CANTO THREE   THE DEBATE OF LOVE AND DEATH   A SAD destroying cadence the voice sank; It seemed to lead the advancing march of Life Into some still original Inane. But Savitri answered to almighty Death: "O dark-browed sophist of the universe Who veilst the Real with its own Idea, Hiding with brute objects Nature's living face, Masking eternity with thy dance of death, Thou hast woven the ignorant Mind into a screen And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe, And a false witness of mind's servant sense. An aesthete of the sorrow of the world, Champion of a harsh an

  BOOK TWELVE Epilogue EPILOGUE   THE RETURN TO EARTH   OUT of abysmal trance her spirit woke. Lain on the earth-mother's calm inconscient breast She saw the green-clad branches lean above Guarding her sleep with their enchanted life, And overhead a blue-winged ecstasy Fluttered from bough to bough with high-pitched call. Into the magic secrecy of the woods Peering through an emerald lattice-window of leaves, In indolent skies reclined, the thinning day Turned to its slow fall into evening's peace. She pressed the living body of Satyavan: On her body's wordless joy to be and breathe

  CANTO TWO   THE JOURNEY IN ETERNAL NIGHT AND THE VOICE OF THE DARKNESS   A WHILE on the chill dreadful edge of Night All stood as if a world were doomed to die And waited on the eternal silence' brink. Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush. As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge Where the last depths plunge into nothingness And the last dreams must end, they paused; in their front Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them pale The lifeless evening was a dead man's gaze. Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul. But still in its lone niche of templed strength M

  CANTO FIVE   THE GODHEADS OF THE LITTLE LIFE   A FIXED and narrow power with rigid forms, He saw the empire of the little life, An unhappy corner in eternity. It lived upon the margin of the Idea Protected by Ignorance as in a shell. Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world He peered across its scanty fringe of sight, To disengage from its surface-clear obscurity The Force that moved it and the Idea that made Imposing smallness on the Infinite, The ruling spirit of its littleness, The divine law that gave it right to be, Its claim on Nature and its need in Time.

  CANTO TWO   THE ADORATION OF THE DIVINE MOTHER   A STILLNESS absolute, incommunicable, Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul; A wall of stillness shuts it from the world, A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense And makes unreal all that mind has known, All that the labouring senses still would weave Prolonging an imaged unreality. Self's vast spiritual silence occupies space, Only the Inconceivable is left, Only the Nameless without space and time: Abolished is the burdening need of life: Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief, The ego is dead, we ar

  THE YOGA AND ITS OBJECTS The yoga we practise, is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. Its object is not personal mukti, although mukti is a necessary condition of the yoga, but the libaration and transformation of the human being. It is not personal ānanda, but the bringing down of the divine ānanda—Christ's kingdom of heaven, our Satyayuga— Page-1 upon the earth. Of moksa we have no personal need; for the soul is nityamukta and bondage

THE YOGA AND ITS OBJECTS SRI AUROBINDO       ARYA PUBLISHING HOUSE CALCUTTA First Edition  . . 1921 Reprinted          19222, 1931 Second Edition .1938 Third Edition . . 1943 Fourth Edition .  1946   All Rights Reserved       Published by "T. Patro for the Arya Publishing House 63, College Street, Calcutta Imprimerie de Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondichéry THE YOGA AND ITS OBJECTS  

CHAPTER X   INDIAN LITERATURE   THE arts which appeal to the soul through the eye are able to arrive at a peculiarly concentrated expression of the spirit, the aesthesis and the creative mind of a people, but it is in its literature that we must seek for its most flexible and many-sided self-expression, for it is the word used in all its power of clear figure or its threads of suggestion that carries to us most subtly and variably the shades and turns and teeming significances of the inner self in its manifestation. The greatness of a literature lies first in the greatness and worth of its substance, the value of its thought and the beauty of its forms,

II   A RATIONALISTIC CRITIC ON INDIAN CULTURE   CHAPTER I   WHEN we try to appreciate a culture, and when that culture is the one in which we have grown up or from which we draw our governing ideals and are likely from overpartiality to minimise its deficiencies or from overfamiliarity to miss aspects or values of it which would strike an unaccustomed eye, it is always useful as well as interesting to know how others see it. It will not move us to change our view-point for theirs, but we can get fresh light from a study of this kind and help our self-introspection. But there are different ways of seeing a foreign civilis

PUBLISHERS' NOTE   The Foundations of Indian Culture comprises, under a single connecting title, the series of articles that appeared in the ARYA, from 15th December, 1918 to i5th January, 1921, in the following sequence: "Is India Civilised?" (Vol. V. No. 5 —Vol. V. No. 7), "A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture" (Vol. V. No. 7—Vol. V. No. 12) and "A Defence of Indian Culture" (Vol. VI. No. I-Vol. VII. No. 6). The essays have since undergone revision by the author. The essay "Indian Culture and External Influence" which originally appeared in the ARYA Vol. V. No. 8, has been appended to this volume as it bears on th