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

CHAPTER XV   I HAVE spoken hitherto of the greatness of Indian civilisation in the things most important to human culture, those activities that raise man to his noblest potentialities as a mental, a spiritual, religious, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic being, and in all these matters the cavillings of the critics break down before the height and largeness and profundity revealed when we look at the whole and all its parts in the light of a true understanding of the spirit and intention and a close discerning regard on the actual achievement of the culture. There is revealed not only a great civilisation, but one of the half dozen greatest of which we have a still exi

INDIAN CULTURE AND EXTERNAL INFLUENCE   IN considering Indian civilisation and its renascence, I suggested that a powerful new creation in all fields was our great need, the meaning of the renascence and the one way of preserving the civilisation. Confronted with the huge rush of modern life and thought, invaded by another dominant civilisation, almost her opposite or inspired at least with a Very different spirit to her own, India can only survive by confronting this raw, new, aggressive, powerful world with fresh diviner creations of her own spirit, cast in the mould of her own spiritual ideals. She must meet it by solving its greater problems

I   THE ISSUE   IS INDIA CIVILISED ?   CHAPTER I   A Book under this rather startling title was published some years ago by Sir John Woodroffe, the well-known scholar and writer on Tantric philosophy, in answer to an extravagant jeu d'esprit by Mr. William Archer. That well-known dramatic critic leaving his safe natural sphere for fields in which his chief claim to speak was a sublime and confident ignorance, assailed the whole life and culture of India and even lumped together all her greatest achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass o