ईशावास्योपनिषद्
Īśā Upanishad
The Lord in His Habitation and the Sun of Truth
All this is for habitation by the Lord, whatsoever is individual universe of movement in the universal motion.
Of all the Upanishads none lay nearer to Sri Aurobindo's heart than the Īśā, the Īśāvāsya, eighteen verses that hold within a few minutes of recitation a whole discipline of seeing and of living. He first put it into English about 1900, printed a version in the Karmayogin in 1909, and returned to it through fourteen years of unfinished commentaries, until between August 1914 and May 1915 he gave the Arya his final translation and analysis in four movements, which the editors of his Complete Works call the quintessence of his Upanishadic interpretation. The principle he finds in it, and which he made the principle of his own philosophy, is "the uncompromising reconciliation of uncompromising extremes".
The extremes are the oldest quarrels of the spirit: God and the world, renunciation and enjoyment, works and freedom, the One and the Many, Knowledge and Ignorance, Birth and Non-Birth. Later thought, he says, took one series of these terms and exalted it over the other until existence in the world became a snare; the Isha will not. It sets each beside its opposite and shows that the two are one Brahman looking at Itself from two sides. The Upanishads, in his phrase, are "vehicles of illumination and not of instruction", and so the verses leap from light to light without stating their transitions. Let us follow them in the order of his four movements, and end where the Upanishad ends, before the face of the Sun.
Sri Aurobindo’s writings on it · 21
The text · 18 passages
Translation by Sri Aurobindo.