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Chapter 29
Note on the Text

The Life Divine
Book Two
The Knowledge and the Ignorance
The Spiritual Evolution

Sri Aurobindo, 1916
From Volume 21 and 22 of
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo

     THE LIFE DIVINE first 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.

     Sri Aurobindo did not do any work for The Life Divine as we know it before June 1914; but between 1912 and the early part of 1914, he wrote three incomplete drafts of a commentary on the Isha Upanishad that he called "The Life Divine". Each of these drafts contains long discussions of philosophical issues. In August 1914, along with the first chapter of The Life Divine, he published the first instalment of a translation and analysis of the Isha Upanishad. From this point on, he kept his Upanishadic interpretation separate from his original philosophical writing. In writing The Life Divine he only occasionally made reference to the Upanishads and other Vedantic texts. He put the heading "Book I / The Affirmations of Vedanta" above the title of the first chapter in the Arya, but made no mention of this division in subsequent chapters. Elsewhere he acknowledged his indebtedness to the Vedantic tradition while at the same time affirming that his philosophy owed more to inner experience than to the reading of texts:

     "My philosophy was formed first by study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy. ...  The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the level of the Higher Mind when I reached that level. ...  This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole."

     Between 1921 and 1939, Sri Aurobindo undertook the revision of chapters of The Life Divine on two occasions. He did this work (1) on pages torn from copies of the Arya and (2) 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 Life Divine with a view to bringing it out as a book. This revision work is described below.

     The revised Life Divine was published 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 same divisions are now called "Books". The 1939 - 40 edition of The Life Divine consisted of three physical volumes, one for "Volume I" (Book One) and two for "Volume II" (Book Two). Subsequent editions of the work were published sometimes in two physical volumes and sometimes in one.

     The revision of the two Volumes (Books) will be considered separately.

29.1  The revision of Volume I (Book One)

     "Volume I" (Book One) of the The Life Divine, "Thoroughly Revised and Enlarged", was published in November 1939. It consists of twenty-eight chapters. The first twenty-seven correspond to the first twenty-seven chapters of the Arya text; the twenty-eighth was newly written in 1939. The revision was carried out in two stages. First, at some point (possibly before 1939), Sri Aurobindo made some changes on a typed copy of the Arya text.¹⁶³ These changes were transferred from the typed copy to the galley proofs by his secretary. Sri Aurobindo then made further changes directly on the proofs. The chapters that were revised in this way do not differ substantially from the Arya text. The only chapters of Volume I (Book One) that received extensive revision are XIX, "Life", and XXIII, "The Double Soul in Man". In each of these chapters, Sri Aurobindo made fairly substantial alterations to the existing text, and also wrote a long addition (two printed pages in XIX, six in XXIII). It would appear that he wrote the new chapter, XXVIII, after completing his revision of the twenty-seven existing chapters. He corrected chapters XIX, XXIII and XXVIII along with the other chapters when he saw the page proofs.

     In December 1940, after he had completed the recasting of Volume II (Book Two), Sri Aurobindo expressed some dissatisfaction with the revision of the earlier Volume. "If I had to write the first volume of The Life Divine again", he is reported to have said, "I would add to it to make the argument more full."

29.2  The revision of Volume II (Book Two)

     Volume II (Book Two) of The Life Divine, "Recast and Enlarged", was published in July 1940. Sri Aurobindo's revision, which was far more extensive than that of Volume I, may be broken down into four operations: the revision of Arya chapters directly on pages from the Arya; the writing of new passages or new chapters; the correction and further revision of successive typed copies of the revised or new chapters; and the correction and further revision of galley and page proofs. It is not possible to reconstruct the exact sequence in which he did this work, but it may be supposed that he began with the revision of the Arya chapters, taking them up more or less in order, and writing new material when required. His revision of typescripts had to wait until the various chapters were typed by his secretary. Once he had finished revising the typescripts, the manuscript was sent to the press in Calcutta, after which he revised the proofs.

     In its recast form, Volume II (Book Two) consists of twenty-eight chapters. Sri Aurobindo numbered them in a single sequence but divided them into two parts, each of which contains fourteen chapters. In all, fourteen of the twenty-eight chapters correspond to a single Arya chapter, two include material from two Arya chapters, while twelve chapters were newly written. See Tables I and II.

     The sixteen chapters that correspond to Arya chapters may be placed in two categories: (1) those that are made up entirely of Arya material, revised and enlarged; (2) those that are made up partly of revised Arya material and partly of new material. The newly written chapters stand apart as a separate category (3). (In Tables I and II these three categories are indicated by superscript numbers 1, 2 and 3.) The chapters falling in each of these categories will be considered separately.

29.2.1  Revised Arya Chapters

     Twelve chapters in the revised edition correspond to chapters in the Arya, namely revised chapters III, IV, VII, VIII, IX, XI, XII, XIII, XVII, XVIII, XIX and XX. Sri Aurobindo began work on these chapters by writing corrections and additions, some of them lengthy, on pages from the Arya. Occasionally he deleted paragraphs, longer passages or entire pages. Once he had completed a chapter, he gave it to his secretary for typing. When he got the typescript back, he made further revisions, particularly to passages that had been heavily revised or newly written during the earlier stage. The final manuscript of certain chapters that had received little revision was typed directly from the first revised typescript. In other cases, one or more intermediate typescripts were prepared and revised before the final form was reached.

     Of the twelve chapters under consideration, III, VIII and IX are the least revised; IV, VII, XI, XII, XIII, XVII, XIX and XX are quite heavily revised, though they still follow the general structure of the corresponding Arya chapters; and XVIII is so thoroughly revised that it may be considered to be practically rewritten.

29.2.2  Partly New Chapters

     Four chapters in the revised edition, XV, XVI, XXI and XXII, consist of a combination of material from the Arya, revised in the manner described above, and entirely new material composed in the manner described below. The mode of combination differs from case to case. Chapters XVI and XXII each started as a single Arya chapter, to which was added an approximately equal amount of new material in such a way that the original structure of the chapter was preserved to a great extent. Chapters XV and XXI were composed of revised passages from a single Arya chapter (in the first case) or two Arya chapters (in the second case), which were combined with newly written material in such a way that the Arya material was absorbed in the new structure. The revision of the Arya portions of Chapter XXI was so extensive, and their integration with the new material so thorough, that it may almost be considered a new chapter.

29.2.3  New Chapters

     Twelve chapters in the revised version are, from the point of view of composition, entirely new. These new chapters are I, II, V, VI, X, XIV and the last six: XXIII to XXVIII. Sri Aurobindo wrote the first drafts on loose sheets of bond paper. His handwriting flows on with little sign of hesitation; there are few cancellations and hardly any rewording of sentences. At times, however, he cancelled and rewrote whole passages, or left off work and recommenced on a different sheet of paper. Often he proceeded fairly continuously from the beginning of the chapter to the end. In other cases, however, he wrote and revised two or more parts of a chapter separately and then combined them, or else wrote and revised a draft and then integrated it in a longer draft that widened the scope of the chapter. Once a chapter had reached its full extent, it was typed for further revision. At this point, he often introduced stylistic changes, as well as new ideas. The process of typing and revision was generally repeated two or three times.

     The twelve new chapters appear to have been written from scratch without any direct reference to material in the Arya. It is worth noting, however, that some new chapters have titles very similar to those of Arya chapters, and deal with similar themes. The clearest of such correspondences are between new Chapter XXIII, "Man and the Evolution", and Arya Chapter XXXVI, "Man and the Evolutionary Movement"; and between new Chapter XXVII, "The Gnostic Being", and Arya Chapters LI and LII, "The Necessity of the Gnostic Being" and "The Spiritual Gnostic Being". When setting aside Arya Chapter XL, "The Fundamental Character of the Ignorance", Sri Aurobindo wrote a note to his secretary indicating that it was to be replaced by a new chapter (later expanded into two chapters, V and VI). But in all these cases, the new chapters do not have any obvious verbal relationship to the ones they replaced.

29.3  Mottoes

     All chapters of the revised edition of The Life Divine have, below the title, translated quotations from the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and other Sanskrit texts. Sri Aurobindo called these quotations "mottoes". The mottoes for the chapters making up Volume I (Book One) are for the most part the same as those that had appeared in the corresponding Arya chapters. Of the chapters making up Volume II (Book Two), only VII, IX, XVI and XVIII retain mottoes that had appeared in the Arya. All the other mottoes in Volume II were selected by Sri Aurobindo from a collection prepared for the purpose by A. B. Purani. Sri Aurobindo chose texts from Purani's collection and translated them into English.

29.4  Printing history after 1940

     A second edition of "Volume I", lightly revised by the author, was published by the Arya Publishing House in 1943. A second edition of "Volume II" was brought out (in one physical volume) by the same publisher in 1944. A third edition of "Volume I" came out in 1947.

     In 1955, a fourth Indian edition of The Life Divine was published by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in one physical volume. This edition was reprinted in 1960. A fifth edition was brought out in 1970 by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as part of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. This edition was reprinted twelve times between 1970 and 1997, sometimes in two and sometimes in one physical volume. In the impressions of 1977 and 1980, the editors introduced a few corrections of obvious typographical and other errors. The impression of 1982 incorporated several revisions that Sri Aurobindo had made in his copy of the first edition, which had only recently come to light. In 2001 a sixth edition, based on the fifth edition but freshly typeset and with a new pagination, was published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

     A one-volume edition of The Life Divine was brought out by the Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, in 1949. In this first 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 the fifth Indian edition and retained in all subsequent editions including the present one.) This edition was reprinted in 1951 and 1965. A second American edition was published by the Lotus Light Press in 1990. This edition was reprinted in 1994 and 2000.

29.5  The present edition

     The present, seventh, Indian edition is issued as volumes 21 and 22 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO. The text has been checked against all editions published before 1950 and, when necessary, the original manuscripts.

29.6  Chapters in Arya and 1940 edition

     ¹ Revised form of a chapter originally published in the Arya.

     ² Chapter comprising revised Arya material as well as new material.

     ³ Entirely new chapter.

     ¹ Revised form of a chapter originally published in the Arya.

     ² Chapter comprising revised Arya material as well as new material.

     ³ Entirely new chapter.

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