Essays on the Gita - Softcover

Sri Aurobindo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8170586127 ISBN 13: 9788170586128

Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications Department, 2003

Synopsis

A masterly exposition of the pre-eminent Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Itwas after reading these essays, in particular, that in the 1930's PresidentWilson's daughter went to Sri Aurobindo and devoted her life - receiving thename Nishtha via his vision in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. Index.

About this title

About the Author:

Sri Aurobindo was born on August 15, 1872, in Calcutta, India. At the age of seven, he went to England for his education. After taking a Tripos in the Classics from Kings College, Cambridge, he returned to India in 1893. For the next fourteen years, he worked in the Princely State of Baroda, in various government departments and as a professor in Baroda College. During this period, he mastered Sanskrit, Bengali and several other Indian languages and produced a prolific output of poetry and literary criticism.

In 1906, Sri Aurobindo quit his post in Baroda and went to Calcutta, where he became one of the leaders of Indias struggle for independence from British colonial rule. In this context, he envisaged and organized a two-pronged approach non-violent Boycott and non-cooperation for the masses and revolutionary action leading to armed insurrection for those who were ready to sacrifice themselves for the country. Arrested in May, 1908 for conspiracy, he spent one year in jail as an undertrial prisoner, but was then acquitted.

from 1905, at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo took to the practice of the spiritual discipline of yoga, initially as a means to enhance his capacity to bring India her independence. Subsequently, in 1910, he withdrew from politics and moved to Pondicherry to devote himself exclusively to the practice of yoga.

After gathering up in himself the essential elements of past spiritual experience, he moved on in search of a more complete realization, one which would unite the two poles of Spirit and Matter. During his forty years in Pondicherry, he worked out a new system of spiritual development which he called the Integral Yoga. The aim of this yoga is a spiritual realization which will not only liberate mans consciousness but transform his nature and divinize life. In 1926, Sri Aurobindo withdrew to the seclusion of his room, but continued to maintain contact with disciples through a large correspondence and by giving darshan four times a year. Among his many writings of the Pondicherry period, the best known are The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays of the Gita and Savitri. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5th December, 1950.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

We of the coming day stand at the head of a new age of development which must lead to such a new and larger synthesis. We do not belong to the past dawns but to the noons of the future. A mass of new materials is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modern knowledge and seeking; and beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the consciousness of mankind but now breaking out again from behind the veil. All this points to a new, a very rich, a very vast synthesis; a fresh and widely embracing harmonization of our gains is both an intellectual and a spiritual necessity of the future. But just as the past syntheses have taken those which preceded them for their starting point, so also must that of the future, to be on firm ground, proceed from what the great bodies of realized spiritual thought and experience in the past have given. Among them the Gita takes a most important place.

Our object, then, in studying the Gita will not be a scholastic or academic scrutiny of its thought, nor to place its philosophy in the history of metaphysical speculation, nor shall we deal with it in the manner of the analytical dialectician. We approach it for help and light and our aim must be to distinguish its essential and living message, that in it on which humanity has to seize for its perfection and its highest spiritual welfare.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications Department
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 8170586127
• ISBN 13: 9788170586128
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 594