ON MUSIC "A music spoke transcending mortal speech." Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book r, Canto 3. The Veda speaks of the universe as a song of seven Chhandas-rhythms. A rhythm is a pattern of harmonious vibrations of consciousness; repetition of seven fundamental rhythms maintains the universe,—each rhythm corresponding to a plane of being. The delight which is the basis of all creation throws itself out in the form of this grand universal symphony. Tagore in his Sādhanā writes: "Music is the highest of the arts because the singer has everything he requires within him. His idea and his expression are brother and sister; very often they are born as twins. In music the

I* I HAVE been overcome these two days by the world of art rushing upon me here from all sides. My visit to your school and to Art Exhibition that is now on at the Jehangir Art Gallery has let loose forms of beauty from all over the world—not only from the present, but from the long forgotten past. Forms have rushed from Greece, from Italy of the Renaissance, from France of the 19th Century, from the East; memory has awakened sleeping forms of China, Japan and India. From this drab world of everyday I am transported to another world—a world of beauty—beauty which is the highest attribute of the Supreme. This is the great service that art render

VI FOR DISCUSSION AND THOUGHT In order to stimulate thought the following points are offered to the art-student:— I.1 Modern art is dominated by techenique or in other words the greatest triumphs of modernist art are in the field of technique. II.2 There is too much domination of " theories "— intellectual ideas—and "isms" in modern art. III3 Most productions of modernist art are expressions of the undisciplined subconscient, suggestions from the lower vital world, full of impulses and crude material and other dream-stuff, fancies and random freaks. 1I quote Herbert Read to show how he agrees with me on this point. Says

-008_Sri Aurobindo's Ideas.htm VII SRI AUROBINDO'S IDEAS I give here a few ideas of Sri Aurobindo on art so as to clarify the fundamental issues : — 1.Art is discovery and revelation of Beauty. 2.All is, from one point of view, beautiful] but all is not, reduced to a single level. All things can be seen as having divine beauty, but somethings have more divine beauty than others. " In the artist's vision too there can be gradations, a hierarchy of values.—Apollo's grapes deceived the birds that came to peck at them, but there was more aesthetic content in the Zeus of Phidias, a greater content of consciousness and therefore of Ananda to express and fill in the essential

On Art ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS BY A. B. PURANI Published by NAVA SARJAN SOCIETY, NARGOL (DT. SURAT.) Publishers: NAVA SARJAN SOCIETY, NARGOL (DT. SURAT ) © SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM First published in April 1955 2nd Edition (enlarged) September 1965 PRINTED AT LALITHA PRINTERS PRIVATE LIMITED, 18, NORTH VELI STREET, MADURAT-1 To Lale Dr. Anand Coomar Swamy who dedicated his life to the service of Art, insisting on and teaching true values, and thus, rendered yeoman's service to the world of Art, this little effort is dedicated in deep gratitude b

LECTURE I Savitri is an epic of more than 23,000 lines. It won't be easy to do justice to it in three days. What will be attempted is only an outline and some kind of foretaste by which you might be induced to get into the body of the book; that's all we can attempt. I consider the appearance of Savitri as the first ray of the new age that is coming in the realm of culture. It begins with the symbol of dawn, and I think symbolically it is itself a dawn of the new age that is coming to mankind. Poetry very often sums up an age and inaugurates a new age and Savitri seems to be an expression which presages; it shows us the coming of a new age. It may take hundreds of years, it i

LECTURES ON S A V I TRI Contents Pre-Content Publishers' Note Lecture I Lecture II Lecture III

LECTURE II Well, yesterday we tried to cover some rough ground about poetry, the possibility of an epic in this age and the idea of an epic being more and more subjective. It is not the size of the event which gives inspiration for an epic, but the significance of the event which is seen and felt by the poet. We saw Aswapathy's history yesterday, and found that Aswapathy is not the childless king that he is in the legend of the Mahabharata, the Indian epic, but he is here a representative of the human race, engaged in the cultural activity of humanity trying to evolve higher and higher values of life. That is Aswapathy. He is a representative, he is a symbol of the human rac

LECTURE III We are trying to follow the epic Savitri, though we are not making a study of the whole epic. We will now pursue an aspect which is less serious in the sense that it doesn't deal with any problem of life - because Savitri does deal, as we saw before, with questions such as whether the world is a mechanical determination which is irresistible and which must now have its way, the consciousness of man having no say in it. That was one problem as we saw. The epic also concerns itself with the evolution of man from his natural self to his true being or his spirit./Aswapathy gets this realization of the spirit, leading to a widening of his true being, equating him with t

-003_Publisher's Note.htm Publisher's Note This book contains three lectures on Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri, delivered in August 1962 by the late A. B. Purani during his visit to the United States. The lectures have been edited to make them more readable, but an effort has been made to retain the lecturer's "voice" - his characteristic directness, drive and enthusiasm. It is hoped that the book will provide a brief but helpful introduction to Sri Aurobindo's poem. Ambalal Balkrishna Purani was born in Surat, Gujarat, in 1894. Inspired as a young man by Sri Aurobindo, then a leader of the Indian National Movement, Purani helped to launch a youth movement which gained widespread p