The Life of Sri Aurobindo by A.B. Purani

Namaste,

Sri Aurobindo lived an amazing life. He was a scholar of Greek classics at Cambridge, college professor, revolutionary and nationalist, and a mystic. He left behind a prodigious output of writing, which was cataloged in the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.



Until I read The Life of Sri Aurobindo by A.B. Purani, I thought that his life could be neatly organized by his various careers and places of residence. Sri Aurobindo began his revolutionary activities at Cambridge, continued them through his tenure in Baroda and his stay in Calcutta, and effectively ended them when he departed to Pondicherry. Even after his withdrawal from politics in 1920, he continued to write cogently about worldly affairs. His sadhana साधना began as long ago as his stay in Baroda (1893-1906), intensified when he was imprisoned in Alipor jail, and culminated in Pondicherry. His life could not be as neatly compartmentalized as I had thought.

Through reading The Life of Sri Aurobindo, I also began to understand why his writings are so difficult to read. Jeffery Paine, author of Father India, told me that Sri Aurobindo ultimately wrote for himself. After I read the book, I came to believe that the problem is that Sri Aurobindo was trying to articulate in words and intellectualize mystical experience. He acknowledged,

What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people really do not understand what I write …

Another problem is that Sri Aurobindo invented new vocabulary. His levels of consciousness, for example, seem to correspond to the koshas कोश or sheaths of the individual.

I drew inspiration from Sri Aurobindo’s vision for India, Asia, and the world, which he wrote for the occasion of India’s independence, August 15, 1947, which was also his birthday. Other readers will find The Life of Sri Aurobindo revelatory and inspiring.

Auroville

As Sri Aurobindo went deeper and deeper in the spiritual life, he turned over operation of his ashram to The Mother née Mirra Alfassa.

Some years after Sri Aurobindo's mahasamadhi in 1950, The Mother had a vision for a utopian community to bring people from all over the world together for spiritual evolution. This was the beginning of Auroville.

An unpaved road lined with shops that cater to "counterculture" types leads to Auroville. On the day we visited, it was pouring, and the road was gutted. When we ventured out of the car, red clay mud clung to our shoes.

The centerpiece of Auroville is the Matrimandir, a dome-shaped building with a golden exterior. One can go inside the Matirmandir to meditate only at certain hours of the day, and then, only with permission. In fact, one can view the exterior of the Matrimandir only at particular hours of the day.


Matrimandir, Auroville

No flowers, incense, or images are allowed in the Matrimandir. If meditation is withdrawal from sense-objects, the Matrimandir enables it!

Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Union Territory of Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry) is a former French colony that provided refuge to Indian nationalists who fled prosecution under British rule.

Sri Aurobindo settled in Pondicherry in 1910 and stayed there until he left his body in 1950. He withdrew from politics and devoted himself to spiritual work in the forty years he lived in Pondicherry.

On a previous trip, we visited Sri Aurobindo Nivas in Vadodara (formerly Baroda), where Sri Aurobindo lived from 1893-1907. It was a logical progression that we visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.

Our visit to the Ashram was a short one. We had darshan at the cenotaph for the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.


Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother

Then we went into the bookstore, which has a comprehensive collection of books by or about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. In a room off the bookstore, the chair in which Sri Aurobindo is seated in the photograph below is preserved:

Sri Aurobindo on Hinduism

Found through Hindu Press International:


Sri Aurobindo

Hinduism gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavor of the human spirit. An immense, many-sided and many staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, Sanatana Dharma. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)

UPDATE: This item has been cross-posted at Savitri Era Open Forum.

On ahimsa

Hinduism is often believed to be synonymous with ahimsa (अहिंसा); in fact, this article on Ahimsa from Wikipedia says it's at the core of Hinduism and cites the influence of the Bhagavad-Gita (भागवद् गीता) on Gandhi.

Michael Danino notes in his article The Gita in Today's World that:

To the West, there is either brute force or pacifism, either violence or non-violence ; to the Gita the truth is neither one nor the other, but the conscious use of force to protect dharma.

I would argue, however, that this duality is not (or perhaps no longer) exclusive to the West.

Danino concludes with this statement from Sri Aurobindo:

We will use only soul-force and never destroy by war or any even defensive employment of physical violence? Good, though until soul-force is effective, the Asuric force [from Asura असुर, or power-hungry being] in men and nations tramples down, breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes, as we see it doing today, but then at its ease and unhindered, and you have perhaps caused as much destruction of life by your abstinence as others by resort to violence.