Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

5. Planes and Parts of the Being

Fragment ID: 313

It [the identification of buddhi with vijñāna and intuition] is the error that came with the excessive intellectualism of the philosophers and commentators. I don’t think buddhi includes intuition as something separate in kind from intellect – the intellectualists considered intuition to be only a rapid process of intellectual thought – and they still think that. In the Taittiriya Upanishad the sense of vijñāna is very clear – its essence is ṛtam, the spiritual Truth; but afterwards the identification with buddhi became general.