What is Sanatanadharma?
(i) “There is a mighty law of life, a great principle of human evolution, a body of spiritual knowledge and experience of which India has always been destined to be guardian, exemplar and missionary. This is the sanatana dharma, the eternal religion.” (CWSA 8: 24)
(ii) The Sanatanadharma is to realise God in our inner life and outer existence, in society no less than in the individual. It is the basis, permanent and always inherent in India, of the shifting mutable and multiform thing that has been termed Hinduism.
(iii) The foundation of Sanatanadharma is truth and courage. It is no sect or dogmatic creed, no bundle of formulas or social rules, but a mighty, universal and eternal truth. It has learned and practiced the secret of preparing man’s soul for the divine consummation of identity with the Infinite and Eternal existence of God. The rules of life and the formulas of belief are desirable and sacred only to the extent they serve this great end.
(iv) “Indian religion cannot be described by any of the definitions known to the occidental intelligence. In its totality it has been a free and tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experience. Observing the one Truth from all its many sides, it shut out none. It gave itself no specific name and bound itself by no limiting distinction. Allowing separative designations for its constituting cults and divisions, it remained itself nameless, formless, universal, infinite, like the Brahman of its agelong seeking. Although strikingly distinguished from other creeds by its traditional scriptures, cults and symbols, it is not in its essential character a credal religion at all but a vast and many-sided, an always unifying and always progressive and self-enlarging system of spiritual culture.” (CWSA 20: 193)
(v) “A religion.. which claims to be eternal, must not be content with satisfying the heart and imagination, it must answer to the satisfaction of the intellect the questions with which philosophy is preoccupied. A philosophy which professes to explain the world-problem once for all, must not be satisfied with logical consistency and comprehensiveness; it must like Science base its conclusions not merely on speculative logic, but on actual observation and its truths must always be capable of verification by experiment so that they may be not merely conceivable truth but ascertained truth; it must like religion seize on the heart & imagination and without sacrificing intellectual convincingness, comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the springs of human activity; and it must have the power of bringing the human self into direct touch with the Eternal. The Vedantic religion claims to be the eternal religion because it satisfies all these demands. It is intellectually comprehensive in its explanation of all the problems that perplex the human mind; it brings the contradictions of the world into harmony by a single luminous law of being; it has developed in Yoga a process of spiritual experience by which its assertions can be tested and confirmed; the law of being it has discovered seizes not only on the intellect but on the deepest emotions of man and calls into activity his highest ethical instincts; and its whole aim and end is to bring the individual self into a perfect and intimate union with the Eternal.” (CWSA 18: 412)
(vi) At the foundation of the Sanatana Dharma lies the idea of the One without a second who is the Eternal, the Infinite and ineffable and unthinkable Existence (or Non-Existence) or, in other words, the Absolute. The world and all that is existent or non-existent is nothing but that Supreme and Absolute Reality. All the many theories and philosophies about the nature of the world are therefore nothing but so many ways of looking at it; each revealing something – an aspect or a facet – of the Supreme Reality. Sri Aurobindo takes an evolutionary view of terrestrial existence because it seems to him to best explain the terrestrial phenomena. According to Sri Aurobindo, a spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter is the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence. The consciousness first houses herself in forms of Matter which appear to be altogether unconscious. It struggles towards mentality in the guise of living Matter and attains to it imperfectly in the conscious animal. It slowly develops further and reaches its climax in Man, the thinking animal. Man, although carrying the burden of his inconscient and animal origin, is yet destined to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood or a supramental or spiritual supermanhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. Religion has an important role to play in this evolution. The true work of the religious instinct in man is to lead him towards the Divine Reality by providing each human being, whatever his position in life or stage in evolution, a mould of spiritual discipline, a way of seeking the Divine Truth – a way proper to the potentialities of his nature. The development of religion in India has been entirely in consonance with the true work of the religious instinct. It has followed a course which, preserving the true intention of the religious seeking of the human being, not only allowed but encouraged any number of religious formulations, cults and disciplines to exist side by side and left each man free to accept and follow that which was congenial to his thought, feeling, temperament, build of the nature. It is the failure to understand the process of terrestrial evolution and the true intention of the religious seeking in man that is at the root of the secular westernized mind’s misunderstanding of Sanatana Dharma. Hinduism is the form that Sanatana Dharma assumed during the development of religion in India.
To sum up, if a culture starting at the same point of time and exactly similar to the ancient Indian culture were to set for itself the most sublime spiritual goal and intensely strive to move its whole body – individual and collective – towards the goal as effectively (swiftly and integrally) as possible, then during the course of its pursuit of the desired goal the edifice of spiritual culture that will get built up will be the same as the Sanatana Dharma. Or, in other words, the Sanatana Dharma or Hinduism is the most perfect and efficient vehicle yet developed by humanity for its journey towards the spiritual perfection.
(vii) “Christianity, Mahomedanism, Buddhism and the creeds of China and Japan are all offshoots of one great and eternal religion of which India has the keeping.” (CWSA 7: 890)
Sanatanadharma – The Religion of Vedanta
“If it were asked by anyone what is this multitudinous, shifting, expanding, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea of religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience we call Hinduism, what it is characteristically and essentially, we might answer in one word, the religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what are the Hindus with their unique and persistent difference from all other races, we might again answer, the children of Vedanta. For at the root of all that we Hindus have done, thought and said through these thousands of years of our race-history, behind all we are and seek to be, there lies concealed, the fount of our philosophies, the bedrock of our religions, the kernel of our thought, the explanation of our ethics and society, the summary of our civilisation, the rivet of our nationality, this one marvellous inheritance of ours, the Vedanta. Nor is it only to Hindu streams that this great source has given of its life-giving waters. Buddhism, the teacher of one third of humanity, drank from its inspiration. Christianity, the offspring of Buddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-hand from the same source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism, Christianity and Sufism on Islam, through Buddha on Confucianism,…” (CWSA 18: 413)
“Vedanta’s final & single answer to all the questions of philosophy is contained in a single mighty & ever-memorable phrase, So ’ham. I am He or more explicitly or to the question of the inquirer अहं ब्रह्मास्मि, I am Brahman. Cutting through all tremors & hesitations, scorning all doubt or reserve it announces with a hardy & daring incisiveness the complete identity of man & God. This is its gospel that the individual Self who seems so limited, thwarted, befouled, shamed & obscured with the bonds & shackles, the mud & stains of earthly life and the pure, perfect and illimitable Being who possesses & supports all existence, to Whom this vast and majestic Universe is but an inconsiderable corner of His mind and infinite Time cannot end and infinite Space cannot confine and the infinite net of cause and effect is powerless to trammel are equal, are of one nature, power, splendour, bliss, are One. It seems the very madness of megalomania, the very delirium of egoism. And yet if it be true?
And it is true. Reason can come to no other conclusion, Yoga ends in no less an experience, the voices of a hundred holy witnesses who have seen God face to face, bring to us no less wonderful a message.” (CWSA 18: 337)
Sanatanadharma – The Only True Nationalism
(i) “I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatana Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the Sanatana Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatana Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatana Dharma it would perish. The Sanatana Dharma, that is nationalism.” (CWSA 8: 12)
(ii) “When you go forth, speak to your nation always this word that it is for the Sanatana Dharma that they arise, it is for the world and not for themselves that they arise. I am giving them freedom for the service of the world. When therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the dharma and by the dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country.” (CWSA 8: 10)
(iii) “Other religions are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatana Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived. This is the dharma that for the salvation of humanity was cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula from of old. It is to give this religion that India is rising. She does not rise as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world. India has always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great.” (CWSA 8: 6)
(iv) “If anyone thinks that we are merely intellectual beings, he is not a Hindu. Hinduism leaves the glorification of intellectuality to those who have never seen God. She is commissioned by Him to speak only of His greatness and majesty and she has so spoken for thousands of years. When we first received a European education, we allowed ourselves to be misled by the light of science. Science is a light within a limited room, not the sun which illumines the world. The Apara Vidya is the sum of science but there is a higher Vidya, a mightier knowledge. When we are under the influence of the lower knowledge, we imagine that we are doing everything and try to reason out the situation we find ourselves in, as if our intellect were sovereign and omnipotent. But this is an attitude of delusion and Maya. Whoever has once felt the glory of God within him can never again believe that the intellect is supreme. There is a higher voice, there is a more unfailing oracle. It is in the heart where God resides. He works through the brain, but the brain is only one of His instruments. Whatever the brain may plan, the heart knows first and whoever can go beyond the brain to the heart, will hear the voice of the Eternal.” (CWSA 7: 891-92)
(v) “Spirituality is India’s only politics, the fulfilment of the Sanatan Dharma its only Swaraj. I have no doubt we shall have to go through our Parliamentary period in order to get rid of the notion of Western democracy by seeing in practice how helpless it is to make nations blessed.” 13 July, 1919 (CWSA 36: 170)” (The Evolutionary Crisis Before Humanity: Sri Aurobindo Divine Life Trust, Khetan Mohalla, Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan 2025: PP. 9-14)
