Contemporary Indian Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: D

For Sri Aurobindo the link between Brahman and the world is Supermind. Supermind, which he also calls the truth-consciousness, is the divine power that stands between the infinite Sat-Chit-Ananda and the lower hemisphere of mind, life and matter, and it carries out creation by the knowledge of unity in difference. Mind, higher mind and illumined mind are stages of the ascent that lie below it in the scale of consciousness and belong to the lower creation, so they are steps towards the link and not the link itself.

Answer: B

The order is Higher mind, Illumined mind, Intuitive mind, Overmind and Supermind. In Sri Aurobindo's scheme of the ascent beyond ordinary mind, the first step is Higher Mind, a thought-mind of luminous ideas, followed by Illumined Mind, where there is spiritual light, and then Intuitive Mind, which brings direct seeing. Overmind comes next, and beyond it lies Supermind. A list that begins with Illumined mind, or with Intuitive mind, or places Supermind first, reverses the stages, and the last list puts Supermind at the start, which would make it the lowest.

Answer: B

According to Sri Aurobindo the Overmind is the father of ignorance. The Overmind separates the aspects of the one Divine Truth and lets each work on its own, and this division, carried to the lower levels, is what lets ignorance arise in the mind, life and matter. Supermind keeps unity and cannot produce ignorance, and illumined and intuitive minds are lower stages that already feel its limits. So the Overmind, the highest of the ranges below Supermind, is named as the origin of the ignorance.

Answer: C

Sri Aurobindo has propounded ultimate reality as supra-ethical. For him the Absolute is beyond the opposition of good and evil: ethics belongs to the plane of mind and its duality, while the divine reality is a unity that transcends such distinctions, so that the soul, in the end, passes beyond ethical rules into a spiritual freedom. Nietzsche rejects the moral order but speaks of the will to power, not of a supra-ethical reality, Gandhi identifies truth with the moral law, and K. C. Bhattacharya is known for his theory of subjectivity and the alternative absolutes, not for this thesis.

Answer: B

The triple process of evolution is widening, heightening and integration. For Sri Aurobindo the evolving consciousness first widens its range, then rises to a higher level of consciousness, and finally integrates the lower parts of the being with the higher, so that the transformation is complete. The answer that begins with heightening, and the one that begins with integration, reverse the stages, while the final choice is wrong because a definite sequence is known and can be named.

Answer: A

The matching is Vivekananda with universal religion, Tagore with surplus in man, Sri Aurobindo with Purṇādvaita and Ambedkar with neo-Buddhism. Vivekananda taught the harmony of all religions, Tagore in The Religion of Man spoke of the surplus in man, which impels him beyond his needs to create, Aurobindo's integral non-dualism is called Purṇādvaita, and Ambedkar embraced Buddhism in 1956 and gave it a social meaning. Therefore the code ii, i, iv, iii is right, and the other codes each cross at least two pairs, such as giving Ambedkar the surplus in man or Tagore Purṇādvaita.

Answer: D

The statement that religion is not meant for an empty belly is Vivekananda's. Hurt by the poverty he saw on his travels in India, he said that it is a sin to preach religion to a hungry man, and that before anything else people must be fed and educated. This was part of his call to serve the poor as the worship of God (daridra narayana). Radhakrishnan, Tagore and Krishnamurti dealt with religion at a different level, as philosophy, creative expression and inner freedom, and are not associated with this sentence.

Answer: D

The view that matter and spirit are the lowest and highest terms of the same existence is Sri Aurobindo's. In The Life Divine he argues that matter is a form of Spirit descended into the lowest plane, and Spirit is the same reality at the top, so that there is a single continuum of being and no opposition between them. Sankara holds that the world is unreal, and Gandhi and Tagore speak of unity and humanity but do not state the doctrine of continuity from matter to spirit as a thesis, so none of them fits.

Answer: A

The matching is Gandhi with My Experiments with Truth, Sri Aurobindo with The Human Cycle, Tagore with The Religion of Man and Radhakrishnan with The Hindu View of Life. Each is a well-known book of its author: the first is Gandhi's autobiography, the second is Aurobindo's study of social development, the third is Tagore's Hibbert lectures and the fourth is Radhakrishnan's Upton lectures. The code ii, i, iv, iii therefore holds, and the other codes exchange authors, for instance giving The Hindu View of Life to Gandhi.

Answer: C

The statement that knowledge is primarily of a definite object and is to be distinguished from the awareness of the indefinite is K. C. Bhattacharya's. In his Subject as Freedom and related essays he distinguishes the definite objective knowledge of things from the indefinite awareness of the self that cannot be made an object. Ambedkar, Radhakrishnan and Tagore are Indian thinkers who wrote on social reform, religion and literature, but this view of knowledge and the indefinite is credited to Bhattacharya.