INTRODUCTION
Someone once mentioned of O. Henry, the short story writer, that the best way to select his hundred best was to put all his stories in a hat and pick up randomly one hundred of them! The same could be easily said in choosing the best work of Sri Aurobindo by putting the names of all his works in a similar hat and picking one. Each of his books gives a unique slice of a particular domain relating to our country’s culture and history. His grasp and understanding of Indian culture were near complete, and it is a tragedy that he was largely ignored by the builders of “new” India at independence for some inexplicable reasons. We had, in fact, the blueprints, in the works of people like Sri Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy, to construct a strong country based on foundations that were still holding despite the ravages of long colonial attacks.
The spiritual foundation of the country was intact, but our builders, after independence, managed to ignore those too and look completely westward to lay the principles of a supposedly new country. The irony was that we were the longest-surviving civilisation and culture for at least five thousand years, and our leaders could not look at our civilisational past to see how this might have happened. We must have had our strengths.
Anyway, this fabulous series of essays called the “The Foundations of Indian Culture and the Renaissance of India” (The Incarnate Word, Volume 14) is a brilliant depiction of the Indian past. Arya magazine published these essays between 1918 and 1921. The initial spark was a book written by William Archer (1917) called “India and the Future,” in which he completely denigrated the country and its people for having no culture, civilisation, arts, or sciences. It was a polemical attack, and Sri Aurobindo started what he termed an “aggressive defence” of Indian culture.
The larger idea of Archer in calling Indian people “barbaric” was to deny them self-rule, a demand of Indian revolutionaries after the first world war. Though it is the starting point, Sri Aurobindo expands these essays to give the most breathtaking exposition of the Indian past and how it could become a solution for the future of human civilisation if assimilated properly with modernity. He takes a grand sweep of the ancient Indian culture in a vision possible only for a Yogi of the highest order.
Here, he not only demonstrates the greatness of Indian culture but shows how its central point of spirituality should become the essence of her future development. For him, this core essential spirituality was the future of all humanity. India’s mission was to develop this spirituality in harmony with the modern world to elevate individuals and communities to the highest realms of the eternal.
A disclaimer: This three-part article is a summary, paraphrasing, and abridgement of the essays contained in the original volume to motivate readers to go for the full original. Except for the introduction and concluding remarks, this article has the sole authorship of Sri Aurobindo. The direct quotes have been highlighted at a few places. This is a humble effort to shorten and abridge the essays for easier consumption, especially for those who are not exposed to the writings of the legendary man. The divine literally shines through in his writings, and this particular book should have been compulsory reading in all schools since the beginning of our post-colonial journey. A lot of deracination and derooting, seen as a widespread phenomenon in the Indian population, would not have existed. Sadly, this was not to be.
THE ISSUE: IS INDIA CIVILISED?
William Archer had made an extravagant rationalistic attack on Indian culture and raised the credibility of the survival of Indian civilisation. John Woodroffe had previously tried to defend Indian civilisation against Archer’s polemics by highlighting its distinct spiritual value. Archer proposed that India must either Europeanize and materialise itself, or else her cultural superiors must keep her under subjection.
John Woodroffe invites vigorous self-defence, but Sri Aurobindo feels that the only sound strategy is vigorous aggression, like Swami Vivekananda’s speech in Chicago or the Swadeshi “extremist” movement. Apolitical and social Europeanisation can only bring a cultural and spiritual death to India. India alone, with whatever decline, has remained faithful to the spiritual motive. This successive passion for English ways, Continental culture, and revolutionary Russia has the potential to rationalise India beyond recognition. However, with proper engagement, we will be the leader in a new world phase. The present conflict, albeit temporary, should culminate on a higher plane and be a preparation for oneness.
Sri Aurobindo writes:
(For) the normal Western mind…The inner existence is formed and governed by the external powers. India’s constant aim has been, on the contrary, to find a basis of living in the higher spiritual truth and to live from the inner spirit outwards, to exceed the present way of mind, life, and body…
Science and philosophy have a basis in reason and materialism in the western world. However, Indian ideals would contend that while reason and science have their place, the real truth goes beyond them. Even science is constantly arriving at conclusions that spiritual knowledge of ancient India had already affirmed. In the desire for a universal world culture, there is danger of the disappearance of a distinctive Indian civilisation. We need to cultivate both spiritual and material tendencies. However, if the spiritual ideal points the final way to a triumphant harmony of manifested life, then fidelity to Indian values is our best way of human progress.
Western culture is proud of its successful modernisation, but it suffers from unsoundness in many respects. The application of ideal reason to inner life has not matched the application of scientific reason. From an evolutionary perspective, no country or continent has ever been fully civilised. If we define civilisation as a harmony of spirit, body, and mind, this has never happened.
Both blind criticism and worship of the Indian past are faulty. A reshaping of India’s spiritual essence must take place under the influence of the West, but its faithfulness to the core essence should stay intact. This requires an unfailing spiritual and intellectual courage to defend our culture against the ignorant Occidental criticism while simultaneously acknowledging our errors.
The European mind places first the principle of growth through struggle and later achieving some kind of unity. Indian culture proceeded on the principle that strove to find its base in a unity and reached out again towards some greater oneness. Instead of aggressively blotting out every other culture—the mark of the Occident—India must affirm her own deeper truths and help in the further evolution of collective humanity.
A RATIONALISTIC CRITIC ON INDIAN CULTURE
One can see a foreign culture through an eye of sympathy or as a dispassionate critic. The third is a hostile critic like William Archer. His book, though a journalistic fake, does help in a comprehensive view of the entire enemy case. It has an ulterior political aim to damage the Indian case for self-government. His ignorance and superficiality on subjects like metaphysics, religions, music, art, architecture, drama, and literature prevent any kind of rational assessment of Indian culture. Only those who possess a culture can judge the intrinsic value of its productions.
“Brahminical” civilisation does not imply dominant sacerdotalism, for the priest has had no hand in shaping our great culture. India’s main motives have been shaped by philosophic thinkers and religious minds, the Rishis, not all of them of Brahmin birth. A class developed to preserve the spiritual traditions, knowledge, and sacred law of the race; they could do this for thousands of years. The central feature of Indian culture has always remained spiritual, from which everything else derives. The culture of a people has three aspects: philosophy and religion; art, poetry, and literature; and society and politics. Together they make up its soul, mind, and body.
Archer tries to prove Indian philosophy and religion to be an irrational monstrosity. Philosophy in Europe is a pursuit apart from life, and ultimate truths are derived from pure reason. The Indian mind holds, on the contrary, that the seer of spiritual truth is the best guide of the religious, moral, and practical life. Our philosophy of the ultimate unthinkable and unknowable is not based on verifiable “scientific” experiments. However, Yoga is a well-tested means of opening up these greater realms, but most, like Archer, are unwilling to take this up before commenting on Indian metaphysics.
Indian culture, with its spiritual nobility, differs from and may be superior to the aims of the western rationalist. To say that Indian philosophy has led away from the study of nature is gross ignorance. No nation before the modern epoch carried out scientific research in all fields as successfully as India did in ancient times. From the earliest Vedic thought, the Indian mind held the same general powers in its spiritual, psychological, and physical existence. The ancient civilisation founded itself very explicitly upon four human interests: desire (Kama), material needs (Artha), ethical conduct (Dharma), and spiritual liberation (Moksha). There was no preaching about a general rush to the cave and the hermitage. The vivid literature and education in various fields of arts, sciences, politics, and administration were never otherworldly directions.
Indian culture, always seeing a self within us greater than the ego, recognised all human possibilities. Asceticism is vital to any culture, but Buddhism, by its exaggeration of asceticism, disturbed the balance. Archer preposterously misunderstands karma and reincarnation as a doctrinal negation of present life. In fact, both karma and reincarnation enormously enhance the value of effort and action. The nature of the present act determines not only our immediate but our subsequent future. At the same time, the idea that our present sufferings are the result of our own past action imparts a calm that the Western intelligence finds difficult to understand.
Archer’s attack is on the irrationality and unethical nature of Hinduism. The European mind characteristically has the cult of reason and the cult of life. Secularism is a necessary consequence of this, where both the infrarational and suprarational refuges of the religious spirit have ceased to exist. But in Asia, there has been no incompatibility between these two powers and the religious spirit. When confronted with Indian religion, thought, and culture, the Western rajasic and pragmatic mind finds it incomprehensible. Indian culture admires the self-possessed sattvic man for whom calm thought, spiritual knowledge, and the inner life are the things of importance. Only by remembering its fundamental character can we comprehend the rituals and philosophy of Hinduism, a non-dogmatic, inclusive religion. The accusation of a lack of ethical values is patently false, since the idea of Dharma is, next to the idea of the Infinite, its major chord. English scholars with a Christian bias were misled by the stress that Indian philosophy lays on knowledge rather than on works as the means of salvation.
Sri Aurobindo says:
The universal embracing Dharma in the Indian idea is a law of ideal perfection for the developing mind and soul of man. This ideal was not a purely moral or ethical conception… it was also intellectual, religious, social, and aesthetic, the flowering of the whole ideal man, the perfection of the total human nature. This was the mind that was at the base of the Indian civilisation and gave its characteristic stamp to all the cultures.
The Western impression has been that Hinduism is an entirely otherworldly system, oblivious to the here and now. The Indian conception of life starts from a deeper centre and moves along fewer external lines. However, it looks through the form and searches for the spirit in things everywhere. Man, himself, is a spirit that uses life and body. A gradual spiritual progress is the secret of the almost universal Indian acceptance of reincarnation, the pivot of the Indian conception of existence. There is room within it for all terrestrial aims and types. Indian culture did not impoverish the richness of the grand game of human life, and it kept always in sight two main truths: first, our being in its growth has stages; secondly, life is complex, and so is the nature of man.
In the initial movement of life, self-interest and desire (kama, artha) are inevitable. The tendency of man to seek after a just and perfect law of his living finds its truth in the Dharma. But even this was only the foundation and preparation for another highest thing— the aim of liberation, moksa. This aim ennobled the individual’s entire life.
There is nothing in the structure of Indian civilisation and its conception of life that shows inferiority to other human cultures. While it may not be perfect, final, or complete, this is a reality shared by all cultures. When Indian culture first tried to figure out how to balance life and spirit, it used two ideas to help it: the system of the four Varnas and the four Ashramas, which represent the four social classes and the four stages of a person’s development. We must not judge the ancient Chaturvarnya by its disintegration and parody—the caste system. The Indian idea fixed the status of a man not by his birth, but by his capacities and inner nature. However, in reality, birth became the foundation of Varna. Yet at no time was adherence to the economic rule quite absolute, and the greatness, originality, and permanent value lay in the real object of all orders—a liberating knowledge of moksha.
For this final end, Indian culture provided a framework, a scale, or a ladder. This was the object of the four Ashramas: the student, the householder, the recluse, and the free super-social man. This profoundly conceived cycle kept the full course of the human spirit in its view. This spiritual tradition has fortunately stayed with us even in the worst days and now rises once more to give the impulse of a lasting renaissance.
RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
Indian culture made spirituality the highest aim of life. The European mind finds itself unable to make out what Hinduism is without rigid dogmas, eternal damnation, or papal heads. It admits all beliefs (including atheism and agnosticism) and permits all possible spiritual experiences and religious adventures. Indian belief, unlike the western one, is that intellectual truth is only one of the doors, and the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite.
The endless variety of Indian philosophy, cultural practices, art forms, literature, and religion, which so puzzles the European, is itself a sign of a superior religious culture. The aggressive and illogical idea of a single dogma or religion for all mankind finds little support in the mature Indian view, which has always allowed a perfect liberty of thought and of worship in man’s approach to the Infinite. A large number of authorised scriptures; Kuladharma, the power of family and communal tradition; the religious authority of the Brahmins; and Parampara, the succession of spiritual teachers, were the different approaches to the Eternal.
Indian religion never denied intermediary forms, names, and powers of the Eternal and the Infinite. Monism, pantheism, or polytheism hardly do justice to Indian religion. Western definitions cannot adequately describe Indian religion. It is necessary to emphasise this synthetic quality and embrace the unity of Indian religious thought. The Hindu religion is founded upon three fundamentals: a) The One Existence of the Veda, to whom the sages give different names; b) the manifold way of man’s approach to the Eternal and Infinite; and c) that the Infinite can be met by each individual soul in itself.
The Vedic and Post-Vedic Ages
Europe put the whole emphasis on the outward life. India characteristically discovered our deepest being as the first necessity and made a spiritual life the aim of existence. In its earliest Vedic form, it looked at outer nature. But even in its external side, the Vedic religion gave a psychic function to the godheads worshipped by the people. Deeply concealed were the higher spiritual truths reserved for the initiates. The Upanishads were the crown and end of the Veda, or Vedanta.
The post-Vedic age saw the rise of the major philosophies, a copious, many-sided epic literature, art, science, a complex society, kingdoms, and empires, by manifold formative activities of all kinds and major systems of living and thinking. An extreme richness of both life experience and the spiritual life interacted, preserving the balance of Indian culture.
Changes happened, not through protest, but by a continuous development of its organic life. The apparent discontinuity in Buddhism was more apparent than real. The Vedantic archetypes matched or traced the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, its ethical system, and universal compassion. What hurt Buddhism was its trenchant affirmations and exclusive negations, which were not sufficiently compatible with the native flexibility of Indian religious consciousness. Indian religion absorbed all that it could of Buddhism but assured its continuity with the ancient Vedanta.
Later, the rituals and ceremonies, along with the pantheon of the great Trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, and Shakti worship, gained prominence. The Purano-Tantric stage was a successful effort to open the people’s minds to a deeper inner truth, experience, and feeling. The central spiritual truth remained the same. The Trinity is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead and Brahman. The idea of the divinity in man was popularised to an extraordinary extent, and Yoga became popular.
The Triple Quartette
The right practice of life was, in the view of Indian culture, a Dharma. Indian culture recognises the spirit as the truth of our being and our life as a growth and evolution of the spirit. The unique and characteristic Indian approach to individual or community spiritual attainment was the triple “quartette.” Its first circle (kama, artha, dharma, moksha) was the synthesis and gradation of the fourfold object of life: desire, personal interest, moral right, and spiritual liberation. Its second circle was the four-fold order (Varnas) of society, carefully graded with economic functions and having deeper cultural, ethical, and spiritual significances. Its third was the four-fold (Ashramas) stages of life: student, householder, forest recluse, and free super-social man.
An endeavour to cast the whole of life into a religious mould was according to the varying natural capacity of man, adhikara. Indian religion wisely admitted the infinite differences between humans of capacities: one physically minded (tamasic); another, capable of deeper psycho-spiritual experience (rajasic); and a third (sattvic), the most developed of all. For the first type, it meant a mass of ceremony, ritual, strict outward rule, and compelling symbols, which may seem like half-awakened religionism, but they have their concealed truth and psychic value. The second type is capable of understanding more clearly the psychic truths. But those things were openings for the third and greatest type of human being. Beyond symbols, he reached for absolute, universal love. Choosing a way, a guide, or an ishta-devata (a special god), understanding one’s nature (guna), and Yoga were important components in this evolution.
Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha
Indian culture distinguished between the lower (worldly) and the higher learning (transcendental), yet it did not create a chasm between them. Despite the summits’ asceticism and austerity, Indian ethics did not inhibit man’s aesthetic or hedonistic nature. Regarding the political, commercial, and social being, the paramount rule of the culture was that the higher a man’s position and power, the greater should be the call on him of Dharma. The king himself was charged to live and rule as the guardian and servant of the Dharma.
The aim of a powerful culture is to teach people to live by reason, by the law of unity, beauty, and harmony, and by some high law of spirit. The decline and arrested growth of Indian culture is true, but misfortune is not proof of the absence of culture. But what accounts for the remarkable and obstinate survival of India?
Our critic looks at our great limitations and insists on our renouncing our own culture and becoming docile followers of the West. We have the right to question if science, practical reason, efficiency, and unrestrained economic production truly represent the entirety of reality and the ideal of civilisation. The ugliness it has produced points to West’s imperfections too. India must not imitate the West but develop what is best in her own spirit and culture.
Indian Culture: A Unique Synthesis of Spirituality and Life
The critic says that the culture of India is both in theory and practice wrong and deleterious to the true aim of human living. However, even nihilistic Buddhism and illusionism gave a powerful discipline to the life of man on earth, society, art, and thought. Presently, the most vital movements of Indian thought and religion are again moving towards the synthesis of spirituality and life, which was an essential part of the ancient Indian ideal.
Archer, ignorantly and arrogantly, denies any practical value of Indian culture. India has been a home of solid realities, of a firm grappling with the problems of thought and life, of measured and wise organisation, and of great action as any other considerable centre of civilisation. In every field—science, literature (Sanskrit, Pali, and vernacular languages), architecture, sculpture, and painting—she went further than any country before the modern era. India not only has the long roll of her great saints, sages, poets, creators, scientists, scholars, and legists; she has had her great rulers, administrators, and heroes, the mind that plans, and the seeing force that builds.
By virtue of its culture, the whole nation shared in the common life. Economic benefits may not have been equal, but their religious life was intense. From the outcastes themselves have come saints revered by all. The entire notion that the Indian people lack life, will, and activity due to their culture is, at best, a myth. Instead of the egoistic will, the Indian mind is more interested in a calm, self-controlling, and even self-effacing personality—an effacement that is but an enhancement of value, power, and personality. This difference between the western rajasic and the eastern sattvic does not imply an inferiority in the aesthetics of Indian life and creation. Surely the Indian is the more evolved in spiritual conception.
…Continued in Part 2
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