Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
The Ashram and Religion
The Hindu Religion and Its Social Structure [2]
I send you Jawaharlal’s
Autobiography. I want to have your opinion on his reading of the Hindu
religion. I agree with the bulk of his condemnation of religion. But it seems to
me he is a little hazy in his ideas, expecting from it just what is beyond its
portée. But of course I don’t wonder, for religion is a most mysterious
term, like our famous kalpataru of Indra’s garden
which promises to its worshippers any fruit they covet.
I fear that to accede to your request for a page and a
half on the mystic soul of India is physically impossible now and
psychologically a little difficult. I have once more the full flood of
correspondence, in spite of the rules of time which have proved an insufficient
dam. Each night is a race to get things done in time which I generally lose and
that means an increasing mass of arrears which have to be dealt with whenever I
get some exceptional leisure. On Sunday a mass of outside letters waiting for
disposal because I have no time on other days and not enough on Sunday either.
In these circumstances to produce a page on such a subject would be a feat of
acrobacy not easily performable.
As for the subject, well in the days of the
Karmayogin or of the Defence of Indian Culture I could have served
you freely. Now I feel as if I have said all I could say on these things — they
have gone back into the far recess of my mind and to pull them out for
expression is not easy. That is a second obstacle.
I do not take the same view of the Hindu religion as
Jawaharlal. Religion is always imperfect because it is a mixture of 
man’s spirituality with the errors that come in trying to sublimate
ignorantly his lower nature. Hindu religion appears to me as a cathedral temple
half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail, but always
fantastic with a significance — crumbled and overgrown in many places, but a
cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real
presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit. The outer social
structure which it built for its approach is another matter.
19 September 1936