Meditations on the Isha Upanishad

Tracing the Philosophical Vision of Sri Aurobindo

— Debashish Banerji

		Price: Rs 350 Hard Cover Pages: 142 Dimensions (in cms): 14x21     Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Samiti in collaboration with Maha Bodhi Book Agency, Kolkata ISBN: 978-93-84721-47-3
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About Meditations on the Isha Upanishad

The author has written four meditations on the Isha Upanishad, drawing on Sri Aurobindo’s commentary on this Upanishad as well as on the larger body of his other works. These meditations follow Sri Aurobindo’s indication that the central idea of the Upanishad, a reconciliation and harmony of fundamental opposites, is worked out symmetrically in four successive movements of thought. The author’s exposition and study of these movements reveal how centrally the Isha Upanishad accords to the philosophical vision of Sri Aurobindo and are particularly pertinent to understanding the source of inspiration for The Life Divine.

REVIEW

The eighteen verses of the Isha Upanishad are packed with an extraordinary wealth of intuitive insight into the deepest mysteries of existence. This key scripture of early Vedanta, as Debashish Banerji observes in his illuminating reflections on it, “functions as a mantra to wake up the secret memory of human identity with the Lord in the heart of all things, leading towards cosmic self-realization.” This being the case, it is not surprising that Sri Aurobindo drew so much upon this Upanishad in presenting his life-affirming spiritual philosophy. Indeed, his various commentaries on this short work – though he left most of them incomplete and unpublished – exceed in volume his writings on all the other Upanishads put together. His last three unfinished commentaries on the Isha before the launching of the Arya in August 1914 bore the title, “The Life Divine”. It was only with the first issue of that monthly journal that Sri Aurobindo adopted the title The Life Divine for a work of original philosophy, beginning to publish it serially along with The Synthesis of Yoga, The Secret of the Veda and his final commentary on the Isha Upanishad. The book under review elucidates the meaning of the Upanishad mainly in the light of that commentary.

The introduction to these meditations is written in a more academic style than the rest of the book. It situates the Upanishads in general and the Isha in particular in the history of Indian “wisdom literature”, discussing especially how they are related to the mystical symbolism of the Vedic hymns that preceded them. Drawing parallels with ancient Greece, the author points out how Sri Aurobindo’s interest in the Upanishads resembles in some ways the interest of modern European philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze in the pre-Socratic origins of Western thought. The process of meditation is also clarified in the introduction with a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Meditation, Banerji explains, means in this context an “intensification of thought” through “a focused mental dwelling on the idea, which leads to identity”. His own meditations on the Isha, he adds, “are offered in such a spirit”.

The rest of the book is structured according to the four “movements” into which Sri Aurobindo divided the text of the Upanishad in the analysis he published in the Arya. Each of the four chapters explores one of these movements. The profundity of these meditations can be illustrated by a typical example. The following passage is a comment on the phrase at the end of the second verse, na karma lipyatenare (“action cleaves not to a man”):

Once again, many layers of meaning seem condensed in this fragment of a couplet. Firstly, there is something in us which is untouched by work or any action, —that is the dimension of the Lord, the Infinite potential which remains Infinite within the finitude of becoming. This remains untouched, irrespective of how much of it appears or is mobilized in the becoming. Even if an infinity of it appears, an infinity remains unmanifest. We hear once more the echo of the Pūrnam verses of the preamble to this Upaniṣad. This is the unborn dimension of being within us, an inexhaustible potency that each of us carries. The entire universe carries this at its center, and each entity in the universe carries it.

Insofar as Sri Aurobindo’s engagement with the Isha Upanishad played a conspicuous role in the formulation of his philosophy, this book clarifies a major influence on his thought. In this respect it fulfils the promise of the subtitle, “Tracing the Philosophical Vision of Sri Aurobindo”. Its scope is limited, however, by the fact that it focuses mostly on the definitive commentary on this Upanishad published by Sri Aurobindo in 1914–15. His extensive previous essays and drafts, going back almost fifteen years to when he was in Baroda, are mentioned only
briefly. References to the Isha introduced into The Life Divine when Sri Aurobindo revised it in 1939–40 are also discussed, as we will see, but their significance for understanding the later development of his vision and experience is not fully brought out. These omissions need not be considered defects of the book, since it achieves admirably what it sets out to do. At the same time, it leaves room for much more work to be done. It is to be hoped that it will stimulate further research.

The evolution of Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of the Isha Upanishad from tentative essays found in notebooks he used around 1900, when he had not yet taken up Yoga, to his authoritative treatment of it in the Arya, is a fascinating story that remains to be told in detail; but it would require another book of a somewhat different kind. Among other things, it would involve examining the shift in Sri Aurobindo’s attitude toward Shankara that occurred from the days when he could still write deferentially that “Shankaracharya’s is an authority which no man can dare to belittle” (CWSA vol. 17, p. 201) to the ironic tone of his aphorism, written around 1913:

Three times God laughed at Shankara, first, when he returned to burn the corpse of his mother, again when he commented on the Isha Upanishad and the third time when he stormed about India preaching inaction. (CWSA vol. 2, p. 463)

After publishing his last translation and analysis of the Isha in the first year of the Arya, Sri Aurobindo did not again comment verse by verse on the text as a whole. But its ideas continued to underlie fundamental aspects of his philosophy. The whole plan of The Life Divine with its two books, “Omnipresent Reality and the Universe” and “The Knowledge and the Ignorance – The Spiritual Evolution”, is clearly indebted to this Upanishad, with its opening evocation of the Lord pervading the movement of the universe and its central reconciliation of Vidya and Avidya, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the consciousness of the One and the consciousness of the Many.

The Life Divine in its original form appeared in the Arya from August 1914 to January 1919. In 1939–40, Sri Aurobindo extensively revised it. He greatly expanded Book Two, substantially rewriting many chapters and adding entirely new ones. Book One was more lightly revised, but a long chapter was added entitled “Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya”. The reference here to verses 15 and 16 of the Isha Upanishad, beginning “The face of Truth is hidden by a golden lid…”, is highly significant. It shows that Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of this Upanishad had continued to evolve in the twenty-five years since he commented on it in the Arya.

In discussing these verses, Professor Banerji makes good use of this passage from The Life Divine, but passes over the difference between Sri Aurobindo’s earlier explanation of the golden lid as a “brilliant formation of concepts and percepts” preventing “self-vision and all-vision” and his later understanding of it as the veil of the Overmind covering the supramental Truth. It should be noted that during the Arya period Sri Aurobindo had not yet coined the word Overmind. The introduction of this term into The Life Divine marks one of the most important developments between the 1914–19 and 1939–40 versions. From the standpoint of tracing his philosophical vision as well as his spiritual experience, therefore, the reinterpretation of the golden lid may be taken to represent a momentous change reflecting a higher realization after Sri Aurobindo’s siddhi of November 1926. But a discussion of this point would be best framed in the context of a thorough study of the revision of The Life Divine. That is a complex topic that could form the subject of a separate book.

Meditations on the Īśa Upaniṣad is sure to deepen the reader’s understanding of an essential work of the philosophical and spiritual literature of India and the world. The Sanskrit verses are printed in Devanagari with transliteration; but this is not an introduction to the Upanishad for learning purposes and there are no word-for-word explanations. Those with sufficient knowledge of Sanskrit and some previous familiarity with the Isha may find, however, that by the end of the book they can recite it by heart even if they could not do so before. It should perhaps be mentioned in passing that Professor Banerji’s Sanskrit scholarship is not on quite the same level as his capacity for philosophical analysis. A few errors in the spelling of Sanskrit words printed in transliteration with diacritical marks may annoy the pundits, but these need not be enumerated here.

It is as a series of meditations on an inspired scripture that this book is likely to appeal most to spiritually inclined readers. But it is also a semi-academic publication which has a strongly intellectual dimension and is written in the language of contemporary thought. Such a book can be compared in certain respects with Sri Aurobindo’s own writings in the context in which they originally appeared. The Arya described itself as a “philosophical review” and Sri Aurobindo referred to what he wrote for it as “the intellectual side of my work for the world” (CWSA vol. 36, p. 209). The importance of this aspect of his work can be appreciated if we recall his statement in the Introduction to The Synthesis of Yoga:

The truth is that neither the mental effort nor the spiritual impulse can suffice, divorced from each other, to overcome the immense resistance of material Nature. She demands their alliance in a complete effort before she will suffer a complete change in humanity. (CWSA vol. 23, p. 24)

The present book is a good example in our own times of the fusion of intellect and spirit that Sri Aurobindo exemplified and advocated. One would like to think that it is a harbinger of things to come.

—Richard Hartz

Richard studied philosophy at Yale University and South Asian languages and literature at the University of Washington. He first visited Pondicherry in 1972 and settled in the Ashram in 1980. He works in the Archives and Research Library.

Reviewed in July 2020