Universal Religion in the Life and Thought of Śrī Aurobindo (1872–1950)

Abstract

The exploration of the concept of universal religion in the thought of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) requires a certain delicacy of treatment, if it does not actually present a difficulty in its ascertainment. Modern Hindu thinkers have understood the concept of universal religion in various ways: Vivekananda offered different concepts of universal religion itself, rather than a single concept of universal religion; Radhakrishnan focused on the ‘religion’ component of the expression to let universality take care of itself, as it were; Rabindranath Tagore was so imbued with the universal that the religion part stands by as the best-man, and Mahatma Gandhi seemed to speak more of what might be called religious universalism than universal religion. In Aurobindo the concept of universal religion is either ‘always on the point of waking but never waking’, or, from another point of view, never goes to sleep. He stays most of the time on this side of the conceptual frontier it represents, though all the while heading towards it; or he operates in an area beyond that frontier, while subsuming it. Hence it is not the case that the concept is absent in the thought of Aurobindo, rather, it does not occupy as well-defined a place as it does in the thought of some other modern Hindu thinkers, and therefore has to be teased out, though not artificially but certainly deliberately.