Sri Aurobindo’s

THE LIFE DIVINE

- A SUMMARY -

Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine as we know it today, with its fifty-six chapters in two books and three parts, differs considerably from the original version of the work, which appeared in fifty-four monthly instalments in the philosophical review Arya between August 1914 and January 1919. Each instalment was written immediately before its publication.

The Life Divine is, in fact, the most thoroughly and systematically revised of all Sri Aurobindo’s prose works.

Between 1921 and 1939, Sri Aurobindo undertook the revision of chapters of The Life Divine on two occasions. He did this work, first, on pages torn from copies of the Arya and, secondly, in his bound set of the journal. In both cases he lightly revised selected chapters. All told, thirty of the first thirty-two Arya chapters received some revision. But he did not consult this work when, in the beginning of 1939, he began a systematic revision of the entire work with a view to bringing it out as a book. The revised Life Divine must be considered a greatly expanded and largely rewritten work. Even those of its chapters which were first published in the Arya and retain their original structure in the revised version have been (especially for its second part) changed substantially. None of Sri Aurobindo’s other ‘revised’ works have been the subject of such a complete recasting. It is evident from the manuscripts that the work is comprehensive and systematic, consisting of the repeated revision of drafts for every chapter, so that by the time of publication, the whole text had been gone over thoroughly many times.

The revised Life Divine was published for the first time in two Volumes in 1939 and 1940 by the Arya Publishing House, Calcutta. It should be noted that these “Volumes” were the two main structural divisions of the work. The 1939-40 edition of The Life Divine consisted of three physical volumes, one for “Volume I” (published in November 1939 and consisting of the first twenty-seven chapter of the Arya text, along with a newly written twenty-eight chapter) and two for “Volume II” (published in July 1940 and consisting of twenty-eight chapters — eight Arya chapters were discarded and seventeen considerably revised, while twelve new chapters were written). Subsequent editions of the work were published in two physical volumes and sometimes in one. The first one-volume edition was brought out in New York in 1949. In this American edition the two “Volumes” were called “Books”; this change of the name of the primary structural division of The Life Divine was adopted in all subsequent editions, published in India or in the United States. The new editions were published in 1955, 1970, 1990, 2001 and 2007. The edition published in 2007 (included in “The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo”, in 37 volumes) has been checked against all editions published before 1950 and, when necessary, the Author’s manuscripts.

Sri Aurobindo once wrote, somewhat jocularly,
in a confidential epistle:

«And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher — although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precisous little about philosophy before I did Yoga and came to Pondicherry — I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher. How I managed to do it and why? First, because P.R. [a French intellectual] proposed me to co-operate in a philosophical review — and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. […] I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!».

The firsts of the Synopsis offered here, was written
by Sri Aurobindo in the 1940’s in response
to pressing requests for a model indicating the lines
upon which a summary of The Life Divine could be attempted.

The others Synopsis are realised by our staff
in the lines of the firsts.

BOOK ONE
OMNIPRESENT REALITY AND THE UNIVERSE

BOOK TWO
THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE
— THE SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION

Part I - THE INFINITE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE IGNORANCE

Part II - THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION