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ARTICLE : Sri Aurobindo on Early Indian Literature
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To: soc-religion-hindu@uunet.uu.net
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Subject: ARTICLE : Sri Aurobindo on Early Indian Literature
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From: Srinivasa Chakravarthy <srini@monod.neusc.bcm.tmc.edu>
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Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 13:01:47 -0600
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian, soc.culture.indian.kerala, soc.culture.indian.karnataka, soc.culture.indian.marathi, soc.culture.indian.gujarati, soc.culture.indian.delhi, soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir, soc.culture.tamil, soc.culture.bengali, soc.religion.hindu
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Organization: Baylor College of Medicine
The Early Indian Literature:
"The early mind of India in the magnificent youth of the nation,
when a fathomless spiritual insight was at work, a subtle intuitive
vision and a deep, clear and gently outlined intellectual and ethical
thinking and heroic action and creation which founded and traced the
plan
and made the permanent structure of her unique culture and civilisation,
is represented by four of her supreme productions of her genius, the
Veda,
the Upanishads and the two vast epics, and each of them is of a kind,
a form and an intention not easily paralleled in any other literature.
The first two are the visible foundations of her spiritual and religious
being, the others a large creative interpretation of her greatest period
of life, of the ideas that informed and the ideals that governed it
and the figures in which she saw man and Nature and God and the powers
of the universe. The Veda gave us the first types and figures of these
things as seen and formed by an imaged spiritual intuition and
psychological and religious experience; the Upanishads constantly
breaking through and beyond form and symbol and image without
entirely abandoning them, ... reveal in a unique kind of poetry
the ultimate and unsurpassable truths of self and God and man and the
world ...
"The Veda is the creation of an early intuitive and symbolic
mentality to which the later mind of man strongly intellectualised
... has grown a total stranger. It is not surprising therefore
that the Veda should have become unintelligible to our minds
except in its most outward shell of language, and that even very
imperfectly known owing to the obstacle of an antique and ill
understood diction, and that the most inadequate interpretations should
be made which reduce this great creation of the young and splendid mind
of humanity to a botched and defaced scrawl, an incoherent hotch-potch
of the absurdities of a primitive imagination perplexing what would
be otherwise the quite plain, flat and coomon record of a naturalist
religion which mirror only .. the crude and materialistic desires
of a barbaric life mind. The Veda became to the later scholastic and
ritualistic idea of Indian priests and pundits nothing better than
a book of mythology and sacrificial ceremonies; European
scholars seeking in it for what was alone to them of any rational
interest, the history, myths and popular religious notions of
a primitive people, have done yet worse wrong to the Veda and by
insisting on a wholly external rendering still farther stripped it
of its spiritual interest and its poetic greatness and beauty."
(to be continued)
Sri Aurobindo
From "Foundations of Indian Culture"
