Sri Aurobindo's Commentaries on Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Ramakrishna

This short book is about an issue that has interested many: what Sri Aurobindo wrote about the previous Avatars, and especially about the most recent ones that have still a considerable influence on human thought. Wilfried Huchzermeyer looked in great detail at everything Sri Aurobindo wrote on Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Sri Ramakrishna. He dealt with this job with the same mental discipline and even-handedness that he had used so successfully in his book comparing Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts on the evolution of consciousness with those of some European philosophers.

Interestingly, it was this very even-handedness that gave me at my first reading of the book, the impression that he had not given enough attention to Sri Krishna. Sri Aurobindo did not only devote a whole book to the explanation of the Gita which is in the end all about Krishna’s life and teachings, but he expressed on many occasions to what extent he felt personally close to him, loved him, and identified with him. In comparison, the Buddha and Christ remained at least to some extent “others” for Sri Aurobindo: he highly respected them, no doubt, but he also stressed much more often that they lived in different times and cultures and had a different work to do. When I felt this apparent lack of balance, I checked how much space each of these three world-famous figures had been given in the book, and I realised that it was near identical: each one got exactly thirty-five pages plus or minus hardly a few lines! For good order, Sri Ramakrishna did get much less space, but this was inevitable simply because Sri Aurobindo mentioned him so rarely, though always with the greatest respect. In The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo called Ramakrishna a spiritual giant, and he considered himself as coming from his “lineage”.

As a whole, the book does not make easy reading, as the author makes no attempts at simplifying Sri Aurobindo’s sometimes complex and many-facetted thoughts. Instead he tries to discover what it actually was that made Sri Aurobindo say sometimes radically opposite things about the same historical figure. Huchzermeyer does this by going, separately for each Avatar, through all of Sri Aurobindo’s books in which they are mentioned. This approach, all by itself, already provides a certain historical and cultural context for each statement. Beyond that, Huchzermeyer goes out of his way wherever needed to find the missing links. With Krishna and Ramakrishna this is relatively straightforward. Sri Aurobindo saw Krishna as the embodiment of the Divine in the previous stage of the evolution of consciousness. In Sri Ramakrishna he recognised one human being who managed in quick succession to realise the Truths brought by all major religions in the modern world. In both cases, he saw his own work as the next step in a continuum. With Buddha and Christ, on the other hand, he had actual differences, which he sometimes ascribed to errors made by their followers, sometimes to the fact that they lived in different times with different needs.

The main difference he has with Buddha’s teachings is the Buddhist stress on a road to freedom from suffering which involves an inner change but leaves the world as it is. This separation of spirituality from daily life and the formation of monastic orders imply a hierarchical divide between religious and mundane activities, which does not go well with Sri Aurobindo’s ideal of a total transformation of life in all its aspects. Regarding the teachings of Christ, Sri Aurobindo considered Christianity’s ethical ideals unrealistic because they did not accord with the workings of nature. But here too, Sri Aurobindo fully acknowledges that this stress may have been needed for Christ to pursue his role in the “humanisation of Europe”.

A welcome element of the book is that it includes short sections about the Mother’s connection with these three Avatars.  Here Huchzermeyer gives bits of biographical detail about the way the Mother came into contact with them, how this affected her, and in the end, of course, what she wrote about them.

A lesser detail that helps to make the book a good read are the brief sidetracks with interesting statements by Sri Aurobindo from his early works or letters. One even smaller thing that still may deserve a special mention in the days of Google and mechanically made indexes, is that Huchzermeyer does include passages where their names are not explicitly mentioned, like the famous passage from Savitri where Sri Aurobindo writes about Christ’s cross without calling him by name.

As a whole, the book impresses by its friendly, respectful atmosphere, which the author maintains throughout, while engaging, at the same time, in detailed, sophisticated mental reasoning. This makes the book a little treasure for all those who appreciate serious scholarship delivered with modesty and candour.

—Matthijs Cornelissen

Dr Cornelissen teaches Psychological Aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s Work at the SAICE and is the founder-director of the Indian Psychology Institute.

Reviewed in December 2019