T.V. Kapali Sastri was a Vedic scholar who had his early training under the renowned Kavyakantha Ganapati Muni. His scholarship and spiritual sadhana endeared him to Ramana Maharshi. From 1916 onwards he was drawn to Sri Aurobindo’s yoga and settled down in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Interpreting the philosophy of Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo became a lifelong vocation for him. Teacher, translator, exegetist, essayist and poet, Kapali Sastri was a philosopher attuned to Tantra. The present monograph, the first full-length study of Kapali Sastri, is an introduction to his multifaceted writings. His Sanskrit commentary on the first Astaka of the Rgveda was inspired by the intuitive interpretation of the Vedic hymns by Sri Aurobindo; in his luminous analysis of the Upanisads, we watch how his great body of work is a natural continuation of the Vedic corpus; in the same manner, his study of Tantra shows how the Tantrik deities are descendants of Vedic divinities; his Sanskrit commentaries on Ganapati Muni’s Umasahasram and other contemporary Tantric-philosophical classics are of vital importance to an understanding of the foundations of Indian culture as well as their unimpeded flow down the centuries. Kapali Sastri’s services to literature, religion and spirituality have been presented here with perceptive care against the philosophical background of Ganapati Muni, Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo.
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