AUROBINDO’S PLACE IN
INDIAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT
DR.
K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR, M.A D. LITT.
In
Sri Aurobindo’s life (August 15, 1872 to December 5,
1950), his writing was not a thing apart: be it poetry, drama, yoga exegesis,
political comment, sociological inquiry, literary and art criticism, it was an
emanation from and an expression of his inner life.
If
it be true, as Keats said, that “Shakespeare led a life of allegory, his works
are his comments on it,” it might equally be said of Sri. Aurobindo
that his was a life of progressive realisation and
his writings are but its radiations and recordings.
Sri
Aurobindo never claimed to be a “philosopher”, although circumstances made him
launch a philosophical monthly review, Arya,
on August 15, 1914 and he kept it going for six and a half years. In the
course of a letter to a disciple written in 1930, Sri Aurobindo drew a
distinction between western metaphysics and the yoga of the Indian
saints, In the west excessive importance has been given always to thought,
intellect, logic and reason as the highest means and even as the highest end;
and spiritual experience itself has been “summoned to pass the tests of the
intellect.”
In
The
typical Indian metaphysical thinker–a Yajnavalkya, a Sankara, a Ramanuja–has
been a yogi and rishi, one who
has armed his philosophy “with a practical way of reaching to the supreme state
of consciousness, so that even when one begins with thought, the aim is
to arrive at a consciousness beyond mental thinking.”1
The
central problems of philosophy were formulated by Kant in the form of three
questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? These
carry the content of the Indian concepts of tattwa,
hita and purushartha. Sri
Aurobindo’s “thought”–although spread over several
voluminous works–is best described as his many-limbed answer to the triune
classic questions of philosophy in the steady light of his own spiritual
experiences at Baroda, Alipur, Chandernagore
and Pondicherry.
Spiritual Realisation
At
In
February 1910 at Chandernagore, Sri Aurobindo had a taste
of the other end of things: the ultimate bleakness of the inconscient.
And in his first four years at
“The
spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt should be
based were already present to us ... but the complete intellectual statement of
them and their results and issues had to be found. This meant a continuous
thinking a high and subtle and difficult thinking on several lines.”
Life Divine
One
line of inquiry–indeed the life-line of the Aurobindonian
world-view–became The Life Divine. The collateral or subsidiary lines of
inquiry assumed in course of time the proportions of The Synthesis of Yoga,
The Psychology of Social Development (since known as The Human Cycle),
The Ideal of Human Unity, The Foundations of Indian Culture and The
Future Poetry, Yoga, sociology, politics, history, criticism and
prophecy–these were but so many stairways to knowledge, so many pathways to
reality, so many roads to realisation.
Every
chapter of The Life Divine–as it came out in the Arya–was headed by one or more epigraphs, culled
from ancient Indian scriptures or the classics of spiritual philosophy. The
main authorities were the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita.
Citing
ancient scriptural authorities for support has been the traditional Indian way
of projecting a dialectic, This universe is, after all, a self-adjusted
continuum in which nothing suddenly erupts from a total emptiness and what
strikes us as “new” has but sprouted from an atomic seed obscurely secreted in
distant past formations. This is the reason why our system-makers have usually
made out that they are but fulfilling what was already implied in the old
scriptures.
Sri
Aurobindo was, thus, merely following a practice sanctified by long usage.
Certainly, he had had spiritual experiences and realisations;
but these also found corroboration in the intuitions of the Vedic singers
and the Upanishadic seers, and in the
affirmations of the Lord of the Gita.
At
the Alipur jail, Sri Aurobindo had grown intimate
with the Gita and had scaled the Upanishadic “Himalayas of the soul,”
After his acquittal and release, Sri Aurobindo spoke at Uttarpara
(May 30, 1909) like one whom prison life had renewed and transfigured. He
published translations of the Isha and Kena Upanishads in the Karmayogin
and wrote about the ancient scriptures in the Dharma. He deplored
the fact that, after Sankara, for centuries people
had been inclined to stop there, and refrain from going back to revealed
scriptures (Sruti: that is Veda and
Upanishad), ancillary scriptures (Smriti:
for example, the Puranas), or even
the Gita detached from the suffocating commentaries.
In
Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo made a fresh study of the Veda,
and his comments and conclusions were set forth in The Secret of the
Veda, which appeared alongside The Life Divine, as if to show
that his philosophical thought, although it had its independent base in his own
realisations, was yet in line with the philosophia perennis of
the Indian tradition.
The
Veda…The Life Divine: the concatenation is
most significant. Aren‘t they respectively the first and the last of the arches
of the bridge of visioned thoughts that spans the
history of Aryan culture, the inspired first beginnings and the culminating fulfilment of the long and great spiritual tradition of
India?
Among
the middle arches were the Upanishads, the Gita,
the Tantra, the Puranas
(notably the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata) and the high-arching poetry of
devotion (Bhakti); and Sri Aurobindo gave each
its appropriate place in his grand and universal synthesis of knowledge and
experience.
Sri
Aurobindo’s first task was to reconcile reality as
transcendent with reality as immanent. The peremptory “either–or” of traditional
thinkers (“It is One” or “It is Many”–“It is Spirit” or “It is Matter”)
had taken hold of one term of the truth and affirmed it alone as the whole.
Sri
Aurobindo found the clue to reconciliation in the concept of supermind–based, again, on his own realisation,
though also confirmed by insights in the Veda. The Puranic
scheme of Ten Avtars–from fish and
tortoise to man and superman–was clearly an evolutionary stair, and Sri
Aurobindo saw it as a spiritual rendering of the modem scientific theory of
evolution.
Reconciling Opposites
Reconciling
the apparent opposites of past metaphysical speculations and affirmations, Sri
Aurobindo structured The Life Divine as follows: Volume one:
“Omnipresent reality and the universe;” volume two: “The knowledge and the
ignorance–the spiritual evolution;”
From an inquiry into the place of “man-as-he-is”, subject
to death, desire and incapacity, the argument turns to the consideration of the
“involution” or “fall” from Sachchidananda
(existence-consciousness-bliss) to the nadir of inconscience.
After the fall, there is the return-movement of evolution or ascent to the high
peaks of consciousness. Infinite consciousness has become ignorance; now
ignorance must enact the drama of spiritual evolution and return to infinite
knowledge. Mental man is no more than a transitional being in the evolutionary
history of the earth or the universe. If he has behind him the prehistoric ages
of animal life and the still earlier geological eras of inanimate existence, he
has ahead of him the plenitudes and puissances of the
life divine:
“...what
has to be developed is there in our being, and not something outside it: what evolutionary
nature presses for is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of
self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and
the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native
self-instrumentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution
has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human
destiny.”2
Global Testament
The
Life Divine, which was published in a revised and definitive
form in 1939..’40, strikes the reader today, not only
as the culmination of the Indian philosophical tradition, but in essence as the
unique global philosophical testament as well, reconciling and going
beyond both western and oriental metaphysical systems. 3
If
Vedantic thought may be said to have reached
its apotheosis in Sri Aurobindo, likewise Christian thought had grown a
new dimension in Fr. Teilhard de Chardin,
whose posthumous work, The Phenomenon of Man (1960),
reveals astonishing parallel insights that link it with The Life
Divine. 4
Sri
Aurobindo and Fr. Teilhard were both mystics as well
as evolutionists, and both treat the problem of “pain” as
inseparable from the evolutionary process.
The
“fall” in the cosmic context can only mean the deliberate swoon of the spirit
in matter: and evolution must ultimately take man (and the world) back to the
cosmic Christ–or what practically comes to the same thing, Sachchidananda.
And this return, reunion and transfiguration will be achieved through a supreme
efflorescence of love, or love charged with knowledge, power and beauty.
But
even Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s
philosophy–forward looking as it is–lacks the integral fullness and amplitude
of Sri Aurobindo’s, in whose thought the dynamic of
individual progress is doubled with the possibility of collective progress as
well.
The
image Sri Aurobindo projects of the perfected or divinised
socieety of the future breathes the ambience
of “a spiritual religion of humanity:”
“A
religion of humanity means the growing realisation
that there is a secret spirit, a divine reality, in which we are all one, that
humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the
human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It
implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom
of this divine spirit upon earth.” 5
Such
a society will also be the quintessentially true communistic society. Like Fr. Teilhard, Sri Aurobindo too was in full sympathy with the
humanistic elements in Marxism, but he couldn’t appreciate its denial of the
spirit or applaud its actual political translations. His views on this question
are succinctly stated in some of his “aphorisms”:
“The
communistic principle of society is intrinsically as superior to the
individualistic as is brotherhood to jealousy and mutual slaughter; but all
practical schemes of socialism invented in
If
communism ever re-establishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a
foundation of soul’s brotherhood and the death of egoism.”
6
The
classless society has not so far materialized any where because democracy,
socialism and communism have not been able in actual practice to end the human
tendency to egoistic separativity, assertiveness and
rivalry, and their attendant evils of exploitation in economic life and
violence in political life. It is only when spiritual evolution resulting in
the cracking of the human ego comes about that the godheads of the
soul–justice, liberty, equality, brotherhood–will be realised
on a permanent basis in a “kingdom of the saints as was dreamt by Christianity,
Islam and Puranic Hinduism.” 7
That
would be the consummation of the convergence of all lines of human aspiration
that have hitherto sustained humanity on the march. Such is Sri Aurobindo’s dynamic world-view that bridges west and east,
and past and future.
As
the eminent English novelist, Dorothy M. Richardson, wrote to me after reading The
Life Divine:
“Has
there ever existed a more synthetic consciousness than Sri Aurobindo? Unifying
he is to the limit of the term.” He is indeed.
1 The
Riddle of This World (1943). pp. 23 ff.
2 The Life
Divine (Centre of Education
Edition (1960). p. 1259.
3
S. K. Maitra, The Meeting of
the East and West in Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy
(1968).
4 R.
A. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin (1971).
5
The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and
Self-determination (1962 omnibus edition), pp. 724 if.
6
Thoughts and Aphorisms (1968). Pp. 80-81.
7 Ibid,
p. 81.