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Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Vedanta · South Asia · 1888 to 1975

Indian philosopher who explained Indian thought to the West, and who held that the world's faiths point to one spiritual reality.

What it is

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888 to 1975) was an Indian philosopher, scholar and statesman. He was born in Tiruttani, taught philosophy at Calcutta and Oxford, and served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967.

He is known above all as an interpreter. He tried to explain Indian thought to the West, and earned a reputation as a bridge-builder between India and Western philosophy. He worked to defend Hinduism against what he called uninformed Western criticism.

The main ideas

  • Advaita Vedanta, renewed. His philosophy rests on Advaita Vedanta, the school that holds the self and the ultimate reality to be one, and he reinterpreted it for present needs.
  • A real world that is not ultimate. He held that the world of ordinary experience is real and varied, yet not ultimate, since it has its origin in the Absolute. He read the idea of maya, usually rendered as illusion, as more than strict illusion.
  • Intuition. He gave intuition a central place, and said it plays a role in every kind of experience, from ordinary perception to the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.
  • Defending a tradition. He answered what he called uninformed Western criticism of Hinduism, while also drawing on Western philosophical and religious thought.
  • A bridge-builder. He is remembered as someone who made Indian thought understood outside India.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone who has learned to doubt anything they cannot prove, and who notices that some of their deepest convictions came to them whole, in a moment of seeing and not by argument. Radhakrishnan would ask them to take such moments seriously as a kind of knowledge, and then to test how they fit the rest of life. This is an illustration of his idea of intuition, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • School years. He attended mission schools and colleges, where he met Christian criticism of Hinduism, and that criticism pushed him to study his own tradition.
  • Indian Philosophy. His two-volume work on Indian philosophy, published in 1923 and 1927.
  • An Idealist View of Life. A book setting out his idealist outlook.
  • Oxford. From 1936 to 1952 he held the Spalding chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics.
  • Public service. He led India's delegation to UNESCO from 1946, was ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952, and became vice president in 1952.
  • President. He was elected president in 1962 and held the office until 1967.
  • Commentaries. He wrote commentaries on the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra and the Bhagavad Gita.

Questions and criticism

  • Knowledge from experience or from scripture? He took knowledge to come from intuitive experience, and he drew on the Upanishads as records of it. It is fair to ask whether those two supports lean on each other in a circle.
  • Are East and West fair labels? Some readers say his writing sets a rational West against a more mystical East, and it is fair to ask whether such contrasts hold up.
  • Does he treat other faiths on their own terms? It is fair to ask whether his picture of a single spiritual reality, with Vedanta at its centre, leaves other religions room to be understood as they understand themselves.

Close neighbours

The pages on Shankara and Vivekananda cover the Advaita tradition he renewed and an earlier teacher who also carried Vedanta to the West.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Shankara · He defended Advaita Vedanta in a modern, open form. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Vedanta thinkers

Sources we used

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