Book Reviewed: Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, by Sri Aurobindo and Anil Baran Roy

The wisdom of Sri Aurobindo

The essential message of BhagavadGita according to Sri Aurobindo is the evolutionary philosophy. His principle work, Life Divine differed from the traditional teachings of Hinduism. His message was that liberation from the cycle of life & death is not the essence of creative power, but it is through the operation of physical laws that govern matter and energy in spacetime. He asserts that the creation of advanced living beings is the work of super-mind that would create values such as love, harmony, unity and knowledge to find the divine truth. The Brahman described in Vedanta philosophy of BhagavadGita and Upanishads is that He has no attributes, but It is an entity that encompasses omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), Omni benevolence (perfect goodness), immutable, divine simplicity, and eternal existence. His qualities are personal and impersonal. Brahman is thought to exist in space-less and timeless dimensions in an unchanging reality amidst and beyond the realm of a universe. He is the Pure Consciousness, the Supreme Lord who can transcend all possible laws of physics, all dimensions and all physical realities in the multiverse. Aurobindo suggested that the physical reality we observe, and experience is manifested as empirical reality through His līlā, or Divine Play. He did not believe that physical reality is an illusion (Maya) as Vedanta philosophy proposed but argued that world with new advanced species understand reality. He reasoned that the evolutionary theory described the process but does not explain the wisdom of creating life. According to him, our existence is a manifestation of Brahman, which imbibed life into matter, and then into mind and consciousness. Thus, all existence and the evolutionary process is due to the power of the Pure Consciousness. This is a spiritual evolution which Aurobindo understood through the practice of yoga, meditation and wisdom of yoga philosophy.

In BhagavadGita, Lord Krishna makes a distinction between Samkhya and Yoga. In addition, His teachings also focus on Vedanta philosophy that is highly colored by the wisdom of the former two philosophical systems. According to Aurobindo, Samkhya and Yoga, taught in Gita are not two different philosophical systems but differ only in their methods and starting points. Samkhya is dualistic, but it is not the same as relative dualism, referred to as Dvaita Vedanta. Samkhya claims absolute duality, and the existence is attributed to two different principles interacting in the fundamentals of creation. The Purusha, the pure consciousness is immutable, immortal and self-luminous, and Prakriti is matter and energy that confers physical reality. Pure consciousness, the Purusha is beyond the boundaries of mater, energy and spacetime, that is It is beyond the realm of physics. But all the sufferings, the cycle of birth & death, ignorance, action and inaction, happiness, joy and sorrow are due to Prakriti, says Sri Aurobindo.

This book is very well written and reads flawlessly. Readers interested in Aurobindo’s interpretation of Gita find this work interesting. I did not take time compare Aurobindo’s English translation with other works but found some of his translations illuminating.