Indian Culture – Sri Aurobindo

Article by - Prakasha Shanbog

Penname: Prakasha Shanbog

Prakasha M.S
C601, Mantri Elite
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Bangalore - 560 076

PH: +91-9845371088
Email : [email protected]

Date: Sep 21, 2021

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 Indian Culture – Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo Ghosh(SA) born on 15 August, 1872 and lived until 5

December, 1950. He was a freedom fighter, poet, essayist, scholar, yogi and
philosopher. As some of you may be aware SA spent about fourteen years in
England during his younger days until the age of 21. His prime education was
in England ambience, however surrounded by British society it was Devine
plan that SA developed immense love, respect, devotion for India. After SA
returned to India, he spent quite a bit of years in Indian freedom struggle, later
he pursued spiritual journey and became great teacher of yoga and worked
for evolution of life on earth.
SA was a versatile writer who wrote with different forms of literature like
prose, poetry and essays. He was one of the pioneers of political awakening
in India. He founded an Ashram at Pondicherry, where, he also launched
'Arya' a monthly review. The principal writings of Sri Aurobindo include, in
prose, The Life Divine, considered as great work of metaphysics, The
Synthesis of Yoga, Secrets of the Vedas, Essays on the Gita, Essays Divine
and Human, The Renaissance in India and other essays on Indian Culture,
The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self- Determination,
Supermental Manifestation upon Earth, The Future Poetry, Thoughts and
Aphorisms and several volumes of letters. In poetry, his principal work is
"Savitri – a Legend and a Symbol" in blank verse.

This article attempts to summarize thoughts SA expressed on Indian Culture,

in the publication ‘The Renaissance of India’.

Civilization and culture

The words Civilization and culture are related to each other. A civilization is
generally defined as an advanced state of human society containing highly
developed forms of government, culture, industry, and common social norms.
Culture is a term used to denote the manifestation of the manner in which we
think, behave and act. Civilization refers to the process through which a
region or society, outstretches an advanced stage of human development and
organization
Indian Culture
The word ‘culture’ is the symbol of India, unique type of highly advanced and
multicolored culture evolved in India long ago. In spite of the regional, social
and linguistic diversities of the country there is always a basic unity in Indian
culture. Moreover, this culture has been maintained in spite of invasions from
outside and suppression by the British. This unbroken continuity of Indian
culture survives still it has the root of the deep spiritual foundation.
The essence of Indian Culture was extraordinarily high, ambitious and noble.
It held that man can become not only conscious of the eternal and the infinite
but to live in its power and universalize, spiritualize and divinize himself by
Self-knowledge. The whole aim of a great culture is to lift humans, who
actually lives in unfathomable ignorance. He/She is full of evil and discord and

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his actual life is a repulsive muddle of ugliness and jarring barbarisms.
He/She is egoistic, material, unspiritual and engrossed by the needs and
desires of his/her physical being. Culture teaches him/her, it gives knowledge,
it teaches reason, the law of good and unity, high law of his spirit. If a
civilization has not any of these aims it is not a great culture. As ancient India
has all these aims it is highest of all be and it surpasses all the others.
As already mentioned SA spent years in England during his younger days,
surrounded by western society it was Devine plan that SA developed
immense love, respect, devotion for India.
‘My homeland is not an inert piece of land, it is my mother, I worship it with
devotion’ was SA developed this imagination of motherland when he was in
England. In SA’s writings India was referred as ‘she’ and ‘her’.
SA explains the greatness of Ancient India through three aspects namely
Spirituality, Vitality and Intellectuality.

Spirituality
Her(India’s) spirituality has always maintained itself even in the decline of the
national vitality, that is which saved India always at every critical moment. Any
other nation under the same pressure would have long ago perished soul and
body. It is interesting to understand the ancient Spirit and characteristic soul
of India. Western writers, struck by the general metaphysical bent have
painted the wrong picture of the Indian spirituality and the blind followers of
west have submissively echoed these western writers.
Spirituality is the master-key of the Indian mind, the sense of the infinite is
native to it. India never lost hold of the insight, that life cannot be rightly seen
in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.
She was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces, it had a keen eye
for the physical sciences. She knew how to organize the arts of ordinary life.
But India saw that the physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right
relation to the supra-physical. She saw that the complexity of the universe
could not be explained in the present terms of man. There were other powers
behind, other powers within man himself of which he is normally unaware, that
he is conscious only of a small part of himself. The invisible always surrounds
the visible, the suprasensible, the sensible, as infinity always surrounds the
finite. She believed in that man has the power of exceeding himself, of
becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is. Truths known to
She long back have only recently begun to be seen in west. She saw the
myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God his own
ineffable eternity. She had understanding that there are ranges of life beyond
our life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these She saw
the grandeurs of the spirit. if human is trained his/her will and knowledge;
he/she could conquer the ranges of mind, become the spirit, become a god,
become one with God. With these long ages of insight and practice it was
ingrained in her’s spirituality, powerful psychic tendency. She is embedded
with ineradicable religious sense, idealism, Yoga, art and philosophy.
She is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception,
and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence. For by its virtue alone

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she has been one of the immortal nations; this alone has been the secret of
her amazing persistence and perpetual force of survival and revival.
Vitality
SA writing on vitality emphasizes it as ‘Stupendous Vitality’, her spirituality
does not flourish on earth in the void. The striking fact of past of India is her
stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost
unimaginably prolific creativeness. For ages she has been creating
abundantly nonstop, lavishly, with an inexhaustible many facets. She has
created republics, kingdoms and empires, philosophies, cosmologies and
sciences. She was instrumental in creating creeds and arts, poems and all
kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works. Her land is the
place of communities, societies, religious orders, laws, codes and rituals,
physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga. She was the mother of
systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts worldly, trades,
industries, fine crafts. The list is endless and, in each item, there is almost a
plethora of activity. She creates and creates and is not satisfied and is not
tired, there is no end for her creation. She expands too outside her borders,
with her ships cross the ocean and her wealth brims over to Judaea, Egypt
and Rome. She spread her arts and epics and creeds in remote islands. Her
traces are found in the sands of Mesopotamia, her religions conquer China
and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria, and the
insights of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists are reechoed by
prophets in other geographies. In all her creations there is the teeming of a
superabundant energy of life.
Intellectuality
Indian intellectuality is massively strong, serious and rich, it is robust and
minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail.
It was founded on seeking for the inner law and truth of things and having in
view always the possibility of conscientious practice. India has been
preeminently the land of the Dharma and the Shastra. She searched for the
inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity, its dharma, that found.
She labored to cast it into elaborate form and detailed law of arrangement its
application in fact and rule of life. Her first step was luminous with the
discovery of the Spirit, her second completed the discovery of the Dharma,
her third elaborated into detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra. But
none was exclusive, the three elements are always present. In this third step
the curious elaboration of all life into a science and an art assumes
extraordinary proportions.
The mere mass of the intellectual production during the period from Asoka
well into the invader’s epoch is something truly prodigious. There is no
historical parallel for such an intellectual activity before the invention of
printing and other facilities of modern science. All that mass of research and
production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities
and with no better record than the memory and with aid of palm-leaf.
Her intellectuality included philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic
and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine. The
inclusion goes on adding astronomy, sciences, all life, politics, society, arts

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from painting to dancing, summing to magnificent sixty-four accomplishments.
The knowledge could be useful to life or interesting to the mind, with practical
side details such as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each
of which had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its
abundant literature.
Thus an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital
creativeness and gust of life penetrating and scrupulous intelligence with
rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity created the
harmony of the ancient Indian culture.

Ages of Indian culture

Four distinct ages can be identified in the ages of Indian Culture namely Vedic
age, Vedanta, Post Vedic, and Purana-tantric system.

Vedic age
Vedic system took its outer foundation on the mind of the physical man with
perceived physical things, which represent the material world. The means,
symbols, rites, figures, to mediate between the Spirit and the normal human
mind were drawn from the most external physical things. Man's first and
primitive idea of the Divine can only come through his vision of external
Nature and the sense of a superior Power or Powers concealed behind her
phenomena,

the Vedic system took natural sense and feeling of the physical man and it led
him to the psychic and spiritual truths of his own being and the being of the
cosmos. There is constant interchange between the individual and the
universal powers of the cosmos which secretly supports all the process of life
and develops the action of Nature.
The Vedic Rishis gave a psychic function to the cosmic powers, they spoke of
the higher Truth, Right, Law of which the cosmic powers were the guardians.
The deeper truth of these was reserved for the initiates, those who were ready
to understand and practice the inner sense. Veda is full of words which, as the
Rishis themselves express it, are secret words that give their inner meaning.
A Truth, Right and Law sustains and governs all the levels of Nature, in
essence, it takes in them different but cognate forms. Rains, lightening, wind
blowing and all activities are governed by Cosmic powers. There is the outer
physical light, another higher and inner light which is the vehicle of psychic
consciousness inmost light of spiritual illumination. Surya, the Sun-God, was
the lord of the physical Sun; but he is at the same time to the Vedic seer-poet
the giver of the rays of knowledge which illumine the mind and he is too the
soul and energy and body of the spiritual illumination. All the Cosmic Powers
have this outer and this inner function, their known and their secret Names. All
their external character are powers of physical Nature, and all their inner
meaning have a psychic function and psychological attributions.
Vedanta

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The Upanishads often called Vedanta have always been recognized as the
crown and end part of Veda, they are the crowning outcome of the Vedic
discipline and experience. Truths visualized and understood by the initiates
reached the ordinary humans through Vedanta. One of the interesting incident
of Vedanta age depicted in Vedanta is of Satyakama Jabali, son of a servant-
girl who did not know who was his father, becoming great teacher of Vedanta,
this establishes the fact the knowledge was open to seeker irrespective of
their background. The work that was done in this period became the firm
bedrock of Indian spirituality. More and more generalized intellectual, ethical
and aesthetic evolved in this period progressing the human race in its cycle of
civilization. The Vedantic seers renewed the Vedic truth by extricating it from
its cryptic symbols and casting it into a highest and most direct and powerful
language of intuition and inner experience.

Post Vedic
This age of Indian civilization was distinguished by the rise of the great
philosophies, by a copious, vivid, multi directional thoughts, many-sided epic
literature, with the beginnings of art and science. It was supported by the
evolution of a vigorous and complex society, by the formation of large
kingdoms and empires, by manifold formative activities of all kinds and great
systems of living and thinking. The evolution never lost sight of the spiritual
motive, never missed the touch of the religious sense, Science too developed,
but it came second only as an auxiliary power. It was through subtle
philosophies that the intellect of India attempted to analyze by the reason and
logical faculty what had formerly been by more living force through intuition
and the soul's experience. But the philosophic mind started from the data
these mightier powers Upanishads. The underlying admission was that
spiritual experience is a greater thing and it is guide more than the clarities of
the reasoning intelligence. The epic literature is full of a strong and free
intellectual and ethical thinking. Art in India, dwelt much upon life, with a focus
on religious-philosophical mind colored by suggestions of the spiritual and the
infinite. Indian society developed with an unsurpassed organizing ability,
stable effectiveness, coordination of the mundane life of interest and desire.
kama, artha, governed always action by a reference at every point to the
moral and religious law, the Dharma. Indian religion followed this line of
evolution and kept its inner continuity with its Vedic and Vedantic origins.
Many of the Buddhism concepts find roots in Vedic and Vedantic origins.
Purana-tantric system
This age was the transformation of symbol and ritual and ceremony or a
substitution of new associated figures, with hints to the original system. It is
development of novel idea-forms from the seed of the original thinking. The
Vedic cosmic powers were overshadowed by the great Trinity, Brahma-
Vishnu-Shiva during this phase, even though they kept their hold by their
outer cosmic sense.
The house of Fire was replaced by the temple, the karmic ritual was
transformed into the devotional temple ritual. Mental images of the Vedic
cosmic powers figured in the mantras yielded to more precise conceptual

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forms of the two great deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and of their Shaktis and their
offshoots. These new concepts stabilized in physical images which were
made the basis both for internal adoration and for the external worship. The
psychic and spiritual mystic endeavor of the Vedic hymns, disappeared into
the less intensely luminous but more wide and rich and complex psycho-
spiritual inner life of Puranic and Tantric religion and Yoga. It was rather an
effort, to open the general mind of the people to a higher and deeper range of
inner truth and experience and feeling.
the newly evolved system became guide to inner mind even in the common
man, awakening the soul and to led him/her through things towards a highest
spiritual truth. It attempted to bring the masses of people into the temple of the
Spirit rather than leave them.
The central spiritual truth remained in both systems the same, the truth of the
One in many aspects. The Trinity is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead
and Brahman, the Shaktis are energies of the one Energy of the highest
divine Being. The idea of the Divinity in every creature was popularized to a
great extent, with occasional manifestation of the Divine in humanity which led
to the worship of the Avataras. The systems of Yoga developed on the same
common basis. All led through many kinds of psycho-physical, inner vital,
inner mental and psycho-spiritual methods to the common aim of all Indian
spirituality, a greater consciousness and complete union with the One and
Divine.
Conclusion
The concept of Sri Aurobindo, Civilization and Culture is not only essential for
the progress and welfare of social development but also useful to become a
civilized and well cultured person in the society. Civilized and cultured person
can handle any type of problem and gives the shape to his society as well as
nation. Development of the mental faculties of man will make him civilized and
cultured.

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