Sadhana

Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (1913) is Rabindranath Tagore's most accessible English-language statement of the spiritual philosophy that lies behind his poetry. The book gathers the lectures Tagore delivered at Harvard in 1912 and at the Quest Society in London the following year — the same season in which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Asian to do so.

The eight chapters set out Tagore's distillation of the Upanishadic vision: that the human self is continuous with a deeper universal Self; that the spiritual problem is the recognition of that continuity through love, action, beauty, and the contemplation of the infinite; and that the institutional separations of religion, art, and politics in modern life rest on a forgetfulness this recognition heals.