Aurobindo's Place in Indian Philosophical Thought

AUROBINDO’S PLACE IN
INDIAN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT

DR. K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR, M.A D. LITT.

In Sri Aurobindo’s life (August 15, 1872 to December 5, 1950), his writing was not a thing apart: be it poetry, drama, yoga exegesis, political comment, sociological inquiry, literary and art criticism, it was an emanation from and an expression of his inner life.

If it be true, as Keats said, that “Shakespeare led a life of allegory, his works are his comments on it,” it might equally be said of Sri. Aurobindo that his was a life of progressive realisation and his writings are but its radiations and recordings.

Metaphysics in East and West

Sri Aurobindo never claimed to be a “philosopher”, although circumstances made him launch a philosophical monthly review, Arya, on August 15, 1914 and he kept it going for six and a half years. In the course of a letter to a disciple written in 1930, Sri Aurobindo drew a distinction between western metaphysics and the yoga of the Indian saints, In the west excessive importance has been given always to thought, intellect, logic and reason as the highest means and even as the highest end; and spiritual experience itself has been “summoned to pass the tests of the intellect.”

In India the position has been just the reverse. While no doubt metaphysical thinkers have tried to approach ultimate reality the intellect, they have assigned only a subordinate status to such mental constructions. On the other hand, “the first rank has always been given to spiritual intuition and illumination and spiritual experience.

The typical Indian metaphysical thinker–a Yajnavalkya, a Sankara, a Ramanuja–has been a yogi and rishi, one who has armed his philosophy “with a practical way of reaching to the supreme state of consciousness, so that even when one begins with thought, the aim is to arrive at a consciousness beyond mental thinking.”¹

The central problems of philosophy were formulated by Kant in the form of three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? These carry the content of the Indian concepts of tattwa, hita and purushartha. Sri Aurobindo’s “thought”–although spread over several voluminous works–is best described as his many-limbed answer to the triune classic questions of philosophy in the steady light of his own spiritual experiences at Baroda, Alipur, Chandernagore and Pondicherry.

Spiritual Realisation

At Baroda in January 1908, Sri Aurobindo stumbled as it were on the realisation of Nirvana, the infinite in effable silence. Later in the year, while in the Alipur jail, he had day after day the experience of the bliss of omnipresent Narayana, the divine person immanent everywhere and in everything.

In February 1910 at Chandernagore, Sri Aurobindo had a taste of the other end of things: the ultimate bleakness of the inconscient. And in his first four years at Pondicherry (1910–’14), Sri Aurobindo got into close grip with all the realities of consciousness from inconscienceto the supramental truth-consciousness or Gnostic consciousness. The problem was to give intellectual formulation and organization to the content of these spiritual experiences and realisations. As he explained in the Aryaof July 1918:

“The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt should be based were already present to us ... but the complete intellectual statement of them and their results and issues had to be found. This meant a continuous thinking a high and subtle and difficult thinking on several lines.”

Life Divine

One line of inquiry–indeed the life-line of the Aurobindonian world-view–became The Life Divine. The collateral or subsidiary lines of inquiry assumed in course of time the proportions of The Synthesis of Yoga, The Psychology of Social Development (since known as The Human Cycle), The Ideal of Human Unity, The Foundations of Indian Culture and The Future Poetry, Yoga, sociology, politics, history, criticism and prophecy–these were but so many stairways to knowledge, so many pathways to reality, so many roads to realisation.

Every chapter of The Life Divine–asit came out in the Arya–was headed by one or more epigraphs, culled from ancient Indian scriptures or the classics of spiritual philosophy. The main authorities were the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita.

Citing ancient scriptural authorities for support has been the traditional Indian way of projecting a dialectic, This universe is, after all, a self-adjusted continuum in which nothing suddenly erupts from a total emptiness and what strikes us as “new” has but sprouted from an atomic seed obscurely secreted in distant past formations. This is the reason why our system-makers have usually made out that they are but fulfilling what was already implied in the old scriptures.

Sri Aurobindo was, thus, merely following a practice sanctified by long usage. Certainly, he had had spiritual experiences and realisations; but these also found corroboration in the intuitions of the Vedic singers and the Upanishadicseers, and in the affirmations of the Lord of the Gita.

Himalayas of Soul

At the Alipur jail, Sri Aurobindo had grown intimate with the Gitaand had scaled the Upanishadic“Himalayas of the soul,” After his acquittal and release, Sri Aurobindo spoke at Uttarpara (May 30, 1909) like one whom prison life had renewed and transfigured. He published translations of the Isha and Kena Upanishads in the Karmayoginand wrote about the ancient scriptures in the Dharma. He deplored the fact that, after Sankara, for centuries people had been inclined to stop there, and refrain from going to revealed scriptures (Sruti: that is Veda and Upanishad), ancillary scriptures (Smriti: for example, the Puranas),or even the Gita detached from the suffocating commentaries.

In Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo made a fresh study of the Veda, and his comments and conclusions were set forth in The Secret of the Veda, which appeared alongside The Life Divine, as if to show that his philosophical thought, although it had its independent base in his own realisations, was yet in line with the philosophia perennis of the Indian tradition.

The Veda…The Life Divine: the concatenation is most significant. Aren‘t they respectively the first and the last of the arches of the bridge of visioned thoughts that spans the history of Aryan culture, the inspired first beginnings and the culminating fulfilment of the long and great spiritual tradition of India?

Among the middle arches were the Upanishads, the Gita, the Tantra, the Puranas(notably the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata) and the high-arching poetry of devotion (Bhakti); and Sri Aurobindo gave each its appropriate place in his grand and universal synthesis of knowledge and experience.

Sri Aurobindo’s first task was to reconcile reality as transcendent with reality as immanent. The peremptory “either–or” of traditional thinkers (“It is One” or “It is Many”–“It is Spirit” or “It isMatter”) had taken hold of one term of the truth and affirmed it alone as the whole.

Sri Aurobindo found the clue to reconciliation in the concept of supermind–based, again, on his own realisation, though also confirmed by insights in the Veda. The Puranicscheme of Ten Avtars–from fish and tortoise to man and superman–was clearly an evolutionary stair, and Sri Aurobindo saw it as a spiritual rendering of the modem scientific theory of evolution.

Reconciling Opposites

Reconciling the apparent opposites of past metaphysical speculations and affirmations, Sri Aurobindo structured The Life Divine as follows: Volume one: “Omnipresent reality and the universe;” volume two: “The knowledge and the ignorance–the spiritual evolution;” Part I. “The infinite conscious and the ignorance;” Part II, “The knowledge and the spiritual evolution.”

From an inquiry into the place of “man-as-he-is”, subject to death, desire and incapacity, the argument turns to the consideration of the “involution” or “fall” from Sachchidananda (existence-consciousness-bliss) to the nadir of inconscience. After the fall, there is the return-movement of evolution or ascent to the high peaks of consciousness. Infinite consciousness has become ignorance; now ignorance must enact the drama of spiritual evolution and return to infinite knowledge. Mental man is no more than a transitional being in the evolutionary history of the earth or the universe. If he has behind him the prehistoric ages of animal life and the still earlier geological eras of inanimate existence, he has ahead of him the plenitudes and puissances of the life divine:

“...what has to be developed is there in our being, and not something outside it: what evolutionary nature presses for is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny.”²

Global Testament

The Life Divine, which was published in a revised and definitive form in 1939..’40, strikes the reader today, not only as the culmination of the Indian philosophical tradition, but in essence as the unique global philosophical testament as well, reconciling and going beyond both western and oriental metaphysical systems. ³

If Vedanticthought may be said to have reached its apotheosis in Sri Aurobindo, likewiseChristian thought had grown a new dimension in Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, whose posthumous work, The Phenomenon of Man (1960), reveals astonishing parallel insightsthat link it with The Life Divine. ⁴

Sri Aurobindo and Fr. Teilhard were both mystics as well as evolutionists, and both treat the problem of “pain” as inseparable from the evolutionary process.

The “fall” in the cosmic context can only mean the deliberate swoon of the spirit in matter: and evolution must ultimately take man (and the world) to the cosmic Christ–or what practically comes to the same thing, Sachchidananda. And this return, reunion and transfiguration will be achieved through a supreme efflorescence of love, or love charged with knowledge, power and beauty.

But even PierreTeilhard de Chardin’s philosophy–forward looking as it is–lacks the integral fullness and amplitude of Sri Aurobindo’s, in whose thought the dynamic of individual progress is doubled with the possibility of collective progress as well.

The image Sri Aurobindo projects of the perfected or divinised socieety of the futurebreathes the ambience of “a spiritual religion of humanity:”

“A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret spirit, a divine reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine spirit upon earth.” ⁵

Humanism of Marx

Such a society will also be the quintessentially true communistic society. Like Fr. Teilhard, Sri Aurobindo too was in full sympathy with the humanistic elements in Marxism, but he couldn’t appreciate its denial of the spirit or applaud its actual political translations. His views on this question are succinctly stated in some of his “aphorisms”:

“The communistic principle of society is intrinsically as superior to the individualistic as is brotherhood to jealousy and mutual slaughter; but all practical schemes of socialism invented in Europe are a yoke, a tyranny and a prison.

If communism ever re-establishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul’s brotherhood and the death of egoism.” ⁶

The classless society has not so far materialized any where because democracy, socialism and communism have not been able in actual practice to end the human tendency to egoistic separativity, assertiveness and rivalry, and their attendant evils of exploitation in economic life and violence in political life. It is only when spiritual evolution resulting in the cracking of the human ego comes about that the godheads of the soul–justice, liberty, equality, brotherhood–will be realised on a permanent basis in a “kingdom of the saints as was dreamt by Christianity, Islam and PuranicHinduism.” ⁷

That would be the consummation of the convergence of all lines of human aspiration that have hitherto sustained humanity on the march. Such is Sri Aurobindo’s dynamic world-view that bridges west and east, and past and future.

As the eminent English novelist, Dorothy M. Richardson, wrote to me after reading The Life Divine:

“Has there ever existed a more synthetic consciousness than Sri Aurobindo? Unifying he is to the limit of the term.” He is indeed.

¹ The Riddle of This World (1943). pp. 23 ff.
² The Life Divine (Centre of Education Edition (1960). p. 1259.
³ S. K. Maitra, The Meeting of the East and West in Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy (1968).
⁴ R. A. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1971).
⁵ The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-determination (1962 omnibus edition), pp. 724 if.
⁶ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1968). Pp. 80-81.
⁷ Ibid, p. 81.