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PART ONE
CHAPTER I
ANCIENT DAWNS SUSTAIN INDIA'S DAYS
Ever-living India
A new age is coming over mankind, a new world order. Cosmic forces are at work preparing man for this immense change in his life and consciousness. Already the higher mind of the race is opening to a broader vision, one evidence of which is the growing quest for the secret of Asia's evolution in history. Far-seeing eyes, here and there, are turning towards India, China and, in fact, the whole of Asia in search of the deeper truth of these civilisations.
India is the hoary guardian of the Asian idea and its profound spiritual secrets, says Sri Aurobindo. True to her heritage, true to the call of the age, India is rearising today to fulfil her destined mission in the world. In the world of culture she holds a unique position. In international life she is d force by herself pledged to peace, freedom and unity for the whole human race. These are among the immediate reasons why the quest is more insistent today than ever before. It seems that the hitherto-prevalent Western standpoint in historiography is being substituted however slowly, by a broader, truer, global outlook envisaging the social, cultural and political evolution of all the peoples of the world, and their progressive march towards a common goal.
Deep in history is implicit the truth of world movements. This truth expresses itself in great upheavals which cross their original bounds and tend to become universal facts. This is how Nature prepares man's evolution towards One World. The growing recognition of the concept of history as a record of' the common human march', and of Asia's importance in ever-expanding cultural movements is indeed a happy augury of the times.
That is why inward-looking thinkers are trying to unravel the mystery of the unique phenomenon of India and China, the only countries in the world, which continue in history as inheritors of a magnificent past whose spirit still lives in their creative strivings; although the present-day China is, for the moment, a virtual denial of her ancient heritage. Indeed both of them do yet have the capacity to regain their old strength and energy and direct them, like India, into regenerative channels, and produce new marvels characteristic of their racial genius and of the urge of the future. It is this fact more than anything else that prompts the questions: how could they do so even under conditions often unfavourable ?
For various reasons, especially for her long subjection to foreign rule,
I India's achievements in modem times have not had their proper place and proper treatment in her own history, to say nothing of world history. But these glorious contributions of India in the world of culture have in them the dynamic elements of a new creation. The great past of India and her modem resurgence have happily begun to attract the higher mind of man.
What it seeks now is an answer to the why and the how of this resurgence, the first signs of which showed themselves more than a hundred years back. But this event is not an isolated one: Indeed, what it truly means will always escape us if we do not look at it from the standpoint of India's evolution through the ages, of which the latest and the most fruitful period, now reached, is marked by a rebirth of her soul for the fulfilment of her particular destiny. This continuity of India's soul from its early dawns, and its present resurgence can be understood only when its 'inwardness', its psychological drive, and the hidden source of its strength are discovered and understood. What is it that has sustained the life-line of India's civilisation through her millennial march in time ? From where does she get the inexhaustible life-force by which she has lived on through the ages springing time and again into fresh spurts of energy, and throwing up men and marvels that shine and shine for ever in the pages of her long and profound history ? What is it that has kept burning the upward flame of her soul even in the darkest days of her decline ?
'One of the oldest races and greatest civilisations on this earth, the most indomitable in vitality, the most fecund in greatness, the deepest in life, the most wonderful in potentiality',1 this is the India of the ages living on by the power of the Spirit which came to her almost when her history began. And by developing this down the ages through constant communion with the highest Reality in the deepest depth of the being she mastered the secret of life-renewal and won for herself the crown of immortality. Indeed her creative activity was unbroken and continuous not for centuries but for millenniums. And there was no domain of spiritual or secular knowledge, no field .of cultural or social activity, in which she did not make her significant original contribution.
'When we look at the past of India', says Sri Aurobindo/what strikes us... is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least,—it is indeed much longer,—she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly, with an inexhaustible many-sidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts worldly,
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Ideal of the Karmayogin, p. I. trades, industries, fine crafts,—the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. She creates and creates and is not satisfied and is not tired; she will not have an end of it, seems hardly to need a space for rest, a time for inertia and lying fallow. She expands too outside her borders; her ships cross the ocean and the fine superfluity of her wealth brims over to Judea and Egypt and Rome; her colonies spread her arts and epics and creeds in the Archipelago; her traces are found in the sands of Mesopotamia; her religions conquer China and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria, and the figures of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists are re-echoed on the hps of Christ. Everywhere, as on her soil, so in her works there is the teeming of a superabundant energy of life.'1 Where does this energy come from ? From 'Solar Glories' seen and won by the early Fathers of the race on whom shone the Sun of Truth and its 'First Dawns' in their uninterrupted succession. For centuries these truths lay hidden in the symbolic hymns of the Rigveda. Their revelation by Sri Aurobindo at this great hour of the world carries its own significance.
Vedic Dawn
Almost when her history began there came to the Seers of India intuitive visions of the Infinite Light of heaven and of its three modes of self-unfoldment, rtam, satyam, bṛhat, 'the Right, the True, the Vast'. The force of these visions impelled the soul of' India to grow and expand both in her inner and outer life, the two aspects being one in the oneness of the Spirit. Ritam, says Sri Aurobindo, is the action of the Divine knowledge, will and joy in the lines of the Truth, the play of the truth consciousness. These lines of the Truth later became the lines of the Dharma which connect the individual soul with its godhead. Satyam is the dynamic essence of the truth-consciousness which has to permeate the being and convert it into its substance. Brihat is the infinity of Sacllchidananda out of which the other two proceed and in which they are founded. Man's divine perfection towards which the force of these visions secretly prepares him lies in the fulfilment of the infinite possibilities of his terrestrial existence, indicated by them. These visions are the spiritual foundations of the culture of India and the world.
Here is the Rishis' paean of joy : 'We have crossed to the other shore of this darkness, Dawn is breaking forth and she creates and forms the births of knowledge.'2 And the fact that this Dawn—the discovery of the Light—had been already achieved by the ancient Fathers is so often proclaimed in utterances like : 'Our fathers found out the hidden light,
1 Sri Aurobindo: The Renaissance in India, pp.12-13. 2Rig Veda, 1.92.6. This and the riks quoted below are Sri Aurobindo's translationin their esoteric significance revealed by him. by the truth in their thoughts, they brought to birth the Dawn.'1 \ This Dawn is the 'Dawn divine who brings with her the heaven of light.'2 The discovery of the Dawn meant a new birth into a new consciousness, into Light and Knowledge. Dawn is the illumination of the Truth upon the mentality of man to bring the day of full consciousness into the darkness or the half-lit night of his being. The Rishi, when he sees 'the wide-shining of this Dawn', followed by the continuous splendour of the all illumining Light, bursts forth: 'Arise, O Souls, arise ! Strength has come, darkness has passed away—the Light is arriving !'3
That the Infinite Light of the Supreme Consciousness which follows the Dawn was also seen and possessed by the Founders of the Vedic Knowledge, is indicated by the declaration of the Rishi: 'Our fathers broke open the firm and strong places by their words, yea, the Angirasas broke open the hill by their cry; they made in us path to the great heaven; they found the Day and swar and vision and the luminous cows.'4 This path, the Rishi continues, is the path that leads to immortality. 'A perfect path of the Truth has come into being for our journey to the other shore beyond the darkness.'5
The great Rishi Vamadeva, like the other Rishis, often refers to 'the victorious attainment of the cow of Light', how 'the human fathers went forward to the possession of the Truth', how 'the souls opened by the divine word'. And when he declares 'Heaven shone forth' he implies the manifestation of the three luminous worlds of Swar, the True, the Right, the Vast. But it is in a most plain and emphatic language that the Rishi reveals his own seerhood : 'All these are sacred words that I have uttered to thee who knowest, 0 Agni, O Disposer, words of leading, words of seer-knowledge that express their meaning to the seer,—I have spoken them illumined in my words and my thinkings.'6
Another victory of great importance is the hold of Rishi Agastya on Matter where he the roots of Desire. Here are the words of a disciple: 'Agastya digging with spades, desiring off-spring, the child and strength, he, the forceful Rishi, nourished both the colours (or either colour), reached in the gods the true blessings.'7 Here, offspring symbolises whatever comes into being as the crown of one's sadhana, child the new transformed personality, and the colours the human and the divine, both of which the Rishi developed in himself. All these done and achieved, the Rishi rose into the Godhead and possessed the supreme Bliss and Beauty of the Truth.
'We have drunk the Nectar. We have become immortal. We have come to the Light, we have found the gods.'8 'I saw the fairest form of the Sun',
1 Rig Veda, VII.76.4. 5 RV. I.46.1. 2 RV. V.80.1. 6 RV. IV.3.16. 3RV. VII.76.4. 7 RV. I.179.6. 4 RV. 71.2. 8 RV. VIII48.3. 'the most glorious of the forms of the gods.'1 'We came to the divine Sun in the Godhead, to the highest Light of all.'2—these are the Rishis' infallible assurances to man that human consciousness can rise to the heavens of the Spirit and then descend with its Light and manifest it upon earth. The Light is the Truth; its manifestation on earth means the growth of man into the Truth-Consciousness, in other words, into a divine perfection which is the next higher stage in the evolution of the present mental man. Therefore does the Rishi declare: 'Create the divine race.'3
The visions, victories and realisations of the Vedic Mystics as revealed by Sri Aurobindo, the Master-Seer of today, are a record of the greatest spiritual achievements of man in that dim past (about 3500 B.C.) of which a complete history has yet to be attempted. They point, if anything, to the future when man will be reborn and remade into a supramental race. 'The mind of ancient India did not err when it traced back all its philosophy, religion and essential things of its culture to these seer-poets, for all the future spirituality of her people is contained there in seed or its first expression.'4
The Vedic Seers knew that the life of man belongs not only to earth but also to heaven, and by voyaging into the vasts of God they discovered the harmony between the two hemispheres of existence, how the Supreme embraces both of them, and promotes between them a constant commerce of their forces, heaven seeking to descend on earth, and earth aspiring to ascend to heaven, so as to bring about a union of these two powers for the growth on earth of a larger life of harmony in the Spirit.
In the depth' and intensity of their vision the Seers saw in man the mighty summit of the earth and in the gods powers of the Infinite Consciousness, both bound by the unseen light of a heavenly Glory which is to manifest on earth and evolve out of man a new being. Thus did the life of man unveil its secret significance to these Mystics who discovered in it 'a thing of mixed truth and falsehood, a movement from mortality to immortality, from mixed fight and darkness to the splendour of a divine Truth whose home is above in the Infinite but which can be built up here in man's soul and life.'
Dawns Upbearing Historic Process
The question naturally arises as to whether the sublime visions, experiences and realisations of the Vedic Rishis were retained by them as their personal treasures, and if so, even though they were a superior order of individuals, whether they constituted themselves as a spiritual aristocracy, living above and apart from society and the workaday world
1 RV. V.62.1. 2RV.I.50.10. 2RV .X.53.6. 4 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture,P.302. and unconcerned with their fellowmen.
The issue is one of the philosophy of history a study of which may furnish a psychological clue in the influence of these spiritual achievements on others in ancient and later times.
If man is a progressive being—and this is an admitted fact—he must have in him a principle of organic growth which evolves and progresses through the various phases of his earthly life. This principle cannot but be a creative principle of perfection not only culminating in the highest mental excellence but going far beyond it.
The Rishis of old, especially the most vigorous of them, cherished flaming aspirations for ascents higher and higher, and the Grace from above drew them up. Thus were they able to attain those heights of consciousness that were their unique achievements. Their life is a glorious example of daring research and pioneer realisation of the Highest Truth, of truth self-acting, self-propelling, sovereignly self-manifesting. It stands to reason, therefore, that the truths seized and possessed by them could never remain hidden within themselves as so much idle capital.
History abounds in proofs of how those truths radiated to other aspirants and permeated the society in which the Rishis lived. Proofs are also there that the Rishis were not recluses but family men who concerned themselves with private and even public affairs. Their clear-sighted and unerring guidance was available to king and commoner alike, and all strata of society profited by their light.
According to this broad pattern, the foundations of human culture were laid not only in India but in many other early societies. These early dawns formed the Age of Mysteries in some parts of the world and marked the beginning of the true history of man. And this history, whether written or unwritten, is a record of man's evolution, of his growth in consciousness impelled and upborne by what the Seer of today has discovered and revealed as the Real-Idea or the Creative Principle of a Supramental Perfection, in one word, the Supermind, as the origin of man's being, the continuing support of his evolutionary march, his ultimate goal and splendid destiny.
The various cultural forms of the racial genius thus come into the pageant of history not as so many isolated facts pieced together but as harmonious expressions of the soul of the race, the outer articulations of its inner ethos, all tending towards the fulfilment of the intention of evolutionary Nature—the advancement and perfection of the race as a whole.
History, therefore, is a continuous process through which the faculties of man go on developing greater and grander powers. And this process has its stages at each of which man takes to those activities that give him the round of experiences he needs for his growth towards the ultimate goal of his individual and collective existence. Even his davs of decline have often been wayside halts or a retracing of steps for a fresh start on his ever-onward path. They are but a downward curve of the spiral of progress, an occasion for self-preparation and reinforcement for a bigger effort.
These activities and experiences of man, while sustaining his life, mind, heart and soul, promote their expansion and development for larger and wider fulfilments of the future. Each stage of his journey, however, is generally found to have one particular idea that governs most of his activities through which grows a particular part of his being. This is how man gathers the needed strength to reach the goal of his adventure, the vision of which came to him almost at the very outset of his journey, as if under some pre-arranged divine plan.
A perfect order of collective life—and no perfect order of life can be anything but a life lived in the Spirit—is the secret aim inherent in the evolution of humanity. Perfection of the individual completes itself in the corning into being of a perfect community. The core of all human progress is an inner preparation of the whole being of man for this great end of his social existence.
But the historic development of mankind is too complex a phenomenon to allow of any clear division into separate periods which may be presented against a common background. That history is fundamentally the working out of a 'predetermined Plan' or a 'creative Idea' is even more difficult to discover in what external epochs appear to be to the student of human affairs. But a deeper view of things vouchsafed to the seers reads in history a hidden purpose for whose accomplishment evolutionary Nature is ever at work, leading man from age to age that he may rise to the summit of his earthly possibilities individually as well as collectively. History reflects this integral vision when it studies all the efforts and achievements of man as a manifold organic progression; and the vision finds its wider meaning in history when the latter depicts the story of how man as a race moves forward in his chequered march to that goal.
This march, generally, has several broad stages through which man has to pass in order to be fully developed in every part and plane of his being so as to become ready for the highest point of his evolution on earth. The story of man is the story of his progress towards his ultimate destiny.
'The Rigveda', says Sri Aurobindo,'.. .is the high-aspiring Song of Humanity; its chants are episodes of the lyrical epic of the soul in its immortal ascension.'1 Here is a hymn: 'Usha (Dawn) follows to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in the eternal succession of the dawns that are coming,—Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead ....what is her scope when she harmonises with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine ? She desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light;
1 Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. xxxvi. projecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come.'1
In this significant Vedic utterance is enshrined the secret of man's historic evolution. The inner, and therefore, the truer definition of history is the story of man's pilgrimage from the Ancient Dawn to the High Noon of the future. The 'infinite rays' of this Dawn are, indeed, the waves of an endless tide of the Light—'eternal succession of the Dawns' —flowing since 'the most distant yesterdays to the most distant tomorrows', working on and preparing man all down the ages for his ultimate destiny —a higher than his present mental life on earth.
Dawn symbolises the first phase of the Light with whose vision man started on his great adventure; it symbolises also the outbreak of other states on the way. 'States upon states are born, covering over covering awakens to Knowledge: in the lap of the Mother one wholly sees.'2 The birth Of man into each state is for him the possession of a new knowledge, a new experience, therefore, a step forward towards the heavenly Light whose complete manifestation upon earth takes place when man gives himself wholly and entirely to the Divine Mother so that she may new-make the child of the earth into a child of heaven. She is the Mother of the gods and each human soul is an evolving god who grows by Her Grace for his outflowering in man.
This pilgrimage of man reaches its end when he is ready for the ultimate Dawn to burst on his consciousness and develop into the Everlasting Day, the Sun of Truth making earth his permanent abode, and man his conscious vessel living for ever in the truth and light of His immortal perfection. But Dawn does not stop with this great fulfilment. It is an eternal phenomenon of the Light of the Supreme Consciousness. When man becomes a gnostic, truth-conscious being, he passes from his human to a divine cycle with newer dawns on his consciousness for greater and yet greater fulfilments in the divine order of infinite progression. The pilgrimage therefore is a long march which the soul in evolution has ceaselessly to pursue, beckoned by the inspiring voice of the Aitareya Brahmana : caraiveti, 'March on'.
The role the East has played in the spiritual history of man has in it a deep significance for his future. The Age of Mysteries through which humanity passed—in different countries and in different periods—may be characterised as the seed-time of its historic development. The vision of Tao that the Mystics of China had in her immemorial past is indeed the source of her strength by which she continues in history, producing those wonders that are China's imperishable contributions to human civilisation. Through that sublime vision China had contact with the supreme centre of life-energy, Tao, called Brahman in India. The way of Tao is, therefore, the 'perfect Way'—the Way to 'perfection'. And China fives on
1 RV. 1.113.8,10. 2 RV. V. 19. sustained by these spiritual strengths in her racial consciousness.
The Vedic age in India was the earliest when the most luminous of the spiritual dawns radiated their golden rays on the intuitive horizon of the ancient Seers who saw in them the Infinite glories of the Supreme waiting to manifest upon earth and make of it a heaven. And intuition was the particular faculty of human consciousness that received its fruition in this period. This is the first touch of the Spirit on the mind of India when she began in that great dawn to open to the Light and develop the intuitive or the visionary bent of her mind, her innate spirituality.
It was over a long period of many centuries, perhaps millenniums, that the Vedic Illuminates occupied themselves from generation to generation with their spiritual pursuits which brought to them their unique visions and victories. Sri Aurobindo says that the soul of India was bom in that vision of the Light which repeating itself over such a length of time implanted in that soul the fire-seeds of an undying quest of the Divine, of an ever-increasing flame of Agni, the Vedic god whom the Mystics invoked in the largest number of hymns ever addressed to any one god in the Rigveda. Agni is the conscient divine Will in man and the universe. When man makes the inner sacrifice Agni who knows the way to the home of the Truth leads his human worshipper to that home. This is how Agni mediates between God and man and fashions gods in man's mortal parts, kindling in him the flame of aspiration, the flame that mounts upward to the gods. It is significant that Bharat, the ancient name of India, means children of Bhārat who are 'the nourishers and fosterers of Light'. It may also mean those who live in Light. In the Satapatha Brahmana the word is associated with the march of Aryan culture along the course of rivers and valleys disseminating its light all the way. To this may be traced the origin of the ancient tradition of agni-vijaya, conquest of Agni, in other words, the expansion of Aryan culture and, therefore, the intensification of the spiritual urge in man.
The Vedic tradition of gotra—root meaning, protecting or guarding the Light—was another way in which the Rishis transmitted the truth of their spiritual achievement to their descendants from generation to generation. The name of a Rishi was thus borne as their gotra-name by his descendants who were to adhere to that Rishi's vision of the Light, follow his way to its realisation, and thereby preserve the vision and maintain its continuity into the future. The Hindus still bear gotra-names after their Rishi-forefathers and feel a thrill of reverence while recalling them in every religious celebration. In their individual sadhana too they concentrate on them in order to draw force and inspiration from these original sources. More than a mere relic of the past, it is still a living institution throughout India.
It is thus clear—and India's history is eloquent with proofs—that it is those her Seers of old who evoked her soul and fostered it with their vigorous seekings, profound realisations and wonderful revelations, and what is more, planted in it an inextinguishable yearning for the Spirit. Once awakened, her soul expressed itself through life and mind and in every form of thought and action, developed itself into a consciousness aflame with the light of heaven, and infused itself into the consciousness of the race. Strong in its inherent strength, it has served for ever as the invisible pilot of her evolution from age to age, steering its course from the early dawns to the sun-blaze of the Everlasting Day.
Wider Vedantic Dawn
The next phase of the age of the Spirit was marked by the spiritual activities not only of the Master-Seers but also of seekers in various parts of the country. The Upanishads therefore represent a turning-point in the historic evolution of India. Taking its start from the intuitive seeing of the heavenly Light, the soul of India now entered upon its chequered career of adventure in order to go through the experience it needed for its enrichment and preparation for the more luminous Noons of the Future. From the unbounded heavens of the Spirit it now turned towards the earth and the things of the earth, not surely to be bound and enmeshed by them but to discover in them the light of heaven.
'The creation of a revelatory and intuitive mind and its illumined experience', 'the Upanishads are not a revolutionary departure from the Vedic mind and its temperament and fundamental ideas, but a continuation and development and to a certain extent an enlarging transformation in the sense of bringing out into open expression all that was held covered in the symbolic Vedic speech as a mystery and a secret,'1 known only to the initiates. Not only do they contain quite a large number of Vedic words and phrases but their authors, the Vedantic Seers, revisioned the Vedic truths and restated them in terms of intuitive intelligence for a fresh illumination of the race-mind. Thus the Vedic passage 'There is a Truth covered by a Truth' is found in the Upanishads as 'The face of the Truth is covered with a golden lid'. The 'golden lid' is the inferior covering which has 'to be removed' 'for the vision of the law of Truth'. The sublime formula of the Upanishads 'He am V corresponds to 'That One' of the Rigvedic verse, the former more categorical than the latter. This is how the Vedic line is maintained in the Vedanta but it has shot out branches and extended in various directions in order to meet the expanding need of the times.
The Upanishads reiterate the Vedic vision of the Truth as Brahman, khe Supreme Person. The Rishi in the Upanishad declares : I have tnown the Supreme Person, the One whose light shines forth from beyond the darkness'2. 'Thou art That', 'All this is Brahman' and 'Brahman is
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 310 2 Svetasvatara Up. 118.8.
all this' are among other mighty declarations of the Vedantic Mystics. They enshrine the great truth that the One is also the Many. But in what relation does the One stand to the Many? The One is pre-eminently real, but 'The Others', the Many are not unreal. Unity is the eternal truth of things and diversity is the play of that Unity, because creation is a self-multiplication of Brahman in the conditions of Space and Time. Creation is not a making but a becoming in terms and forms of conscious existence. Brahman is the One Self of all and the Many are the becomings of the One Being. And both the Self and the becomings are Brahman. The inmost reality of man is the divine Self. To become conscious of it is to grow into it, into its ineffable harmony and perfection—an endeavour of which man alone of all terrestrial beings is capable. The Upanishads say that to know Brahman is to become Brahman. They call Brahman ānanda, Delight, and the Bright Immortal. A knower of Brahman thus attains immortality: that is to say, he ascends out of earthly joy and sorrow into a transcendent Beatitude that is for ever. Therefore do the Upanishads reaffirm the aspiration of the human soul to be led 'from non-being to true being, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.'1
Since Brahman is Delight and is also the inmost truth of everything, Delight is the very essence of all existence. Says the Taittiriya Upanishad : 'From Delight all these beings are bom, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return.' Why then pain and grief ? They are but 'perverse terms of Ananda', stages in Nature's evolutionary process which prepares man for his destined perfect life in bliss that is for ever. This unique Vedantic teaching is the world's highest hope.
The theme of the Upanishads is brahmavidyā or ātmavidyā, the Science of the Self. They are a gospel of the inner illumination in which knowledge is always knowledge by identity and not by logical reasoning. The Vedantic thinkers did not think in order to know, but went beyond thought straight to the vision itself. Whenever there was a controversy, the sages would meet in an assembly, generally convened by kings many of whom were themselves sages, and proceed not by discussion or dialectics, but by a comparison of intuitions and experiences in which the less luminous would give place to the more luminous.
The Upanishadic knowledge includes several vidyās, esoteric sciences, by which could be achieved mastery of the various parts and planes of man's physical, vital and mental being for his growth towards the light of the Atman, the Self of the Transcendent Truth. And action, according to the Upanishads, is as much a necessity for this growth as contemplation. Thus they affirm life, affirming also that it is in this body that Brahman is to be realised. They also uphold a great ideal of education which was to train the youth for a perfect life in the Spirit.
1 Brihadaranyaka Up. 1.3.28. The Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka record 'an epoch of immense and strenuous seeking, an intense and ardent seed-time of the Spirit.'1 They contain a good number of names and regions associated with spiritual activities of a unique kind that characterise the age as one of the most important in the spiritual history not only of India but of the whole world. The Chhandogya is called by Sri Aurobindo 'the summary history of one of the greatest and most interesting ages of human thought'.
There were kings and nobles, saints and sages, God-seeking souls including those of low and unknown parentage, who, stirred to a passionate search for the highest word of revealing experience, enthusiastically participated in these activities. Ashramas of sages, homes of illumined teachers, cottages of humble God-knowers, courts of kings and sacrificial assemblies, pulsated with upheavings of the soul, the stir of spiritual seeking, the fire-urge of passionate aspiration for the highest knowledge. The Upanishads testify how seekers in that great age of the Spirit won their unique victories which made them immortal as well as the country to which they belonged. The Upanishads speak also of a number of women-seers, Brahmavadinis, as does the Rigveda.
The Upanishads consolidated and expanded the spiritual tendency of the race by a fresh and vigorous search for the higher values of life, which flowered into those marvellous creations of the Indian mind, creations of which a free and natural interweaving stands today as the many-hued texture of Indian civilisation.
The Upanishads are not merely a greater efflorescence of the great Vedic beginning but, they have been the acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions that flowed from it in India like her great rivers from their Himalayan cradle fertilising the mind and life of the people and kept its soul alive through the long procession of the centuries, constantly returned to for light, never failing to give fresh illumination, a fountain of inexhaustible life-giving waters. Buddhism was only a restatement of the Upanishadic ideas which can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and which form the profoundest part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West, and Sufism only repeats them in another religious language. The larger part of German metaphysics is little more in substance than an intellectual development of these great realities, and modern thought is rapidly absorbing them. And even the larger generalisations of Science are constantly found to apply to the truth of physical Nature formulas already discovered by the Indian sages in their original, their largest meaning in the deeper truth of the spirit.2
The Vedanta movement initiated in modem times by the great Swami
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, p.165. 2 Adapted from Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp.305-6 Vivekananda has had a world-wide acceptance.
To the Upanishads India owes her spiritual mind and also her central conception of life as a continuously enlarging process of the progressive growth of man's finite consciousness into the infinite consciousness, a growth of his ordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature which it is man's destiny to attain in his terrestrial evolution.
Each nation, says Sri Aurobindo, is a Sakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Sakti, the living energy of the great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence. For by its virtue alone she has been one of the immortal nations; and this alone has been the secret of her amazing persistence and the perpetual force of her survival and revival. India's social system is built upon this conception; her philosophy formulates it; her religion is an aspiration to the spiritual consciousness and its fruits; her art and literature have the same upward look; her whole dharma or law of being is founded upon it. It is her founding of life upon this exalted conception and her urge towards the spiritual and the eternal that constitute the distinct value of her civilisation. The Veda and Upanishads are thus the very bedrock of Indian civilisation. One might almost say', in the words of Sri Aurobindo, 'that ancient India was created by the Veda and the Upanishads and that the visions of inspired seers made a people.'1
Growth on Lines of Dharma
Thus with the spiritual bent of her mind securely developed, India was now to enter upon a new age, the age of the Dharma. This age was 'distinguished by the rise of great philosophies, by a copious, vivid, many-thoughted, many-sided epic literature, by the beginnings of art and science, by the. evolution of a vigorous and complex society, by the formation of large kingdoms and empires, by manifold formative activities of all kinds and great systems of living and dunking. Here as elsewhere, in Greece, Rome, Persia, China, this was the age of a high outburst of the intelligence working upon life and the things of the mind to discover their reason and their right way and bring out a broad and noble fullness of human existence.... And in all this there was a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence.'2
The great discovery of this age was the concept of the Dharma having its root in the Vedic ṛtam, the Right. Essentially, it implies the right path or line of self-development, of the development of consciousness, for the individual and the collectivity, by following which they can attain
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Future Poetry, p. 345. 2 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp.167-68 their perfection as envisaged in the Veda and the Vedanta. The elaboration of this idea was the need of the age for the expansion of the mind at that stage of its evolution.
The true truth of Dharma, says Sri Aurobindo, is that 'it is at once religious law of action and deepest law of our nature, and is not, as in the Western idea, a creed, cult or ideal inspiring an ethical and social rule; it is the right law of functioning of our life in all its parts. The tendency of man to seek after a just and perfect law of his living finds its truth and its justification in the Dharma. Everything indeed has its dharma, its law of life imposed on it by its nature; but for man the dharma is the conscious imposition of a rule of ideal living on all his members. Dharma is fixed in its essence, but still it develops in our consciousness and evolves and has its stages; there are gradations of spiritual and ethical ascension in the search for the highest law of our nature. All men cannot follow in all things one common and invariable rule. Life is too complex to admit of the arbitrary ideal simplicity which the moralising theorist loves; Natures differ; the position, the work we have to do has its own claims and standards; aim and bent, the call of life, the call of the spirit within is not the same for everyone; the degree and turn of development and the capacity, adhikāra, are not equal. Man lives in society and by society, and every society has its own general dharma, and the individual life must be fitted into this wider law of movement. But there too the individual's part in society, and his nature and the needs of his capacity and temperament vary and have many kinds and degrees : the social law must make some room for this variety and would lose by being rigidly one for all. The man of knowledge, the man of power, the productive and acquisitive man, the priest, scholar, poet, artist, ruler, fighter, trader, tiller of the soil, craftsman, labourer, servant cannot usefully have the same training, cannot be shaped in the same pattern, cannot all follow the same way of living. All ought not to be put under the same tables of the law; for that would be a senseless geometric rigidity that would spoil the plastic truth of life. Each has his type of nature and there must be a rule for the perfection of that type; each has his own proper function and there must be a canon and ideal for the function. There must be in all things some wise and understanding standard of practice and idea of perfection and living rule,—that is the one thing needful for the Dharma....'1 And it is this that motivated all social thinking in ancient India.
'The universal embracing dharma in the Indian idea is a law of ideal perfection for the developing mind and soul of man.... The ideal is clearly portrayed in the written records of ancient .India during two millenniums and it is the very life-breath of Hindu ethics. It was the creation of an at once ideal and rational mind, spirit-wise and world-wise, deeply religious, nobly ethical, firmly yet flexibly intellectual, scientific and aesthetic,
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp.118-19. patient and tolerant of life's difficulties and human weakness but arduous in self-discipline. This was the mind that was at the base of the Indian civilisation' and gave its characteristic stamp to all the culture.'1
The earlier phase of the age of the Dharma was 'that magnificent youth of the nation, in which a fathomless spiritual insight was at work, a subtle intuitive vision and a deep, clear and greatly outlined intellectual and ethical thinking and heroic action and creation which founded and traced the plan and made the permanent structure of her unique culture and civilisation.'2
Ancient India's law-makers were those saints, sages and seers whose knowledge and mastery of the Vedic and Vedantic truths of man, God and the universe formed the basis of the laws that have governed the social, political, religious and cultural life of the people for thousands of years. But there was no such compartmentalism as divides human activity today. The age of the Dharma brought into being a social framework which included every possible form of human activity. The sages of ancient India therefore laid down the four fundamental motives of human living, founded the institution of the four stages of life, and gave a definite shape to the social organisation; but all these institutions had their roots in the previous age of the Spirit.
As an example of how they were based on the spiritual truths of man's being maybe mentioned the system of caste much maligned by Western scholars and Indian reformers. Its deeper meaning is that brāhmana, kṣatriya, vaiśya and śūdra represent different active powers and potentialities of the Spirit and its executive Sakti within us; the predominance of one or the other in the more well-formed part of our personality accentuates our main tendencies, dominant qualities and capacities, effective turns in action and in life. It is these individual traits and natural proclivities and not birth that was to determine caste. The purpose of this psychological classification was to organise the being of man in a way that would promote bis spiritual evolution.
The spiritual truth of each type has also its bearing on the pyramidal expansion of consciousness in humanity through the four principal stages of its evolution in history The first stage was that of the small circle of brahmana masters of esoteric knowledge at the apex; below them was the second, of the larger group of Kshatriya kings who preserved the Knowledge and helped in its dissemination; below them was the third, of the yet wider communities of acquisitive vaisya merchants whose wealth is the mainstay of the modem world-wide civilisation, however commercial in character; and the base of the pyramid is the largest class of humanity, the sudra workers, whose awakening is an outstanding event in recent history—an event the spiritual significance of which will reveal
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp.120-121. 2Ibid., p. 292. itself in the coming age of the Spirit when humanity will be reborn into a new consciousness ushering in a new cycle of evolution. The inner history of man is the history of this gradual growth and expansion of his consciousness towards its supreme fulfilment in the future.
These four classes of humanity represent therefore an eternal truth of man's individual and collective evolution. Subjectively, they form human society everywhere today as much as they did in ancient India, though not as a recognised institution. Of course the hereditary form in which the caste system exists today is meaningless anachronism. Happily for India, it is now fast vanishing. It must however be admitted that this system has rendered a positive service : it has maintained unbroken for over four thousand years the socio-economic structure of India's social and collective life and saved it from disintegration by shocks of foreign onslaughts and conquests.
The laying down of the lines of the country's social and collective progress, and their observance in life helped the mind of India in that age to become keen, capacious and masterful. This growth of mind led to the inevitable growth of mind individuality, ego and its exclusiveness. Ancient wisdom had foreseen it and so emphasised the subordination of the ego and individual interests to the collective ideals of the race.
When with the passage of time, the light of Dharma began to fade with the natural consequence of man's gradual falling back from the ideal, his mind, driven by selfish instincts and impulses, dominated his life and stood as a barrier to his higher progress.
At this crucial hour of India's culture, the Light of Sri Krishna appeared on the horizon. His descent on earth was the descent of a divine force to help humanity out of the great evolutionary crisis. He broke down the barriers of mind, pulled it out of the blind alley into which it had driven itself and rendered it plastic enough to receive and assimilate a Higher Light. This Higher Light was the light of the Overmind, the possibility of which in the spiritual development of man, says Sri Aurobindo, 'was opened by Sri Krishna'. The Overmind is a higher than mental consciousness, a cosmic and unitary consciousness which supports the evolutionary process and prepares the earth for the manifestation in it of the yet higher Supramental Truth-Consciousness.
The work of Sri Krishna forms a living chapter in India's history. He revealed to Arjuna, the chosen representative of the Aryan race, the wider meaning of the Dharma : the Dharma of the race is greater than the dharma of the kula or family. Indeed Dharma figures as the very centre and soul of everything that is said and done in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the latter promulgating for the first time the spiritual background of India's national consciousness—a reaffirmation of the spiritual ideal of the nation to realise which has ever been its sole dharma.
In their vision of the Vast the seers of India discovered the unity of all existence, the oneness of all multiplicity. Many were to them the forms and aspects of the One in its becoming. That is why the mind of India has always tended towards an integral view of things. To it distinctions are only apparent. True knowledge reconciles them in. their essential identity. According to the Gita, to see God within oneself is not to see the whole truth of Him, to see Him in all and all in Him and all within Oneself is the true truth. Throughout her history India has ever tried to discover this unity in diversity and build a synthesis of the different streams of thought and spiritual discipline that have flowed from her speculative and inward endeavours.
The Gita—the greatest philosophical work of the time, and one of the greatest of all time—embodies the grand synthesis of the age of the Dharma which was the continuation of an ancient tradition whose origin may be traced to the Veda. The Vedic synthesis, says Sri Aurobindo, was that 'of the psychological being of man in its highest flights and widest rangings of divine knowledge, power, joy, life and glory with the cosmic existence of the gods, pursued behind the symbols of the material universe into those superior, planes which are hidden from the physical sense and material mentality. The crown of this synthesis was in the experience of the Vedic Rishis something divine, transcendent and blissful in whose unity the increasing soul of man and the eternal divine fullness of the cosmic godheads meet perfectly and fulfil themselves. The Upanishads take up this crowning experience of the earlier seers and make it their starting-point for a high and profound synthesis of spiritual knowledge; they draw together into a great harmony all that had been seen and experienced by the inspired and liberated knowers of the Eternal throughout a great and fruitful period of spiritual seeking. The Gita starts from the Vedantic synthesis and upon the basis of its essential ideas builds another harmony of the three great means and powers, Love, Knowledge and Works, through which the soul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal.'1
When under the shock of separative stresses the unity and compactness, the richness and grandeur of India's spiritual life threatened to break, the Gita laid down a powerful synthesis unifying and harmonising the divergent trends : the Infinite Divine was shown as simultaneously One and Many, static and dynamic, Personal and Impersonal, Immanent and Transcendent, so that one could be in the world, even in the whirl of activities, and yet remain inwardly detached, in possession of peace, light and bliss of the Divine.
Seeking the Divine through a synthesis of Love, Knowledge and Works is the best way of realising the Divine in his completeness. The Infinite has infinite ways of approach thrown open to seekers. To confine oneself to one to the exclusion of others would be to deny the Divine his infinitude
1 Sri Aurobindo : Essays on the Gita, First Series, pp. 10-11. and life its (fullness—an imperfect achievement. The Gita's approach is no intellectual eclecticism but a perfectly natural and spiritual synthesis in consonance with India's all-harmonising genius.
The Gita has been a perennial source of inspiration to all schools of thought and spiritual discipline in India throughout her historic evolution wherein its influence has indeed been a most potent factor. 'Itself the creation of a vast synthetic mind and a rich synthetic experience', this great scripture has always helped, as nothing else has done, to reinforce the spiritual tendency of the Indian mind. Its grand synthesis apart, each of the various ways of divine realisation expounded here in the language of the gods has inspired seekers to carry on their quest, and has thereby kept burning the flame of their soul's aspiration towards the Infinite. 'I accept into my Love all those who come to me, no matter by what way. Whatever the paths they choose to take, it is my path that they follow,' are the divine words of Sri Krishna in the Gita.
The synthesis, however, did not, because it could not, at that stage of India's evolution, maintain its effective hold on the racial consciousness. But it has ever remained there as a finely-formulated code of spiritual life, the shining ideal of a harmonious perfection and a divine fulfilment of man—not as the last summit but as the starting-point for a further achievement, for another ascent to a still higher summit up the scale of evolution.
While in this age India developed her puissant intellectuality which gave her the round of experiences she needed for her growth at that stage of her history, that very unilateral development weakened the synthetic cast of her mind and narrowed the largeness of her vision. The result was that the dividing tendency of the mind asserted itself, and with it, asserted the lower parts of human nature over which both the light of intuition and the illumined intelligence had lost their effective control. This led to a disintegration of the social life, and a disruption of the cultural ideal. The state of affairs was very near to a repetition of the conditions that had precipitated the Bharata War and compelled a direct intervention of the Divine. While the heterodox sects, about sixty of which existed in the time of the Buddha, were abroad, challenging the ritualistic performances to which religion had reduced itself, the society was dominated by particular classes whose claim to be its custodians alienated the majority of the people. There must now come one who could give a new turn and fresh impetus to Indian life and rescue it from the chaos.
The Buddha made his appearance at this critical juncture of India's history and delivered his message of freedom : freedom from ignorance and suffering, from social and religious restraints, repressions and aberrations and even from the coils of one's own self, into an utter transcendence above and an overflowing love and compassion below. A way out into the vastness of a Beyond, and an oceanic heart of equality and active love for all, are his greatest gifts to humanity. But greater than the greatest was the gift of his own great self—his unique personality. This, more than anything else, has enshrined itself in the consciousness of man all over the world.
The Buddha's message of freedom and the powerful impact of his love released the creative energy of India into an outflowering of cultural activity unparalleled in all history. It came as a springtide into the fields of Indian culture and the genius of the race threw up a myriad forms of beauty, delight and power which brimmed over to distant lands and peoples. India's gospel of universal love vibrated to the souls of China and Japan, Palestine and even Alexandria. The seeds of a world brotherhood were sown; in the heart of man was laid the foundation of human unity.
Of the two schools into which Buddhism broke up, one professed to stand by the original teachings of the Master; the other, accepting the Yoga and Bhakti aspects of Hinduism, provided a free scope to what was hitherto discountenanced—the worship and adoration of the Buddha. This widening of the door gave a tremendous impetus to the growth of sculptural and pictorial arts, because the Master must be represented in the best possible manner. But the cardinal principle of both the schools remained the same : the denial of life and the world, sources of suffering, and bondage. The effect was a more or less mass retirement of young nobles and princes into monasteries leaving unworthy persons in their place with the inevitable consequence of gradual enfeeblement and emasculation of the Indian people. A glimpse of the situation can be taken from Fa-Hien's personal testimony in the fifth century: 'From Northwest India across the Pan jab along the Yamuna-Ganga valley down to Tamralipti (Tamluk) in Bengal there were almost numberless monasteries full of monks belonging to either school of Buddhism...' Some of these monasteries housed about six hundred monks each, drawn mostly from the elite of the society. The country, thus weakened, fell an easy prey to the invasion of barbarian hordes who swooped down upon it time and again and broke up its political integrity, exposing the country to the risks of larger invasions in later times.
Sri Aurobindo says that one of the principal causes of India's decline was the practical disappearance of the kshatriya with his manhood and strength, moral and physical, love of honour, chivalry, self-devotion, generosity and grandeur of soul.
Yet the dhamma of the Buddha had many points in, common with the Aryan ideal of Dharma which was the basis of India's social, religious and political life. Even his philosophy, says Sri Aurobindo, had its roots in the Upanishads, and its popularisation helped in preserving to some extent the spiritual values of India, and thereby the spirituality of the race. There are scholars who believe that Buddhism was a new stir of India's soul promoting cultural movements that had their rise and growth in the period characterised by some scholars as a continuation of the previous age of the Dharma. When Asoka, the great Mauryan emperor and the first antinationalist in history, sent missionaries to various parts of his empire and to countries beyond for the inner regeneration of man, he was inspired by the spiritual ideal of his race. Was it not the same ideal again that moved him to declare : 'Conquest by Dharma is higher than conquest by the sword', 'Concord alone is meritorious', 'All men are my children' ? No wonder he made it his life's mission to share the spiritual treasures of his country with others far and near.
The Maurya empire is a notable example of how the ancient Indian imperial idea, derived from the Dharma ideal of man's collective living, was given a glorious form. In ancient India, says Sri Aurobindo, 'two opposing forces were at work, one centrepetal which was continually causing attempts at universal empires the other centrefugal which was continually impelling the empires once formed to break up again into their constituent parts'. Both these equally trong forces tended to reconcile themselves throught their recognition of the central authority of the cakravarī rājā, 'universal monarch', of cakravartī kṣetra, 'dominion of the universal monarch', whose empire would comprise, among others, smaller or larger autonomous administrative units the basis of which was the Vedic sabha that has ever continued as the village self-government or 'republic'—the origin of the panchayat of today—which is the democratic foundation of India's political institutions. In ancient times these independent smaller units were a most active and dynamic factor in the cultural progress of the country.
But these smaller states, rich cultural units in themselves, were a menace to the unity and integrity of the country as a whole. The Bharata War was an instance in point. The Greek invasion was another. Chandragupta Maurya built up his empire after expelling the Greek garrisons left behind by Alexander. And in order to consolidate it against any further foreign agression as well as against any internal disunity among the princes he aimed at centralising the imperial administration in keeping with the principles of Kautilya's Arthaśāstra, a work on ancient Indian polity, which stresses the pragmatic application of the Dharma ideal to political administration.
Splendid Classical Resurgence
The age that followed was an age of marvellous creations, creations that are among India's imperishable contributions to human civilisation. It witnessed an abundance of creative and aesthetic enthusiasm of the race pouring itself into things mental, material, and even sensuous, all constituting the pride, beauty and power of life. This age is generally called the Classical age covering about one thousand years from the first century A. C. 'It is the great period of logical philosophy, of science, of art and the developed crafts, law, politics, trade, colonisation, the great kingdoms and empires with, their ordered and elaborate administrations, the minute rule of the Shastras in all departments of thought and life, an enjoyment of all that is brilliant, sensuous, agreeable, a discussion of all that could be thought and known, a fixing and systemising of all that could be brought into the compass of intelligence and practice,—the most splendid, sumptuous and imposing millennium of Indian culture.'1
Never in her history has India seen such a many-sided blossoming of her force of life. Culturally, she has never been so rich, so colourfully creative. No other age has given her such a plenitude of experiences, because, apart from other things, she lived her life literally to the full.
The curve of India's adventure reached further down to the very material basis of life where her mind sought to infuse the light of the spirit into the materialised vitality of man and to probe the truth of matter.
The works of art produced in this period bear the impress of a wonderful fusion of the two main trends of the Indian mind : its love of life tempered by a knowledge and mastery of its complexities, and its quest of God, the Spirit, the Self of things with life as the field and means of its manifestation. Indeed the light of heaven shines in these works of art even as they reflect the life-energy that gave them form and beauty. A typical example is the figure of Dhyani Buddha, one of the artistic excellences of the period : a serene triumph over life and death and time, a beatific communion of the individual with the Universal Soul in a vast, radiant, victorious calm but vibrant with the mighty rhythms of the Eternal. Another example is the tribhaṅga or triple-bend pose, particularly of women in Ajanta and Bagh, depicting a wonderful harmony between such contradictory feelings as nonchalance and voluptuousness, both losing themselves in a sublime spirit of self-surrender that has about it a penumbra of something above the earth and the earthy. Art in this age was a kind of Yoga, a spiritual discipline, and many of the artists were monks whose accurate knowledge of mundane life was indeed remarkable.
Poetry reached its acme of perfection in the immortal works of Kalidasa; science, literature and philosophy attained their classic importance through the master-minds of the time, a representative collection forming the navaratna or Nine Gems in the Court of Vikramaditya, Kalidasa being one of them. The classical sublimity of their productions reveals the glories of life inspired by the ancient ideal of Dharma that permeated the whole range of the racial life and burst forth through various expressions.
The Classical age represents the Purano-Tantrik stage of Indian religion which 'was once decried by European critics and Indian reformers as a base and ignorant degradation of an earlier and purer religion. It was rather an effort, successful in a great measure, to open the general mind
1 Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 333-34. of the people to a higher and deeper range of inner truth and experience and feeling !'1 There were aberrations which were difficult to avoid and perhaps inevitable in the daring efforts of the Tantriks to realise their original and exacting ideal. Happily, the aberrations, however inexcusable, were more or less counterbalanced by their achievements.
The central spiritual truth of all religious schools in India is the truth of the One in many aspects. 'Thus the Trinity—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva— which had its origin in the Vedic Trinity—Brahmanaspati, Vishnu, Rudra—and which itself is the origin of the multiplicity of gods,' 'is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead and Brahman; the (Tantrik) Shaktis are energies of the one Energy of the highest divine Being. But this greatest religious truth was no longer reserved for the initiated few; it was now more and more brought powerfully, widely and intensely home to the general mind and feeling of the people'... .Above all, 'the idea of the Divinity in man was popularised to an extraordinary extent, not only the occasional manifestation of the Divine in humanity which founded the worship of the Avatars, but his Presence discoverable in the heart of every creature. The systems of Yoga developed themselves on the same common basis. All led or hoped to lead through many kinds of psychophysical, inner vital, inner mental and psycho-spiritual methods to the common aim of all Indian spirituality, a greater consciousness and more or less complete union with the One and Divine or else an emergence of the individual soul in the Absolute. The Purano-Tantrik system was a wide, assured and many-sided endeavour, unparalleled in its power, insight, amplitude, to provide the race with a basis of generalised psycho-religious experience from which man could rise through knowledge, works or love or through any other fundamental power of his nature to some established supreme experience and highest absolute status.'2
'The Indian mind has always realised that the Supreme is the Infinite; it has perceived, right from its Vedic beginnings, that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an endless variety of aspects.. Even when it (the Indian mind) sees the One without a second, it still admits his duality of Spirit and Nature; it leaves room for his many trinities and million aspects. Even when it concentrates on a single limiting aspect of the Divinity and seems to see nothing but that, it still keeps instinctively at the back of its consciousness the sense of the All and the idea of the One., Even when it distributes its worship among many objects, it looks at the same time through the objects of its worship and sees beyond the multitude of godheads the unity of the Supreme. This synthetic turn is not peculiar to the mystics or to a small 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, tradi-
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, p.172. 2 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 173-74. tions 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.'1
That the Divine in his infinitude can be approached in any and every way, in whatever manner one's nature is prompted to choose, is, as the Gita authoritatively lays down, the cardinal principle of India's spirituality, of her Sanatana Dharma, the Eternal Religion. Who can deny that in the One World that this divided world of today is destined to become, this eternal and all-embracing principle will not be universally accepted ? The recognition and realisation of the truth of the One and the Many is the secret keystone of the vast structure of Indian life—a creative perception of Unity in Diversity, leading to a harmonious organisation of multitudinous life, as distinguished from the intolerance and repression of limited faiths.
All the Puranic tradition, say* Sri Aurobindo, draws the richness of its contents from the Tantra. The Bhagavata recognises the necessity of Tantrik initiation for all the five principal classes of worshippers. The root mantras are all Tantrik. And in the system of Tantrik discipline is seen a wonderful coordination of works, Yoga, knowledge and devotion. This Tantrik synthesis is another notable creation of the synthetic Indian mind. 'Though less subtle and spiritually profound, (it) is even more bold and forceful than the synthesis of the Gita,—for it seizes even upon the obstacles to the spiritual life and compels them to become the means for a richer spiritual conquest and enables us to embrace the whole of Life in our divine scope as the Lila of the Divine; and in some directions it is more immediately rich and fruitful, for it brings forward into the foreground along with divine knowledge, divine works and an enriched devotion of divine Love, the secrets also of the Hatha and Raja Yogas, the use of the body and of mental askesis for the opening up of the divine life on all its planes, to which the Gita gives only a passing and perfunctory attention. Moreover it grasps at that idea of the divine perfectibility of man, possessed by the Vedic Rishis but thrown into the background by the intermediate ages, which is destined to fill so large a place in any future synthesis of human thought, experience and aspiration.'2
Tantrik cults were widely prevalent in various parts of India in the latter centuries of the Classical age, although they had been there from much earlier times. It is said that Tantrik discipline and forms of worship had their origin in the Upanishads, if not in the Veda.. In fact, the Vedantic and the Tantrik Yogas are the two principal lines on which Indian spirituality has developed into a dynamic force in her historic evolution. And this was because man grows towards his perfection as much through
1 Ibid., pp. 146-48, 152. 2 Sri Aurobindo : Essays on the Gita, First Series, pp. 11-12.
the practice of the Vedantic Yoga of the Divine Self as that of the Tantrik Yoga of the*Divine Sakti. When the seeker realises the truth of their oneness, he opens to the truth of his ultimate integral perfection.
The outburst of India's creative genius in the latter half of this age is attributed by some scholars to the wide popularity of Tantrik cults. It is the collective concentrated invocation to the Divine Sakti that generated in the race a force and a will impelling its soul to break into myriad forms of art and beauty. This has been called 'The Tantrik Renaissance' and its influence spread beyond the borders of India. If, as it is alleged, Buddhism prompted this movement, it was its Mahayana form, which had already incorporated a number of Tantrik goddesses into its pantheon. Any way, there is no gainsaying the fact that Tantrikism was a vital factor in the cultural activities of the period.
The Tantrik cults also played a most important part in the movement of religious intermingling that had begun in India with the rise of Mahayana Buddhism. This school of Buddhism along with Vaishnavism and Tantrikism sustained the inherent spirituality of the race during the Classical age.
This age started with the Brahmanical revival under the Sungas during whose reign art and literature began to take their first classical turn'—a movement in which Brahmanism was a motivating force. Kanishka, the greatest of the Kushan kings in the first century A. C., is an outstanding figure in this age. An ardent champion of Mahayana Buddhism, he was also a great patron of art and literature and took a leading part in the literary, philosophical and scientific activities of his reign. In the process of assimilation and absorption starting with the Greeks, the Kushans, originally a Central Asian tribe, became naturalised Indians.
The Gupta emperors in the fourth and fifth centuries A.C. were however the greatest ruling dynasty of the Classical age. They were the followers of Vishnu, and under their patronage the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata and many of the Puranas were collated and given their final form. The teachings of the two epics and the Puranas were certainly behind the splendid cultural and political achievements of the Gupta period—more truly, of the Gupta emperors. In the Mahabharata, in the Bhagavata and several other Puranas Sri Krishna figures as the incarnation of Vishnu, as does Sri Rama in the Ramayana. And these sacred works were the source, support and inspiration of the Vaishnavic movements all through India's history. The Chandi, the quintessence of Tantrik thought, written in Bengal about the fourth century A.C., was the principal scripture of the Tantriks. Mahayana Buddhism adopted many Tantrik deities, while many Buddhist gods and goddesses' found their place in the Tantrik pantheon. In fact, the two cults remained indistinguishable for a long time and ceased to have separate apellations, the Buddha being regarded as an incarnation of Vishnu. Yet in the Classical age the spiritual mind of India was unable continuously to remain fully and fruitfully active, because in trying to maintain its touch with the material basis of life, it became tainted by material grossness and this taint adhered to it even after it had obtained the necessary experience of the spiritual life. 'The divine childhood, (in the Vedic age,) the heroic youth, the bright and strong early manhood of the people and its culture (during the early and late stages of the age of the Dharma,) are over, and there is instead a long and opulent maturity and as its sequence an equally opulent and richly coloured decline. (But) the decline is not to death... .'1 It was to give the race a fresh start with all the experience of the past.
Materialism, experienced by India in this period, was by itself certainly not her aim. It could only be a means of the soul's self-expression in material life; and when her people found themselves floundering in it, a categoric and emphatic reaffirmation of the polar reality, the Spirit, a clarion call to the Eternal and Absolute behind the shadowy flux of temporal relativities, became an imperative need of the hour. And to meet the need came Sri Sankaracharya, that mighty exponent of the ancient monistic cult, the Brahmavada of the Upanishads. With all the depth and intensity of his soul he proclaimed it as the greatest truth of the Vedanta. But it was not the whole truth. Nevertheless, Sankara helped the groping and bewildered mind of India to revert to its ancient experience of Advaita, the One Reality without a second.
Shankara's philosophy does not suggest any synthesis of the three great paths of God-realisation, the synthesis that was evolving in the historic development of spirituality in India. Yet it must be acknowledged that his actual work did help in the practice of these three paths, however separatively. His triumphal march over the length and breadth of the country expounding and vindicating his doctrines is undoubtedly an inspiration to all spiritual workers. His commentaries on the ancient scriptures—sparkling gems of his brilliant intellect—do always illumine the path of knowledge. And his hymns—spontaneous outpourings of the devotional fervour of his soul—never fail to inspire the heart of devotion all over India. They are among the most melting and exalting lyrics in the Sanskrit language. One wonders whether the stem apologist of Vedanta, the acute dialectician, was, indeed, the author of such 'mellifluous canticles'. Some of his more rapturous hymns are invocations to the Divine Mother* which along with his hundred verses on Her as the supreme source of Divine Bliss and Beauty point to the Tantrik inclinations of Shankara's soul. In these verses he seeks to reconcile the path of Knowledge with Sakta theism. Was it that Shankara's was a Vedantic mind and a Tantrik soul ? And that, to this he owed his will and power which won him the brilliant victories in the Vedantic field ? One may trace in it a
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, p.332. semblance of the synthetic cast of the Indian mind.
The Classical age, thus equipped with high moral, intellectual and material values, might have been followed by a new age in which all these riches could have been harmonised and made to serve a higher unified life in the Spirit. But this did not happen, perhaps it could not, owing to lack of proper leadership.
There was however no absence of cultural endeavour whether in this period or in the next. In fact, such endeavours have never known any full stop. Works of art, literature and architecture produced in this period are worthy of India's creative genius. The magnificent temples, both of the North and the South as also the literary works are its glorious examples. And there were behind them religious movements inspired by Vaishnavism and Tantrikism in the North and by the lives and teachings of Sankara, Ramanuja, the Alwar and Saiva saints in the South. Many of the Pandya, Pallava and Chola kings were devout followers of Saivism and Vaishnavism, and history testifies that the all-round progress of their kingdoms was largely due to their religious zeal. The wide popularity in the North of the two master-thinkers of the South is no less remarkable. The enthusiasm of the Vijayanagara kings to revive ancient Indian ideals was certainly at the back of their wonderful literary and artistic achievements. The Vijayanagara style of architecture is one of the finest in all India, while their empire is characterised as 'a synthesis of South Indian culture'. Another notable fact about the South is that it has to this day preserved many traditions and values of ancient Indian culture.
Medieval Endeavour
Conditions in the social and political life of the country had already begun to worsen. After the disintegration of Harsha's empire, Indian princes obsessed mostly with their extreme individualism, could not realise the pressing need of unity and solidarity for maintaining the independence and integrity of the country which had already been subjected to incursions by barbarian hordes. Their disunity together with disruptive factors in India's social and religious life, the former cramped by rigid rules, the latter choked by the dead-weight of formalisms, paved the way for another invasion and gave a rude shock to the country. The effect of the shock, however, began to subside before long, and a cultural rapprochement between the two communities—Hindu and Muslim— tended to become a possibility.
The view that from selfish motives the brahmanas had hedged in the society with rigorous laws is not wholly correct. The reason was, as Sri Aurobindo says, rather their love of the traditional structure of things and their anxiety to preserve the ancient institutions from barbarian onslaughts that had already begun. It must be admitted that by protecting the shell they helped in protecting the substance of ancient ideals. The smṛtikāras (law-makers of ancient India) took to the tortoise way, to use their own words, kamaṭhavrata. Even though this is judged reactionary from certain points of view, this step has certainly been a factor in maintaining Indian society in the midst of untoward conditions then prevailing.
By the way, Harsha's eclecticism in his devotion to Hindu, Buddhist and Jain gods at one and the same time was an evidence of his synthetic mind and to this may be attributed his wide philanthropy and his liberal State policy ensuring equal treatment of all without distinction.
The problems raised by foreign invasions had to be met. And this could be done only by a new upsurge of India's soul. Hence the rise of the medieval mystics who restated the ancient truths in more popular terms, emphasising the oneness of Truth, of God, who resides within the heart and to whom all are equal. They sang the Vedantic unity of existence and the Vaishnavic universality of love. It was another expression, though partial, of the synthetic Indian mind, this time by saints who came from the lower ranks of the society. They came, perhaps, to expose the hollowness of human distinction:; which divided, weakened and crippled Hindu society, contradicted its own conception of the True, the Right, the Vast, and stood in the way of its expansion which alone could reunite the communities into a single whole.
Ramananda, who came from the South and belonged to the Ramanuja sect of Vaishnavism, is generally believed to have been the founder of the Bhakti movement in medieval India. In his teachings can be seen an attempt to synthesise the two basic values of India's spiritual heritage —the philosophy of Yoga and Knowledge and the bhakti cult. Here is a popular verse : 'Bhakti arose first in the Dravida land; Ramananda brought it to the North; and Kabir spread it to the seven continents and nine divisions of the world.' Ramananda declared : 'There is only one God who is the origin of all'. He recognised no distinction of caste and creed, and saw humanity as one family and all men as brothers.
Kabir was the greatest of his first twelve disciples all of whom were of low birth. Kabir spoke in simple words, but they were words of great power : 'Be truthful, be natural. Truth alone is natural. Seek this truth within your own heart, for there is no truth in the external religious observances. The difference among all faiths lies only in the difference in names; everywhere there is a yearning for the same God. Why do Hindus and Muslims quarrel for nothing ?... Be pure. The whole creation is within your own self, behold the Lord of creation there. There is no distinction between outer and inner, for all distinctions have been harmonised in Him who is above and beyond all distinctions. In this harmony are truth and realisation.' This is the call of India's soul to her children to rise to the height of her true truth—the Vedantic truth of freedom and fundamental ..unity of all existence, whose reaffirmation India needed at that hour of crisis.
The most famous among those who followed Kabir's teachings was Dadu. The dream of his life was to unite all the divergent faiths in one bond of love and comradeship. To give effect to this ideal he founded a community called Parabrahma-Sampradaya which reflected his Vedantic leanings. Dadu had religious discussions with Akbar for forty days. His famous disciple Rajjabji says : 'It is dark all around, the only light is within our own hearts'. Like Kabir and the other saints who followed him, Dadu had both Hindus and Muslims as his disciples.
There is no doubt that the lives and teachings of these inspired God-men of medieval India were a great cohesive force in the growth of common cultural fellowship, of which an eminently notable example is the great emperor-dreamer Akbar who envisioned not only an all-India empire based on peace, freedom and equality but a universal faith based on the essential truths of all philosophies and religions which had nourished his mental make-up. There are scholars who believe that in both these conceptions Akbar was influenced more by ancient Indian ideals than by any other.
Another example is the Mughul prince Dara Shukho, a scholar, mystic and thinker, whose greatness does not seem to have been as yet properly assessed. Deeply versed in Sanskrit sacred literature Dara translated some of it including the twelve major Upanishads into Persian in the preface of which he invokes the god Ganesa in the Hindu traditional way. In his book Majma-ul Bahrin or 'Mingling of the Two Oceans', Dara made the first attempt 'to reconcile the teachings of Brahma Vidya and the tenets of al-Kuran'. He said, 'Islam and Hinduism are like twin brothers, two columns at the entrance to the path leading to the Unique One.' Dara is considered by a writer the embodiment of the synthetic thought that occupied the best minds of the India of his time.
From the thirteenth century onwards there began to rise in Maharashtra a number of saints whose connection with the Bhakti movement of the North is attributed by some scholars to the fact that Ramananda was the preceptor of the father of Jnanadeva who was the first of these Maharashtra saints, followed by Namadeva, Ekanatha, Tukaram and Ramadasa. Remarkable for depth and catholicity, their teachings declared that every one can realise God in this life. In their philosophy of mysticism are harmonised devotion and knowledge. Love of God, they say, is the easiest road to realisation; though in their own spiritual experiences they realised their identity with God in the supreme light beyond the universe : in these experiences, 'one sees a shower of stars, the light of the crescent and the full moon; there is an end to darkness, there is the dazzling light of the dawn that fills the earth and knows no setting.' Tukaram exultingly declares that he has seen the face of God shining like billions of suns and beautiful like a bright diamond set in the midst of a number of jewels, —an almost Vedic vision. Tukaram says that he has in his hands the keys of the rich treasury of spiritual experience and offers them to any seeker.
Two of these illumined souls, Tukaram and Ramadasa, regarded an ideal saint as a practical man too. They upheld the ideal of Maharashtra Dharma and gave form to their philosophy of action through Sivaji. Himself a divinely-inspired soul, this mighty Maratha was indeed greater than the wonders he worked. But Sivaji was also a worshipper of Bhawani, the goddess of Sakti, by whose strength coupled with the wisdom of his preceptors he won unique glories not only for Maharashtra but for the whole of India. When on one occasion Sivaji made a gift of his kingdom to his preceptor and expressed a desire to spend the remainder of his life in meditation as an ascetic, the latter returned the gift to his disciple and asked him to hold it thenceforth as a special trust from God. Handing over his ochre-coloured scarf to Sivaji, Ramadasa said : 'Let this be the symbol that you are the vice-regent of the King of kings.' Here is a moving example of both preceptor and disciple reaffirming India's timeless spiritual ideal: To live for God and only for God is the highest aim of life.
Sivaji's place in history has yet to be properly assessed. He was indeed greater in a way than any of the great conquerors of history from Alexander to Napoleon These latter had, every one of them, at least some ready material to build on, but Sivaji had none. He reared a powerful army of heroes out of common clay; he created a people, a nation, once observed Sri Aurobindo. This was possible because there was in him a power of God at work.
Nanak is another saint and mystic of medieval India who endeavoured to purge Hinduism and Islam of all superstitions and wrong practices. There is one God in the world, he says, but He is within all as well; this world is the True One's abode, and the body is His temple; the highest object of life is to love God selflessly; death is the privilege of the brave, if they die fighting God's battle. In such truths was born Sikhism preserved and developed by the Gurus the tenth of whom was that great soul, Guru Govind Singh, who infused into his followers a new and undying spirit and gave them 'the fire-baptism' of the sword to fight the holy cause of their country's freedom. 'His pure and invincible Khalsa was an astonishingly original and novel creation' and Sikhism is a 'profound spiritual beginning, its first attempt to combine the deepest elements of Islam and Vedanta'.1 'Let the Hindu Dharma be awake and all mists vanish', said the great Guru.
The cultural history of Bengal is the mirror of her synthetic mind. In its creation an important factor was her early Upanishadic and Tantrik initiation sustained and nourished by the natural warmth of her heart
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 430. which later burst into a Vaishnavic fervour of the soul's love for God. It is said that the early kshatriya mystics of Bengal had evolved a new form of esoteric culture referred to in the Chhandogya Upanishad. Besides, the Sakti cult had been prevalent in Bengal from very early times. To this may be traced the Tantrik disciplines developed and systematised in Bengal over her long past.
Mahayana Buddhism—at least the form it took in Bengal—was a natural blending of the Vedantic and Tantrik Yogas with the cult of devotion. It was the principal religion of Bengal for centuries, and it flourished there under the patronage of the Pala kings who were all of them Mahayanists and the first of whom became a king by the consent and will of the people. It may be noted that some of the greatest of the Pala kings performed Vedic sacrifices and offered liberal gifts to the brahmanas who conducted these sacrifices. They extended their benefactions to Jains also. The Palas, more than any other dynasty, ruled over most of northern India for about four hundred years at a stretch from the ninth century A.C.. Their democratic beginning and, under their patronage, the marvellous expressions of the country's creative soul have greatly helped forward the cultural evolution of India. It is difficult to deny that this was largely due to the new spiritual impulse the soul of Bengal had received from the liberal teachings of Mahayana Buddhism.
The Senas who followed the Palas tried to revive the old Brahmanical traditions. They formulated new caste alignments and enforced those invidious laws that hampered social progress, and therefore, the progress of the race. While these rigid institutions helped, as they had done before, in safeguarding the ancient ideals, they could not equally safeguard the political integrity of the country which soon lost its freedom to the Muslims.
But Bengal did not take long to adjust herself to this new situation. The Tantrik and Buddhist cults had made notable contributions to a development which was quickened by the advent of Sri Chaitanya who in his ecstatic sense of oneness of all and everything made no distinction of race and religion, and freely drew the Muslims within the loving arms of Vaishnavism. And his influence was not confined to Bengal alone. His triumphal march—properly speaking, his trek—from Bengal to Gujarat in the North, and in the South as far as Rameshwaram has been an inspiring chapter in the spiritual history of India. It may be noted that the life and teachings of this God-intoxicated mystic left a deep, wide and exalting influence on the social, cultural, spiritual and even political life of Bengal. In a very practical sense, it was pre-eminently a revolutionary influence. Indeed Sri Chaitanya had ever been an abiding force in the formation of the Bengali nature as it is today—soft and ardent, emotional and impulsive.
Out of the Neo-Vaishnavism of Sri Chaitanya a number of separate cults evolved in Bengal, along with a second group which arose from the esoteric schools of Tantrikism and Buddhism. All these formed the basis of a spiritual synthesis developed in Bengal, to which Sahajiya, a most influential cult, made an important contribution. Its followers, both men and women, were required to go through a course of extremely strict mystic discipline which is held by some to be almost without a parallel in the spiritual history of mankind. All these sects had in their folds Hindus, Muslims and later, even Christians. The existence of religious denominations has never proved a bar to the growth of spiritual fellowship in Bengal which, almost from the beginning of her history, has been inspired more by the natural impulse of her soul than by any other need, least of all by any institutional religion.
Eighteenth-century Bengal gave evidence of a definite deterioration in the practices of these cults. In fact, it had started earlier. There were corruptions in every walk of life, social, cultural and political. Bengal seemed to be slowly sinking into a morass of decay and degeneration. Not only in Bengal, this tendency prevailed more or less in the whole of India, and its evils crept into the entire life of the Indian people, the forms and institutions of which were either dead or dying.
Yet in those days of gloom Ramprasad sang 'the Glory of the Mother' out of the fullness of his impassioned soul. And his songs, by their sheer sweetness and intensity, thrilled and enthralled the heart and mind of all Bengal. Even today they enjoy a wide and unchallenged popularity. Ramram Basu, a Hindu, composed the earliest Bengali hymns for the Christian Church without in the least losing faith in his own religion. And there were evidences that Bengal had then her illumined souls and earnest seekers pursuing their spiritual life in the silence of seclusion, wandering bauls and Vaishnava singers enlivening the mass mind by the sweetness and fervour of their devotional songs, kathakas or declaimers giving popular expositions of the epics and the Puranas, besides the daily performance of various folk forms of worship. In one form or other these have always existed in other parts of India too. In the North there were the mystics, spiritual descendants of the medieval Masters. The broad-based soul of India, true to its inborn Godward tendency, has thus maintained its cultural ethos and thereby 'the mutlti-mooded and allembracing spirituality of the race' which was born in the Vedic Dawns and has since been growing for a larger fulfilment in the future.
It is for this glorious consummation of her age-long endeavour that 'India still lives and keeps the continuity of her inner mind and soul and spirit with the India of the ages. Invasion and foreign rule, the Greek, the Parthian and the Hun, the robust vigour of Islam, the levelling steam-roller heaviness of the British occupation and the British system, the enormous pressure of the accident have not been able to drive or crush the ancient soul out of the body her Vedic Rishis made for her.
At every step, under every calamity and attack and domination, she has been able to resist and survive either with an active or a passive resistance. And this she was able to do in her great days by her spiritual solidarity and power of assimilation and reaction, expelling all that would not be absorbed, absorbing all that could not be expelled, and even after the beginning of the decline she was still able to survive by the same force, abated but not slayable, retreating and maintaining for a time her ancient political system in the South, throwing up under the pressure of Islam, Raj put and Sikh and Mahratta to defend her ancient self and its idea, persisting passively where she could not resist actively, condemning to decay each empire that could not answer her riddle or make terms with her, awaiting always the day of her revival . And even now it is a similar phenomenon that we see in process before our eyes. And what shall we say then of the surpassing vitality of the civilisation that could accomplish this miracle and of the wisdom of those who built its foundation not on things external but on the spirit and the inner mind and made a spiritual and cultural oneness the root and stock of her existence and not solely its fragile flower, the eternal basis and not the perishable superstructure ?' 1
True, there came over India a long spell of decline and darkness during the medieval times. But this decline, as Sri Aurobindo sees it, may be regarded as a 'needed waning and dying of old forms to make way not only for a new, but, if we will that it should be so, a greater and more perfect creation . .. . Our failure is a preparation for success. Our nights carry in them the secret of a greater dawn.' And when darkness is thickest dawn is ready.
Therefore must India rise. She has still ' ... something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an Anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.'2
1 Sri Aurobindo : The Foundations of India Culture, pp. 415-16.2 Ibid., p. 430.
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