Sri Aurobindo's philosophy bridged the East and West

Buddhist eschewing of a Divine Being Re: a possible integration between Buddhism and Integral Yoga? by rjon on Sun 19 Nov 2006 01:32 PM PST Profile Permanent Link 

It seems to me that Buddhism is much closer to the scientific doxa of modernity than Vedanta and Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga," and thus has been an easier recourse for Westerners looking for an authentic spiritual tradition. -- The Buddhist eschewing of a Divine Being to which humans can claim privileged access may also be why there have been fewer religious atrocities created by followers of Buddhism. But, my question remains whether these same aspects of Buddhism imply that it also lacks a core component present in the Vedantic approaches, which is, as Debashish says above, "... related to the "Divine Maya of Supermind" ? ~ ron 4:55 PM Friday, December 01, 2006

Anonymous 1:29 AM, January 09, 2007 I have spent some time in a Sri Aurobindo study group and despite having a strong bond with some of the people have been somewhat frustrated by an inability to communicate something. it seems to me that as beautiful and rich as SA's philosophy is that his reaching for the supramental is actually a flaw that diminishes the impact of his work relative to Buddhism. the strength of the Buddha's contribution was that he looked directly, in a disciplined way it what can be known without reaching for an absolute, permanent or substantial entity called the self or 'God'. It was Buddha's view that this reaching for God came out of clinging.

Buddha's critique of the philosophy of his Indian forebears was that the weakness of spiritual approaches that reach too quickly for God, rather than looking directly at one's pain (with the intention of transforming it) was a form of epistemological suicide. in practice I have seen how it this approach has a tendency to try to banish all human emotion, thus separating it from a sense of the Divine. Buddha's approach was to integrate the suffering of existence with the sense of freedom that came with disciplined meditation. in his view trying to contact the supermind through meditation would only cause more grasping and more suffering.

Implications of the Buddhist Approach to Rebirth November 6, 2012

The Buddhist approaches recognizes rebirth as well as karma. It starts from the mechanical recurrence proposition for the physical existence, and recognizes that there is an energy that propels this rebirth process forward according to the chain of cause and effect, karma. Buddhism however does not accept nor recognize any eternity to the soul; rather it treats the soul much in the same way it treats the body, as a phenomenon of the mechanical cause and effect which acts based on the desire-will… The Buddhist view is, in its own right, an enormous progress from the view that treats life and physical existence purely as consisting of an essentially meaningless procession of days ending in death with no purpose or significance; but it does not yet provide us any affirmative rationale for the existence of the universe and the entire structure of life and being. Buddhism and the Law of Karma « Sri Aurobindo Studies 10 Dec 2012

Buddhism however takes up this challenge and proposes a schema of law and organized action for the moral being of man, through their discussion of the law of karma. The Buddhist framework provides us the system that explains and helps us to gain mastery over our moral and ethical impulses and our relationships to the social organization of life.

At the same time, just as the physical scientists cannot and do not explain anything beyond the physical laws of nature, the Buddhist conception assigns what is beyond our human range to a silent, uninvolved status, called Nirvana, which is beyond the impulsions of the senses and the force of desire, and therefore, is the place where the law of karma is dissolved into a Oneness of quiescence.

Sri Aurobindo, while acknowledging the progress represented by the Buddhist conception, also notes that it has a similar gap when it goes beyond the mental/emotional status of humanity, to what the physical scientist has when he tries to go beyond physical, material nature.

Sri Aurobindo advises that just as the next stage of progress revealed the operations of a set of principles, so also when we move beyond the limitations of the human mental framework, we can expect to find another level and a corresponding set of principles operative there. 

Integral Advaitism Of Sri Aurobindo - Page 341 - Rāmacandra Miśra - 1998 - Preview In Buddhism also we find the doctrine of rebirth given a place of great importance. ... What is ordinarily called soul or spirit is, according to Buddhism, nothing but the stream or flux of conscious states. This stream of ...

The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Page 119 - V. P. Varma - 1990 - Preview - More editions On the other hand, although Aurobindo is critical of the dearth of spirituality in Europe, he thinks that Christianity was a link in the transmission of some basic spiritual ideas like fraternity and humanitarianism from Indian Buddhism to the ...

Gaveshaṇā - Volumes 1989-2000 - Page 5 - Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India) - 1995 - Sri Aurobindo has written that Buddhism was a parent of Christianity which was its "step-child" — "two religions, the most hostile to Nature, in the East Buddhism, her step-child Christianity in the West," "Christianity... the active compassion ...

Psychotherapy and Spirit: Theory and Practice in Transpersonal ... - Page 79 - Brant Cortright - 1997 - Preview - More editions For Aurobindo, higher mind is a level of spiritual mind best represented by Buddha, whereas in the spectrum model the level of vision-logic is still very much within the realm of mental mind and egoic mind at that.

Penguin Sri Aurobindo Reader - Page 69 - Paranjape, Makarand - Preview towards asceticism and renunciation, and maintained itself until it was in its turn displaced and disorganised by the exaggeration of its own tendencies in Buddhism. The sacrifice, the symbolic ritual became more and more a useless survival ...

Essays On The Gita - Page 86 - Sri Aurobindo - 2000 - Preview - More editions Sri Aurobindo. tide of Buddhism, was lost afterwards in the intensity of ascetic illusionism and the fervour of world-shunning saints and devotees and is only now beginning to exercise its real and salutary influence on the Indian mind.

Evil in Hindu Myth - Page 209 - Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger - 1980 - Preview The Buddha and Sankara were both regarded by Aurobindo as inferior to Krsna; though Aurobindo...

Parmenides and The Way of Truth: Translation and Commentary - Richard G. Geldard - 2007 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo's philosophy bridged the East and West and is usually filed under Advaita Yoga, but only so as to distinguish him from the Vedantists and the Buddhists. In fact, Aurobindo succeeded in unifying a number of philosophic positions in ...

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Page 64 - Jeffrey J. Kripal - 2007 - Preview - More editions In another classically Tantric move, Aurobindo insists that desire is not something to be repressed or, worse yet, extinguished (a code word in his text meant to evoke the nirvana of Buddhism). Indeed, it is essentially divine, a manifestation of...

Sri Aurobindo: a biography and a history - Page 428 - K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar - 1985 - Islam comes into the picture also because, in Muhammad Iqbal (and his Asrar-i-Khudi or 'The Secrets of the Self), "Islam found its own Aurobindo". As for Buddhism, it represents "the same kind of spirituality as Sankara's Vedanta; it is not ...

Gifford Lectures - Page 252 - Seyyed Hossein Nasr - 1989 - Preview - More editions It is interesting to note that if such movements in Hinduism and Christianity have resulted in figures like Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, in Buddhism and Islam they have given rise to that unholy wedding of ideas taken from these ...

Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future: Collected Essays - Thomas Lombardo - 2011 - Preview - More editions Yet in the twentieth century, Eastern thinkers, such as Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), attempted to synthesize Hinduism and Buddhism with Western science and evolution, and complementarily, Western writers, like Ken Wilber, have attempted to...

Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gita - Page 64 - Robert Neil Minor - 1986 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo faults past interpreters who have missed this point. They missed it, he says, because of the debilitating emphasis on renunciation of "the heresy of Buddhism" and the subsequent monopoly on the Gita's interpretation by the brahmin ...