World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 65

Third movement:
In the third movement there is a return to the justification of life and work - the subject of verse 2 - and an indication of their divine fulfilment.
The degrees of the Lord's self-manifestation in the universe of motion and the becoming of the One Being are set forth. And the inner law of all existences declared to be by his conception and determination. (Verse 8)
Vidya and Avidya, Becoming and Non-becoming - are reconciled by their mutual utility to the progressive self-realisation which proceeds from the state of mortality to the state of immortality. (Verses 9 to 14)
Fourth movement:
The fourth movement returns to the idea of world and under the figures of Surya and Agni, the relations of the Supreme Truth and immortality (Verses 15 and 16), the activities of this life (Verse 17) and the state after death (Verse 18) are symbolically indicated.
This, in a nutshell, is Sri Aurobindo's introduction to the organization of ideas in the Isha Upanishad. The present work consists of my meditations on the first of these movements.
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The Isha Upanishad, like many other Upanishads, begins with a preamble or Invocation. The Invocation of the Isha Upanishad is famous and known as the purnam stotra. It goes:
Om, purnamadah purnamidam, purnat purnamudachate. Purnaschya purnamadaya purnameva vishishyate. Om shanti, shanti, shanti.
From this outset we see the significance of the Isha for Sri Aurobindo in its use of the term Purnam. Sri Aurobindo's philosophy has been named Purnadvaita Vedanta; in English this has been translated as Integral Nondualism. Thus we see that to Sri Aurobindo the term Purna refers to integrality. The word Poorna commonly means full, complete, whole. Sri Aurobindo would like us to think of this wholeness as integrality. Integral implies a complexity which is yet unified. This unified wholeness is being hymned in the Purnam Stotra: That, there, is the whole. This, here, is the whole. The whole or complete, arises from the whole and complete. Withdrawing the whole from the whole, it is indeed the whole that remains.
As a prelude to this Upanishad, this cryptic verse is evidently preparing us with a contemplation which is paradoxical and startling. In this sense, it is reminiscent of Zen koans and may point to the origin of this mode of yogic contemplation. It refers to a kind of mathematics that is not our com
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