Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Life and Death in the Ashram
Business
As usual you seem to have received some very fantastic
and sensational reports about what you call the mill business. There was no
“mill” in question, only X’s small foundry and Y’s equally small
oil factory. X was in difficulties about her affair and came to the
Mother for advice and offered to sell; the Mother was prepared to buy on
reasonable or even on generous terms on certain conditions and use it, not on
capitalistic lines or for any profit, but for certain work necessary to the
Ashram, just as she uses the Atelier or the Bakery or the Building Department.
The Ashram badly needs a foundry and the idea was to use Y’s machinery
for making the soap necessary for the Ashram. The Mother told X that she
was sending for Z and if he consented to run these two affairs, she might
buy but not otherwise as the Mother herself had no time to look after these
things. Z came but found the whole thing too small and not sufficient for
the purpose or for some larger work he wanted to do; so X had to be told
that nothing could be done. That is the whole affair. Where do you find anything
here of capitalism and huge profits and slums and all the rest?
I may say however that I do not regard business as
something evil or tainted, any more than it was so regarded in ancient spiritual
India. If I did, I would not be able to receive money from A or from
those of our disciples who in Bombay trade with East Africa; nor could we then
encourage them to go on with their work but would have to tell them to throw it
up and attend to their spiritual progress alone. How are we to reconcile A’s
seeking after spiritual light and his mill? Ought I not to tell him to leave his
mill to itself and to the devil and go into some Ashram to meditate? Even if I
myself had 
had the command to do business as I
had the command to do politics I would have done it without the least spiritual
or moral compunction. All depends on the spirit in which a thing is done, the
principle on which it is built and use to which it is turned. I have done
politics and the most violent kind of revolutionary politics,
ghoraṃ karma, and I have supported war and sent men to it, even though
politics is not always or often a very clean occupation nor can war be called a
spiritual line of action. But Krishna calls upon Arjuna to carry on war of the
most terrible kind and by his example encourage men to do every kind of human
work, sarvakarmāṇi. Do you contend that Krishna was
an unspiritual man and that his advice to Arjuna was mistaken or wrong in
principle? Krishna goes farther and declares that a man by doing in the right
way and in the right spirit the work dictated to him by his fundamental nature,
temperament and capacity and according to his and its dharma can move towards
the Divine. He validates the function and dharma of the Vaishya as well as of
the Brahmin and Kshatriya. It is in his view quite possible for a man to do
business and make money and earn profits and yet be a spiritual man, practise
Yoga, have an inner life. The Gita is constantly justifying works as a means of
spiritual salvation and enjoining a Yoga of works as well as of Bhakti and
Knowledge. Krishna, however, superimposes a higher law also that work must be
done without desire, without attachment to any fruit or reward, without any
egoistic attitude or motive, as an offering or sacrifice to the Divine. This is
the traditional Indian attitude towards these things, that all work can be done
if it is done according to the dharma and, if it is rightly done, it does not
prevent the approach to the Divine or the access to spiritual knowledge and the
spiritual life.
There is of course also the ascetic ideal which is
necessary for many and has its place in the spiritual order. I would myself say
that no man can be spiritually complete if he cannot live ascetically or follow
a life as bare as the barest anchorite’s. Obviously, greed for wealth and
money-making has to be absent from his nature as much as greed for food or any
other greed and all attachment to these things must be renounced from his 
consciousness. But I do not regard the ascetic way of living as
indispensable to spiritual perfection or as identical with it. There is the way
of spiritual self-mastery and the way of spiritual self-giving and surrender to
the Divine, abandoning ego and desire even in the midst of action or of any kind
of work or all kinds of work demanded from us by the Divine. If it were not so,
there would not have been great spiritual men like Janaka or Vidura in India and
even there would have been no Krishna or else Krishna would have been not the
Lord of Brindavan and Mathura and Dwarka or a prince and warrior or the
charioteer of Kurukshetra, but only one more great anchorite. The Indian
scriptures and Indian tradition, in the Mahabharata and elsewhere, make room
both for the spirituality of the renunciation of life and for the spiritual life
of action. One cannot say that one only is the Indian tradition and that the
acceptance of life and works of all kinds, sarvakarmāṇi,
is un-Indian, European or Western and unspiritual.