Religion as Experience

'The Hindu attitude to religion is interesting. While fixed intellectual beliefs mark off one religion from another, Hinduism sets itself no such limits. Intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer expression to inward realisation. Religion is not the acceptance of academic abstractions or the celebration of ceremonies, but a kind of life or experience. It is insight into the nature of reality (darsana), or experience of reality (anubhava),' said Dr S Radhakrishnan to whom the grateful nation pay homage on Teachers' Day

- RAJU MANSUKHANI

When Dr S Radhakrishnan was invited in 1926 to Manchester College, Oxford to deliver the Upton lectures, he was already a renowned professor of philosophy at Calcutta University. As a teacher, he was demonstrating his ability to simplify complex issues of western and Indian philosophy; making the subject inspiring, interesting for students and lay-people who wanted to uplift their lives.

“The world is now full of racial, cultural and religious misunderstandings,” he said, referring to the end of the First World War, the millions who had died in Europe, Africa and Asia, and the anti-colonial upsurge in the 1920s shaking up the British Empire. “We are groping in a timid and tentative way for some device which would save us from our suicidal conflicts. Perhaps the Hindu way of approach to the problem of religious conflicts may not be without its lessons for us,” he advised the august audience.

Dr Radhakrishnan questioned at the start, “How was Hindu society built up out of material so diverse, so little susceptible in many cases to assimilation, and scattered across a huge continent measuring nearly two thousand miles from north to south and eighteen hundred miles from west to east? It cannot be denied that in a few centuries the spirit of cultural unity spread through a large part of the land, and racial stocks of varying levels of culture became steeped in a common atmosphere. The differences among the sects of the Hindus are more or less on the surface, and the Hindus as such remain a distinct cultural unit, with a common history, a common literature and a common civilisation.”