Gifted with a lighter, subtler and clearer mind than their insular neighbours, the French people have moved irresistibly towards a social and not a political development. It is true that French orators and statesmen, incapacitated by their national character from originating fit political ideals, have adopted a set of institutions curiously blended from English and American manufactures; but the best blood, the highest thought, the real grandeur of the nation does not reside in the Senate or in the Chamber of Deputies; it resides in the artistic and municipal forces of Parisian life, in the firm settled executive, in the great vehement heart of the French populace—and that has ever beaten most highly in unison with the grand ideas of Equality and Fraternity, since they were first enounced on the banner of the great and terrible Republic. Hence though by the indiscreet choice of a machine, they have been compelled to copy the working of English machinery and concede an undue importance to politics, yet the ideals which have genuinely influenced the spirit which has most deeply permeated their national life are widely different from that alien spirit, from those borrowed ideals. I have said that the French mind is clearer, subtler, lighter than the English. In that clarity they have discerned that without high qualities in the raw material excellence of machinery will not suffice to create a sound and durable national character,—that it may indeed develop a strong, energetic and capable temper, but that the fabric will not combine fineness with strength, will not resist permanently the wear and tear of time and the rending force of social problems:—through that subtlety they divined that not by the mechanic working of institutions, but by the delicate and almost unseen moulding of a fine, lucid and invigorating atmosphere, could a robust and highly-wrought social temper be developed:—and through that lightness they chose not the fierce, sharp air of English individualism, but the bright influence of art and letters, of happiness, a wide and liberal culture, and the firm consequent cohesion of their racial and social elements. To put all this briefly, the second school of thought I would indicate to my readers, is the preference of a fine development of social character and a wide diffusion of happiness to the mechanic development of a sound political machinery. Here then as indicated by these grand examples we have our two principal motors of progress; a careful requisition for the sake of evolving an energetic national character and high level of capacity, of a sound political machinery; and the ardent, yet rational pursuit, for its own sake, of a sound and highly-wrought social temper.

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In the hazy blue of early morning comes that heart-warming sound: the roar of thousands of waterfowl wings as ducks rise en masse, from the waters, like a Mexican wave getting airborne. Pintail, and common teal, shovellor and gadwall speed through the gossamer mists as their perennial extortionist the marsh harrier comes calling. They swirl and settle, only to be roused again within minutes. In the maroon azolla-covered waters, purple herons stand stock still, merging beautifully with the marsh grasses, and egrets dazzle in pristine white. A flock of bar-headed geese fly past, honking in that conversational way of theirs, and on a branch just off the path, a little cormorant yawns…

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More than a hundred years ago Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) gave a talk entitled The Mission of the Vedanta, proclaiming the Vedantic essence of life that should become universal, not in the sense of dogmatic religious imposition but in the discovery of the first principles on which is founded the harmony of existence. His work in India and abroad had made a deep impression in the hearts of the perceptive and the alert of the time and there was good reason to be proud of his achievements. That one can be assertive without being aggressive is what one sees in this staunch preceptor of values based on spiritual ideology. We present in the following excerpts from the address he delivered at Kumbhakonam, a centre of religious learning in the South.

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Here is a selection of poems of Li Bai made by Lata Iyer.

A sword with the keenest edge,
Could not cut the stream of water in twain
So that it would cease to flow.
My thought is like the stream; and flows and follows you on forever.

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Apropos of India’s partition and the forces that worked behind it, we have the account by Munshi based on what Sri Aurobindo had told him in the course of an interview in 1950. India’s integrity and spiritual destiny always remained the concern of Sri Aurobindo. In the course of the interview, Munshi was taken aback when Sri Aurobindo surprised him with the unexpected question: “When do you expect India to be united?”

In this context we have to only remember the Nehru-Liaquat Pact and the Pakistan government’s refusal to sign a joint declaration, stating that in no event should there be recourse to war. This was on the political level; we don’t know things that were present in the occult world. One recoils despicably when there is the disregard for things that come from the knowledge founded on the workings of the spirit. …

But we should not take Sri Aurobindo as “Read-Only Text” frozen for all time without the contents of dynamism in time. We should lend ourselves to its dynamism, to its well-visioned efficacy. It is at times said that in the present conditions it makes more sense to work to achieve a culture of spiritual unity in India rather than the unification of India and Pakistan. But to speak of spirituality where there is falsehood is to be ignorant of things.

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We must remember the galvanising words of the Master: “Materially you are nothing, spiritually you are everything. It is only the Indian who can believe everything, dare everything, sacrifice everything. First therefore become Indians. Recover the patrimony of your forefather. Recover the Aryan thought, the Aryan discipline, the Aryan character, the Aryan life. Recover the Vedanta, the Gita, the Yoga. Recover them not only in intellect or sentiment but in your lives. Live them and you will be great and strong, mighty, invincible and fearless. Neither life nor death will have any terrors for you. Difficulty and impossibility will vanish from your vocabularies.”

And this is what the Mother says: “The world will be made better only in proportion as we make ourselves better. The Vedantic truth that the world is only a projection—a function—of our consciousness is as pragmatically true as it is spiritually true. The ills that humanity suffers from—collectively and individually—stem from the errors that lie at the root of our ignorant nature. We must be cleaned of these evils—individually first of all—if we ever hope to see a clean world outside. A yoga of self-purification is the condition precedent to a yoga of perfection.” It is of course wrong to expect that every individual of the country will rise to this prospect of the “yoga of perfection”, but not to be aware of it is a sad commentary on our state of affairs.

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He has outwinged distances of the mysterious Bird of Time.
Suddenly he has become the blue ether of the luminous Self,
Suddenly he has become the expanse of a superconscient glow,
Suddenly he has become one with the infinity of the All-Alone.
There is no bamboo-tube telescope, no awl of imagination,
There are no river-beds, no estuaries, no lakes, no swans,
The landscape has vanished, and there are no wheels of revolution.
He is what Yin and Yang gave him, he is simply the son of Tao;
Chuang Tse is drowned in the Autumn flood of a hundred streams.
The waterfall has become quiet—yet the Unknown is beyond.
Will Chuang Tse then climb up the mountain to be the mountain?

Chuang Tse was a famous Taoist philosopher in ancient China who lived around the 4th century BC during the Warring States Period. Using parable and anecdote, allegory and paradox, he set forth the early ideas of what was to become the Taoist school. Central in these ideas is the belief that only by understanding Tao (the Way of Nature) and dwelling in unity can man achieve true happiness and be truly free in both life and death. Witty and imaginative, enriched by brilliant imagery, making sportive use of both mythological and historical personages such as Confucius, the book which bears Chuang Tzu's name has been savoured by Chinese readers for centuries.

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... if the example of France is not sufficient ... let us divert our eyes to Ireland where the ancient and world-wide quarrel between Celt and Teuton is still pending. Is it at all true that the initiators of Irish resistance to England were a body of successful lawyers, remarkable only for a power of shallow rhetoric, and deputed by the sort of men that are turned out at Trinity College, Dublin? At any rate that is not what History tells us. We do not read that the Irish leader annually assembled to declaim glib orations, eulogistic of British rule and timidly suggestive of certain flaws in its unparalleled excellence, nor did they suggest as a panacea for Irish miseries, that they should be given more posts and an ampler career in the British service. I rather fancy Turlough O’Neill and his compeers were a different sort of men from that. But then it is hardly fair perhaps to cite as an example a disreputable people never prolific of graduates and hence incapable of properly appreciating the extraordinary blessings which British rule gives out so liberally wherever it goes. Certainly men who preferred action to long speeches and appealed, by the only method available in that strenuous epoch, not to the British sense of justice but to their own sense of manhood, are not at all the sort of people we have either the will or the power to imitate. Well then, let us return to our own orderly and eloquent era.

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At the midnight hour of 14 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the solemn promise of India awaking to life and freedom. At that moment of history he was claiming Independence from the British. “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge...At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Sixty years have passed today and it is time for assessment and introspection, as to what extent the soul of India has been able to find its authentic and fulfilling utterance, to what extent the pledges made have been implemented. Has India awakened to the greatness of her soul? Indeed, what is it that constitutes the greatness of a nation’s soul? If truth-values found the greatness of a nation’s or an individual’s soul, the question is: Are we living in them?

The real problem of the society, as in the case of the individual, is for it to find its soul, the true collective soul… There has to be a conviction that, culmination of the social development into the Age of the ageless Spirit is the secret urge and motivating force behind the evolutionary Nature’s long painstaking and patient working. Humanity’s conscious participation in it will assuredly hasten this triumph and this glory. The soul of India has the intuition of perceiving these possibilities and India’s freedom is meant for its growth in the progression of the manifesting spirit. If this can be kept as the focus, the celebration of India’s sixty years of independence will then be truly significant.

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During the period August-November 1918 Sri Aurobindo wrote a series of four articles under the title The Renaissance in India. These had first appeared in his monthly Arya which in 1920 were issued in the form of a book. The book was reissued on a number of occasions later on. In the Birth Centenary edition it appears in The Foundations of Indian Culture as volume 14. This new birth in India is intimately connected with the eternal values of truth for which the country stands, the basis of Sanatan Dharma, the religion perfected and developed through the Rishis, saints and Avatars now going forth to do the divine work among the nations—as Sri Aurobindo spoke at Uttarpara in 1909. In the Renaissance he sees a new birth for India with the possibilities of a force rearising to shape not only its present life but also the future. We present in the following a brief summary of this series of articles.

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Here is a personal note from Lata Iyer presenting us the poetry of Li Bai who belonged to the Tang Dynasty: “My knowledge of the Chinese language is frugal. It is restricted to the technical aspects of my professional work in China where I conduct Sustainability Assessments as a freelance consultant. I have been lucky to have travelled extensively in China. I have been a student of Chinese culture and its multitudinous aspects. I find this country, its language, the culture, its thoughts and philosophy extremely fascinating and deep. My travels to the various parts of China especially in the ancient historical regions of Beijing, Xian (Shanxi), Inner Mongolia, Shenyang (capital of the erstwhile Manchuria region and the ancient capital city of the Qings), and the ancient city of Pingyao have made me aware of the long history of this country and its rich outputs. As someone who loves poetry, I was fascinated with the place occupied by poetry in the Chinese social landscape. This small compilation has been made as a lover of Chinese poetry rather than as a scholar or literary expert. Instead of confusing the reader with the names of several poets, I thought it would be a good idea to start with a single poet. I can think of no better name than Li Bai or Li Po.”

We are thankful to Lata for this beautiful piece of work, which includes a fairly detailed introduction to Li Bai and English rendering of his several poetic compositions. We shall serialize these in the next few instalments—Li Bai "the god dismissed from the Heaven".

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Sturge Maynard rose from the fireside and looked out on the blackish yellow blinding fog that swathed London in the dense folds of its amplitude. In his hand he carried the old book he was reading, his finger was still in the page, his mind directed, not with entire satisfaction, to the tenor of the writer's imaginations, for if these pleased his sense of the curious they disgusted his reason. A mystic, mediaeval in epoch and temperament, the old Latinist dealt with psychological fancies the modern world has long discarded in order to bustle to the polling booth and the counting-house. Numerous subtleties occurred repulsive to the rigid and definite solutions of an age which, masterful with knowledge in the positive and external, tries to extend its autocracy in the shape of a confident ignorance over the bounds of the occult world within, occult—declared the author—only because we reject a key that is in everyone's hand, himself.

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My wife and I were struck with awe. The man was a HERO! a hero who deserves all our respect. Our journey came to an end; 45 minutes of a lesson in humility, selflessness, and of a hero-worshipping Mumbai, my temporary home. We disembarked, and all I could do was to pay him a tip that would hardly cover a free ride for a blind man.

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