Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
11 December 1939
Purani was having a discussion with Sri Aurobindo about the appropriate Sanskrit quotations for The Life Divine. At the end Satyendra and Nirodbaran laughed aloud.
Sri Aurobindo: What is the matter?
Satyendra: Nirodbaran is laughing because he doesn’t understand a bit of the talk. It is all Greek to him.
Nirodbaran: Same for you.
Champaklal: Nirodbaran was trying for some time to pick up Sanskrit and now has given up.
Nirodbaran: I was trying to learn the letters. I studied Pali in my school, so I don’t know Sanskrit.
Purani: In Bengal they write Sanskrit in Bengali script and their pronunciation of Sanskrit is awful.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. I remember in Barin’s school he engaged a Bengali to teach Sanskrit. When the teacher left, he engaged a Hindustani teacher whose pronunciation was quite different from the Bengali way. The students found fault with his pronunciation. I had to take great pains to convince Barin that it was the Bengali teacher who was wrong. (Sri Aurobindo related the story with much relish and enjoyment.) The Bengali language, I mean the written language, is very easy.
Satyendra: How?
Sri Aurobindo: It has very little grammar, no complication about gender, number, etc., as in Sanskrit or French.
Purani: In French, the gender is especially complex. In Sanskrit the word “Dara”, meaning “wife”, is masculine. I don’t know why.
Sri Aurobindo: Does it mean that several men make a woman? In German, the word for “maiden” is neuter. (Laughter)
At noon Nirodbaran read out a letter to Sri Aurobindo. It was written by Sisir Maitra to Anilbaran in the course of their discussion on Reason, Buddhi, Kant, Hegel, the Gita, etc. Ultimately Sri Aurobindo was referred to. In the evening Purani took up the topic.
Purani: Anilbaran asks if Buddhi can mean the same thing as Understanding. Professor Maitra says they are the same and so he places Buddhi lower than Reason just as Kant does with Understanding.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, Kant seems to place Understanding lower than Reason while Hegel, it is said, puts Understanding and Reason on the same level. But Buddhi seems to me to be more than Understanding. What does Indian philosophy say?
Purani: According to it, sadasad viveka shakti (the power of discriminating the true from the false) is called Buddhi.
Sri Aurobindo: That is not Understanding. Can one discriminate sadasad by Understanding alone or does one require Intellect? It is by what Indian philosophy calls Vijnana that one can do it. And Vijnana, in Indian philosophy, is more or less equivalent to Buddhi. Hence Buddhi is Intellect. Understanding is only a part of Buddhi.
Purani: Kant says we are free while we follow Reason, not while we follow our senses.
Sri Aurobindo: Then Buddhi can’t be the same as Kant’s Understanding. If anything it should be Higher Reason.
Purani: Anilbaran asks another question. Kant says that one can arrive at the Truth by Reason. Maitra says the Gita also affirms the same thing, while Anilbaran contends that one can’t.
Sri Aurobindo: Does the Gita say so? Or is it Maitra’s own opinion? If it is, it may be all right as a constructive thought, and it may be true in a certain sense. But if the Gita is mentioned, the proper text has to be traced. I think the Gita has advocated Reason as one of the means through which one can approach the Truth. Even Shankara, I believe, doesn’t say that Reason is useless. He admits that it prepares for what is beyond – even for going beyond Sattwa, etc. It is a stepping-stone.
Purani: Anilbaran wants to know whether Kant and Hegel had a notion of a faculty beyond mind.
Sri Aurobindo: I don’t think so.
Purani: They didn’t believe in a suprarational consciousness?
Sri Aurobindo: No, they thought Reason can arrive at the Truth.
Purani: Kant’s Critique begins with the statement that knowledge of a particular thing in itself is not possible with the present human instruments of knowledge. He distinguishes between phenomenon and noumenon and says that men can only know phenomenon. He disputes Berkeley’s view of subjectivism – that there is no world outside the perceiving consciousness. According to Berkeley, you project the world out of yourself. Kant does not admit that. He says that the tree you perceive exists or rather something (noumenon) exists which appears to us as the tree. But our knowledge of it may not be quite correct: for instance, we see it standing on its roots. But it may be standing on something else for that matter.
Sri Aurobindo: It is the story of the Vishnu Purana where we read that it is difficult to say whether the king is on the elephant or the elephant is on the king.
All European philosophers after the Greeks hold that Reason is the faculty by which you arrive at the Truth. The question about sense-perception and its reliability is easily met. We perceive certain things by our senses and the sensations are the same because our senses have a common organisation. Even so, different persons perceive the same thing differently in some respects. And if you had the senses differently organised, you would perceive the same thing differently.
About Reason, what I may say is that if it was sufficient for arriving at the Truth, then all men by reasoning would arrive at the same conclusion. I am not speaking of abstract Reason. If Reason could work in the abstract and be an ideal faculty, it might perceive Truth. As it is, practical Reason deals with different ideas and there it differs in different individuals and they reach different conclusions even from the same data.
What I say is that Reason can perceive that there is something beyond itself and that this something is the Truth. But each reasoner tries to assert that this Truth is what he takes it to be. He sets up his own idea as the whole Truth. But the Truth is infinite and has an infinite number of sides. Each conclusion of Reason has some truth in it but we have to find something which is fundamental behind all the particular formulations of Reason, and we can do this only by experience. That which is beyond is the Absolute, and the Absolute can’t be known by Reason or Mind. What can be formulated by Reason is Sachchidananda – Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. That is to say, the Absolute presents itself to the mind as Sachchidananda. You can’t go beyond this concept.
Purani: Kant’s Critique is very difficult to understand and very dry.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, I tried to read it and after reading two pages I gave it up. Besides, the German language itself is difficult. The subject in a German sentence comes at the top of a page and the verb at the bottom. So perhaps it is more suitable than other languages for philosophy?
Purani: Does Western philosophy believe in Mukti?
Sri Aurobindo: No. In the West they believe in heaven or salvation.
Purani (After a while): Nirodbaran was asking: if Reason comes to different conclusions, don’t spiritual experiences also do the same?
Sri Aurobindo: That is quite another field. What Reason does is to assert one thing as true and the rest as false. For example, if the Impersonal is true, the Personal is false. But when you go above the mind you realise that the Truth, being infinite, has many sides and all of them are true. In the Overmind, all the different truths converge and are held together.
Evening
We had great fun when we learnt that Dr. Rao had not reached Madras as expected. One of us joked that his personal assistant, who had been wanting to occupy his post, had made him disappear to get his job, and now the personal assistant himself would criticise Dr. Rao for failing to present himself for duty.
Satyendra: Now that the Congress Ministry has resigned, the Government officers may expect trouble. Savoor was telling me the same thing.
Sri Aurobindo: What?
Satyendra: That they might not be allowed to come here now.
Nirodbaran: The Ministers should not have resigned so soon. Now they are simply doing nothing.
Satyendra: What else could they do? Gandhi doesn’t want to embarrass the Government.
Sri Aurobindo: Nor embarrass himself.
Satyendra: They couldn’t remain and sit idly there.
Sri Aurobindo: They are idle just the same now. I could understand if they had launched some campaign against the Government.
By this time Purani had arrived. He didn’t yet know the news about Rao’s disappearance. Sri Aurobindo said, “Have you heard the news?” We all looked at Purani with intriguing smiles.
Purani: What news?
Sri Aurobindo: That Rao has disappeared? One of three things may have happened: The P.A. has made him disappear, he has gone to Karikal, or he was sleeping at Villupuram.
In the end we found out that he had got into the wrong compartment and gone to Karikal. Some friend had told him at the station that he was sitting in the Karikal carriage. But he paid no heed saying, “No, no, my name is here, it is all right.” When Sri Aurobindo was told about it he remarked, “Just like him!”