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WorkRabindranath Tagore

Sadhana: The Realisation of Life

Talks on the Upanishads first given in Bengali to schoolboys in rural Bengal, then read in English at Harvard.

by Rabindranath Tagore141 passages held

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First published
(aged 52)
Original language
English

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Overview

Some European philosophers owed a great deal to the Upanishads, the ancient Indian scriptures, and had concluded that India's God was an abstraction, reached by turning away from the world; Western scholars, Rabindranath Tagore complained, handled the same scriptures as museum pieces. His family had used them in daily worship, and this book is his answer. The infinite, he argues, is met inside the finite world, and the soul reaches it through nature, love, work and beauty rather than by renouncing them. He starts from a contrast between ancient Greece, raised inside city walls, and India's forest hermitages, open to the living world; he treats evil as real but never final; and he reads the Buddha's teaching as a widening of love. The model he names is his father, Debendranath Tagore, who lived close to God without abandoning his worldly duties. The talks began as discourses in Bengali to the pupils of his school at Bolpur in rural Bengal; friends helped turn some of them into English, and the last, on action, is a translation of one such talk on karma. Tagore brought them to the United States in the winter of 1912, when he went to Urbana, Illinois, where his son Rathindranath had studied agriculture. James H. Woods, a Harvard scholar of Indian philosophy, encouraged him to finish the series, and Tagore read most of it at Harvard. Macmillan published the book in London that year, the year Tagore became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and by 1921 it was in German, translated by Helene Meyer-Franck for the Munich publisher Kurt Wolff as Der Weg zur Vollendung.

Key concepts

What does the book mean by realisation?

Making a truth one's own in how one lives, not just knowing it. Tagore takes the word from the Upanishads: to know the infinite in this life is to be true, and the way to know it is by realising it in each and all. So the chapters move from realisation in love to realisation in action and in beauty. A truth held only as an idea, on this view, has not yet been realised at all.

What is the difference between the self and the soul here?

The self is the part of a person that holds on to its own separateness; the soul is the part that comprehends all. Tagore's great teachers are those who give up self for the love of mankind and so live the life of the soul. Human greatness, he says, lies not in plundering, earning or inventing but in that comprehension, and it dies when the soul is wrapped in a dead shell of habit.

Does the book deny that evil is real?

No. It denies that evil is permanent. Tagore grants that the sum of death and decay on earth at any moment would appal anyone who counted it. But evil, he argues, keeps moving: it cannot fit with the whole, so the whole corrects it moment by moment, as error is corrected in thought. What makes evil seem final is imagining it standing still, when it is always on the way to being undone.

Why does joy matter so much in this book?

Because Tagore takes joy as the source of creation itself. He quotes the Upanishad: from joy springs all this creation, by joy it is kept, toward joy it moves and into joy it enters. Creation therefore comes from fullness, not from need, and the same holds for people: what they make out of joy is free and lasting, and what they make only under compulsion is a makeshift.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Infinite Inside the Finite

Must a person leave the world to reach God, as Europe believed India taught? Tagore's answer reverses the reputation of a whole tradition.

Tagore starts from where a civilisation grew up. Greece, raised inside city walls, learned to divide and rule and to set man against nature; India's forest hermitages taught her to hold the world and the self as one great truth. Read that way, the Upanishads do not call the soul out of the world but further into it: the infinite is known by realising it in each and all, in nature, the family, society and the state. He wrote against European admirers who had made India's Brahma a bare abstraction.

  • spirituality
  • unity
  • infinity
  • human-nature relationship
  • harmony
  • consciousness
  • knowledge
  • finitude
  • science
  • civilization
  • truth

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The Lamp and Its Oil

The self hoards and the self suffers. Whether it is to be destroyed or put to its proper use is where Tagore parts company with a common reading of the Buddha.

Tagore treats evil and the self together. Pain is real but never final: evil keeps moving and the whole corrects it moment by moment, as a child's falls give way to walking. The self, likewise, is not to be extinguished but spent, as a lamp spends its oil to give light, and Nirvana, on his reading, is reached through love. The Buddha's boundless love, kept up in every posture of the day, is his model of a self given away.

  • selfhood
  • love
  • desire
  • selflessness
  • self-realization
  • self-transcendence
  • individuality
  • soul
  • freedom
  • suffering
  • human nature

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Work and Beauty Born of Joy

Is work a burden laid on people and beauty a luxury beside it? The last lectures argue that both are how the infinite shows itself in the finite.

Creation, says the Upanishad, springs from joy, not from need, and Tagore draws the human consequence: work done only under necessity is a makeshift left in ruins when the need moves on, while work done from joy is a person's freedom. Beauty follows the same pattern. It stands on law as on a pedestal, and a flower that serves nature like a servant reaches the heart like a messenger. Against a Buddhism of pure renunciation he cites the Buddha himself: only actions that lead to evil are condemned.

  • joy
  • action
  • work
  • beauty
  • art
  • aesthetics
  • ethics
  • religion

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Within this work

passages held
141
distinct concepts
238
by passages held, corpus-wide
#432

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “love” and “selfhood”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
loveselfhood12
freedomlove9
freedomselfhood6
joyspirituality6
freedomjoy5
loveunity5
spiritualityunity5
desirespirituality4
freedomspirituality4
infinityspirituality4
joylove4
lovespirituality4
desireinfinity3
selfhoodunity3
desireselfhood2
freedominfinity2
infinitylove2
infinityselfhood2
joyselfhood2
joyunity2
desirefreedom1
desirejoy1
desirelove1
desireunity1
infinityjoy1
selfhoodspirituality1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1913 Sadhana: The Realisation of Life you are here EN
  2. 1916 The Spirit of Japan

    A single lecture, printed in Tokyo as a pamphlet; with "The Message of India to Japan", given a few weeks earlier, it makes up the Japanese chapter of Nationalism.

     EN
  3. 1917 Nationalism

    Written for a lecture tour of the United States in 1916–17, with his two Tokyo addresses added; the argument returns in shorter form in the essay "The Nation" in Creative Unity.

     EN
  4. 1922 Creative Unity

    Where Nationalism attacks the nation-state, this later collection sets against it what Tagore wanted built instead, from the village religion of Bengal to the university he founded.

     EN
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