"Hymns to the Goddess" 1   THIS IS one of a series of publications by Mr. Arthur Avalon consisting of texts and translations of the Tantras. The hymns collected and translated in this volume are, however, taken from other sources besides the Tantras. Many of them are from the considerable body of devotional hymns attributed by tradition to the philosopher Shankaracharya, a few from the Mahabharata and the Puranas. Most are well-known stotras addressed to the various forms and names of the female Energy, Mother of the worlds, whose worship is an important part of that many-sided and synthetic who

Opinions Written as Acting Principal, Baroda College   1905   Resolving a Problem of Seniority in the High School   College Office Baroda 3rd. May 05.   Mr Nag was appointed in the Baroda High School by His High. ness the Maharaja Sahib but being on leave has not yet joined his appointment. I believe that His Highness the Maharaja Sahib while reserving to himself the full right to make appointments on other weighty grounds, is always willing to give the utmost consideration to the claims of seniority of old and deserving servants. Moreover the position

III   His Official Career   THUS equipped, thus trained Bankim began his human journey, began in the radiance of joy and strength and genius the life which was to close in suffering and mortal pain. The drudgery of existence met him in the doorway, when his youth was still young. His twenty-first year found him at Jessore, his fifty-third was the last of his long official labour. Here too however his inveterate habit of success went always with him. The outward history of his manhood reads more brilliantly even than that of his youth, and if he did not climb to the highest posts, it was only because these are shut to indigenous talent. From start to finish, his ability,

V   The Training of the Senses   THERE are six senses which minister to knowledge, sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, mind, and all of these except the last look outward and gather the material of thought from outside through the physical nerves and their end-organs, eye, ear, nose, skin, palate. The perfection of the senses as ministers to thought must be one of the first cares of the teacher. The two things that are needed of the senses are accuracy and sensitiveness. We must first understand what are the obstacles to the accuracy and sensitiveness of the senses, in order th

Part Eight   Reviews   Sri Aurobindo wrote the first of these book-reviews in 1909 for publication in the Karmayogin. He wrote the others between 1915 and 1920 for publication in the Arya, a philosophical journal of which he was the editor and principal writer. "Suprabhat"   THE PAPER Suprabhat, a Bengali monthly edited by Kumari Kumudini Mitra, daughter of Sj. Krishna Kumar Mitra, enters this month on its third year. The first issue of the new year is before us. We notice a great advance in the interest and variety of the articles, the calibre of the writers and the

The Men that Pass   ROMESH Chandra Dutt is dead. After a long life of the most manifold and untiring energy, famous, honoured, advanced in years, with a name known in England as well as in India, the man always successful, always favoured of Fortune, always striving to deserve her by skill and diligence, type of a race that passes, of a generation that to younger minds is fast losing the appearance of reality and possibility, has passed away at the height and summit of his career before his great capacities could justify themselves to the full in his new station, but also before the defects of his type could be thoroughly subjected to the severe ord

About Astrology 1   THE SUBJECT of this book is one which stands nowadays put away under a sort of intellectual ban, placed on it some centuries ago by the scientific and rationalistic European mind and not yet lifted. Mr. N. P. Subramania Iyer has undertaken an astrological series which will deal with the various parts of astrology, and the present volume contains the text and translation of the Kalaprakasika, a treatise on the selection of the right times by astrological rule for undertaking any and every action of human life. The book is well printed and got up, the translat

A Preface on National Education   These two chapters appeared in the last two issues of the Arya in 1920 and 1921.   1   THE NECESSITY and unmixed good of universal education has become a fixed dogma to the modern intelligence, a thing held to be beyond dispute by any liberal mind or awakened national conscience, and whether the tenet be or not altogether beyond cavil, it may at any rate be presumed that it answers to a present and imperative need of the intellectual and vital effort of the race. But there is not quite so universal an agreement or common attain

Rajayoga   Man fulfilling himself in the body is given Hathayoga as his means. When he rises above the body, he abandons Hathayoga as a troublesome and inferior process and rises to the Rajayoga, the discipline peculiar to the aeon which man now evolves. The first condition of success in Rajayoga is to rise superior to the dehatmak bodh, the state of perception in which the body is identified with the self. A time comes to the Rajayogin when his body seems not to belong to him or he to have any concern with it. He is not troubled by its troubles or gladdened by its pleasures; it has them to itself and very soon, because he does not give his

Part Four   On Art   Sri Aurobindo wrote these essays in 1909­10. He published all of them except the last in the Karmayogin, a weekly newspaper of which he was the editor and principal writer.     The National Value of Art   I   THERE is a tendency in modern times to depreciate the value of the beautiful and overstress the value of the useful, a tendency curbed in Europe by the imperious insistence of an age-long tradition of culture and generous training of the aesthetic perceptions; but in India, wher