History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c94.353

v7.c94.353

The writings of Shri Aurobindo are numerous and voluminous. For a list of his writings along with a few other works, vide the Bibliography (pp. 267-269) given by Shri Diwakar at the end of his work 'Mahāyogī'. The present author has read only the following works of Shri Aurobindo 'Yoga and its objects' (1938, a brief work in which 'adhyātma Yoga' is said to be higher than Hathayoga and Rājayoga); 'The Mother' (1937), 'Essays on the Gītā (5th ed. of 1949), 'The Synthesis of Yoga' (1948) which attempts to show that all three paths, viz. of knowledge (Jñānayoga), of Devotion (Bhaktiyoga) and of Divine works (Karmayoga) can be integrated; 'the problem of Rebirth' (published by the Aurobindo Ashram in 1952 after his passing away); 'Foundations of Indian culture' (essays brought together in one volume, revised by Shri Aurobindo), New York, 1953; Aurobindo's *Magnum Opus* is 'Life Divine' (originally in three volumes, now available in one of 1272 pages, published by the Aurobindo International University Centre, Pondicherry 1955). The present author has read only the first volume of this last work. Men of ordinary intelligence like the present writer find this philosophical work not easy to read, and are often at a loss to find out, in the flood of high sounding phrases used by Shri Aurobindo concerning the mind, overmind, supermind, his precise meaning. Only one sentence is cited here for sample (from p. 345 of the big one volume edition); ‘Overmind, intuition, even supermind not only must be principles inherent and involved in the Inconscience from which we arise in the evolution and inevitably destined to evolve, but are secretly present, occult actively with flashes of intuitive emergence in the cosmic activity of mind, life and matter.’ The present author regards the book ‘Foundations of Indian culture’ as the best of the works of Shri Aurobindo which he has read. Prof. R. D. Ranade in his Lectures on ‘Bhagavadgītā as a philosophy of God Realization’ (Nagpur, 1959 pp 163–176) submits to examination Aurobindo's ‘Essays on the Gītā’ and disagrees with him on some points. While these pages were passing through the press the present writer received a copy of ‘Integral Philosophy of Aurobindo’, a symposium edited by Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri and Dr. Frederic Spiegelberg (and published by Allen and Unwin, 1960), which contains 30 papers written by Indian and Western scholars on the Philosophy of Aurobindo, p. 32 defining the essence of integral Yoga and p. 44 distinguishes between ‘mind’ and ‘supermind’ (of Aurobindo's philosophy).