SUPPLEMENT TO VOLUME  12

 THE UPANISHADS

Sri Aurobindo wrote a number of commentaries on Isha Upanishad from different points of view at different times. Of the three included here the last two were left incomplete and the first begins only with Part II which itself is unfinished.

The first and second commentaries seem to belong to Sri Aurobindo's Baroda Period and the third to the early Pondicherry Period.

This supplement is additional to the one already included in Volume 12.

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THE KARMAYOGIN

    A COMMENTARY ON THE ISHA UPANISHAD

PART II

      KARMAYOGIN THE IDEAL

CHAPTER IV

The Eternal in His Universe

                                    
                                                                                 Isha Upanishad, 4.  

 I. ETERNAL TRUTH THE BASIS OF ETHICS

"There is the One and It moveth not, yet is It swifter than thought, the Gods could not overtake It as It moved in front. While It standeth still, It outstrippeth others as they run. In It Matariswan ordereth the waters."

I. THE ROOT OF ETHICAL IDEALS

EVERYTHING that has phenomenal existence, takes its stand on the, Eternal and has reality only as a reflection in the pure mirror of His infinite existence. This is no less true of the affections of mind and heart and the formations of thought than of the affections of matter and the formations of the physical ether-stuff out of which this material Universe is made. Every ethical ideal and every religious ideal must therefore depend for its truth and permanence on its philosophical foundation; in other words, on the closeness of its fundamental idea to the ultimate truth of the Eternal. If the ideal implies a reading of the Eternal which is only distantly true and confuses Him with His physical or psychical manifestations in this world, then it is a relatively false and impermanent ideal. Of all the ancient nations the Hindus, for this reason only, attained to the highest idea and noblest practice of morality. The Greeks confused the Eternal with His physical manifestations and realised Him in them on the side of Beauty; beauty therefore was their only law of morality which governed their

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civilisation. Ethics in their eyes was a matter of taste, balance and proportion; it hinged on the avoidance of excess in any direction, of excessive virtue no less than of excessive vice. The fine development of personality under the inspiration of music and through the graceful play of intellect was the essential characteristic of their education; justice, in the sense of a fine balance between one's obligations to oneself and one's obligations to others, the ideal of their polity; decorum, the basis of their public morality; the sense of proportion the one law of restraint in their private ethics. Their idea of deity was confined to the beautiful and brilliant rabble of their Olympus. Hence the charm and versatility of Greek civilisation; hence also its impermanence as a separate culture. The Romans also confused the Eternal with His manifestations in physical nature, but they read Him on the side not of beauty but of force governed by law; the stern and orderly restraint which governs the Universe, was the feature in Nature's economy which ruled their thought. Jupiter was to them the Governor and great Legislator whose decrees were binding on all; the very meaning of the word religion which they have left to the European world was "binding back" and indicated as the essence of religion restraint and tying down to things fixed and decreed. Their ethics were full of a lofty strength and sternness. Discipline stood as the keystone of their system; discipline of actions created an inelastic faithfulness to domestic and public duties; discipline of the animal impulses an orderly courage and a cold, hard purity; discipline of the mind a conservative practical type of intellect very favourable to the creation of a powerful and well-ordered State but not to the development of a many-sided civilisation. Their type too, though more long-lived than the Greek, could not last, because of the imperfection of the ideal on which it was based. Beauty is not the ultimate Truth of the Eternal but only a partial manifestation of
Him in phenomena which is externalised for our enjoyment and possession but not set before us as our standard or aim, and the soul which makes beauty its only end is soon cloyed and sated and fails for want of nourishment and of the growth which is impossible without an ever-widening and progressive activity. Power and Law are not the ultimate Truth of the Eternal but

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manifestations of Himself in phenomena which are set within us to develop and around us to condition our works, but this also is not set before us as our standard or aim. The soul which follows Power as its whole end must in the long run lose measure and perish from hardness and egoism and that which sees nothing but Law wither for dryness or fossilise from the cessation of individual expansion. The Chinese seem to have envisaged the Eternal in a higher aspect than these Mediterranean races; they found Him not in the manifested physical Universe itself, but in its origination and arrangement out of the primal materials from which it arose. Heaven, Akasha or the Eternal in the element of Ether, creates in the womb of Earth or formal Matter which is the final element developed out of Ether, this arranged and orderly Universe; - He is therefore the Father, Originator, Disposer and Arranger. Veneration for parents and those who stand in the place of parents. became the governing idea of their ethics; orderly disposition, the nice care of Ceremony, manners, duties, the law of their daily life; origination and organisation the main characteristics of their intellectual activity. The permanence and unconquerable vitality of their civilisation is due to their having seized on an interpretation of the Eternal which, though not His ultimate truth to humanity, is at least close to that truth and a large aspect of it. It is really Himself in his relation to the Universe but not the whole of Himself. But the ancient Aryans of India raised the veil completely and saw Him as the universal Transcendent Self of all things who is at the same time the particular present Self in each. They reached His singleness aloof from phenomena, they saw Him in everyone of His million manifestations in phenomena, God in Himself, God in man, God in Nature were the "ideas" which their life expressed. Their civilisation was therefore more many-sided and complete and their ethical and intellectual ideals more perfect and permanent than those of any other nation. They had in full measure the sense of filial duty, the careful regulation of ceremony, manners and duties, the characteristics of origination and organisation which distinguished the Chinese. They had in full measure the Roman discipline, courage, purity, faithfulness to duty, careful conservatism; but these elements of character and culture which

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in the Roman were hard, cold, narrow and without any touch of the spirit in man or the sense of his divine individuality, the Hindus warmed and softened with emotional and spiritual meaning and made broad and elastic by accepting the supreme importance of the soul's individual life as overriding and governing the firm organisation of morals and society. They were not purely devoted to the worship and culture of beauty like the Greeks and their art was not perfect, yet they had the sense of beauty and art in a greater degree than any other ancient people; unlike the Greeks they had a perfect sense of spiritual beauty and were therefore able to realise the delight and glory of Nature hundreds of years before the sense of it developed in Europe. On the ethical side they had a finer justice than the Greeks, a more noble public decorum, a keener sense of ethical and social balance, but they would not limit the infinite capacities of the soul; they gave play therefore to personal individuality but restrained and ordered its merely lawless ebullitions by the law of the type (caste). In addition to these various elements which they shared with one civilisation or another, they possessed a higher spiritual ideal, which governed and overrode the mere ethics. (mores or customary morality) which the other nations had developed. Humanity, pity, chivalry, unselfishness, philanthropy, love of and self- sacrifice for all living things, the sense of the divinity in man, the Christian virtues, the modern virtues were fully developed in India at a time when in all the rest of the world they were either non-existent or existent only in the most feeble beginnings. And they were developed because the Aryan Rishis had been able to discover the truth of the Eternal and give to the nation the vision of the Eternal in all things and the feeling of His presence in  themselves and in all around them.

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