Radhakrishnan in Three Ideas
the essentialsIntuition
Religion rests on intuitive experience of the real, which reason clarifies but cannot replace.
Hinduism as a way of life
Not a creed but “a way of life” — tolerant, experiential, open to all truths.
East and West
India’s spiritual insight and the West’s science must meet.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (5 September 1888 – 17 April 1975) was an Indian philosopher and statesman, the most influential twentieth-century interpreter of Indian philosophy to the West. He taught at Mysore and Calcutta, became Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford (1936–52), and served as India’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, first Vice-President (1952–62) and second President (1962–67). His two-volume Indian Philosophy (1923–27), The Hindu View of Life (1926), An Idealist View of Life (1932) and his translations of the Upaniṣads, the Gītā and the Brahma Sūtras made Indian thought accessible to English readers. His own philosophy, rooted in Advaita Vedānta, held that religion rests on intuitive experience of ultimate reality, that Hinduism is “not a religion but a way of life” marked by tolerance and inclusiveness, and that the spiritual insight of India and the science of the West must be brought together. His birthday, 5 September, is celebrated in India as Teachers’ Day.
Curiosities
did you know?- When students wanted to celebrate his birthday, he asked that it be observed as Teachers’ Day instead — 5 September in India.
- As ambassador to the Soviet Union (1949–52) he is said to have patted Stalin on the cheek.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Is religion a matter of experience or of belief?
Explore Next
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Kundakunda
The most revered Digambara Jain teacher — author of the Samayasāra, which distinguishes the absolute standpoint, from which the soul is pure consciousness untouched by karma, from the conventional standpoint, from which it is bound.
Maitreyī
Yājñavalkya’s wife, “a discourser on Brahman”, who asked whether all the wealth in the world could make her immortal — and, refusing her share of his property, received instead his teaching that all love is love of the Self.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa
The 19th-century Bengali mystic of the Dakshineswar Kālī temple who practised Hindu, Muslim and Christian paths and declared “as many faiths, so many paths” — the guru of Vivekananda and the fountainhead of modern Hindu universalism.
Bādarāyaṇa
The author, by tradition, of the Brahma Sūtras — the systematisation of the Upaniṣads that became the root text of every school of Vedānta. Often identified with Vyāsa, compiler of the Vedas and author of the Mahābhārata.
Ramana Maharshi
The silent sage of Arunachala (1879–1950), who at sixteen experienced his own death and the deathless Self, and taught one practice above all — self-inquiry, “Who am I?” — the simplest and most direct path of Advaita.