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the Critic of Poetry* Umashankar Joshi
SRI Aurobindo's principal mission was to practise yoga and through yoga embody the truth of life. The main bulk of his writing is on yoga, on philosophical and metaphysical subjects. He has also been a creative writer since his early youth, his most outstanding work being Savitri — A Legend and A Symbol, an epic effort. A poet's critical theory, his critical credo, even when it is not formulated in prose, is always there in an implied form in his poetic creations. For example, the sweep as well as the depth of the worlds in which Aswa-pati moves, the etching of the figure of Savitri at the end of the third Book, the oft-occurring observations about man's inner life couched in a resonant phraseology — all these unfailingly point to a special approach to poetry on the writer's part. Certainly he is least interested in a mundane narration. He likes to talk of personalities that stand for more than what they appear to be, that serve as symbols. Far from just turning out quotable maxims, Sri Aurobindo lavishly indulges in delineating the contours of a vast uncharted innerness in sparkling lines surging forth like wave after wave. In short, for Sri Aurobindo the poet, the word is suffused with spirituality. When the poet describes man as 'a colonist from immortality' or mind as 'a backward scholar on logic's rickety bench', vouchsafes that 'truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,' lends his ear to the 'muttering in the brooding core of matter's sleep' and suggests that 'our passion
Page-155 heaves to wed the eternal calm', we get an inkling of the range of his vision, of the depth of his sympathy, of his ease of articulation with the aid of apt word and image, and, above all, of his eagerness to catch 'the light that never was on sea or land'. But we do not have to construct Sri Aurobindo's poetical ideas with the help of his poetic writings. Fortunately, he has himself dealt with them in much detail in The Future Poetry. Sri Aurobindo says that in the days to come there will be an endeavour to realize "the mantra in poetry", which he describes as "that rhythmic speech which, as the Veda puts it, rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of the truth — sadanad rtasya". It will be the result of a larger cosmic vision, of a psycho-spiritual outlook — or, as he suggests, "should we rather say, in look?" — "a seeing by a closer identity in the self of man, with the self of things and life and Nature and of all that meets him in the universe". He urges upon the poet that he "has to find the language of these identities". According to Sri Aurobindo, what the new age "will aim at is neither materialism nor an intuitive vitalism, nor a remote detached spirituality, but a harmonious and luminous totality of man's being". He adds, "a larger field of being made real to man's experience will be the realm of the future Poetry". Sri Aurobindo's comprehensive vision of the future society includes the creative interaction between the essential characteristics of the East as well as of the West and finds in it the propitious moment for the birth of the mantra. "It is in any case the shock upon each other of the oriental and occidental mentalities, on the one side the large spiritual mind and inward eye turned upon self and eternal realities, on the other the free inquiry of thought and the courage of the life energy assailing the earth and its problems that is creating the future and must be the parent of the poetry of the future." Sri Aurobindo, while hailing the advent of the new poetry as it articulates in the work of Whitman, Carpenter, some of the French Symbolist poets, Yeats, A. E. and Tagore, does voice an apprehension that its course may not run smooth. "But," he says, "the privilege of the poet is to go beyond and discover that more intense illumination of speech, that inspired word and supreme inevitable utterance, in which there meets the unity of a divine rhythmic movement with a depth of sense and a power of infinite suggestion welling up directly from the fountain-heads of the spirit within us. He may not always or often find it, but to seek for it is the law of his utterance, and when he can not only find it, but cast into it some deeply revealed truth of the spirit itself, he utters the mantra." Page-156 He points out that the mantra becomes possible only at a certain highest level of the fused intensities (1) of rhythmic movement, (2) of verbal form and thought-substance, of style and (3) of the soul's vision of truth. It is the pasyanti vdk, the seeing word, the language of intuitive illumination, a great ecstasy culminating in the inevitable, absolute and revealing word. "The inspiration seems to leap even beyond itself and beyond any pursuit or touch of the intellect into a pure revelatory spiritual vision." In a letter to a Sadhak Sri Aurobindo explains that the mantra "is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or some very high place of Inspiration", and adds, "you must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level." Sri Aurobindo's primary concern being with Sadhana, the spiritual transformation of the nature, the widening of the consciousness into the cosmic consciousness, he says in unambiguous terms in another letter, "It is obvious that poetry cannot be a substitute for Sadhana." Sri Aurobindo puts poetry in its place, and in poetry prizes that part which has its source in the Overmind or the Supermind. But he knows that it is difficult to get continuous inspiration from the Overmind and "it is only in short passages and lines that even a touch of it is attainable". He shows how one gets nearer the Overmind rhythm and inspiration in the lines of Wordsworth:
Or '... a mind ... Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.'
Or in a line like Milton's 'Those thoughts that wander through eternity.' As a Yogi, Sri Aurobindo places poetry, but that does not come in his way of enjoying and dwelling on the beauty and significance of poetry, and that too not only of that particular variety which has its inspiration from the highest plane. His Yoga refers to the five planes anna, prana, mana, vijiiana and ananda, the physical, vital, mental, supramental and that of Bliss respectively. Page-157 While assessing poetry, Sri Aurobindo, far from being obsessed by his idea of mantra in poetry, leans mainly on the validity of articulation: "The poetic value or perfection of a line, passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes; it depends on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature." When Sri Aurobindo ranks no poet higher than Homer and Shakespeare, he is thinking of their essential force and beauty and not of the scope of their work as a whole. He says that as far as the scope and range are concerned the Mahabharata is a far greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey and both the Indian epics have a vaster canvas than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare. "But as poets — as masters of rhythm and language and the expression of poetic beauty — Vyasa and Valmiki though not inferior, are not greater than either the English or the Greek poet." It is to be remembered that Sri Aurobindo speaks from intimate knowledge of English, Greek and Sanskrit.
And there you are! To speak less flippantly, the first three have at once supreme imaginative originality, supreme poetic gift, widest scope and supreme creative genius. Each is a sort of poetic demiurge who has created a world of his own. Dante's triple world beyond is more constructed by the poetic seeing mind than by this kind of elemental demiurgic power — otherwise he would rank by their side; the same with Kalidasa. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but on a much smaller scale. Virgil and Milton have a less spontaneous breath of creative genius; one or two typal figures excepted, they live rather by what they have said than by what they have made." He is prepared to concede Vyasa a place beside Valmiki, and Sophocles beside Aeschylus. He dismisses, for example, Hugo as "too oratorical to be quite sincere". If Shelley had lived, if Keats had finished Hyperion ("without spoiling it") and if Wordsworth "had not petered out like a motor car with insufficient petrol", they would have had a claim among the supreme singers. Sri Aurobindo's comparison of Shakespeare and Goethe emphasises his predilection in favour of supreme inevitability of articulation. Goethe's "style and movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one Page-158 might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice ... it (his poetry) was only a part of his genius and not the whole. There is too a touch mostly wanting — the touch of an absolute, an intensely inspired or revealing inevitability; few quite supreme poets have that in abundance, in others it comes by occasional jets or flashes". Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo shows that the impeccable lawlessness of word and rhythm, an unfailing perfection, in Racine, would not make him a greater poet than Shakespeare, who sinks to flatnesses which Racine would have abhorred, just because the French dramatist has not in him "the poetic superman." So also The ocritus, who is always perfect, cannot be ranked with Aeschylus and Sophocles. With regard to Housman's comparison of Blake and Shakespeare, Sri Aurobindo hails Blake as "Europe's greatest mystic poet" but clearly points out: "Purity and greatness are not the same thing; Blake's may be pure poetry in Housman's sense, and Shakespeare's not except in a few passages .... But as a poet of the play of life Shakespeare is everywhere and Blake nowhere." In The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo surveys the whole history of English poetry and it is interesting to watch him assessing with judicious discernment the achievements of the great English poets. About Keats, he says that he "enters the secret temple of ideal Beauty, but has no time to find his way into the deepest mystic sanctuary----This dawn has no noon, hardly even a morning." He adds that "there comes in some absolute moments a native voice of the spirit, in Wordsworth's revelations of the spiritual presence in Nature and its scenes and peoples, in Byron's rare sincerities, in the luminous simplicities of Blake, in the faery melodies of Coleridge, most of all perhaps in the lyrical cry and ethereal light of Shelley. But these are comparatively rare moments." And this is how he juxtaposes Shelley and Keats: "They are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus." As for Tennyson, he concedes that there has been no more consummate master of the language, but he adds that there is extraordinarily little in the end, no great lyrical, odic or epic outbursts to sweep us out of ourselves. His conventional sentimentalism of Victorian domesticity and respectable social ethics add up to a brilliant failure. Everything seems to be given a greater than its intrinsic value by a felicitous power of speech. "The spirit is not filled, but the outer aesthetic mind is caught and for a time held captive." In contrast, Browning is a great creator but no artist, his strength too robust and rugged and direct to give forth sweetness. When he achieves lyrical elevation, we have some immortal lines. He had the Page-159 making of a great interpretative poet, he could have well become the Shakespeare of his time, but, says Sri Aurobindo, "the supreme greatness cannot come in poetry without the supreme beauty". Sri Aurobindo, as a practising critic of poetry, always searches for the genuine poetic accent and the supreme greatness. He evinces great catholicity of poetic taste. He extols chandas, the rhythmic speech, the metre, as reflecting "a balanced harmony ... the foundation of immortality in created things". But he deals with the blank verse, the 'gadya chhanda' in Bengali and free verse the modernist metre-less verse with much sympathy and understanding. He says, "All things can be tried — the test is success, true poetic excellence." He warmly praises Whitman: "His is the most Homeric voice since Homer." Again, "I have little temperamental sympathy for much of the work of Pope and Dryden," he says, "but I can see their extraordinary perfection or force in their field, the masterly conciseness, energy, point, metallic precision into which they cut their thought or their verse, and I can see too how that can with a little infusion of another quality be the basis of a really great poetic style, as Dryden himself has shown in his best work." This catholicity, accompanied by an indefatigable search for the truth of poetic achievement, characterises Sri Aurobindo's critical writings. He does not allow his criticism to be cribbed and cabinned by his own theory or practice of poetry. He once wrote to a poet, "A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste, the rest he condemns or ignores. (My own case is different, because I am not primarily a poet and have made in criticism a practice of appreciating everything that can be appreciated, as a catholic critic would.) Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right judgment from contemporary critics." He says that his reading of modern English poetry had stopped by the time he left England with that of Meredith. But we find how with great sympathy he deals with modern and contemporary poets. Time and again he emphasises the great service Mallarme, the creator of Symbolism, rendered to the French language. By writing his strange enigmatic profound style, Mallarme turned the whole structure of French upside down. Sri Aurobindo, discussing a line in Le Cygne, Mallarme's sonnet, writes to a correspondent, "you will find lots of kindred things in the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or at least would-be revelatory) images. You disapprove ? Well, one may do so, — classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to admire." What could be more refreshing than the full-throated encomium he pays to Baudelaire, who, as he says, "was never vulgar — he was too refined and perfect an artist to be that. He chose the evil of life as his Page-160 frequent subject and tried to extract poetic beauty out of it.... But this is not the only stuff of his poetry." Equally gratifying is Sri Aurobindo's evaluation of D. H. Lawrence's work: "I suppose Lawrence was a Yogi who had missed his way and come into a European body to work out his difficulties." Lawrence's appreciation of Ajanta paintings, he adds, must have been due to the same drive that made him seek for a new poetry as well as a new truth from within. The idea is to get rid of all over-expression, of language, form and emotion for their own sake, because all that veils the real thing. He therefore wants to get rid of rhyme, metre, artifices, which draw us away from the real behind the form. But in practice, he often fails to achieve the bareness, the rocky directness. Lawrence's is a case of poetic theory getting the better of a man of genius. And yet this is how Sri Aurobindo would conclude the discussion: "Lawrence's poetry, whatever one may think of his theory or technique, has too much importance and significance to be lightly handled and the modernism of contemporary poetry is a fait accompli.... It is too solid to be met with a mere condemnation in principle." I do not know how the idea of reading, for example Dickens, in order to be a literary man, should have provoked Sri Aurobindo into saying, "He was the most unliterary bloke that ever succeeded in literature and his style is a howling desert." How could he have forgotten at least Dickens's great gift of humour and his benign comic spirit! Sri Aurobindo does have an eye for humour, which he shows can be poetic and even epic like Kaikeyi's praise of Manthara's hump in the Ramayana, and discerningly contrasts the comic creators like Aristophanes and Shakespeare with Pope, whose "success if brilliant is thin because the deeper creative founts and the kindlier sources of vision are not there".
Sri Aurobindo in his Yoga wants the meddling mind to be silent so that the spirit can speak. When he talks about poetic creation, he demands the same thing. He advises a poet-Sadhaka to keep the intellect quiet so that the 'transcription' would be 'pure'. This should not lead to the belief expressed by a correspondent that one was to "sit in vacant meditation and see what comes from the intuitive Gods". Sri Aurobindo replies: "It was a joke. But all the same that is the way things are supposed to come. When the mind becomes decently quiet, an intuition perfect or imperfect is supposed to come hopping along and jump in and look round the place. Of course, it is not the only way. People tell a stupendous amount of rubbish. I wrote everything I have written since 1909 in that way, i.e. out of or through a silent mind, and not only a silent mind but a silent consciousness. But Gods and Goddesses had nothing to do with the matter."
Page-161 He knows that of course it is not the only way, and shows how Milton in his later days used to write every day fifty lines, and Virgil nine which he went on correcting till they were within half way of what he aimed at, "in other words he used to write under any conditions and pull at his inspiration till it came". Sri Aurobindo adds, "Usually the best lines, passages, etc. come like that." Sri Aurobindo has hitched his wagon to the star of mantra-utterance. However, that does not prevent his doing justice to any type of poetic creation which has some kind of excellence or other about it. It is exceedingly rewarding and refreshing to watch him grope for the special excellence which inheres in a poetic situation and assiduously articulates it without doing any harm to the truth of that situation. While doing ample justice to beauty in all types of poetic utterances, Sri Aurobindo ardently aspires for the advent of the Yuvd Kavih, priyo atithir amartyo mandrajihvah, rtacid rtava, the youth, the Seer-poet, the beloved and immortal guest with his honeyed tongue of ecstasy, the Truth-conscious, the Truth-finder, born, like "Agni, as a flame from earth and yet the heavenly messenger of the Immortals." Page-162 Sri Aurobindo the Critic of Art Mulk Raj Anand
HERE is no doubt that the theory of the expansion of consciousness, put forward by Sri Aurobindo, is one of the most significant contributions to human thought in the 20th century. Of course, there had been essays in this direction by the Sufi Attar in his book Conference of Birds. Guru Nanak had also worked out various stages of development of awareness. And, in the West, Henry Bergson had put forward the concept of 'creative evolution' at some length. Professor Lloyd Morgan in his Gifford Lectures had concretely shown, beyond St. George Mivart's Genesis of Species, the possibility of development of innate powers from non-mental to mental states, through memory, image and vision. But it is to Sri Aurobindo that we owe the boldest exposition of the development from manas or thought-sensations through cittasuddhi or purification of citta, or dead habits, to Buddhi or thought proper, and to spirituality when "the claims of the body and the interference of the emotions" cease and supra-consciousness may be achieved. I am not dealing here with that theory, which has been exposited by many discerning critics, but with its application by Sri Aurobindo to art-activity. Let me quote a significant passage from Sri Aurobindo's brochure, The National Value of Art; he writes: "The value of art in the training of intellectual faculty is also an important part of its utility. We have already indicated the double character of intellectual activity, divided between the imaginative, creative and sympathetic or comprehensive intellectual centres on the one side, and the critical, analytic and penetrative on the other. The latter are best trained by science, criticism and observation, the former by art, poetry, music, literature and the sympathetic study of man and his creations. These make the mind quick to grasp at a glance, subtle to distinguish shades, deep to reject self-sufficiency, mobile, delicate, swift, intuitive. Art assists in this training by raising images in the mind which it has to understand not by analysis, but by self-identification with other minds; it is a powerful stimulator of sympathetic insight." "But beyond and above this intellectual utility of Art, there is a higher use, the noblest of all, its service to the growth of spirituality in the race."
Page-163 "...in India, the greatest efflorescence of a national Art has been associated with the employment of the artistic genius to illustrate or adorn the thoughts and fancies of the temples and instruments of the national religion.... Spirituality is a wider thing than formal religion and it is in the service of spirituality that Art reaches its highest self-expression. Spirituality is a single word expressive of three lines of human aspiration towards divine knowledge, divine love and joy, divine strength, and that will be the highest and most perfect Art, which, while satisfying the physical requirements of the aesthetic sense, the laws of formal beauty, the emotional demand of humanity, the portrayal of life and outward reality, as the best European Art satisfies these requirements, reaches beyond them and expresses inner spiritual truth, the deeper not obvious reality of things, the joy of God in the world and its beauty and desirableness and the manifestation of divine force and energy in phenomenal creation." It (Art) is Ananda! Again: "Man becomes God, and all human activity reaches its highest and noblest when it succeeds in bringing body, heart and mind into touch with spirit. Art can express eternal truth, it is not limited to the expression of form and appearance."1 Further: "Our life is largely made up of the eight rasas. The movements of the heart in its enjoyment of action, its own and that of others, may either be directed downwards, as in the case with the animals and animal men, to the mere satisfaction of the ten sense-organs and the vital desires, which make instruments of the senses in the average sensual man, or they may work for the satisfaction of the heart itself in a predominatingly emotional enjoyment of life, or they may be directed upwards through the medium of the intellect, rational and intuitional, to attainment of delight through the seizing on the source of all delight, the Spirit, the satyam, sundaram, anandam who is beyond and around, the source and the basis of all this world-wide activity, evolution and progress."2 All these words of Sri Aurobindo are inspired by the ancient aesthetic theory of rasa-bhava-ananda, put forward by Bharata in the Natya Shastra. The unique thing which the modern sage does is to link the attain-
Page-164 ment of dnanda, not only with poetry, drama and dance, as the ancient philosopher had done, but to look at works of plastic and pictorial arts in the light of the theory which Bharata, and almost all other commentators, including Bhattanayaka, Abhinavagupta, and Dharmajaya had not done. The ancients had placed sculpture and painting as minor decorative arts within the context of architecture and had not applied the theory of rasa to them. "Art," Sri Aurobindo writes, "assists in this training (of the imaginative, creative and sympathetic or comprehensive intellectual centres) by raising images in the mind." He considered the temple to be "the centre of life", an "altar raised to the divine self". "The Indian-Sculptor," he said, "is concerned with self-identification embodying spiritual experiences and impressions, as he has seen them in psychic memory." In Indian painting also spiritual intention or psychic suggestion are the things of first importance! Conscious of the fact, that the arts have for long ages been thought to be 'by-paths of the human mind' 'for the few', he warned people to show the universal impulse to enjoy the beauty and attractiveness of sound, to look at and live among pictures, colours, forms, albeit for the attainment of 'spiritual vision'. Sri Aurobindo realised that this ideal of Indian art had more or less lapsed in modern India, because of the mediocre foreign education, as also because the ruling intelligentsia from the West had misunderstood the Indian tradition, from its bias in favour of the Greek and European Renaissance perspectives. In fact, Sri Aurobindo devoted three of his longest articles on art theory (later published in the book entitled, The Significance of Indian Art) to the defence of Indian Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, against the misinformed attacks of an English critic of his time, Mr. William Archer. This defence and the writings of E. B. Havell, Ananda Coomarswamy and Abanindranath Tagore certainly gave value to traditional Indian art in the days when alien contempt had led to the bypassing of two thousand years' tradition of great creative works of art all over India and condemned the Indian artisan to making bazar pictures and clay models of Indian types for Anglo-Indians to take 'home' as 'quaint' and 'exotic' specimens of heathen workmanship. Sri Aurobindo and the pioneer interpreters thus rendered a profound service to our country in awakening Indians and foreigners alike to the values of our plastic and pictorial arts. And yet the crisis of misunderstanding of Indian art, both in India and the West, lasted and the ancient art ideals could not be brought back into the living consciousness. Page-165 The patrons in India preferred Artists with the capital A to make portrait sculpture busts or life-size paintings, showing them to be more glorious, more handsome and more important then they were in real life. The artists accepted self-expression in the Western sense as their ideal. One of the typical British Blimps, Sir George Birdwood, wrote in his Handbook to the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, as follows: "The mythology of the Puranas... has had a fatal effect in lighting the growth of the pictorial and plastic art in India. The monstrous shapes of the Puranic deity are unsuitable for the higher forms of artistic representation; and this is possibly why sculpture and painting are unknown as fine arts in India." Further: "The decorative art of India, which is a crystallised tradition ... cannot be ranked ... with the fine arts of Europe, wherein the inventive genius of the artist, acting on his own spontaneous inspiration, asserts itself, in true creation." This must have rankled in the mind of Sri Aurobindo, who was a contemporary witness of the total misunderstanding. The frequency of such views, which were expressed every now and then, remained a source of continuous irritation. A member of the Royal Academy talked of a Buddha sculpture as "squinting down from the nose", his figure devoid of all plastic sense. There were protests against this kind of attitude in Great Britain itself, by artists like Sir William Rothenstein and others. The reaction of the finest minds of the Indian intelligentsia against the depreciation in the West tended, however, to become almost a political attitude. One of the enlightened Englishmen, Mr. E. B. Havell, who had entered the Indian Educational Service as Principal of the College of Art, Calcutta, had gone deeper into the ideals of Indian art. He felt that the imposition of the Greek and Roman models in the art schools to be copied by Indian students for drawing practice had no relevance whatever for the Indian consciousness. He wanted the students, instead, to go back to the classical art of India for inspiration: "The true aim of the artist," he wrote, "is not to extract beauty from nature, but to reveal that life within life of the noumena within phenomenon, the reality within unreality, and the soul within matter. When that is revealed, beauty Page-166 reveals itself. So all nature is beautiful for us, if we can realise the divine idea within it." E. B. Havell persuaded the artist Abanindranath Tagore to join him as Vice-Principal of the College of Art in Calcutta. And, together, they began to stimulate the return to the models of classical and mediaeval art of India, including the Moghul miniatures. The Tagore family had already set up the Vichitra Studio in the family house at Jorasanko. And quite a few artists, like Nandalal Bose, Asit Kumar Haldar, Kshitindranath Mazumdar, Sailendranath Dey, had joined this workshop, to self-consciously carry out experiments for the resuscitation of Indian art. They rejected the oil paints and canvases that came from the West and worked in water colours, on handmade paper. They imbibed some influences from the Far East as well as from folk art. They were gifted craftsmen and achieved the old curvaceous line. But they failed to put conviction into the myths and legends of the Hindus and the Buddhists, which they painted. At the best, their figures remained sentimentalised, middle-class Bengali types, elevated to the status of Sita, or Shakuntala, or Usha, or Parvati. The Buddha appeared as an attenuated personality, like an elegant representative of the Bhadra Lok of Bengal, a kind of new 20th century version of the late 6th century decoration Bodhi-sattvas in Cave No. 1 of Ajanta, with almond eyes, arched eyebrows, and a dissolving presence. It has since been obvious to the discerning few that a nationalist, political revival in art does not constitute a renaissance. Controversy raged in the pages of Rupam magazine. Sri Aurobindo, whose general formulations, with those of Ananda Coomarswamy and E. B. Havell, had supplied the manifesto for the revival, wrote encouragingly about the intentions of the Bengal painters, though, due to his exile, he could not see much of their work, except through reproductions in the Modern Review. On the other hand, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, a younger critic, said: "For young India today, to appreciate and assimilate the new achievement of mankind in aesthetics, as in the utilitarian sciences and art, is not tantamount to inviting an alleged denationalisation...." On the contrary, he felt "that it was one of the chief means of acquiring strength, in order that India may put forward the creative urge of life and contribute to the expansion of the human spirit as the offspring of Maya and Vishvakarma should be able to do". Further: "These arts are regulated by the science of space, geometry, the vidya of Rupam, the knowledge or form morphology." "The language of the painter and sculpture, is, therefore, point, line, angle, cone, square, curve, mass, volume. The creator of beauty speaks in the vocabulary of Page-167 positions, magnitudes, dimensions and perspectives." "To a Shilpin, there is only one organ of sense and that is the eye." "The artist creates whatever his form-sense, his rasa-jnana, dictates to him as worth creating. He is solely interested in juxtaposition of forms, in the intermarriage of shapes, in the permutations and combinations of masses and surfaces, consistent with sculptural or pictorial reasons." Sarkar averred that "structural composition" was the spiritual basis of painting and sculpture. "Space on the canvas is naturally to be divided into different sections and subsections. The problem is to divide it in such a manner that the different parts form one harmonious whole, limbs of an integral entity." In effect, against the ethereal colour-washes of the revivalist painters, who generally rubbed a wet towel after splashing paint on paper, to make the surface look thin for spirituality, Sarkar suggested the bringing of substance, form and reality into painting. The debate remained infructuous. The leading members of Abanindranath Tagore's group became heads of the various art institutions of India, and, for two generations, the Bengali revival held the field. Many students, in all parts of the country, produced copies of the copies of Ajanta and Bagh and Mughal, Rajasthani or Pahari miniatures. Only Gaganendranath Tagore, the brother of Abanindranath, began to experiment in his own individual manner, and experimented with various visions and techniques from the pressures of his uniquely individual sensibility. Later, Jamini Roy also broke away from the revival, and began to draw inspiration from the earth-colours of his village and from a deep religious- sense of his own, and resorted to the anonymous tradition of India, based on concrete themes like those of the Kalighat Pat painters. Amrita Sher-Gil, an Indo-Hungarian woman, synthesised the colour and space sense of Indian wall-painting with the feeling for substance which she had acquired from Paris. And Rabindranath Tagore, who had backed the revival at one time, had second thoughts and wrote: "I strongly urge our artists vehemently to deny their obligation to produce something that can be labelled as Indian Art, according to some old world mannerism. Let them proudly refuse to be herded into a pen like branded beasts that are treated as cattle and not as cows." "If it is a fact that some standard of invariable formalism has for ages been following the course of the arts in India, making it possible for them to be classified as specially Indian, then it must be confessed that the creative mind which inevitably breaks out in individual variations, has lain dead or dormant for those torpid years." "All traditional structures Page-168 of art must have a sufficient degree of elasticity to allow it to respond to varied impulses of life, delicate or virile, to grow with its growth, to dance with its rhythm." And, at the age of sixty-five, the poet who had said, in his Sahitya Lectures in 1911, that the aim of literature is harmony, began to paint from his subconscious and produced several hundred genuine doodles, scribbles, figures, compositions and landscapes, full of apperceptions which had lain buried in his sensibility for a long time. When he asked himself later, where these paintings came from, the answer came: 'Nobody knows ... it is the tide of creation itself which bears it along its own current." The clash of the rasa-bhdva-dnanda aesthetic of the age of the gods with the creative process of the artists of the 20th century machine civilisation can be witnessed in the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore and the contemporary painters of India. It will be noticed that when Sri Aurobindo gave his exposition of the spiritual in art, he did so from abstract formulations of Beauty. Whereas Rabindranath Tagore, who had also originally exposited a generalised theory of literature as Absolute Harmony, was compelled, as a practising creative artist, to be concrete and to proceed from the finite to the infinite. Thus in the functioning of the artist, in the transition from the age of the gods when the Supreme was the total cosmos, to the age of man when the individual is only a part of the cosmos, the emphasis has shifted from the god-intoxicated artist who was to realise moksa for himself and enable the onlookers to attain release, to the individual who seeks to comprehend some part of the cosmic process. And, more and more, creative art has come to be understood as an expression of the human personality, with sanctions in man's own deepest awarenesses. Also, the analysis of the creative process of each artist has come to be the internal test for criticism of his work. In so far as the study of the creative process has often disclosed confusions, inchoate urges, excitements, and hysteria, which are on the level of sensation, illusory phenomena, and mundane reality, which may or may not achieve the numinous, the ideal of Absolute Harmony, which Sri Aurobindo desired, has ceased to be a test of excellence in painting, or sculpture. Of course, in the age when the craftsman was only part of a guild, giving expression to the ultimate ideal anandam, in his various incarnations making images through which the contemplator could merge his consciousness into the Ultimate Reality, the test was whether the icon was a perfect expression of the divine or not. Even then, however, this ideal was Page-169 seldom applied to actual works. Nor did the humble craftsman often observe the more abstruse injunctions of the silpasastras. Now, when the artist is expressing his individual fancies, whims, inspirations or possible insights, he is forced to be experimental and cannot assert how far he is able to express his feelings, moods or passions, and to reveal his personal vision of any part of the cosmos. The evidence of science about the origin of the cosmos is also more tentative. Some philosophers like Lord Russell deny the existence of a cosmic order initiated by God, because they find that certain atoms are not caused and fly off on their own, thus suggesting that there can be no harmonious design in nature, that, in fact, the universe may be absurd, illogical and merely a mistake. In such a situation, when everything is relative, scientists like Einstein suggested the possibility of talking about the origin of the world in poetical hunches, and not to assert anything which has not been proved in the laboratory. This crisis of knowledge has left man desolate. He is forced to resort to any subterfuge to recognise his identity. During the last few centuries, he has been piling up information, mostly of the outside world, to physically conquer the world. Unable to acquire integrated wisdom, he has been concerned to explain the cycle of human existence, as birth, growth and decay. The idea of karma and rebirth has been more or less given up, as the evidence of continuity of the soul beyond death has been found questionable. One of the few hypotheses on which there is more or less tentative agreement is that the universe has evolved from the amoeba, become the spark, and grown into organic life. Sex and generation are seen as expressions of the earth's fertility. In all this the exiled body-soul of man seeks refuge in renewal of the personality, through physical stimulus, mental works and creative art. In fact, the principle of perennial recreation, renewal and art activity as the means of human evolution on parallel lines to the changes of the earth and its activisation through man's will, have made art and literature the very source of man's becoming. Therefore, in creative art the progress of man is from the concrete expression towards illumination of the psychic bit by bit, so that the accumulation of insights can bring about an integrated whole man, and not abstraction to abstraction. It may be said, therefore, that the only shared belief among the intelligentsia of the world is a new broad humanism, with sanctions in those insights which help man to evolve to humanness. The human being is faced with the consequences of the world-wide struggle for political power of the modern godless nation-states, of economic disparities among them and among the citizens, and the ignorance Page-170 of the illiterate masses, exposed to the hope of democracy, equality of opportunity and the worship of the new deity, money. The spirit of man is further threatened by the pursuit of the technology-run mad world, the kisch commercial culture and sensational entertainment, which do not create enlightenment so much as psychosis, sentiment and tend to release demoniac forces of hatred, fear and violence. The established religions, having failed to control man's lusts and greeds and power-urges in the contemporary atomic civilisation, fail also to answer the questions of the ordinary life. And their transcendental solutions become obsolete. What, then, is the way out for man in our time in relation to creative art? Sri Aurobindo has left no detailed analysis of how exactly actual works of art might help to expand consciousness. He made some generalised references to the works of Europeans like Michaelangelo, Tintoretto, and other renaissance painters, as also to Indian, Chinese and Japanese works of art. He considered the works of the West as providers of delight on the sensuous plane only, while he thought that the important works of Eastern art approximated to the spiritual ideal. In the absence of much analysis by the sage of concrete works of art, one can only wait to see how his general theory of spirituality will work out in the hands of the international architects who are building the new model Auroville Township, as these disciples may have grasped the meaning of Sri Aurobindo's ecstatic cosmic visions in terms of their personal techniques, materials and design, within the humanist framework, which emphasises all man's needs and interests. If I may be permitted, however, to put forward a more tentative definition of the creative process, I would like to define it within my own humanist framework. In this endeavour I start from the concrete. I consider man to be part of the total cosmos, which is organic, infused with energies which emerge before us in the experience of phenomena. I feel that man has the power of feeling, and is thus able to have a sensuous apprehension of the cosmos. This apprehension can be of an immediate experience, perception, apperception, or intuitive insight. Or it can be apprehension through a classical mode of music, or painting, or poem, or the revelation by a creative artist about an aspect of the universe. Man has the unique gift of consciousness, of apprehending that he will die, while inorganic life is not aware of itself. I find that, through the dialectic of experiences, awarenesses and visions, man not only seeks information and knowledge of outside things, Page-171 but recreates them as the wisdom of the heart, and can become a whole man, nearly a god, by accumulating insights and achieving grace, poise and some harmony. Man's creative energy thus transforms materials, forces and experiences into a near total or total structure or coherent form. The flood of feelings is controlled. The compulsion to create becomes the flow of consciousness through the areas of darkness, illumined only in intense moments through creative works. The consequent insight adds itself to previous insights, and may make towards the organic growth of man. There is no part of man's life which may not enter into the creative experience, provided it is organised into art. Thus all the hangovers of tradition, the truths of religion, philosophical speculation, and poetic insight, can come within the humanist framework and help to enlarge consciousness as integral parts of the creative artist's being if he considers them relevant to his growth. The inherent biology, however, tends to select only those values of classical culture which can be absorbed in the being. In this sense many old myths have little use in the contemporary situation, when we need new myths of man made from within our own felt experiences. Within the humanist framework, the awareness of tragic experience and disharmony is capable of providing inspiration as the sense of harmony. The catharsis, which comes from the apprehension of tragedy, may, in spite of the confrontation of violence, disruption and death, lead to the feeling of calm, balance and equipoise from its insights into evil. I believe that, in so far as art and literature concern themselves with personal human relations and seldom attempt abstract generalisations, and in so far as creative works state the predicament of man but do not solve his problems, they are not logical, social or metaphysical philosophies, but tentative, casual, free universes of discourse, as it were, which illumine consciousness and reveal the noumena as well as liberate man into the whole man. In this sense, every work of art, if it is alive, can impart to man the ability to live at the highest intensity of awareness, as a true human being, with more and more total understanding of the cosmos, and even reflect the human condition in the moral crisis of a time, in all its contradictions and tragic predicaments. Only we go from the concrete towards the essences, as Sri Aurobindo himself does in his poem Savitri, and not from an abstract formulation of ananda, as the departure point before creating a sculpture or painting. The creative process is full of confusions, tensions, apprehensions and yields insights with difficulty. The struggle for image is the struggle to create ever new myths, an arduous struggle to organise forms, from the Page-172 multifarious pressures of human existence, with the utmost skill, so that the inspiration may be realised in an autonomous work of art and may help to extend or rather intensify consciousness, stir the imagination, even confer spirituality. This belief in the expansion of consciousness we share in common with Sri Aurobindo. Page-173 Sri Aurobindo's Interpretation of the Vedas and the Upanishads* T. M. P. Mahadevan
'T'HE term 'Veda' may be understood in a wider or narrower sense. In its wider sense, it consists of four parts: Mantra, Brahmana, Aranyaka, and Upanishad. In its narrower sense, it refers to Mantra alone, or Mantra and Brahmana. Modern Vedic scholarship which is Western in its original character takes 'Veda' in the narrower sense. It understands by 'Veda' primarily the collections (Samhita) of hymns (Mantras); and it considers the Rg-Veda Samhita to be the earliest and the best. Sri Aurobindo accepts this definition of 'Veda'; but he differs from the Western Vedic scholars in his approach to, and interpretation of, the Vedic hymns. The Western Orientalists did a great service, it is true, to the cause of Indian culture by making the Vedic literature accessible to the modern mind. But they had their own obsessions and preconceived theories which vitiated their interpretation of the Vedic hymns. For them, the Vedas were "the hymnal of an early, primitive and largely barbaric society, crude in its moral and religious conceptions, rude in its social structure and entirely childlike in its outlook upon the world that environed it".1 These scholars considered the hymns to be the outpourings of a primitive people in adoration of natural powers personified as gods; they sought to propitiate or appease the "gods" so that they may receive largesses from them or ward off their fury. The scholars also see in the hymns an evolution of religious consciousness from naturalistic polytheism, through what Max Muller calls henotheism, to monotheism and monism. They even fix the relative chronology of the hymns on the basis of their revolutionary theory. According to them, the latest hymns to be composed are those which have some rudimentary philosophical ideas, and constitute the transition to the Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo says that, before applying his mind to the original texts, he had passively accepted the conclusions of European scholarship and had thought that, while the Vedic hymns were "an important document
Page-174 of our national history, 'they were of but small value' for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience".1 In other words, he had agreed with the average educated Indian, whose model in this regard was the Western Orientalist, that the Upanishads, rather than the Vedic hymns, constituted the most ancient source of Indian thought and religion, the first Book of Knowledge.2 A sense of dissatisfaction with the modern view came over Sri Aurobindo, while he was pursuing the path of Yoga; and this was confirmed when he started studying the Vedic hymns in the original. He came across terms which were symbolic and stood for certain psychological experiences ; when he found that these very terms occurred in the Vedic hymns, his surmise was that these terms had a symbolic meaning in the Vedic texts also. The deeper he got himself involved in the study of the mantras of the Rg-Veda with the insights that he had gathered, the greater the realization dawned upon him "first, that the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exact light psychological experiences of my own for which I had found no sufficient explanation either in European psychology or in the teachings of Yoga or of Vedanta, so far as I was acquainted with them, and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning".3 It is not that Sri Aurobindo rejects outright the naturalistic-ritualistic interpretation of the Veda. This interpretation is not quite modern after all. Even in the earlier days of classical erudition, says Sri Aurobindo, the ritualistic view of the Veda was already dominant.4 The Brahmana, the second section of the Veda in the wider sense, endeavours "to fix and preserve the minutiae of the Vedic ceremony, the conditions of their material effectuality, the symbolic sense and purpose of their different parts, movements, implements, the significance of texts important in the ritual, the drift of obscure allusions, the memory of ancient myths and traditions."5 Sayana, the well-known commentator on the Veda, interprets the hymns in the context of ritual. Sri Aurobindo is convinced that Sayana is obsessed by the naturalistic formula and seeks continually to force the sense of the Veda into that narrow mould.6 Many of the gods are identified with natural powers such as the Sun, the Fire, the Winds, the Dawn, the Day, the Night, etc. Thus, according to Sri Aurobindo, the seeds of that naturalistic theory of the Veda to which European learning has given so wide an extension are to be found in Sayana.7
Page-175 The hymns — at least some of them — do bear a ritualistic-naturalistic interpretation. But Sri Aurobindo feels that this is not the only or the most important mode of interpreting the Vedic hymns. The truer and the more pertinent approach is the psychological-mystical. The hypothesis which Sri Aurobindo proposes is that the Veda has a double aspect — the inner and the outer, the esoteric and the exoteric, the psychological and the physical. Of these, the obvious sense is the latter and the hidden significance is the former. The poet-seers who composed the hymns deliberately put two meanings into the words — the psychological for the elect, and the physical for the profane: they "favoured the existence of an outer worship, effective and imperfect, for the profane, an inner discipline for the initiate, and clothed their language in words and images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, a concrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers."1 Thus, the hymns have a double meaning: the deities of which they speak are both internal psychological powers as well as powers of external nature. It is a system of parallelism that one finds in the hymns as regards their thought-content. This may also be described as a system of double values by which the same language served for the worship of the deities in both aspects. But, in Sri Aurobindo's view, it is "the psychological sense that predominates and is more pervading, close-knit and coherent than the physical. The Veda, accordingto him, is primarily intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture.2 The Vedic seers, it would seem, made the words deliberately ambiguous and capable of double meaning. Sri Aurobindo's guess is that they concealed the spiritual and psychological knowledge "in a veil of concrete and material figures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated."3 Probably, they even thought the inner meaning was "unfit, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary human mind or in any case liable to perversion and misuse and loss of virtue if revealed to vulgar and unpurified spirits".4 Let us illustrate from the massive work of Sri Aurobindo on the Veda how he extracts the spiritual-psychological significance from the ritualistic-naturalistic garb of the hymns. The Vedic sacrifice requires, apart from the god and the mantra, three factors: the person who performs the sacrifice, the offering that it made, and the fruits of the offering. So far as the outer sacrifice is concerned, what these are is clear. But what is the psychological significance of each of them? What are the factors that constitute the inner sacrifice? The master of the sacrifice, yajamdna, is, of course, the doer of the action, whether it is internal or external sacrifice. But there are also the officiating
Page-176 priests. What do they stand for in the psychological sense ? Sri Aurobindo suggests that the priest, in the inner sense, is "a non-human power or energy or an element of our personality" which is responsible for the execution of the inner sacrifice. The word purohita, for instance, means "put in front"; and the god Agni who is described as purohita symbolizes the divine Will or Force in humanity which is required for consecrated action.1 Next come the offerings. What is their inward significance? The material offerings are soma-juice, clarified butter (ghrta), etc. What, for instance, is the symbolic meaning of ghrtal Sri Aurobindo takes the word to mean the intellect (dhisana) which is to be offered to the gods. The fruits of the external sacrifice are said to be such benefits as cows, horses, gold, offspring, etc. In the psychological sense, what do these fruits mean? Let us consider 'cow' and 'horse'. The Vedic cow, says Sri Aurobindo, was an exceedingly enigmatical animal and came from no earthly herd. The psychological meaning of the word go which is the Sanskrit for 'cow' is 'light'. The asva which is 'Horse' means 'energy'. "It was apparent, therefore," concludes Sri Aurobindo, "that the two chief fruits of the Vedic sacrifice, wealth of cows and wealth of horses, were symbolic of richness of mental illumination and abundance of vital energy".2 We turn, now, briefly to the Vedic gods. The reference to natural phenomena or powers is obvious, and has been mentioned already. We may begin with Agni. For the ordinary worshipper, Agni is the god of fire. The word may be taken to mean the principle of heat and light in physical nature. But, what is the psychological significance of 'Agni' ? Let us hear Sri Aurobindo: "Agni meant the Strong, it meant the Bright, or even Force, Brilliance. So it could easily recall to the initiated, wherever it occurred, the idea of the illumined Energy which exalts man to the Highest, the doer of the great work, the Purohit of the human sacrifice."3 Similar senses should be attached to the other Gods. Indra, in the psychological interpretation of the hymns, represents Mind-Power. Vayu is always associated with the Prana or Life-Energy which contributes to the nervous activities that in man are the support of the mental energies governed by Indra.4 Varuna, which stands for a power of wideness and purity, is what is present in man as conscious force of the Truth. Mitra, which is also a power of life, represents Love, Joy and Harmony. We have said enough to indicate how Sri Aurobindo would interpret the significance of the Vedic gods. From the external standpoint, the gods are universal powers of physical Nature personified; in the inner sense, they are universal powers of Nature in her subjective activities, Will, Mind, etc. In the Veda, a distinction is made between the powers of the
Page-177 human mind and those of the divine; and the teaching is that man by the right use of the mental action of these powers in the inner sacrifice to the gods can convert them into their true or divine nature, i.e. the mortal can become immortal.1 For this interpretation of the Vedic hymns, Sri Aurobindo claims a distinctive advantage over the classical interpretation of Sayana, on the one hand, and over the interpretation of the modern scholars, on the other. Because Sayana did not have the key to the inner sense, he was obliged to assign variable significance to the same word. For instance, irtam\ which is almost the key-word of any psychological or spiritual interpretation, is rendered by him sometimes as 'truth', more often as 'sacrifice', and occasionally in the sense of 'water'. The psychological interpretation gives to the word rtam the sense of Truth invaribly. Similarly, the word dhi is assigned various meanings by Sayana: 'thought', 'prayer', 'action', 'food', etc. The psychological interpretation given to it by Sri Aurobindo is invariably the sense of thought or understanding. Thus, there is consistency in Sri Aurobindo's interpretation of the key-terms. According to the modern understanding of the hymns, there is no unity of thought or consistency in them. There are various strata of musings in the hymns. And they mark the beginnings of speculation on the physical and the supraphysical. Sri Aurobindo totally rejects this view. He is convinced that the hymns are "not the work of rude, barbarous and primitive craftsmen, but the living breath of a supreme and conscious Art forming its creations in the puissant but well-governed movement of a self-observing inspiration".2 The hymns,.taken as a whole, represent the ins-pirer1 experience of the sages and seers — the cumulative and consistent legacy of the Age of Intuition. They mark rather the concluding phase of this age than the beginnings of a primitive endeavour to penetrate behind the phenomena of Nature. "We may therefore surmise," observes Sri Aurobindo, "that our actual Samhita represents the close of a period, not its commencement, nor even some of its successive stages. It is even possible that its most ancient hymns are comparatively a modern development or version of a more ancient lyric evangel couched in the free and more pliable forms of a still earlier human speech."3 And again, the Veda is "a Scripture not confused in thought or primitive in its substance, but one, complete and self-conscious in its purpose and in its purport, veiled indeed by the cover, sometimes thick, sometimes transparent, of another and material sense, but never losing sight even for a single moment of its high spiritual aim and tendency".4 While Sri Aurobindo's study of the Vedic hymns is fairly full and penetrating,
Page-178 it is a pity that he has not bestowed that much of attention on the Upanisads. This is probably because, according to him, the Upanishads mark a later phase which is in the nature of degeneration rather than improvement. The Age of Intuition had ended, and the Age of Reason had commenced. Even the early Upanisads, according to Sri Aurobindo, came long after the hymns. There is to be seen in them a struggle lb recover the true sense of the Vedic hymns. While the Brahmanas, the liturgical texts, aimed at preserving the Vedic ritual, the Upanisads endeavoured to recapture the soul of Veda, "to recover the lost or waning knowledge by meditation and spiritual experience".1 Sri Aurobindo believes that the Upanishads fall into two periods: those which belong to the earlier "still kept close to the Vedic roots, reflected the old psychological system of the Vedic Rishis and preserved what may be called their spiritual pragmatism"; and those Upanishads which constitute the later group manifest a marked deviation; in them "the form and thought became more modern and independent of early symbols and origins, some of the principal elements of Vedic thought and psychology began to be omitted or to lose their previous connotation and the foundations of the later ascetic and anti-pragmatic Vedanta began to appear."2 The Chandogya and the Brhadaranyaka, Sri Aurobindo considers to beihe earliest Upanisads. They are followed by the Taittiriya and the Aitareya and the Isa. Sri Aurobindo has rendered into English the first eight Upanisads in the list of the traditional one hundred and eight. These eight do not include, it will be noticed, the two long Upanisads, the Chandogya and the Brhadaranyaka.3 Anything like a commentary he has added only to one of the Upanishads, the Isa. The reason for selecting, this short Upanisad for special treatment seems to be that, according to Sri Aurobindo, it is "the sole Upanishad which offered almost insuperable difficulties to the extreme illusionism and anti-pragmatism of Shankara-charya".4 Without stopping to enquire into the meaning of the expressions "extreme illusionism" and "anti-pragmatism", we may note that the implication seems to be that the other Upanisads do not present to Sankara "insuperable difficulties". At the outset, let us remind ourselves of the conviction of the classical commentators. They do not make a distinction among the Upanisads as earlier and later; they believe that all the Upanisads teach the same truth. In fact, according to them, the entire Veda, in the wider sense of the
Page-179 term, bears a perfect harmony: there is no contradiction between any two of its parts. Each commentator finds a key for unlocking this harmony. The key that Sankara discovers is the truth of non-duality (advaita). Even as Sri Aurobindo is convinced that all the Vedic hymns have a harmonious meaning, Sankara feels certain that all the Upanisads have an identical purport.*' Probably, Sri Aurobindo will not object to Sankara's interpretation of the other Upanisads, although he does not see his way to accepting the latter's metaphysical intuition. But he rejects Sankara's account of the teaching of the Isa Upanisad. According to him, the principle that this Upanisad follows is "the uncompromising reconciliation of uncompromising extremes".1 The extremes are: God — the World; Renunciation — Enjoyment; Quietism — Action; the One — the Many; Cessation of Birth — Birth; the Knowledge — the Ignorance; etc. It is Sri Aurobindo's conviction that the Isa Upanisad does not subordinate the latter in each of these pairs to the former, but that it "tries instead to get hold of the extreme ends of the knots, disengage and place them alongside of each other in a release that will be at the same time a right placing and a right relation. It will not qualify or subordinate unduly any of the extremes, although it recognises a dependence of one on the other".2 Since for Sankara, the former extreme in each of the pairs is paramariha, he is not interpreting the Isa Upanisad aright, in the judgement of Sri Aurobindo. Therefore, Sri Aurobindo goes to the extent of saying that one of the three occasions on which God laughed at Sankara was when he commented on the Isa Upanisad.3 Did God laugh at Sankara? And, for what? The basic distinction that is important for understanding Sankara is the one between the paramarthika (the absolute) and the vyavaharika (the empirical, relative). It is in the light of this distinction that Sankara harmonises the apparently discordant teachings of the Upanisads. It is not by employing the logic of the finite, as it is alleged, that Sankara has discovered the truth of this harmony; the dependence is on what Sri Aurobindo has termed the logic of the Infinite, the intuitions of the Upanishadic seers as well as Sankara's own. Sri Aurobindo himself seems tacitly to confirm Sankara's intuition when he says: "Brahman, exceeding as well as dwelling in the play of His Maya, is Isa, lord of it and free. Man, dwelling in the play, is anisa, not
Page-180 Sri Aurobindo's Interpretation of the Vedas and the Upanishads 181 lord, not free, subject to Avidya. But this subjection is itself a play of the Ignorance, unreal in essential fact (paramartha), real only in practical relation (vyavahara), in the working out of the actions of the divine Energy, the Chit-Shakti."1 At a few other places also in his analysis of the Isa Upanisad, Sri Aurobindo appears to accept the insights of Sankara, as for instance, when he says of Brahman that "the unity and stability are the higher truth",2 and that the "chain of Karma only binds the movement of Nature and not the soul which, by knowing itself, ceases even to appear to be bound by the results of its works,"3 and that therefore, "the way of freedom is not inaction, but to cease from identifying oneself with the movement and recover instead our true identity in the Self of things who is their Lord".4 When Sankara speaks of Brahman as the non-dual Reality, he is not advocating any numerical oneness or exclusive monism. His Absolute is not one of the extremes, or exclusive of anything. Only, it is not a One-in-the-Many, as Sri Aurobindo would like to have it. Renunciation for Sankara too is not a physical rejection; it is, even as for Sri Aurobindo, "renunciation of all in desire" which may be described as "the condition of the free enjoyment of all".5 When Sankara says that action is not the direct means to release, he does not mean by non-action inertia or inaction: it signifies knowledge which consists in the freedom from wrong identification of the Self with the movements of the body and the mind. There are these two paths taught in the Veda: works and knowledge. The end that can be achieved by the way of works (karma) including the acts enjoined by the Veda is prosperity (abhyudaya) in this world and in the next. The final end which is liberation from bondage (nihsreyasa, moksa) can be realized only by pursuing the path of knowledge (jhana). He'who is eligible only for the performance of karma is not competent to follow the path of jhana. He who is qualified for the latter discipline has no need for karma. This does not mean, however, that karma has no place in the scheme of spiritual progress. When it is performed without any selfish motive, it helps one in acquiring the qualification for the higher path. Karma, thus, serves as the external means (bahirahga-sadhana). To expect more from it is not proper. Through niskama-karma (desireless action) the mind gets purified; through jhana release is gained. Unless this truth is grasped, the Upanisadic teaching cannot be understood. Sankara makes this clear in his introduction to the Isavasya, where he says that the Upanisad texts are not for use in the rituals, but teach the true nature of the Self as pure, sinless, one, eternal, bodiless, and all-pervading. The purport
Page-181 of the Upanisads is to reveal the nature of Reality, and not to enjoin works. Sankara's analysis of the mantras of the Isavasya is as follows: Of the two types of eligible persons, the first verse of the Isavasya relates to those who are fit for jnana, and the second to those who are eligible for karma-yoga. Verses 3-8 have in view those who long to pursue the path of knowledge; and so they expound the nature of the Self, and also describe the consequences of realizing or not realizing the Self. Verses 9-18 are addressed to the other type of eligibles; they recommend the joint-performance of karma and upasana, work and worship.1 There is nothing incongruous or absurd in Sankara's interpretation of the Upanishads, including the Isavasya; and we are unable to agree with Sri Aurobindo in his judgement in this regard. But we have unstinted and unreserved admiration for his insights into the secret of the Vedic hymns. He has made the most valuable and marvellous contribution to the study of the Veda, the watershed from which the perennial river of Indian culture flows.
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