Book Title: World of Philosophy
Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
View full book text
________________
Meditations on the First Movement of the Isha Upanishad
- Dr. Debashish Banerji I consider it an honor to present an article in felicitation of Professor Shastri, who has contributed so many years of ground-breaking scholarship in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy. One of Professor Shastri's major projects in the recent past was the compilation of all Sanskrit interpretations of the Isha Upanishad. In recognition of this work, I present here my meditations on the first three stanzas of the Isha Upanishad, based on the interpretation of this text by Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950).
The Isha Upanishad is an early Upanishad, and a highly condensed text, containing only eighteen verses. This Upanishad has a special signifi-. cance for Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo's relationship with this Upanishad goes back to the early years after his return to India in 1893, when he was a teacher at Baroda University. He began translating, contemplating and commenting on this Upanishad from that time. He continued taking this as one of the central pillars of his own engagement with the Indian tradition through the revolutionary period in Bengal (1905-1910). The final form in which we have it comes from the cultural and spiritual journal known as the Arya which he published from Pondicherry over the period 1914 to 1920, when he wrote all his major works. Here we find a growth or evolution in his engagement with this text which keeps pace with his own advance as a yogi. It leads us to wonder why Sri Aurobindo found this text so fascinating. At a certain point he started writing a commentary on this text which he titled The Life Divine. As anyone even slightly familiar with the writings of Sri Aurobindo knows, this is also the title of his most well known philosophical work, also serialized in the Arya. It became an independent text, with over a thousand pages. But perhaps it was a commentary on the Isha Upanishad that provided for him the initiatory movement and seed for this magnum opus of his philosophy. In retrospect we may say that what Sri Aurobindo found in this text is the quintessence of what would become his yoga philosophy, the idea of a divine life on earth and the condition for its possibility.
It seems to me that though an early text, the Isha Upanishad follows in the wake of an already established Upanishadic tradition. Somebody reading the Isha would get very little from it if it were not for the fact that there is an enormous background to it. There is also the fact that these texts are operating simultaneously with an oral tradition. They form only the tip of the iceberg, of a tradition of esoteric teachings and practices that are shared in a community of initiates.
Thus it is important to consider the Isha as part of a tradition and
14
