Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
30 December 1938
During the sponging of Sri Aurobindo there was a little talk on homoeopathy. Somebody said he was puzzled how an infinitesimal quantity could act.
Sri Aurobindo: That is no puzzle to me. Sometimes the infinitesimal is more powerful than the mass. It approaches more and more the subtle state and from the physical goes into the vital or dynamic and acts vitally.
In the evening the talk began with a reading of S’s letter describing vividly his sense of persecution by people.
Purani: These people get possessed by the idea of persecution.
Becharlal: Is it a possession?
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, a possession of the nervous system and the vital mind, though it is not like insanity. It is, however, very difficult to convince these people that their ideas of persecution are false. There are two types: one imagines all sorts of things – eighty per cent of cases are of this type – and the other twists everything.
My brother had this persecution mania. He was always in fear of something terrible happening to him. For instance, he used to think that the British Government was going to arrest him.
Becharlal: He was a very successful professor, I hear. People used to listen to his lectures with rapt attention.
Sri Aurobindo: He was very painstaking. Most of the professors don’t work so hard. I saw his books interleaved and marked and full of notes. (Then looking at Purani) I was not so conscientious as a professor.
Purani: People who heard you – even those who politically differed from you – speak very highly of your lectures.
Sri Aurobindo: I never used to look at the notes and sometimes my explanation didn’t agree with them. I was professor of English and for some time of French. What was surprising to me was that students used to take down everything verbatim and mug it up. This sort of thing could never have happened in England.
Becharlal: But we did it in England.
Sri Aurobindo: Did what?
Becharlal: Take notes.
Sri Aurobindo: That’s different. You can take notes and utilise them in your own way.
Becharlal: No, we used to take everything down verbatim. The professors brought in many theories, a lot of recent discoveries. Besides, each professor had his own fad. So we had to do it.
Sri Aurobindo: In medicine it may have been so, for there is not much scope for original thinking there. But in the arts it was different. You listened to the lectures, noted down what you liked and then made what you wanted of it. There was always a demand for the student’s point of view. In India the students, besides taking down my notes, used to get notes of professors from Bombay, especially if they happened to be examiners.
Once I was giving a lecture on Southey’s Life of Nelson. And my lecture was not in agreement with the notes in the book. So the students remarked that it was not at all like what was in the notes. I replied that I hadn’t read them. In any case, they are mostly rubbish. I could never go into the minute details. I read and left it to my mind to absorb what it could. That’s why I could never become a scholar.
Up to the age of fifteen I was known as a very promising scholar at St. Paul’s. After fifteen I lost this reputation. The teachers used to say that I had become lazy and was deteriorating.
Dr. Becharlal: How was that?
Sri Aurobindo: Because I was reading novels and poetry. Only at the examination time I used to prepare a little. But when now and then I wrote Greek and Latin verse my teachers would lament that I was not utilising my remarkable gifts because of laziness.
When I went up with a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, Oscar Browning commented that he had not seen such remarkable papers. As you see, in spite of my laziness I was not deteriorating!
Dr. Becharlal: Was there any prejudice against Indians at that time?
Sri Aurobindo: No. There was no distinction between an Englishman and an Indian. Only the lower classes in England used to shout “Blackie, Blackie.” But the prejudice was just beginning. It was brought by Anglo-Indians and Englishmen returning from the colonies. It is a result of democracy, I suppose. But among the cultured Englishmen it was unknown and they treated us as equals.
In France one never heard of such prejudices. I don’t know if you have read in the papers the story about a Paris hotel. Pressed by a number of Americans, this hotel asked some Negroes to leave. As soon as the news reached the President’s ear, he sent an order that if the hotel proprietor did this his licence would be cancelled. The French have Negro Governors and other Negro officers, not to speak of taxi-drivers. There was even a Senegalese Deputy who used to dominate over the Governors. But I wonder why they have never appointed an Indian Deputy in Pondicherry. The English people, on their side, have a certain liberality and common sense.
Dr. Becharlal: Liberality?
Sri Aurobindo: By liberality I don’t mean generosity but a freedom of consciousness and a certain fairness. Because of this, along with their public spirit, there is not such corruption in public life as in France or America. They can vehemently criticise one another in the press, even personally, but that does not affect their private relations. You have seen how Brailsford has attacked Chamberlain, but their friendship and private relations won’t be affected.
Dr. Becharlal: That will only be appearances.
Sri Aurobindo: No, no. It is quite genuine. And there is a great freedom of speech in England.
Dr. Becharlal: Vivekananda said that it is difficult to make friends with Englishmen but once it is done it lasts a lifetime.
Sri Aurobindo: Quite true.
Purani: The Japanese, Jean Herbert says, are also like that. Generally they are only polite and formal, but once you can make a friendship they are very good friends.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, they are very polite in their manner and conduct. But they don’t admit you into their private life. They have a wonderful power of self-control. They don’t lose their temper or quarrel with you, but if their honour is violated they may kill you afterwards. They can be bitter enemies. They have a sense of honour as well as of dishonour, unfortunately, and in one case they may kill you and in the other kill themselves at your door. If a Japanese killed himself at an Englishman’s door, it would be impossible for the Englishman to live there any more. If a robber entered a Japanese house and the householder told him that he required some money, the robber would part with some of his loot; but if the householder said that he had a debt of honour to pay, then the robber would leave the whole sum behind and go away. Imagine such a housebreaker in England or America!
The Japanese have a high sense of chivalry too. In the Russo-Japanese War, when the Russians were defeated the Mikado almost shed tears thinking of the Czar. That was a true sense of chivalry.
When a congregation of fifty or sixty thousand were caught in a fire due to an earthquake, there was not a single cry, not a flutter. All were standing up and chanting Buddhist hymns. That’s a heroic people with wonderful self-control.
Dr. Becharlal: If they have such self-control they would be very good for Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo: Ah, self-control is not enough for Yoga. The Japanese are more an ethical than a spiritual race. Their ethical rules are extremely difficult to follow.
But these things perhaps belong to the past. It is a great pity that people who have carried such ideals into practice are losing them through contact with European civilisation. That is the great harm which European vulgarisation has done to Japan. Now you find most people mercantile in their outlook: they will do anything for the sake of money.
Naka’s mother, when she returned from America to Japan, as is the custom with the Japanese, was so horrified to see the present-day Japan that she at once went back.
That the Japanese are not a distinctly spiritual race can be shown from an example. Hirasawa, a friend of Richard’s and the Mother’s, was a great patriot but he did not like the modern tendencies of Japan; so he used to say, “My soul has become a traitor.”
Purani: Have you read Noguchi’s letters to Tagore defending Japan’s aggression?
Sri Aurobindo: No; but there are always two sides to a question. I don’t believe in fanatical shouts against imperialism. Conquests of that sort were at one time regarded as the normal activity of political life; now you do it under pretexts and excuses. Almost every nation has been doing it. What about China herself? She took Kashgar in the same way. The very name “Kashgar” shows that China had no business to be there. There is also the question of war. Apart from new fashions of killing, there is nothing wrong in war as such. All depends on circumstances. It is the Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy that cries out against it. The French people don’t.
Purani: It is said the French people don’t usually lose their head, but when they lose it, they lose it well.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes; India also was considered docile and mild, like an elephant, but once the elephant is off the line you had better keep out of his way!
Now there is a new morality in the air. They talk of pacifism, anti-nationalism, anti-militarism. But the talking is done by those who can’t do things. In any case it has to stand the test of time.
Purani: Jwalanti (Madame Monod-Herzen) used to be wild when England began to shout against Italy’s war on Abyssinia. Of course, she does not defend Italy, but England should be the last nation to raise a cry.
Sri Aurobindo: Quite so. England was the only country that defended air-bombing because she wanted to kill the Pathans!
Dr. Becharlal: Has European civilisation today nothing good in it?
Sri Aurobindo: It has lowered the moral tone of humanity. No doubt, it has brought in hygiene, sanitation, etc. But even the nineteenth century civilisation with its defects was better than what we have now. Europe could not stand the test of the last world war. The ancient peoples tried to keep to their ideals and to raise them still higher while Europe lost all her ideals after the war. People have become cynical, selfish. What you hear of post-war England or post-war Germany is not all wrong. Have you not heard Arjava (J. Chadwick) inveighing against post-war England? I suppose it is all due to commercialism.