SRI AUROBINDO: HIS UNIQUENESS

S. SHANKARANARAYANAN, M.A., F.I.C.W.A.

India is a land of sages and saints and it is usual to talk of Sri Aurobindo as one of the sages modern India has produced and whose impact has been felt by the whole world. But what is unique about Sri Aurobindo? Is he just one more sage in the illustrious galaxy that has adorned the spiritual firmament of India?

Sri Aurobindo is unique because he represents in himself the long-awaited fruit of the evolution of spirituality on earth. In the cosmic scheme of things, it has been given to India to cherish and nourish spiritual things in its bosom and give expression to them. If we trace the history of spirituality in India from early times, we find the Vedic Seer soaring to spiritual heights with his feet firmly fixed on the ground. As time went on, the pristine streams of inspiration, intuition and mystic communion of the Vedic times got lost in the arid sands of sacrificial rituals and external ceremonies. Buddha had to appear and reveal the hollowness of the outward forms. In the process he had to preach about the hollowness of life and extol a state of negation, void, nihil as the ultimate aim to be achieved. The whole country was caught in the spell of this message and it was an uphill task for Acharya Sankara later on to uplift the whole nation from the lethargy of inaction and bring it back to the robust optimism of the Vedic times. He was not able to succeed in this to the full extent. The message of the Buddha had cast such a spell on the Indian mind that he could only modify it. While affirming that God is Truth, he had to concede that the world is false, Brahma Satyam Jagan Mithyaa. And the Veda was understood only as a handbook of rituals and was subjected to much criticism. Therefore, to propagate his message Acharya Sankara had to leave the Veda out and take to Upanishads as the end-product of the Veda, Vedaanta. Thus, his commentaries on the Upanishads, Brahma Sutra and the Bhagavat Gita Prasthaana Traya, set the pattern for the later Acharyas. From his time onwards, the belief became rooted in the mind of the nation that to gain God the world had to be rejected and it was impossible to gain supremacy over matter and spirit at the same time. His concept of Adwaita, monism, was later qualified by Sri Ramanuja and much later Sri Madhwa with a pragmatic approach preached Dwaita, duality. Thus Indian spirituality was evolving slowly till in recent times it took a new turn and found new expression in the life of Sri Ramakrishna. The essential spirituality underlying all the religions of the world is one and the same and this was demonstrated in the Spiritual Sadhana of Sri Ramakrishna illustrating in himself the harmony of all religions. And it was left to Swami Vivekananda to pave the way for the West to receive the immortal message of the Spirit from the East.

Thus the stage was set for Sri Aurobindo to make his unique contribution, the consummation of the evolution of spirituality on earth. The Vedantic ideal stressed on the supremacy of the Purusha subordinating the action of Nature, Prakriti, to his will. The Tantric discipline saw the world as Power, as Reality, as the symbol of the paramountcy of Prakriti and made the Purusha inert, inactive. Both the Vedantic ideal and the Tantric discipline are necessary for an integral realisation. One need not give up Matter in order to realise the Spirit, neither one has to wean himself away from the Spirit in order to have a grip over Matter. Spirituality has been long associated with the East, while materialism has been the ruling principle in the West. The East has to get a grip on Matter while the West should learn to win the Spirit. This has been the long endeavour of the earth. The world is not to be rejected, it has to be transformed by the Power of Spirit. The life’s solution is in death but in a higher evolved life where principles higher than those of the mind will govern. Sri Aurobindo declared the object of his Yoga in these terms: “Perfection has to be worked out, has to be accomplished. Imperfection, limitation, death, grief, ignorance, matter are only the first terms of the formulary; they are the initial discords of the musician’s tuning. Out of imperfection, we have to construct perfection, out of limitation, to discover infinity, out of death, to find immortality, out of grief, to recover divine bliss, out of ignorance, to rescue divine self-knowledge, out of matter, to reveal spirit. To work out this for ourselves and for humanity is the object of our Yogic practice.”

The Veda declares that man is the offspring of Heaven and Earth. Heaven is his father, Earth is his mother. He cannot disown his parentage from either of them. He is the product of both matter and spirit. Sri Aurobindo therefore looks to the Veda, the fount of Indian spirituality for the propagation of his thought. In this respect he makes a departure from the other Acharyas. He has not commented on the Brahma Sutra as it is only the amplification of the Upanishadic thought reconciling the various view-points. His Prasthana Traya is the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita. His writings on the Secret of the Veda, his commentaries on Isha and Kena and his luminous notes on other Upanishads and his essays on the Gita are standing monuments to his intuitive scholarship in the authentic exposition of the ancient Sanatana Dharma.

Again, Sri Aurobindo is unique in that like other Acharyas, did not write his commentaries in Sanskrit. If he wanted, he would have easily written in the language of the Gods. To propagate his message for humanity, he chose the language of Man, the English language which the majority of the people in the world understand. The language of materialism was thus made a sure vehicle for the expression of the subtleties of the Spirit.

All along in India, there had been no dearth of great realised souls. But they did not deign to express themselves or communicate experiences in rational terms to others. If they wrote at knowing that language was a poor vehicle for their profound thoughts, they wrote in pithy aphorisms sutras which could lend themselves to many interpretations. Or they narrated their experiences in easy stories and parables which tended in over-simplification or generalisation of their profound findings. Again, Sri Aurobindo is unique in that he has written in great detail, in unambiguous terms quite logically and rationally about all the ramifications and intricacies of the realms of the Spirit which normally baffle description.

Hitherto, the Yoga had been for the liberation of the individual with the society was left behind to its own ignorance. Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is for the whole humanity, for the whole of the earth. Integral is his vision. All the known sciences and thoughts of the world are embraced in the science of his integral Yoga; nothing is left out. In fact it is no exaggeration to say that one understands the thought of Acharya Sankara or Sri Ramanuja, the concept of the Tantra, etc., after one has read the writings of Sri Aurobindo. In his scheme, each has its due place, nothing is discarded. In no other spiritual path such an ideal is put forth to be achieved. What is this unique ideal? In the words of Sri Aurobindo himself:

“There is a Truth-consciousness as it is called in the Veda–a Supermind as I have termed it–possessing knowledge, not having to seek after it and constantly miss it. In one of the Upanishads, a being of knowledge is stated to be the next step above the mental being. Into that the soul has to rise and through it to attain the perfect bliss of spiritual existence. If that could be achieved as the next evolutionary step of Nature here, then she would be fulfilled and we could conceive of the perfection of life even here, its attainment of a full spiritual living even in this body–or it may be in a perfected body. We could even speak of a Divine Life on earth; our human dream of perfectibility would be accomplished and at the same time the aspiration to a heaven on earth common to several religions and spiritual seers and thinkers. The ascent of the human soul to the supreme Spirit is that soul’s highest aim and necessity, for that is the supreme reality; but there can be too the descent of the Spirit and its powers into the world and that would justify the existence of the material world also, give a meaning, a divine purpose to the creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest ideal, Spirit embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the Spirit.”

“Dharma means literally that which one lays hold of and which holds things together, the law, the norm, the rule of nature, action and life.”

–SRI AUROBINDO

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