke to their purified intelligence... .. and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas. 10 In other words, he was now able to see the links between Veda and Upanishad on the one hand, and on the other, between the Vedic world of dynamic symbolism and his own inner world of ...
... bodies unclean,' as says the Vishnu Purana. 1 The creation is rotted to its core. Time for the deliverance. Time for pralaya. Out of the apocalypse, phoenix-like, a new creation emerges. The Puranas state that the duration of each yuga is in direct proportion to the diminishing Truth. 2 As a result, man's life-span diminishes also. In addition, they say that with the declining Truth man's stature... great virtue of the Kali Yuga is that the spiritual progress man accomplishes with great, ascetic efforts in the Satya Yuga he can accomplish with very little effort in the Kali Yuga." 2.Some Puranas put the durations respectively as 4800, 3600, 2400, 3600, 2400 and 1200 years of the gods. One god-year = 360 human years. Page 69 portrays this beautifully and the narrative sparkles ...
... now attempting to find out the utmost each sense could feel, probing and sounding the soul-possibilities in matter and even seeking God through the senses. The emotional religion of the Vaishnava Puranas which takes as its type of the relation between the human soul and the Supreme the passion of a woman for her lover, was already developing. The corresponding Tantric development of Shaivism may not... d itself fully; but the concretisation of the idea of Purusha-Prakriti, the union of Ishwara and Shakti, Page 165 from which it arose, was already there in the symbolic legends of the Puranas and one of these is the subject of Kalidasa's greatest epic poem. The Birth of the War-God stands on the same height in classical Sanskrit as the Paradise Lost in English literature: it is the masterpiece ...
... × It is to be noted that the Puranas distinguish specifically between two classes of Pitris, the divine Fathers, a class of deities, and the human Ancestors, to both of whom the piṇḍa is offered. The Puranas, obviously, only continue in this respect the original Vedic tradition. ...
... schools. Its Sankhya is the catholic and Vedantic Sankhya such as we find it in its first principles and elements in the great Vedantic synthesis of the Upanishads and in the later developments of the Puranas. Its idea of Yoga is that large idea of a principally subjective practice and inner change, necessary for the finding of the Self or the union with God, of which the Rajayoga is only one special a... Indian religious consciousness. It is the foundation of the highest Bhaktiyoga which claims to exceed the rigid definitions of monistic philosophy; it is at the back of the philosophy of the devotional Puranas. The Gita is not content, either, to abide within the Sankhya analysis of Prakriti; for that makes room only for the ego-sense and not for the multiple Purusha, which is there not a part of ...
... are all on different planes, some very close to man, others very close to the Supreme, with many intermediaries. You will understand better what I want to tell you if I mention the gods of the Puranas—like those we saw the other day in the film—who in many ways are, I must say, inferior to man (!) although they have infinitely more power. There are gods of the Overmind who are the great creators... all eternity on their own plane. Here Sri Aurobindo is speaking mostly about the Vedic gods, but not exclusively nor in a very definite way. At any rate these gods are higher than the gods of the Puranas. Here is what Sri Aurobindo tells us. In fact, it is a prayer: Be wide in me, O Varuna; Be mighty in me, O Indra; O Sun, be very bright and luminous; O Moon, be full of charm and sweetness ...
... luminous whole, expressing in its various aspects the single and universal Truth; for under the myriad contradictions of phenomena (prapancha) there is one Truth and one only. All the Smritis, the Puranas, the Darshanas, the Dharmashastras, the writings of Shaktas, Shaivas, Vaishnavas, Sauras, as well as the whole of Buddhism and its Scriptures are merely so many explanations, comments and interpretations... surrounded by it or Page 102 clothed by it. The Lord himself is present on the Ocean in various forms, Prajna, Hiranyagarbha & Virat, or Vishnu, Brahma and Maheshwara. This is what the Puranas represent as Vishnu on the Serpent of Time & Space in the Causal Ocean & Brahma growing out of the lotus in his navel etc. This is the Lord, the King & Ruler. We must therefore realise all things in ...
... accomplished in detail, slowly and with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth in the symbols of the Puranas .” 24 In this view the ancient Hindu concept of pralaya , or dissolution of a universe, is part of the eternal process of manifestation. This concept was even less than a century ago thought... accomplished in detail, slowly and with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing , which is imaged and set forth in the symbols of the Puranas.” 26 Multiple Universes and Typal Worlds In “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds” in Savitri , Sri Aurobindo has given an unprecedented description of “the world-stair,” the tremendous ...
... Words of the Mother - III 4 November 1958 The Gods and Their Worlds Do the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Greek and Egyptian mythology have any real existence? Between the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Greek and Egyptian mythology, all kinds of similarities are found; it could be an interesting subject for study. To the modern Western ...
... y, 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 with them.... ally. But, of course, there is also the transcendental aspect to be taken note of. Pantheism generally does not recognise it and sees only the universal. In contrast to that the language of the Puranas has a certain richness and flexibility to understand things in an intuitive way. The problem of the universe as Nature-begotten cannot be solved from within; for there is no agent present ...
... immortality and not for disappearance. The Kutsa-Indra parable belongs to the set of the two Vedic-Upanishadic birds Page 577 on the same tree, or of Nara and Narayana of the Puranas, or of the later-day Aitihasic human Warrior and the divine Avatar on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Everywhere the soul, instead of losing itself in the oversoul, gets enriched in a shining and... the exact hour and moment of death which Savitri reckons when Satyavan is about to die in the forest. But the year is symbolic and the hour is symbolic. About it Sri Aurobindo tells: "...in the Puranas the Yugas, moments, months etc. are all symbolic and it is stated that the body of man is the year." Therefore abandonment of the body, dehanyāsa , at the end of the year, saṁvatsara , is the ...
... of a transfrontier home survives in India. Not only the religious books after the Rigveda but also those portions of the Puranas which purport to transmit either legendary or historical information are absolutely silent. "According to traditional history as recorded in the Puranas," says Pusalker, "India itself is the home of the Aryans, and it was from here that they expanded in different directions ...
... 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 psycho-religious experience. New tendencies and mystic... materialism, which also developed during this period, was entirely anti-Vedic. × There are 18 Puranas. Each Purana has five parts: (1) Creation of the World, (2) Destruction and recreation of the world, (3) Reigns and periods of Manus, (4) Genealogy of Gods, and (5) Dynasties of solar and lunar kings ...
... received this knowledge from Sanat Kumāra, and he transmitted it to Krishna Dwaipāyana Vedavyāsa, Vedavyāsa composed that knowledge in 18 books, each one of them is called Purāna. The names of these Puranas are given in the following table along with the number of verses mentioned against each: Name Number of verses Brahma Purāna 10,000 Padma Purāna 55,000 ... knowledge relating to birth, death, and the condition of the soul after the death of the body. We also find in them questions and answers dealing with philosophic and yogic matters. Most importantly, Puranas are related to great deities, particularly Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Bhāgavata Purāna is considered to be the most valuable book on Lord Krishna, and it is looked upon as an unparalleled composition ...
... emendation. In the fixed tradition of the Veda, which extends in India over at least four thousand years, it has been held as authoritative and true in the Brahmans and the Upanishads, Tantra and Puranas, in the doctrines of great orthodox philosophical schools and in the teachings of famous saints and sages. The very term Veda means knowledge and by knowledge, the tradition means the knowledge... them, and, secondly that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas."¹ There is a profound statement in one of the hymns of Vamadeva, where the poet speaks of secret words of knowledge that expressed their meaning only to, the seer: "ninya vacamsi nivacana kavaye ...
... Sri Krishna In Brindavan Editorial Note Sri Krishna's life, as it is narrated in the Puranas and in several other writings, reads like a legend or even like a myth. It is sometimes argued that Sri Krishna and his life have only a symbolical value. It has also been doubted whether Sri Krishna ever lived in any historical or prehistorical time. Even the M... 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 and the stories that ...
... religion. This is glorified as Hinduism and the Sanatana Dharma. If, in addition, a man has emotional or ecstatic piety, he is a Bhakta; if he can talk fluently about the Veda, Upanishads, Darshanas & Puranas, he is a Jnani. If he puts on a yellow robe and does nothing, he is a tyagi or sannyasin. The latter is liberated from the ordinary dharma, but only if he does nothing but beg and vegetate. All work ...
... themselves the most perfectly, continuously and on the most colossal scale, precisely because they have been the most indomitably original in the form & matter of their literature. The Vedas, Upanishads & Puranas are unique in their kind; the great Epics in their form and type of art stand apart in the epic literature of the world, the old Sanscrit drama has its affinities with a dramatic species which developed ...
... 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 whole which we ...
... schools, the general Indian mind was Page 606 always overpoweringly attracted by the synthetical tendency. The Gita seems to be in part the expression of such a synthetic reaction, the Puranas show constantly the same tendency and even into the philosophical schools it made its entry. Prof. Ranade's article on Greek and Sanskrit carries us into another field, that of Comparative Philology ...
... radiates out towards our mentality in the three heavenly luminous worlds of Swar, the domain of Indra. Below is ranked the triple system in which we live. We have the same cosmic gradations as in the Puranas but they are differently grouped,—seven worlds in principle, five in practice, three in their general groupings: 1) The Supreme Sat-Chit-Ananda The triple divine worlds 2) The Link-World ...
... Veda speaks as the Truth that is the final goal and home of man. It is described here as the greater infinite heavenly world, (Swargaloka, Swarloka of the Veda), which is not the lesser Swarga of the Puranas or the lesser Brahmaloka of the Mundaka Upanishad, its world of the sun's rays to which the soul arrives by works of virtue and piety, but falls from them by the exhaustion of their merit; it is the ...
... are driven to the use of metaphors, and since metaphors must be used, one will do as well as another, for none can be entirely applicable. Let us then image Avyakta as an egg, the golden egg of the Puranas, full of the waters of undifferentiated existence and divided into two halves, the upper or luminous half filled with the upper waters of subjective ideation, the lower or tenebrous half with the lower ...
... although it explains the created world by the double principle of Purusha and Prakriti; nor is it Vaishnava Theism although it presents to us Krishna, who is the Avatara of Vishnu according to the Puranas, as the supreme Deity and allows no essential difference nor any actual superiority of the status of the indefinable relationless Brahman over that of this Lord of beings who is the Master of the universe ...
... fact the beginning of a form of symbolic or figurative imagery for the poetic expression of spiritual experience which reappears constantly in later Indian writing, the figures of the Tantras and Puranas, the figures of the Vaishnava poets,—one might add even a certain element in the modern poetry of Tagore,—and has its kindred movements in certain Chinese poets and in the images of the Sufis. The ...
... fortunate enough to hear many say several times that the Arya would elucidate the secrets of the Veda and, as a corollary, unravel many a knot, till now unloosened, in the Upanishads, Itihasas, Puranas, etc. I heard many also declare that Sri Aurobindo had found a new method of Yoga for the sake of mankind and would divulge in the Arya the characteristic process of sadhana for following this method ...
... Vedantic Sachchidananda and the Puranic satya-tapas-jana . As for vijnana getting identified with buddhi in later times, I don't believe that the identification can be laid at the door of the Puranas. The philosophers who started interpreting the religious books seem to have divided manas from buddhi as sense-mind from the pure reason and interpreted vijnana with the latter. As far as I ...
... her soul-mate. His words are like the Mantra that a Yogin absorbs in his very cells, and Savitri starts on her quest. In this ancient culture of varied religious and spiritual quests, the Puranas have played an important part in getting the aspirant accustomed to certain ideas. For instance, the universal deities take an individual form and not only walk on this earth but go through all ...
... to this the Mother narrates her experience in the occult region where she had encountered an immense black Serpent. This Serpent prevented her from entering the cave of the vital world. 78 The Puranas also contain references to the jewel-serpent or Nagamani. In Savitri we have an echo of these: In the deep subconscient glowed her jewel-lamp; Lifted, it showed the riches of the Cave ...
... the God. Page 15 The easy flow of the poetic verses is the movement of his limbs and the deep esoteric sense of these stanzaic delineations gives to his poise comeliness. Eighteen Puranas bejewelled with fundamental propositions of things adorn his shining godhood. Literature and poetry and art in their spontaneous fondness are indeed the jingling bells of the silken belt around his ...
... old Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world is already turning.” 17 The clearest sources of evolutionary thinking in the Indian tradition are however to be found in the Puranas, which contain the story of the succession of the Avatars. “The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution.” 18 An Avatar, in brief, is a direct incarnation ...
... out a suggestive scheme for music? Still I will see what comes—if anything comes. AE.'s lines on Krishna are a magnificent poem; of course, it gives only one side of the Krishna idea as it is in the Puranas and the Gita. I never met Chakrabarti 1 personally and know nothing about Krishnaprem's Guru. Chakrabarti's father came here to see me, but even that I hid forgotten till the Mother reminded ...
... brackets have been omitted from the version published in the Centenary Edition (1972), 30. Bhāgavat: an old and widely read Purana dealing with the life of Sri Krishna and his devotees. 31. Puranas: sacred works composed by Vyasa, eighteen in number, which contain the whole of Hindu mythology and ancient legendary history. 32. (Dilip's note:) Dhruba Sundara, that is, "Beauty in the Concrete" ...
... in my book, Mr. de Sa again is unable to focus his attention. He makes a loose reference to Pusalker and his "contention". What Pusalker really says is that the Indian tradition, especially in the Puranas, makes India itself the home of the Aryans, from where they expanded in different directions to various countries. Neither Pusalker nor I offer this statement off our own bat. We are citing Indian ...
... Proto-Harappān, 101 Przewalski horse, 70, 73 Pumpelly, 69, 71 Punjāb, 14, 15, 16, 17, 61, 62, 85, 118 Pur, purah, iv, 95, 102, 103, 104, 119, 120, 131, 132 Puranas, 15, 16 Pusalker, A.D., 8, 26, 33, 49, 57, 87, 101, 110, 116, 126, 127 Pythagoras, 107 Quetta, 69 Rajasthan, 62, 63 Ramayana, 8, 10 ...
... puraniks , whose profession it is to read the scriptures for the benefit of the local Hindu community. From an early age he had been steeped in the sacred writings and the ocean of stories from the Puranas and other sources. He too was irresistibly attracted by the name of Sri Aurobindo and the reports about him from people who knew him or were his disciples. Together with eleven others he decided to ...
... then he was not an Avatar—for of that kind there have been thousands and they cannot be all Avatars. I don't know that historically there could have been any other Buddha. It is the Vaishnava Puranas, I think, that settled the list of Avatars, for they are all Avatars of Vishnu according to the Purana. The final acceptance by all may have come later than Shankara, after the Buddhist-Brahminic ...
... at his side and shared the meal. When the hero went to the house of his Guru to study, he learnt the four Vedas as others might learn a game or a song. Having filled his mind with the Vedas and the Puranas, he had no wish to keep the sacred words in the secrecy of his heart. He taught them to his brother. Just as kindness loves to share good knowledge, it also loves to share good news. For example ...
... religion. This is glorified as Hinduism and the Sanatana Dharma. If, in addition, a man has emotional or ecstatic piety, he is a Bhakta; if he can talk fluently about the Veda, Upanishads, Darshanas and Puranas, he is a Jnani. If he puts on a yellow robe and does nothing, he is a tyaga or sannyasin. The latter is liberated from the ordinary dharma, but only if he does nothing but beg and vegetate. All ...
... lot of confusion has been caused by those who have been writing and preaching that the Supramental Yoga can be done and its goal reached through the deities to whom people are accustomed. The old Puranas, the Tulsi Ramayana, etc. are being expounded with a view to promote the ideal of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. Their view is that Sri Krishna, Rama, Sita—all can give the truth of the Supramental. ...
... family deities as well as at all the temples in the city with fragrant flowers and to the accompaniment of (various) musical instruments. (2) Let bards well-versed in singing praises as well as in the Puranas (containing ancient legends, cosmogony, etc.,) as also minstrels, all those proficient in the use of musical instruments as well as courtesans from every quarter, the queen mothers as also the ministers ...
... a new synthesis. The conflict that arose in Indian thought as a result of the growth and development of Buddhism was sought to be resolved by the composite philosophy that we find embedded in the Puranas and Tantras. Still later, when the conflict between the various schools of Vedanta became acute, we find in Sri Chaitanya a profound and subtle synthesis. At the same time, the coming of Islam in India ...
... working of ivory, in architecture, physics, mechanics, antidotes, mining, crossing of rivers, leaping and jumping and sleight of hand; in stories, dramas, romances, poems; in the Mahabharata, the Puranas, the Itihasa and the Ramayana; in all kinds of writing, all foreign languages, all technicalities, all mechanical arts, in metre and in every other art. And while he ceaselessly studied, even in ...
... that occurred in that chapter was Sri 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 ...
... contradictory to former ones. SRI AUROBINDO: He says, "This fellow has done some Tapasya, let me give him something." He is also Bholanath: he doesn't remember what he has given. DR. MANILAL: In the Puranas his boons lead sometimes to destruction. SATYENDRA: He is also the God of destruction. DR. MANILAL: Yes, and he runs away from the destruction! SRI AUROBINDO: He doesn't care for destruction ...
... in the Purana. This Purana is most anti-Buddhist. SATYENDRA: Then it must have been very late. PURANI: Buddha was born 550 B.C. SRI AUROBINDO: This Purana is not so early as that. All the Puranas in fact are posterior to Buddhism. They are a part of the Bramanical revival which came in the Gupta period as a reaction to Buddhism. PURANI: They are supposed to have been written about the third ...
... Being. For example, some know that there are Gods but they won't admit that they are greater than themselves. PURANI: The fight between the Devas and the Asuras is graphically described in the Puranas. Just as the Asuras are against the human race, there must be other Beings who help the human race. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. Human beings by themselves are no match for the Asuras. If it is only an influence ...
... the, 304 Polonius, 187 Pope, 212 Pound, Ezra, 192 Pragmatism, 326 Prithwiraj, 90 Prometheus, 234 Proteus, 274 Prussia, 88 Puranas, the, 71 Pythagoras, 150,211,219 QUANTUM MECHANICS, 316 RACINE, 197 Raghus, the, 55 Ramayana, the, 217 Ramdas, 396 Raphael, 176-8 Red Cross ...
... soul of a dying man leaves the physical body and makes its journey elsewhere. Many accounts have been detailed in books such as (i) Yoga-Vasistha Maharamayana, (ii) Garuda and Brahmavaivarta Puranas, (iii) Kausitaki Brahmana, (iv) Chhandogya Upanishad, (v) Aranyaka Shruti. One Janaki Mukhopadhyaya wrote a book titled Mṛtyu-path or The Way of Death in the early part of the twentieth ...
... Legends of the Veda Stories of the Upanishads and their Yogic Import Evolution and the idea of the Avatar The Great Greeks and Romans Augustus and World-Unity Puranas and Tantras The Bhakti Age of India Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci Ideal of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: A Call to Yoga in World-Action Ideal of Nationalism and ...
... the created world by the double principle Page 93 of Purusha and Prakriti; nor is it Vaishnava Theism although it presents to us Krishna, who is the Avatar of Vishnu according to the Puranas, as the supreme Deity and allows no essential difference nor any actual superiority of the status of the indefinable relationless Brahman over that of this Lord of beings who is the Master of the universe ...
... Veda speaks as the Truth that is the final goal and home of man. It is described here as the greater infinite heavenly world, (Swargaloka, Swarloka of the Veda), which is not the lesser Swarga of the Puranas or the lesser Brahmaloka, of the Mundaka Upanishad, its world of the sun's rays to which the soul arrives by works of virtue and piety, but falls from them by the exhaustion of their merit; it is the ...
... life, some of these accused persons without as much as glancing at what was happening around them, were absorbed in reading the novels of Bankim Chandra, Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, or the Gita, the Puranas, or European Philosophy.' At last the trial drew to a close. Had it not been for Sri Aurobindo, the case would have been over long ago, for he was the one person, more than any other, whom the ...
... also it is the passage of connec- Page 253 tion (previous to opening) between the higher and the lower consciousness. There are stories in the old scriptures, Puranas, that some great yogis were tempted by the Apsaras (fairies of other worlds). Then some of them left their yogic tapasya and even married them. Are these really facts or mere religious fables? ...
... seems to be the personification of the lower Overmind, Jehovah and Satan of the Hebrews, Olympians and Titans of the Greeks, Ahriman and Ahura Mazda of old Iran, the sons of Diti and Aditi the Indian Puranas speak of, are powers and personalities of consciousness when it has descended entirely into the mind and the vital where the division is complete. These lower reaches have completely lost the unitary ...
... raised to a higher or to the highest status, then they have to come down to the earth and be born as men. In this human body alone the sadhana for ascension is possible. To use the language of the Puranas, the other worlds are the fields for enjoyment while this earth is the field for work. That means the other worlds are the regions for some definite and fixed qualities. They are typal existences. ...
... on Page 45 of the lower Overmind. Jehovah and Satan of the Hebrews, Olympians and Titans of the Greeks, Ahriman and Ahura Mazda of old Iran, the sons of Diti and Aditi the Indian Puranas speak of, are powers and personalities of consciousness when it has descended entirely into the mind and the vital where the division is complete. These lower reaches have completely lost the unitary ...
... Pashu, the, 80 Petrarch, 209 Pharaohs, the, 200 Pishacha, the, 80,213 Plato, 34, 120, 134, 178 Plotinus, 34, 40 Pondicherry, 17 Pradyurnana,44,207 Prudhomme, Sully, 320 Puranas , the, 46 Pyramid, the, 200 Pythagoras, 180 RACINE, 210 Raghus, the, 214 Rakshasas, 46 Rama, 58 Ramakrishna, 116, 128, 141, 160, 243, 247,383 Raphael, 210 Ravana, 58 ...
... note that the peculiar system of images and the complexity of its thought and symbolised experience which began in the Veda. reappeared constantly in later Indian writings, in the Tantras and the Puranas, as also in the figures of the Vaishnava poet. It is also notable that a certain element of this tradition appears even in the modern poetry of Tagore. Just as the Vaishnava poetry of Bengal uses ...
... groups of three riks each, graded according to the spiritual progression. The first group begins with the invocation of the twin Riders. Who are these Riders? According to the narration of the Puranas, the Aswinikumaras are generally known as the twin heavenly physicians. It means, they drive away disease, decay and incapacity from the being and make the life-energy pure, sound and indomitable. ...
... all around like poisonous air. It is not that at present he lacks disciples and worshippers. Now who is that notability? He is our Ravi Varma. Curiously enough, his themes are mostly taken from the Puranas, that is to say, his heroes and heroines are the gods and goddesses. But what of that? He has seen them in his own light – with the eyes of an ultra-modern vulgarian. Just recollect to your memory ...
... and siddhi, for the path and the goal. He was to build up on the ever-shifting sands of the shore a firm and strong edifice, a Temple of God. Have we not read in the Page 401 Puranas and other scriptures that whenever and wherever a sage or a Rishi sat down to his meditation and sadhana, there rushed' upon him at once a host of evil spirits to break up his work? They seemed to ...
... this Bharatavarsha, they are even greater than the gods as far as heaven and liberation are concerned. Even the gods bow to them and sing their praise.' Dada continued: 'That is why the Puranas say that all the other parts of the earth are bhogabhumi, where the fruits of action are merely enjoyed. It is only India that is the karmabhumi, the country of karma or action. It is through the ...
... foundation for his sādhana and siddhi, for the path and the goal. He was to build up on the ever-shifting sands of the shore a firm and strong edifice, a Temple of God. Have we not read in the Puranas and other scriptures that whenever and wherever a sage or a Rishi sat down to his meditation and sadhana, there rushed upon him at once a host of evil spirits to break up his work? They seemed to ...
... fortunate enough to hear many say several times that the Arya would elucidate the secrets of the Veda and, as a corollary, unravel many a knot, till now unloosened, in the Upanishads, Itihasas, Puranas, etc. I heard many also declare that Sri Aurobindo had found a new method of Yoga for the sake of mankind and would divulge in the Arya the characteristic process of sadhana for following this ...
... incarnation of Vishnu who measured the three worlds—the material, the vital and the mental—in his three steps. In die Rig Veda there is a symbolic reference to this which is enlarged as usual, in the Puranas. Rig Veda, I. 22. 17-18. (15) "Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes Entered in currents or in pouring waves Into the immobile ocean of his calm." Sāvitrī ...
... it when he read Hindi books or news-papers." An 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 ...
... name and of the Kirtan. He cites Tulsidas in support of his contention. Sri Aurobindo : If it was so easy it would have been delightful. Disciple : There is a story of Ajamil in the Puranas to support the efficacy of repeating the Name. Sri Aurobindo : The value of Name and Kirtan depends upon awakening of the Psychic Being and its influence over other parts of nature. Disciple ...
... Karmayogin; Art and Literature; Passing Thoughts; Conversations of the Dead. Volume 4 Writings in Bengali: Hymn to Durga; Poems; Stories; The Veda; The Upanishads; The Puranas; The Gita; Dharma; Nationalism; Editorials from Dharma; Stories' of Jail Life; Letters. Volume 5 Collected Poems, THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS: Short Poems; Sonnets; ...
... Aurobindo told Sudhir to go to Belur Math and see Sushil Maharaj. The Maharaj (monks are addressed by that name) — spoke about many things, giving illustrations from the Gita, the Upanishads and the Puranas. But Sudhir was not impressed. He came back and told him so. But Sri Aurobindo said: “One should not have prejudices against people. As experiences accumulate, one should observe, discriminate and ...
... already - by the time he launched the Dharma - won an individual mastery of the language to be able to make an astonishing variety of contributions to the paper: essays on the Upanishads, the Puranas and the Gita (including a rendering of the first two Books), essays on Nationalism, religion and spirituality, essays on subjects like 'The Eight Siddhis', 'Sannyasa and Tyaga', 'National Resurgence' ...
... foundation for his sadhana and siddhi, for the path and the goal. He was to build up on the ever-shifting sands of the shore a firm and strong edifice, a Temple of God. Have we not read in the Puranas and other scriptures that whenever and wherever a sage or a Rishi sat down to his meditation and sadhana, there rushed upon him at once a host of evil spirits to break up his work? They seemed to ...
... mind all roads lead eventually to the Rome of its longing, the dwelling of the Most High God. One can see how powerfully Kalidasa's poetry must have prepared the national mind for the religion of the Puranas, the worship of Kali, Our Mother & of Srikrishna, of Vrindavun, our soul's Paramour. Here indeed lies his chief claim to rank with Valmekie & Vyasa as one of our three national poets, in that he gathered ...
... is infinite being and infinite consciousness and infinite bliss, and the seats are the three divine worlds, called earlier in the hymn the three supreme births of Agni, Satya, Tapas and Jana of the Puranas, which correspond to these three infinities of the Deva and each fulfils in its own way the sevenfold principle of our existence: thus we get the series of thrice seven seats of Aditi manifested in ...
... is clear. Thus in the Mundaka Upanishad ब्रह्मा देवानां प्रथमः संबभूव, it is the first of Gods, the earliest birth of Time, the father of Atharva, and not the unborn eternal Hiranyagarbha. In the Puranas Brahma is described as in fear of his life from Madhu and Kaitabha, and cannot be the fearless and immortal Hiranyagarbha. Nor would it be possible for Aswalayana to come to Hiranyagarbha and say "Teach ...
... heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda. Page 93 × The systems of the Puranas and Tantras are full of the ideas of the Sankhya, though subordinated to the Vedantic idea and mingled with many others. × ...
... and, if pressed, would turn the straightforward philosophical language of the Gita into a constant, laborious and somewhat puerile mystification. The language of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainly symbolic, full of figures and concrete representations of things that lie behind the veil, but the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual ...
... old story and poem or epic tradition of the Bharatas took its present form. There is a hint also in the poem of the story or legend of the Avatar's early life in Vrindavan which, as developed by the Puranas into an intense and powerful spiritual symbol, has exercised so profound an influence on the religious mind of India. We have also in the Harivansha an account of the life of Krishna, very evidently ...
... 21, 23, 25-26, 36,37 ,55,56,57,74, III , 14 1, 160 , 184, 236 , 238, 254 see also Shakti, strength pralaya, 74 press, 80, 174 propaganda, 196 psychoanalyst is, 197-198,218 psychology, 198 Puranas , 69 , 96, loolln), IOS, 110 R Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti, 166, 237-238(fn) Rama, 238 Ramakrishna, 76 , 102 Ramakrishna Mission, 112 Ramayana, 98(fn) Ramdas. 46 Ramprasad, 146 ...
... them, and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas. 35 * * * 1915 (?) (Extracts from an interview given to a correspondent of The Hindu:,) I am convinced and have long been convinced that a spiritual awakening, a reawakening ...
... reality, a Lila or a creation made by the will of God, but temporal and not eternal. The aim is the eternal status above. The idea of a temporary Kingdom of heaven on earth is contained in the Puranas and conceived by some Vaishnava saints or poets; but it is a devotional idea, no philosophical basis is given for the expectation. I think the Tantric overcoming of imperfection is more individual ...
... teaching. Nevertheless it was possessed by the ancient sages and our correspondent will find a great deal of more or less scattered information on these and cognate questions in the Veda, Upanishads and Puranas. But it is doubtful whether he would obtain a satisfactory answer to his queries in the form in which he has put them. He will find for instance a long description of invisible Page 451 ...
... struggle, is satisfied with the minor conquests of Indra. He does Page 108 not yet rise to those heights where Indra working in the mind is no longer a supreme helper, but may even be, as the Puranas tell us, an obstacle and an opponent—because activity of mind even the highest, so long as it is not abandoned and overpassed, interferes with a yet higher attainment. It is only by rejecting Indra ...
... inferior worlds attained by the Fathers who still belong to the evolution in the Ignorance. By the Devayan one gets beyond the Ignorance into the light. The difficulty about the Pitris is that in the Puranas they are taken as the Ancestors to whom the tarpan is given—it is an old Ancestor worship such as still exists in Japan, but in the Veda they seem to be the Fathers who have gone before and discovered ...
... embrace of Kali. The visitation of Kali seems to be intended to save him from his Asura environment now turned hostile to him as to Prahlada. Qy. [Query] Was it in this way that the legends of the Puranas were formed? Jyotirmay Images. 2) Image of the Pashu-raid. A woman more mature of body & face than the other, fleeing with her two children. In the second image she has abandoned her children ...
... so I had immediately to put you on your guard against it. It was of the nature of a supraphysical temptation such as the appearance of the Apsaras to the Tapaswis in the stories of the epics and Puranas. The other dreams were dreams of success and fame and were also of the vital plane. You need not be depressed by these ordeals in the subtle worlds; they come to all in one form or another; only you ...
... the physical figure of Varuna is much less definite than the burning Fire or the radiant Sun or the luminous Dawn. The old commentators thought strangely enough that he was the God of Night. In the Puranas he is the deity of the waters Page 500 and his noose, which in the Veda never pretends to be anything more than a psychological metaphor, has become the violent lasso of the ocean-god. ...
... entered into it for their cosmic functions. This is a clear parable of the creation of more and more developed forms till one was found that was capable of housing a developed consciousness. In the Puranas it is stated that the tamasic animal creation was the first in time. Tamas is the Indian word for the principle of inertia of consciousness and force: a consciousness dull and sluggish and incompetent ...
... which gave rise to this scripture came from outside India - and this silence is repeated and supported by all Indian literature: at no place in the Brah-manas or the Upanishads or the Sutras or the Puranas do we have the slightest hint of an "Aryan invasion" of India. Such a silence is surely a very strong argument. Similar is the argument from silence as regards cotton. The Rigvedics flourished in the ...
... a discovered this level. Both "vijnana" and "mahas" came, in Page 175 course of time, to denote the Overmind. At a still more subsequent period, most probably later than the main Puranas, "vijnana" got identified with "buddhi", the highest stratum of the human intelligence; the pure reason as distinguished from the sense-mind which was labelled as "manas". Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan ...
... inaccuracy and triviality. Pandit Bhoje Dutt is not a political agitator, but a religious preacher and social reformer; the proposed lecture had nothing to do with the Mahomedans and was upon the Hindu Puranas, and there was no breach of peace or any approach to a breach of the peace at Monghyr. So much for the accuracy. Secondly, Mr. Swinhoe ought to have known that, although a lecture may be against the ...
... test of truth or the test of usefulness. All the Rishis do not belong to the past; the Avatars still come; revelation still continues. Some claim that we must at any rate adhere to Manu and the Puranas, whether because they are sacred or because they are national. Well, but, if they are sacred, you must keep to the Page 50 whole and not cherish isolated texts while disregarding the body ...
... upper half of world-existence. Pure idea (vijnana) stands as the link between the two. These seven principles or terms of existence Page 99 are the basis of the sevenfold world of the Puranas (Satyaloka, Tapas, Jana, Mahar, Swar, Bhuvar & Bhur). The lower hemisphere in this arrangement of consciousness consists of the three vyahritis of the Veda, "Bhur, Bhuvah, Swar"; they are states ...
... pregnant phrases, containing a world of meaning in a point of verbal space, with which the Upanishads are thickly sown. Yogo hi prabhavapyayau. For Yoga is the beginning & ending of things. In the Puranas the meaning of the phrase is underlined & developed. By Yoga God made the world, by Yoga He will draw it into Himself in the end. But not only the original creation & final dissolution of the universe ...
... and the hierarchy of the vegetal, animal, human kinds [is] a fixed unchanging ladder for its ascent. A successive creation of higher and higher species is envisaged in the Upanishads as well as the Puranas and heredity affirmed as a means of conscious continuity of the human embodiment of the Spirit, but still the evolution is individual and not cosmic, spiritual not physical. Yet here too this persistent ...
... fortunate enough to hear many say several times that the Arya would elucidate the secrets of the Veda and, as a corollary, unravel many a knot, till now unloosened, in the Upanishads, Itihasas, Puranas, etc. I heard many who also declared that Sri Aurobindo had found a new method of Yoga for the sake of mankind and would divulge in the Arya the characteristic process of sadhana for following this ...
... Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo). He translated many works of Sri Aurobindo into Telugu and started the magazine Arka in that language (printed in our Ashram Press even today). He had read in Sanskrit the Puranas, Upanishads, etc. It is a wonder how and when he and many others of that period did all that they did. The sheer volume and variety of their achievements is astounding — more so when you see the quality ...
... But the original Indian genius was very far from such a negative spirituality — and when spirituality is not only positive but also many-tracked, as in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the Puranas, a strong impetus is given to the searching mind and the adventurous life-force to try out every kind of speculation and practice, be it ever so non-spiritual in its surface-shape. With her firm hold ...
... because it is how things actually are. “In certain aspects the old Vedantic thinkers anticipate us,” noted Sri Aurobindo, “they agree with all that is essential in our modern ideas of evolution. … The Puranas admit the creation of animal forms before the appearance of man and in the symbol of the Ten Avatars trace the growth of our evolution from the fish through the animal, the man-animal and the developed ...
... an attempt to prophesy details of future history. What is expressed is something that has to come, but it is symbolically indicated, no more.” 64 The description of the Avatars dates from the Puranas , in other words from a traditional view that saw the evolution of the cosmos as cyclic. As mentioned before, the Aurobindonian conception of the cosmic evolution is cyclic but progressive . Although ...
... as she said herself. Most of them expect her to be shiningly divine in all her earthly ways, twenty-four hours a day. And that she was, of course, but not like the temple Gods or the Gods in the Puranas . For she was here not only in a human body, she had also to take upon her or rather into her the full human condition in order to transform it, more specifically the human condition of the disciples ...
... then the Avatar has been present on the Earth in the Twentieth Century. Then Kalki, with the sword of Truth, has fought his battles, even though his physical incarnation was not as described in the Puranas. The World-Redeemer came, and nobody recognised him – as is humanity’s wont. Third Phase: After the Departure of the Avatar Then comes the time when the Avatar leaves his body and the disciples ...
... should not obey them—they should only be in contact with the Supreme in his aspect of perfect Love. I don't know how to put it.... To me, those gods always seemed... (not those described in the Puranas, they're different... well, not so very different!) but the way Theon presented them, they seemed just like a bunch of marshmallows! It's not that they had no power—they had a lot of power, but they ...
... unalloyed, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love, there is as much SELF love as love for the beloved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself. Evidently the gods of the Puranas are a good deal worse than human beings, as we saw in that film the other day 1 (and that story was absolutely true). The gods of the Overmind are infinitely more egocentric—the only thing that ...
... Valley Civilisation of c. 2500-1500 B.C. However, the need for inversion of epochs argued in these books does not tempt the author of the new volume to be a fanatic of the antiquity-favouring Puranas, even while giving them a good deal of consideration, nor to plead for the traditional fixing of the Kaliyuga and the Bharata War at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. as do the nationalist-minded ...
... 206 Pulindas, 296 Punjāb, 163, 182, 186, 212, 216, 238-41, 283 Pundras, 296 pur/pura (= nagara), 192, 196, 197 pur/purah, 298-305, 337 fn. Puranas, 169, 200 Purukutsa, 283, 286-90, 326, 330, 335, 354 Puru, 338, 354, 355 Purus, 254, 283 Pusalker, A.D., 157, 347-8, 353 Pusan, 251, 296, 363, 394, 395 ...
... 12-13 Negative testimony about Aryan invasion from A. H. Dani and F. Khan 13 A. L. Basham's plea for "historical geography" a failure 13-14 The Puranas' negative pronouncement, confirming the Rigveda's testimony of an inland position looking westward 14-15 The Rigvedics autochthones for all practical purposes 15-16 ...
... it to the Upanishads and the Veda. Moreover, the Upanishads and the Gita form the entire basis of different schools of Vedanta, and the synthesis of yoga that we find in each school of Vedanta and Puranas and Tantra can be understood only if the Vedic knowledge, as developed through the Upanishads and the Gita, gets related to these later developments. It is also significant that although the synthesis ...
... developed in the subsequent period of Indian history. During the Purano-Tantric Age, however, we find another synthesis of yoga, the synthesis of the Tantric yoga. While that synthesis was developing, the Puranas continued the synthetic tendencies which were present in the Gita and developed a synthesis with increasing stress on the yoga of Divine Love. There were also other Vedantic systems of yoga, and each ...
... Gods, Trimurti, Brahma (Creator), Visnu (Preserver) and Maheswara (Destroyer). Siva is symbolic not only of destruction but also of reproduction. At times Siva has been referred to in the Epics and Puranas as Supreme God having in him all the powers of creation, destruction and regeneration. Also He is claimed to be the symbol of Status (sthiti). In contrast His wife variously named Parvati, Durga ...
... speaks as the Truth that is the final goal and home of man. It is described here as the greater infinite heavenly world, (Swargaloka - Swarloka of the Veda), which is not the lesser Swarga of the Puranas or the lesser Brahmaloka of the Mundaka Upanishad, its world of the sun's rays to which the soul arrives by works of virtue and piety, but falls from them by the exhaustion of their merit; it is the ...
... although it explains the created world by the double principle of Purusha and Prakriti; nor is it Vaishnava Theism although it presents to us Krishna, who is the Avatara of Vishnu according to the Puranas, as the supreme Deity and allows no essential difference nor any actual superiority of the status of the indefinable relation less Brahman over that of this Lord of beings who is the Master of the ...
... them, and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas." (Ibid, The Secret of the Veda, Vol. 10, pp. 34, 36-7) Sri Aurobindo explains in detail how, following the clue that he had now discovered he found also the clue to the symbolism of the words ...
... step in the exploration of a more and more complete spirituality. As Sri Aurobindo says, "One can see how powerfully Kalidasa's poetry must have prepared the national mind for the religion of the Puranas, for the worship of Kali, our Mother and of Sri Krishna of Vrindavan, our soul's Paramour." Although Kumarsambhava contains seventeen sargas or cantos, it is admitted by most critics that ...
... expertise (in the science of life) so that he could become a bestower of life to human beings. Charakasamhita *** All the observations made by the sage Vyasa in all the eighteen Puranas may be-summed up in the two statements: to do good to others is a virtuous act and to afflict others is a vicious one. Page 185 ...
... Dharma in 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 ...
... e's King John – I still remember these titles – and several other titles of the type used in my college as textbooks. Some works of Vivekananda came and also the Brahmavaivarta and the Vishnu Puranas in the Basumati edition. All of these books we went through over and over again, times without number, for new books could not be had for the asking. But questionings too began to arise: and what ...
... The Sixth Sukta The theme of this sukta is to awaken the power of Indra with the help of his followers, the Maruts. Who are the Maruts? We find in the Puranas that Vayu (the Wind-God) in the womb of Diti (the consciousness of duality) had been divided into forty-nine parts by the Lord Indra. As a result, the Maruts, sub-divisions or various forms of ...
... Asura-nature means a fundamental ego-centricism, violent and concentrated self-will. Change is possible for the human being; he can go downward, but he can move upward too, if he chooses. In the Puranas a distinction has been made between the domain of enjoyment and the domain of action. Man is the domain of action par excellence; by him and through him evolve new and fresh lines of activity and ...
... Asura-nature means a fundamental ego-centricism, violent and concentrated self-will. Change is possible for the human being; he can go downward, but he can move upward too, if he chooses. In the Puranas a distinction has been made between the domain of enjoyment and Page 9 the domain of action. Man is the domain of action par excellence; by him and through him evolve new and fresh ...
... of it and there is no idea of bringing down the Truth. Mainly, theirs is the working of the intuitive mentality. Then came the intellectual philosophies – which were only intellectual – and the Puranas followed. If the Supramental is brought to the physical then it might tend to endure, because Matter, though limited, is the one thing certain on this plane. If a number of men can reach this condition ...
... Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo VII Miracles (A) 26-3-1924 Disciple : The Puranas state that the span of life is different in different cycles. Is it a fact ? For instance, Rama is said to have lived eleven thousand years. Sri Aurobindo : That is nothing ! ( Laughter ) Disciple : It seems so, for his father, Dasharatha ...
... desertion of his disciples and the humiliation. But he felt the suffering on the cross. Otherwise there is no use in suffering. If the suffering is not real there is no meaning in it. PURANI: In our Puranas there are many stories of the Divine's intervention, not by His omnipotent power but according to rules of the game. SRI AUROBINDO: Of course, if it were to be by omnipotent power it could be done ...
... Mother's supervision. Once my partner and I had reached the finals and were to face a younger pair who were known to be the Mother's favourites. Gods, goddesses especially, have their chosen ones, if the Puranas are to be believed, and they always win. Of course we are to assume that there are larger purposes which we cannot guess, behind the seeming partialities. The Mother broached the topic of the game ...
... Asura-nature means a fundamental ego-centricism, violent and concentrated self-will. Change is possible for the human being; he can go downward, but he can move upward too, if he chooses. In the Puranas a distinction has been made between the domain of enjoyment and the domain of action. Man is the domain of action par excellence; by him and through him evolve new and fresh lines of activity and impulsion ...
... right here, in the Ashram, which may be described in Tagore's words as 'the beaches of the vast ocean of humanity', you can discover so many mysteries of the visible and in visible worlds. In the Puranas it is said Page 12 that Ganesh covered the whole universe by running around his mother Parvati." "How is that?" asked Vinit. "Don't you know the legend? It says that Shiva and Parvati ...
... millions of years. Sir, according to Jainism (Dr. Manilal mentioned a book.) SRI AUROBINDO: I am not interested in Jain history. PURANI: Where is the history? It is more a story like the Puranas. The topic changed. What exactly Sri Aurobindo refers to in the following is not remembered. SRI AUROBINDO: I have sent both the synopsis and the summary down to Nolini. I don't know how many ...
... your good self, let me have the one Page 400 thing that I need, the Divine Knowledge." I am sure many of our children here will be bold enough to say as Nachiketas did. In our Puranas too we see whenever and wherever the Rishis assemble and start doing tapasya, the hostiles – they are called rakshasas – rush in, try to break their tapasya, even kill them. The akshasas are the e ...
... grew up as everyone in our ward had a few books with him. Most books in the library were religious — the Gita, the Upanishads, the works of Vivekananda, the life and conversations of Ramakrishna, the Puranas, hymns, spiritual songs, etc. Among other volumes were the works of Bankim, patriotic songs, books on European philosophy, history and literature. A few of the men practised spiritual disciplines in ...
... eighth year's commemorative volume of the Sri Aurobindo Medical Association in Cuttack. Here is the piece for your reading: "Since time immemorial man has tried to conquer death. We read in the Puranas that the rishis and even the asuras were doing great tapasya to become immortal. In medieval Europe kings kept alchemists to find out the process by which man could prolong his youth and life, as well ...
... eighth year commemorative volume of the Sri Aurobindo Medical Association in Cuttack. Here is the piece for your reading: "Since time immemorial man has tried to conquer death. We read in the Puranas that the Rishis and even the asuras were doing great Tapasya to become immortal. In medieval Europe kings kept alchemists to find out the process by which man could prolong his youth and life, as ...
... Sri Aurobindo, it is a collective problem; in fact, it is a cosmic problem. Very often it is seen that the ignorance of the collectivity is far more dangerous than that of the individual. The Indian Puranas speak of the Asuras and Rakshasas, the titans, who symbolise the inordinate ignorance of the collectivities. The abnormal ambition of an individual may harm himself and a few persons around him but ...
... working. But, when it is a question of incarnation, as in the case of Hitler, then it is a different matter. Disciple : That makes the conflict between the Gods and the Asuras represented in the Puranas very realistic even for our times, because, generally the Gods used to get beaten by Asuras and run for protection either to Mahakali or to Rudra or to Vishnu. Sri Aurobindo : It is the ...
... five chapters unavoidably hurries through the later centuries and takes a sweeping glance at the many regional literatures. The cardinal notes everywhere are spiritual, intuitive and psychic. If the Puranas are essentially a true religious poetry, the Tantras outline "a complete psycho-spiritual and psycho-physical science of Yoga." The great period of Tamil literature was contemporary with the classical ...
... mob behind him. The guard was overpowered, the tricolour hoisted on the Government Page 233 buildings and the Governor himself was made a prisoner. 31 And the boy heroes in our Puranas: Dhruva, Prahlad, Krishna himself! And Chittaranjan Guhathakurta at Barisal! Young men had no lack of examples, whether drawn from literature and myth or from modem European or contemporary Indian ...
... persons without as much as glancing at what was happening around them, were absorbed in reading the novels of Bankimchandra, Vivekananda's Raja Yoga or Science of Religions, or the Gita, the Puranas, or European Philosophy. 32 As for the way Sri Aurobindo's unruffled demeanour struck the boys, we have the testimony of one of them, Upendranath Bandopadhyaya, as recorded in his book of ...
... (1632-77), but also the greatest of our modern scientists, Albert Einstein (1879-1955), born one year after Mirra. Besides, my acquaintances of that race are all people of refinement. Like the Hindu Puranas, the old Hebrew books such as the Talmud are full of parables and allegories. Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, similarly gives the account of the Creation, of the Deluge; and it has f ...
... in detail, slowly and with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth for us in the symbols of the Puranas." The Fish Avatar rescued the Veda from the waters of the Flood. Sri Aurobindo rescued the Veda from the waters of obscurity into which it had fallen. Page 42 ...
... —the Hindu perceiving many truths of Veda surviving in Purana & Tantra & Itihasa, already present in the deeper passages of the Brahmanas,—will not easily believe that the European scholars’ is the last word & that in this modern rubbish of Nature-worship & incoherent semi-savage poetry we have the secret of that Veda from which Vedanta, Purana, Tantra, Itihasa, Yoga&Brahmana spring, that Veda which ...
... of that little girl that the jailors were awakened, who without losing time could run to inform Kamsa. Many incidents of Krishna's infancy have been described in the Bhagavata Purana, Harivamsa and Vishnu Purana. Puranic stories are symbolic, and although they narrate truthfully the Page 24 inner reality of spiritual events and experiences, their external descriptions need... Yashoda trembled with awe and wonder on seeing the whole universe in a trice and to shield herself, closed her eyes. Let us hear further stories from the texts selected from the Bhagavata Purana, Harivamsa Purana and the Vishnu Mahapu-rana. Some of these stories are related not only to Sri Krishna but also to his elder brother Balarama (often called Rama), since both grew up together right from the ...
... the progress and transformation of the earth. 8 June 1960 × The story of Krishna, as related in the Bhagavat Purana. ...
... are these Hindu astrologers? Kapali Shastri also couldn't say anything about the Year of the Gods. PURANI: No. SRI AUROBINDO: They have spoken about past events. SATYENDRA: In the Bhavishya Purana there are some prophecies. PURANI: They are more historical. SRI AUROBINDO: Apart from historical ones, there are others too. Isn't it so? PURANI: Yes, but they are more individual than general... The writer speaks there of the return of the House of Delhi. SRI AUROBINDO: The House of Delhi? Mogul? That is finished. PURANI: He means Rajput. As regards historical events, the Bhavishya Purana deals with them up to the advent and establishment of British rule in India. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. I remember how during the Swadeshi movement the Bengal revolutionaries used to quote passages from ...
... as a recurrent series of phenomena of which the terms vary but the general formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognise the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijñāna-vijṛmbhitāni , developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree... tamasic, the result of the predominance of the third principle of nature which leads to ignorance and inertia. That is the state of the animal and the lower forms of humanity which are called in the Purana the first or tamasic creation. This animal ignorance the development of the intellect tends to dispel and it assumes therefore an all-important place in human evolution. But it is not only through ...
... have described is Vedic in the real sense, though not one which would easily be recognised by the modern systems of Yoga which call themselves Vedic. It is the union of the "Earth" of the Veda and Purana with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas hardly ...
... shrines within, the statues of the minor gods and goddesses and the bhaktas and the god-intoxicated, the paintings on the walls and the sculptured pillars and walls reproducing scenes from epic and purana, the cosmic play and the tāndav dance, and moving from sacred enclosure to another enclosure, always moving within, observing the vāhanās, being enraptured by the ritual, the swaying of the lights ...
... say that there was but a swoon and that the fancies of a zealous and imaginative wife were portrayed as real truths, would be doing but poor justice to the ancient Vedantic poet of the Purana. I would take Satyavan, meaning 'he who has Satyam', one of the well known names of Brahman, to be the enlightened soul of a knower. He at first plays with the horses, the senses; but ...
... broken afterwards by Time and circumstance and of which modern Hinduism presents us only some preserved, collected or redeveloped fragments; I shall suppose that the real meaning & justification of Purana, Tantra, Itihasa & Yoga can only be discovered by a rediscovery of their old foundation and harmonising secret in the true sense of the Veda, and in this light I shall proceed, awaiting its confirmation... of men's actions, duties and institutions by an external compulsion representing the community's collective will began in the Bronze Age with the institution of government in Kingship. The Vishnu Purana tells us, conformably with this idea, that Vishnu in the Satya incarnates as Yajna, that is to say as the divine Master in man to whom men offer up all their actions as a sacrifice, reserving nothing ...
... though not the most important part of Yogic accomplishment, and used them with an abundant and unhesitating vigour. They are recognised in our sacred books, formally included in Yoga by so devotional a Purana as the Bhagawat, noted and some of their processes carefully tabled by Patanjali. Even in the midnight of the Kali great Siddhas and saints have used them more sparingly, but with power and effectiveness ...
... Disposer of its Laws, the Almighty Providence, the Master of the Dharma. It has a similar sense to the word यमः applied to the single god of Dharma, Yama. There is an echo of this use in the Vishnu Purana when it is said that Vishnu is born in the Satya Yuga as Yajna, in the Treta as the Chakravarti Raja, in the Dwapara as Vyasa. In the Satya Yuga mankind is governed by its own pure, perfect and inborn ...
... of my thoughts and take thy joy of my activities according to the law of the ideal of Truth of things, exalting mind into supermind.” The hymn throws a flood of light on the persistent tales of the Purana & Itihasa in which Indra appears as the enemy of the Yogin, fearing to be overpassed, seeking to keep him by any means from conquering Swar and becoming too mighty for Indra himself. It is the Powers ...
... class or to philosophic thinkers nourished on the high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta, It permeates the popular mind nourished on the thoughts, images, traditions, and cultural symbols of the Purana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living figures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarian ism, the large cosmic universalism of the Vedic scriptures. ...
... our knowledge of it may not be quite correct: for instance, we see it standing on its roots. But it may be standing on something else for that matter. SRI AUROBINDO: It is the story of the Vishnu Purana where we read that it is difficult to say whether the king is on the elephant or the elephant is on the king. All European philosophers after the Greeks hold that Reason is the faculty by which ...
... In the development of art in mankind East has contributed her share. But the art-ideals of the East are not understood by many even among those who claim to follow them. In the Vishnu Dharmottar Purana the six limbs—(Shadanga) of the art of painting are enumerated showing that Indian Art must have reached a high standard of development before the canons of art could be formulated. We have no time ...
... the first Asian Games on this day. As Dr. Prasad declared the Games open at 4.15 p.m., the 40,000 joyous spectators present at the National Stadium burst into applause and guns were fired from the Purana Quila. The flags of the eleven participating countries flew majestically around the stadium. Pt. Nehru gave a short crisp message on this occasion: "Play the game in the spirit of the game." A large... flag and the torch were handed over to the Chief Commissioner of Delhi for safe keeping till the Games were held again four years later in Manila (Philippines) in 1954. Eleven guns were fired from the Purana Quila and with the National Anthem, the first Asian Games came to an end. Other Asian games 2nd Asian Games : 1954 Manila (Philippines) 1021 participants from 18 countries ...
... and experienced turning it to the soul's uses, in this Hinduism we find the basis of the future world-religion. This sanatana dharma has many scriptures, Veda, Vedanta, Gita, Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences that ...
... anything else. His name means man the mental being. He is the divine legislator, the mental demi-god in humanity who fixes the lines upon which the race or people has to govern its evolution. In the Purana he or his sons are said to reign in subtle earths or worlds or, as we may say, they reign in the larger mentality which to us is subconscient and from there have power to determine the lines of development ...
... described is Vedic in the real sense, 2 though not one which would easily be recognised by the modern systems of Yoga which call themselves [Vedic] 3 . It is the union of the "Earth" of the Veda and Purana with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which this world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas ...
... and experienced turning it to the soul's uses, in this Hinduism we find the basis of the future world-religion. This sanātana dharma has many scriptures, Veda, Vedanta, Gita, Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences that ...
... predominate in the later writers, their language is a laborious and deliberate though a powerful and beautiful construction and appeals only to an erudite audience, a learned elite. The religious writings, Purana and Tantra, moving from a deeper, still intensely living source, aiming by their simplicity at a wider appeal, prolong for a time the tradition of the epics, but the simplicity and directness is willed... 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 him with more or less of additional decoration, but substantially ...
... not clear. Both obviously owe much to Milton. Fragment of a Play. This piece was written in Pondicherry sometime around 1915. The plot appears to be based on an episode in the Bhagavata Purana. STORIES More than once Sri Aurobindo remarked in conversation that he had written some stories that subsequently were lost. "The white ants have Page 1005 finished ...
... many expressions in the Veda especially in relation to Indra and the Rudras." Sri Aurobindo did not note in his Yoga diary all the various literary work he was simultaneously doing. Bhagavat Purana, for instance, which he was translating into English. But those were early days yet. With the passage of time, as his Yogic experiences evolved, so did his literary output. But to come back ...
... Prayers and Meditations will at once reply in a chorus : Love is the truth and essence of the Mother's life and love the nuclear force of her personality. In the Chandi (a portion of the Markendya Purana), the Divine Mother has been hymned under her diverse aspects of Consciousness, Intelligence, Power, Peace, Beauty, Forgive- ness, Kindness, etc., but the most primal and puissant, the most graceful ...
... Lover and Beloved, the Giver and the object of all action, ritual and worship, of all karma also entered into it in the associations of the worshipper and sometimes became prominent. The Vishnu Purana tells us that Vishnu in the Satya Yuga incarnates as Yajna, in the Treta as the conqueror and king, in the Dwapara as Vyasa, the compiler, codifier and lawgiver. It is not meant that He incarnates... become clearer and clearer aswe proceed. This view of life as well as Yoga, which is only the sublimation of life, as a struggle between the Devas & Daityas is one of the most fundamental ideas of Veda, Purana, Tantra and every practical system in Hinduism. Agni is par excellence the warrior whom theDaityas most dread, because he is full of the ahaituka tapas, against which, if properly used and supported ...
... impulses to activity: there has been much revival of the vitality of old forms, a new study, rehabilitation, resort to old disciplines and old authorities and scriptures,—we may note that Vedanta, Veda, Purana, Yoga, and recently the same thing is being initiated with regard to the Tantra, have each in their turn been brought back into understanding, if not always yet to a perfect Page 25 un ...
... Reality and the Universe The Life Divine Chapter XIV The Supermind as Creator All things are self-deployings of the Divine Knowledge. Vishnu Purana. (II. 12. 39.) A principle of active Will and Knowledge superior to Mind and creatrix of the worlds is then the intermediary power and state of being between that self-possession of the ...
... the word occurring in passages where the whole context relates to mental activities. Finally, we have the goddess Dakshina who may well be a female form of Daksha, himself a god and afterwards in the Purana one of the Prajapatis, the original progenitors,—we have Dakshina associated with the manifestation of knowledge and sometimes almost identified with Usha, the divine Dawn, who is the bringer of i ...
... (for the Sruti speaks not of a single Vritra but of many) are not—at least in many hymns—forces either of cloud or of drought, but Titans of quite another & higher order. The insight of Itihasa and Purana in these matters informed by old tradition seems to me often more correct than the conjectural scholarship of the Europeans. But there is an even more important truth than the high moral and spiritual ...
... or the ant expresses Brahman in its inferior & more rigid & limited nature;—these six rank among other processes,—for life of Veda is supple, flexible and wide,—some of which are the foundation of Purana & Itihasa. The fundamental perception, separating, narrowed itself and became the Uttara Mimansa of Badarayana; the discriminative analysis, separating, narrowed itself and became Sankhya of Kapila;... ever-narrowing tendency of logical exclusiveness, established themselves in other philosophies and branches of practice & knowledge and have come down to us, changed, often disfigured, in Shastra, in Purana, in legend & history, in different schools of Yoga. The original method of all these differences was the method of Gautama in the episode of the Chhandogya, the exclusive affirmation of one's own ...
... Babu Bhagavan Das's "Krishna, a Study in the theory of Avataras", which contains much interesting matter and especially some very striking citations from that profound and beautiful work, the Bhagawat Purana: but the renderings given are rather modernising paraphrases than translations. There is a brief essay or rather the record of a reflection by Mr. Cousins on "Symbol and Metaphor in Art", quite the ...
... its springs of life from these ancient and ever flowing waters. Conscious or unwitting each Indian religionist stirs to a vibration that reaches him from those far off ages. Darshana and Tantra and Purana, Shaivism & Vaishnavism, orthodoxy & heresy are merely so many imperfect understandings of Vedic truth & misunderstandings of each other; they are eager half-illuminated attempts to bring some ray... illimitable Master Soul to the souls apparently limited in bodies, have all their authority in the Upanishads. The philosophical analysis of Sankhya, the practices of Tantra, the worship & devotion of Purana, the love of the formed Divinity & the aspiration to the Formless, the atomic structure of Vaisheshika & the cardinal principles of Yoga,—whatever has been afterwards strong in development & influential... . India has become the land of saints & ascetics, but progressively also of a decaying society and an inert, effete & helpless people. The indignant Page 372 denunciation of the Vishnu Purana against the certain results to society of the Buddhist heresy has been fulfilled in the fate of our strongly Buddhicised Hindu nation. We see increasing upon it through the centuries the doom announced ...
... own age, that .] of the laborers (Shudras), or rather the servants—of the ego, of the machine, of sex and comfort. The age of the "small dirty bodies,” ksudra deha samskara-barjitah, as the Vishnu Purana literally says. 15 And each time, the Shakti came down from one center to another: from the mind center to the heart center to the stomach center to the sex center—that is, the center of Matter... since Buddhism. Pre-Buddhist India was not like that, especially not Vedic India. × This Vishnu Purana, which dates back roughly to the third century A.D., says many other interesting things about our Kali Yuga. For instance: "In the Kali Yuga, kings will not take care of their subjects, and yet they ...
... may be true or not to the mind, but it is the traditional attitude of Indian spiritual experience. Ask any Yogin, he will tell you that the Life Heavens are childish things; even the gods, says the Purana, must come down to earth and be embodied there if they want mukti , giving up the pride of their limited perfection—they must enter into the last finite if they want to reach the last infinite. A ...
... have a great natural predilection for the other two arts. Appreciation _______________ 1 Ref : Rupam , April-July 1925; "The Mithunar in Indian art” "Mithunal Vibhushayet" – Agni Purana (Bibliotheca Indica) ² From A Defence of Indian Culture – subsequently published under the title The Foundations of Indian Culture Page 216 of painting I cultivated ...
... ripeness of its manhood, threw out so many original intuitions in science, created so rich a glow of aesthetic and vital and sensuous experience, renewed its spiritual and psychic experience in Tantra and Purana, flung itself into grandeur and beauty of line and colour, hewed and cast its thought and vision in stone and bronze, poured itself into new channels of self-expression in the later tongues and now ...
... have been so great that they have been described as the bible of the Indian people. That is not quite an accurate analogy, for the bible of the Indian people contains also the Veda and Upanishads, the Purana and Tantras and the Dharmashastras, not to speak of a large bulk of the religious poetry in the regional languages. The work of these epics was to popularise high philosophic and ethical idea and cultural ...
... threshold of Nirvana and took the vow never to cross it while a single being remained in the sorrow Page 269 and the Ignorance. It is that which underlies the sublime verse of the Bhagavata Purana, "I desire not the supreme state with all its eight siddhis nor the cessation of rebirth; may I assume the sorrow of all creatures who suffer and enter into them so that they may be made free from ...
... debut in Delhi with a ballet in English based on Nehru's book, The Discovery of India, highlighting the pan-Asian aspect of Indian Nationalism. It was staged at the 1946 Asian Relations Conference at Purana Qila in Delhi. Overwhelmed, Nehru said the ballet was 'much better than my book'. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya was the early founder of the AIWC. She was one of the greatest protagonists ...
... Essays from the Karmayogin; Art and Literature; Passing Thoughts; Conversations of the Dead. Volume 4 — Writings in Bengali: Hymns to Durga; Poems, Stories; The Veda; The Upanishads; The Purana; The Gita; Dharma; Nationalism; Editorials from Dharma; Stories of Jail Life; Letters. Volume 5 — Collected Poems, THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS: Short Poems; Sonnets; Longer Poems; On ...
... within as the constant communion with the Supreme through one's senses and mind and heart: "Aikyam yad buddhimanasor indriyānān ca\ sarvadā/viśveśvare parādeve dhyānam etat prakirtitam." (Garuda-purana, Purva, 243.10) Here is what Sri Aurobindo says about its "Manana and darśana, a constant) thinking of him [the Divine] in all things and seeing of him always and everywhere is essential ...
... = life, & there is nothing to prevent us from taking विश्र्वायु= that which is the source of all being here on this earth, for Surya is सविता, the Father & Creator; all things are, says the Vishnu Purana, सर्वाणि विज्ञानविजृंभितानि. महो द्रुहो अपधायि. Sayana says “The wheel was wrested from Surya, the great doer of harm”! प्रभुतस्य द्रोग्धोः. An astonishing interpretation. The great evil-doer, injurer ...
... orders, the householder and the ascetic, the monk and the layman, an effect which subsists to the present day. It is this upsetting of the Dharma for which we find it fiercely attacked in the Vishnu Purana under the veil of an apologue, for it weakened in the end the life of society by its tense exaggeration and its hard system of opposites. But Buddhism too had another side, a side turned towards action ...
... capable of hostility to the Divine and so were liberated in a few lives—compared with them the great Rishis and Bhaktas were very poor spiritual vessels. I am aware of the paradox about Ravana in the Purana, but let me point out that these Asuras and Rakshasas did not pretend to be disciples or worshippers of Rama or Krishna or Vishnu or use their position as disciples to get moksha by revolt—they got ...
... hymns: "In the fixed tradition of thousands of years they have been revered as the origin and standard of all that can be held as authoritative and true in Brahmana and Upanishad, in Tantra and Purana, in the doctrines of great philosophical schools and in the teachings of famous saints and sages. The name borne by them was Veda, the knowledge, - the received name for the highest spiritual ...
... sense I have given certainly belongs to the word Deva, is discoverable in Haya from its roots, & that this brightness & joyousness was the character of the Aryan gods, I think every reader of Veda & Purana must feel and admit. Last of all, the Horse becomes Aswa for men. But is he not Aswa for all? why particularly for men? The answer is that the Rishi is already moving forward in thought to the idea ...
... and are conceived as a support for the rhythm of its workings. And human life was in ancient Indian thought no vile and unworthy existence; it is the greatest thing known to us, it is desired, the Purana boldly says, even by the gods in heaven. The deepening and raising of the richest or the most potent energies of our minds, our hearts, our life-power, our bodies are all means by which the spirit ...
... systematisers, wittingly or unwittingly, of good will or against their grain, have been stirred to their task by some vibration that reached them from those far-off ages. Our Darshana, Tantra and Purana, our Shaivism, Shaktism and Vaishnavism, our orthodoxy, heresy and heterodoxy, even when they have been the most perfect misunderstandings of each other, have always been imperfect understandings of ...
... literate class or to philosophic thinkers nourished on the high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta. It permeates the popular mind nourished on the thoughts, images, traditions and cultural symbols of the Purana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living figures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarianism, the large cosmic universalism of the Vedic scriptures. Indian ...
... The Human Cycle Are the astronomical figures that determine the Yugas in the Hindu mythology to be taken literally? “Too much weight need not be put on the exact figures about the Yugas in the Purana. Here again the Kala and the Yugas indicate successive periods in the cyclic wheel of evolution, – the perfect state, decline and disintegration of successive ages of humanity followed by a new birth ...
... circle; to express this in English, so as to create the same picture as the Sanscrit conveys, it was necessary to add "in lovely dances". The word Kinnaries presents a serious initial difficulty. The Purana mythologising partly from false etymology has turned these Kinnars into men & women with horse-faces & this description has been copied down into all Sanscrit dictionaries, but the Kinnaries of Valmekie ...
... have described is Vedic in the real sense, though not one which would easily be recognised by the modern systems of Yoga which call themselves Vedic. It is the union of the "Earth" of the Veda and Purana with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas ...
... The experience you have described is Vedic in the real sense, though not one which would easily be recognised by the modem systems of Yoga... It is the union of the 'Earth' of the Veda and Purana with the Divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas hardly ...
... spirit was on the threshold of Nirvana and took the vow never to cross it while a single being remained in the sorrow and the Ignorance. It is that which underlies the sublime verse of the Bhagavata Purana, "I desire not the supreme state with all its eight siddhis nor the cessation of rebirth; may I assume the sorrow of all creatures who suffer and enter into them so that they may be made free from ...
... with the Earth consciousness, then the universal and finally with the Ineffable. Sri Aurobindo, in his reply to her letter describing the experience, calls it 'the union of the "Earth" of the Veda and Purana with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above Page 852 our earth, i.e., the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images.' 1916 ...
... capable of hostility to the Divine and so were liberated in a few lives — compared with them the great Rishis and Bhaktas were very poor spiritual vessels. I am aware of the paradox about Ravana in the Purana, Page 155 but let me point out that these Asuras and Rakshasas did not pretend to be disciples or worshippers of Rama and Krishna or Vishnu or use their position as disciples to get ...
... come down and participated in the labour of the earth's evolution. Earth is the field of progress. There is no progress of our kind on the higher planes. Sri Aurobindo cites the passage from Vishnu Purana where it is said that even the gods, if they want to rise higher, have to come down to the earth and take a human birth. That is the purport of "the godhead greater by a human fate." Page ...
... have been so great that they have been described as the bible of the Indian people. That is not quite an accurate analogy, for the bible of the Indian people contains also the Veda and Upanishads, the Purana and Tantras and the Dharmashastras, not to speak of a large bulk of the religious poetry in the regional languages. Page 285 The work of these epics was to popularise high p ...
... 504 Black Sea, 461 Bloch, J., 284 Bodh-gayā, 41, 280 Bodhi/Boudyas, 121, 122, 123, 224 Book of Joel IV, 6; 259 Boudyas, see Bodhi Brahma, 243, 580, 582 Brahmā Purana, 71 Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta, 19 Brahmagupta: Khandakhadiyaka, 19, 25, 515 Brahmajala Sutta, 327 Brāhmanas (and Śramanas), 108, 234, 235, 241, 242, 247, 254, 255 ...
... for what was being done in the Ashram was Sri Krishna's own work. Of course, by this he did not mean that the Ashram was an ultra-Vaishnavite centre and was repeating the teachings of the Bhagawata Purana or even the Bhagavad Gita in an intense form. What he meant was that the Ashram was carrying further the lines along which Sri Krishna had proceeded -the lines of a synthesis of Yoga, the coalescence ...
... you have described is Vedic in the real sense, though not one which would easily be recognised by the modem systems of Yoga which call themselves Yogic. It is the union of the "Earth" of the Veda and Purana with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas hardly ...
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