'Nirvana' To 'Neti Neti': Savitri And Sri Lalita Sahasranama

(This is the seventh article in Aravindan Neelakandan's series on Sri Aurobindo's 'Savitri' and the Sri Lalita Sahasranama. The earlier parts are here: one, two, three, four, five, and six).

In the vast multiplicity of the spiritual traditions of India, the ultimate Reality is often approached through two distinct yet complementary paths: the path of negation, which seeks the silent witnessing, and transcendent Absolute beyond all manifestation; and the path of affirmation, which embraces the dynamic, creative, and immanent Absolute manifest as the cosmos.

Two of the most profound expressions of this dual approach are found in Sri Aurobindo's 20^th century epic poem, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, and the ancient sacred hymn, Sri Lalita Sahasranama, particularly as illuminated by the 18^th century commentary of Bhaskararaya, the Saubhagyabhaskara.

Nirvana as the Necessity

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is far more than a retelling of a Mahabharata tale; it is, in his own words, 'a legend and a symbol' of the soul's journey from ignorance and death to a divine consciousness and immortal life - from individual spiritual adventure to a species transformation.

Book Seven, 'The Book of Yoga', forms the experiential core of this journey, detailing the inner askesis through which Savitri prepares herself to confront Fate. The canto explored here—'Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute', represents a crucial movement from a world-negating peace to a world-embracing divinity, a passage central to Sri Aurobindo's vision of Integral Yoga.

In Canto VI of Book Seven, Savitri is impelled by a 'greater Voice' to undertake a journey of radical self-effacement:

Banish all thought from thee and be God’s void.

Then shalt thou uncover the Unknowable

And the Superconscient conscious grow on thy tops;

Infinity’s vision through thy gaze shall pierce;

This command initiates her passage into the All-Negating Absolute, an experience detailed with stark and powerful imagery.

The first step is the cessation of the instruments of the lower nature. Her mind, no longer a 'factory of thought-sounds', becomes a 'vacant consciousness' watching from within a 'bare Reality'.

This leads to a profound dissolution of the personal self, the very nucleus of worldly experience:

She was no more a Person in a world,

She had escaped into infinity.

What once had been herself had disappeared;

There was no frame of things, no figure of soul.

With the ego extinguished, the phenomenal world loses its seeming reality. It is perceived as a 'convincing cheat of self', a mere 'spark-burst' from the light of the Absolute, a collection of 'glimmerings of the Bodiless/That disappear from Mind when That is seen'.

This perception is voiced by the 'formless Dread', the 'negating Absolute' that confronts her, declaring the universe a 'cheat' of Maya and asserting, 'For only the blank Eternal can be true./All else is shadow and flash in Mind’s bright glass'.

The Reality she enters is described in terms of a majestic, formless emptiness. It is a 'stupendous lone reality', an 'impassive, sole, silent, intangible' Being. This is the 'lonely Absolute' that 'negated all', effacing the world from its solitude and drowning the soul in 'everlasting peace'.

Savitri's state becomes one of near-total annulment, a being on the verge of non-being:

Unutterably effaced, no one and null,

A vanishing vestige like a violet trace,

A faint record merely of a self now past,

She was a point in the unknowable.

This experience is presented not as a final goal but as a necessary purification. The Voice that commands her to 'Annul thyself' is a 'mighty and uplifting Voice', the 'voice of Light after the voice of Night'. It frames this self-naughting as a strategic withdrawal, a way to 'uncover the Unknowable' and find the 'hid Truth in things seen null and false'.

The void is not an end but a passage, a 'sacred darkness' that holds more than all worlds. It becomes the pre-requisite for further integrated evolution.

In infinite Nothingness was the ultimate sign

Or else the Real was the Unknowable.

A lonely Absolute negated all:

It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude

And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.

'Neti Neti' in Sahasranama

The Divine Names one finds from 132 to 187 in the Sri Lalita Sahasranama is particularly remarkable for the sustained focus on the Divine Mother's transcendent, attribute-less nature, defining her through a series of negations that echo the neti neti ('not this, not this') of the Upanishads while at the same time also bringing forth her Saguna Brahman aspect for sadhana.

The sequence establishes Her as the attribute-less Brahman.

-132. Niradhara: She who has no support Though She is the support of all the Existence—from multiverses to quarks and beyond, She rests on nothing.

-133. Niranjana: She who is stainless ('without blemish'). Bhaskararaya’s commentary explains that this is not a mere moral quality but Darshana. He directly links it to the description of the Absolute in the Svetasvatara Upanishad as niranjanam, thereby identifying Lalita with the formless, attribute-less Brahman.  

-134. Nirlepa: She who is without attachments. She is beyond the causal chain of action and consequence (karma), remaining untouched by the cosmic processes She initiates.  

--135. Nirmala: She who is without Impurity. She is free from mala, the primordial ignorance or sense of imperfection that is the root of ego and bondage.  

-136. Nitya: She who is Eternal. She is beyond time and change, the immutable reality that persists through all cycles of creation and dissolution. Here, one can see that there is a harmonious blending of a Personal Deity as the Impersonal Brahman - it allows the devotee to navigate between the two aspects.

-137. Nirakara: She who is Formless. This is a definitive attribute of the Nirguṇa Brahman, the Reality that precedes and transcends all shapes and forms.  

-138. Nirakula: She who is without Agitation. She is the serene, unperturbed witness of the cosmic flux, the calm centre of all movement.

 -139. Nirguna: She who is without Attributes. This is the quintessential name for the Absolute—beyond the three guṇas (qualities) of nature.

-142. Nishkama: She who is without Desire. She is the fullness that lacks nothing and is therefore free from the desires that impel the universe.

-143. Nirupaplava: She who is Indestructible. She is beyond the threat of cosmic dissolution or any form of destruction.

-144. Nityamukta: She who is Eternally Free. Her freedom is not an attainment but her intrinsic nature.

-145. Nirvikara: She who is Unchanging. She is without the six modifications (vikaras) such as birth, growth, and decay that define all phenomenal existence.

She is without change or evolution. Bhaskararaya points out that She is not any of evolutes or the evolutionary changes which are the 23 categories of Sankhya.

-146. Nishprapancha: She who is beyond the Phenomenal Universe. She transcends the entire five-fold sensory world. She is without 'accumulation, extension, expansion, contraction' etc.

-147. Nirashrya: She who is 'Body-less'. She is without body. On Her depends all. She depends on none.

-152. Nishkarana: She who is without Cause. As the ultimate cause of all, She herself is uncaused.

-154. Nirupadhih: She who is without Limitation. She is not dependent on any conditioning adjunct or form. Bhaskararaya explains that a coloured flower transferring its colour to a crystal is upadhi. Similarly ignorance causes the multiplicity of consciousness. She is without parts. The two upadhis are 'whole' and 'parts'. She is free from both.

-155. Nirishvara: She who has no Superior. There is no lord or power above Her; Bhaskararaya points out that there are two Darshanas: the Mimamsa which is unitary and does not give importance to an Iswara. Then there is Sankhya whose Niriswara Sankhya denies the place for Iswara. She belongs to both.

-156. Niraga: She is without Desires or Likes. This means that the desire and other differences and perturbances arising in the mind do not belong to the Self. Thus to overcome them at the mental plane one should be strong in renunciation. Through this one can overcome desire, wrath, covetousness, bewilderment, pride and envy.

-157. Ragamathani: She destroys the desires and perturbances of the mind.

-158. Nirmada: She who is without pride.

-159. Madanashini: She destroys pride.

-160. Nishchinta: She who is without the movement of thoughts. A modern day master J.Krishnamurti (1895-1986) considered all thought processes as belonging in time. This psychological time, according to him, contains the constant operation of thought, with its forward and backward projections of the self, creates inner turmoil, conflict, and fear. To be free from this psychological entanglement, Krishnamurti advocates 'ending of time' where the thinker and thought, or the observer and observed, become one, leading to a radical shift in consciousness.

-161. Nirahankara : She who is without ego.

-162. Nirmoha: She who is without bewilderment.

-163. Mohanashini : She who destroys bewilderment.

-176. Nirvikalpa :She is beyond conceptual thoughts. Bhaskararaya explains this as the state devoid of the distinction between subject and object, the unconditioned consciousness of the final stage of meditation.

-178. Nirbheda : She who is without difference or "Non-dual." She is the one reality in which all distinctions are resolved.

-182. Nishkriya: She who is without Action. She is the motionless substratum from which all action proceeds, the unmoved mover.

The Resonance

The resonance between these two descriptions is profound. Savitri's journey into nirvana is the experiential process of realising the ontological state that the Sahasranama attributes to the Divine Mother.

The stripping away of Savitri's personhood, thoughts, and worldly perceptions is a movement into the state of being Nirakara, Nirguna, and Nirahankara. Savitri realises the state of consciousness that unveils and reveals what the Divine Mother eternally is.

This parallel reveals a crucial spiritual principle common to both paths.

The void of Nirvana is not a nihilistic emptiness but a plenum-void. In Savitri, it is a 'sacred darkness' that 'held more than all the teeming worlds'. It is the 'womb and grave of thought, a cipher of God'.

Similarly, in the Shakta tradition, the static, attributeless Shiva-consciousness is the indispensable ground upon which the dynamic play of Shakti unfolds.

The names in the Sahasranama, by defining the Devi as this transcendent ground, establish the foundation of her absolute freedom and power. Her state of being "without" (Nir-) is not a lack but a supreme fullness, a freedom from limitation that is the very source of her freedom to act.

This understanding of the pregnant void prevents a life-negating interpretation and sets the stage for the grand affirmation that follows.