Readings In Savitri Volume 7

Includes summary, overview and extensive verse by verse commentary.

Includes summary, overview and extensive verse by verse commentary.

Includes summary, overview and extensive verse by verse commentary.

This book presents contemporary perspectives of scholars working on different aspects of the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo- the idea of evolution, integral yoga, the transformation of the individual, society and earth, theories of nation and human unity, philosophy of emotions and ethics of the environment. Contributors examine Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, its close conceptual relationship to classical Indian philosophy and its relevance. It sheds light on how his philosophy deals with the twenty-first century's fundamental problems and offers possible solutions. The book brings out the modern debate in Western philosophy involving thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, and their predecessors, such as Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. This book is an exercise in comparative Philosophy,one that unpacks the mind of Sri Aurobindo in the context of Indian, European and Anglo-American philosophical discourse. It is of great relevance for a new generation of students, scholars of Indian philosophy, politics, religious studies and those interested in knowing the thought and practice of the twentieth-century Indian, thinker and yogi, Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol spans more than 900 pages and covers the gamut of human life and aspiration, the meaning of existence and the evolutionary development of consciousness. Sri M.P. Pandit has systematically gone verse by verse through this epic and highlighted the sense and opened the meaning to us with his brief commentary or meditation on the themes thus revealed. Sri Pandit was secretary to the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He wrote and lectured extensively on Sri Aurobindo’s yoga and the Mother’s transformational work. The current volume X is the final volume in the series, and covers Book X, canto IV, Book XI and Book XII. The volume also includes a line index to Savitri to aid the seeker in identifying the source of virtually any passage in the text. The index contains the first portion of all 23,803 lines in Savitri making it an invaluable tool for anyone studying the text

Since 1980, Shraddhavan has been teaching English in Auroville through close readings of Sri Aurobindo’s revelatory epic Savitri: a legend and a symbol. In August 1998 these classes were resumed at Savitri Bhavan, with a growing number of students, including young Tamil teacher-trainees from the Arul Vazhi School located in Promesse, Auroville. These classes were given the name ‘The English of Savitri’ and they concluded in May of 2009 as this group reached the end of the poem. This book is based on the transcripts of a new series of classes given by Shraddhavan between August 2009 and October 2010, which have been edited for conciseness and clarity, while aiming to preserve some of the informal atmosphere of the course. Edited transcripts of these classes began to be published serially in the Bhavan’s journal of Study Notes on Savitri, ‘Invocation’, from issue 32 onwards, since it was felt that they may be of interest to a wider audiance. They are now being published in book form in several volumes by Yukta Prakashan publishers of Vadodara. This suggested the idea of collecting the original English articles into a book form as well. This is the first such volume, covering all the five cantos of Book One of the poem, ‘The Book of Beginnings’.

This book summarises the author s much more detailed commentary on Sri Aurobindo s epic poem Savitri published in his ten-volume Readings in Savitri. In a seamless narrative that encapsulates each canto of all the twelve books of the epic, the author explains the significance of Aswapathy s yoga undertaken to acquire self-knowledge, world-knowledge, and god-knowledge, the descent of the Divine Grace in the form of Savitri, her meeting with Satyavan and eventual confrontation with Death, and her final victory that wins immortality for man.