Savitri - A first Contact

 PROGRAMME OUTLINE

 Introduction to Savitri 

OM NAMO BHAGAVATHE SRI ARAVINDHAYA SHARANAM  MAMA

Good evening Ladies and Gentleman.  This evening’s programme by the Sunshine Youth Group is another special offering we place at the feet of the Divine Mother and Sri Aurobindo.  For the first time, the group is venturing into Savitri, Sri Aurobindo’s epic creation of about 24 000 lines, that embodies the whole of His and The Mother’s Poorna Yoga or Integral Yoga that spans decades of their work on this earth. 

Sri Aurobindo used the storyline of a well-known legend from the Mahabharata and turns it into a symbol and a quest, a symbol of and a quest for the highest that mankind can aspire for.

The opening pages of the earliest known manuscript of Savitri are dated as August 8 and 9th, 1916.   And in November 1950, during the last months of his sojourn on earth in His physical body, Sri Aurobindo dictated the last passages to be added to the work.  Savitri actually grew from about 800 lines to about 24 000 lines between 1916 and 1950.

Sri Aurobindo took upon himself a tremendous labour of love, unparalleled in the history of literary creation as he compiled in this colossal endeavour,  about 8000 pages of manuscript with some of the passages evolving through as many as fifty versions.

In a first bid of establishing contact with Savitri, Maya, Veera, Prapti, Anuvrat, Ashish, Adi and Tanvi, are here to share with you, Ladies and Gentleman, lines that they have culled out from the epic poem, and meditated upon over a period of time.  Just prior to this, Satyavrat comes on with a synopsis of the epic poem.  Following the rendition of the lines describing the characteristics of the main characters, Dhana and Kannappan will enact a brief encounter between Savitri and the Lord of Death, depicting the victory of Love, that is Savitri, over Death, that is ignorance in the human consciousness.  Following this 5 children will recite all in all, 20 lines from Book 7, Canto 5 ( The Book of Yoga; The finding of the Soul).  Then Kiruthika presents "What Savitri Means to Me".  Lastly, a representative of the group presenting today sums up the collective experiences of the team in preparing for this significant presentation.

O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power.

All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;

Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,

Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair.

And in her body as on his homing tree

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.

 (Bk 3,canto 4)

Synopsis of Savitri

 The legend of Savitri is well known.  It occurs in the Vanaparva of the Mahabharata.  The King of Madra, Aswapathy, begets a child after many years of severe tapas.  This child is named Savitri, after the deity that granted him the boon.  Savitri goes in quest for her partner and returns home to tell her parents that it is Satyavan that she has found.  Narad who is there then, pronounces his foreknowledge of the doom that is to befall on Satyavan.  He reveals that a year from that date, Satyavan is to die.  Savitri marries Satyavan despite this and lives with him happily, serving his aged parents.  On the fateful day,  Yama, the Lord of Death appears and attaching a noose around the spirit of Satyavan, leads him away.  Undaunted, Savitri follows him and by virtue of the force of her purity, talks the Lord of Death into returning Satyavan to her.

 In M P Pandit’s words, Sri Aurobindo has turned this common legend into “a symbol of the quest of humanity for the crown of immortality”.  In this great epic poetry, Sri Aurobindo, expounds the philosophy of Poorna Yoga, or Integral Yoga in his very own uplifted style.  Lets hear a prologue to the epic poem in the master’s own words:

 The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharatha as a story of conjugal love conquering death.  But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle.  Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance;  Savitri is the Divine Word, Daughter of the Sun, goddess of the Supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save;  Aswapathy, the Lord of the horse, her father, is the Lord of the Tapasya, the concentrated energy of the spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes;  Dyumatsena, Lord of the shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here taken blind, losing its celestial kingdom and vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory.  Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.

 THE QUEEN MOTHER

At his side a creature beautiful, passionate, wise,
Aspiring like a sacrificing flame
Skyward from its earth-seat through luminous air,
Queen bowed, the human mother of Savitri.

A silence sealed the irrevocable decree,
The word of Fate that fell from the heavenly lips
Fixing a doom no power could ever reverse
Unless heaven's will itself could change its course.
Or so it seemed; yet from the silence rose
One voice that questioned changeless destiny.
A will that strove against the immutable Will,

  A mother's heart had heard the fateful speech
That rang like a sanction to the call of death
She felt the leaden inevitable hand
Invade the secrecy of her guarded soul
And smite with sudden pain its still content
And the empire of her hard-won quietude.
Awhile she fell to the level of human mind,
A field of mortal grief and Nature's law
She shared, she bore the common lot of men
And felt what common hearts endure in Time.
Awhile she lost her spirit's tranquil poise,
Awhile she shared the lot of common souls
And bore the heavy hand of Death and Time
And felt the anguish in life's stricken deeps.

 NARAD 

 Narad the heavenly sage from Paradise
Came chanting through the large and lustrous air.
He beheld the cosmic Being at his task,
His eyes measured the spaces, gauged the depths,
His inner gaze the movements of the soul,
He saw the eternal labour of the Gods,
And looked upon the life of beasts and men.

His song the name of Vishnu and the birth
And joy and passion of the mystic world.
And how the stars were made and life began
And the mute regions stirred with the throb of a soul.

And darkness yearning towards the Light,
And Love that broods within the dim abyss
And waits the answer of the human heart,
And death that climbs to immortality.

He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,
Of the Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,

Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
Heart sensing Heart, thought looking straight at thought,
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and ecstasy.
He spoke but held his knowledge back from words
His speech like glimmering music veiled his thoughts;
Pitiful to mortals, only to them it spoke,
As a wind flatters the bright summer air;
Of living beauty and of present bliss:
He hid in his all-knowing mind the rest.

YAMA

Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,
A limitless denial of all being 

That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.

In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form

Bore the deep pity of destroying gods.

A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips

That speak the word of doom.  Eternal Night

In the dire beauty of an immortal face,

Pitying arose, receiving all that lives

Forever into its fathomless heart, refuge

Of creatures from their anguish and world pain.

 
He stood in silence and in darkness wrapped,
A figure motionless, a shadow vague,
Girt with the terrors of his sacred sword.
Half-seen in clouds appeared a sombre face,
Night's dusk tiara was his matted hair,
The ashes of the pyre his forehead's sign.

His shape was nothingness made real, his limbs  

Were monuments of transcience and beneath

Brows of unwearying calm large godlike lids

Silent beheld the writhing serpent, life.

Unmoved their timeless wide unchanging gaze  

Has seen the unprofitable cycles pass,

Survived the passing of unnumbered stars

And sheltered still the same immutable orbs.

SATYAVAN           

As if a weapon of the living Light,

Erect and lofty like a spear of God

His figure led the splendour of the morn.

Noble and clear as the broad peaceful heavens

A tablet of young wisdom was his brow,

Freedom’s imperious beauty curved his limbs,

The joy of life was on his open face.

His look was a wide daybreak of the gods,

His head was a youthful Rishi’s touched with light,

His body was a lover’s and a king’s.

Out of the ignorant eager toil of the years

Abandoning man’s loud drama he had come

Led by the wisdom of as adverse Fate

To meet the ancient Mother in her groves.

In her divine communion he had grown

A foster-child of beauty and solitude,

Heir to the centuries of the lonely wise,

A brother of the sunshine and the sky,

A wanderer communing with depth and marge.

A veda-knower of the unwritten book

Pursuing the mystic nature of her forms,

He had caught her hierophant significances,

Her sphered immense imaginations learned,

Taught by sublimities of stream and wood

And voices of the sun and star and flame

And chant of the magic singers on the boughs

And the dumb teaching of four-footed things.

Helping with confident steps her slow great hands

He leaned to her influence like a flower to rain

And, like the flower and tree a natural growth,

Widened with the touches of her shaping hours.

The mastery free natures have was his

And their ascent to joy and spacious calm;

One with the single Spirit inhabiting all,

He laid experience at the Godhead’s feet;

His mind was open to her infinite mind,

His acts were rhythmic to her primal force;

He had subdued his mortal thought to hers.

KING ASWAPATHY

 He came new-born, infant and limitless

And grew in the wisdom of the timeless child,

He was a vast that soon became a Sun.

A great luminous silence whispered to his heart;

Into our province of ephemeral sight,

A colonist from immortality.

A pointing beam on earth's uncertain roads.

His birth held up a symbol and a sign;

His human self like a translucent cloak

Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.

His days were a long growth to the Supreme

A skyward being nourishing its roots

On sustenance from occult spiritual founts

Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.

His soul lived as eternity's delegate,

His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,

His will a hunter in the trail of light.

The gifts of the spirit crowding came to him;

They were his life’s pattern and his privilege.

A Universal light was in his eyes

A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;

A force came down into his mortal limbs;

A current from eternal seas of Bliss;

He felt the invasion and the nameless toil.

A pilgrim of the everlasting Truth,

Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind;

He has turned from the voices of the narrow realms

And left the little lane of human Time.

He caught up lightly like a giant’s bow

Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave

The powers that sleep unused in man within.

He made of miracle a normal act

And turned to a common part of divine works.

Magnificently natural at this height

Efforts that would shatter the strength of mortal hearts.,

 SAVITRI

A flame of radiant happiness she was born,

And surely will that flame set earth alight.

The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy

A prodigal of her rich divinity,
Her self and all she was she lent to men,
Hoping her greater being to implant
That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.

To live with grief, to confront death on her road,
The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.

Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,
Her nature felt all Nature as its own.
Apart, living within, all lives she bore;

Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;
The universal Mother's love was hers.
Aloof, she carried in herself the world.

Her beauty and flaming strength were seen afar
Like lightning playing with the fallen day
A glory unapproachably divine.

A greatness and sweetness and light
Poured out from her upon her little world.

She saw the undying fountains of her life,
She knew herself eternal without birth.

  Dialogue between Savitri and Yama 

 God of Death, Yama 

Where matter is all, there Spirit is a dream:

If all are the Spirit, matter is a lie,

And who was the liar who forged the universe?

The real with the unreal cannot mate.

He who would turn to God, must leave the world:

He who would live in the spirit, must give up life;

He who has met the Self, renounces self.

In me all take refuge, for I, Death, am God.

 Savitri

 But who can show to thee Truth’s glorious face?

Our human words can only shadow her.

To thought she is an unthinkable rapture of light,

To speech a marvel inexpressible.

O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme

Thou wouldst grow suddenly wise and cease to be.

If our souls could see and love and clasp God’s Truth,

Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts,

Our being in God’s image be remade

And earthly life become the life divine. 

 Lines from Savitri 
 

A secret soul behind

Is master and witness of our ignorant life,

Admits the Person’s look and Nature’s role.

But once the hidden doors are flung apart

Then the veiled king steps out in Nature’s front;

A light comes down into the ignorance,

Its heavy painful knot loosens its grasp:

The mind becomes a mastered instrument

And life a hue and figure of the soul.

 In the slow process of the evolving spirit,

In the brief stade between a death and birth

A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;

Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff

A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.

Even if the struggling world is left outside

One man’s perfection still can save the world.

There is won a new proximity to the skies,

A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,

A deep concordat between Truth and Life:

A camp of God is pitched in human time.

Conclusion

 Here are the concluding lines from Savitri for the evening:

The superman shall reign as king of life,

Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven

And lead towards God and truth man's ignorant heart

And lift towards godhead his mortality.

The spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze

And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.

Then man and superman shall be at one

And all the earth become a single life.

Thus shall the earth open to divinity

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play;

This earthly life become the Life divine

 To Sri Aurobindo and The Mother we offer all of our efforts in this presentation.

 OM NAMO BHAGAVATHE SRI ARAVINDHAYA MEERAYA SHARANAM  MAMA