Notes on sanatana dharma

Many Hindus today believe that sanatana dharma – meaning ‘eternal religion’ or ‘invariable law’ –was the original Sanskrit name of the Hindu religion, and that it was used for what is now called Hinduism in ancient times. However, I have been told this is not the case. The term does not occur at all in the Vedas and the Upanishads, and while it occurs in old texts like the Mahabharata, it always means something like ‘everlasting law’ or ‘ancient rule’. The phrase never equates the eternal religion with Hinduism.

This is confirmed by a famous modern Hindu teacher, Chandrashekharendra Saraswati Swami, who wrote in 1995: “Hinduism was not the name of our religion in the distant past. Nor was it known as ‘Vaidika Mata’ (Vedic religion) or as ‘sanatana dharma’ (the ancient or timeless religion). Our basic texts do not refer to our faith by any name.”

In fact, it seems that before the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the term was not applied to the Hindu religion. Then it was used to define orthodox Hinduism by those Hindu groups who felt threatened by attempts to purge Hinduism of certain practices. And it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the term began to be applied to the modern or neo-Vedantic form of Hinduism, which presented itself as a “universal religion”.

Sri Aurobindo was influential in this because in his famous Uttapara speech of 1909 he used the term extensively. He reported that he had heard the voice of God during his imprisonment, telling him:

Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion, something about which you had your doubts and it is the truth of the Hindu religion. It is this religion that I am raising up before the world, it is this that I have perfected and developed through the rishis, saints and avatars, and now it is going forth to do my work among the nations. I am raising up this nation to send forth my word. This is the Sanatana Dharma, this is the eternal religion which you did not really know before, but which I have now revealed to you.

However, Sri Aurobindo’s definition of sanatana dharma was much wider than simply being a label for orthodox Hinduism.

For, he continued, It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because in this peninsula it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages. But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country, it does not belong peculiarly and forever to a bounded part of the world. That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose.

And he emphasized this universality in his revised version of the speech, published one month later in the Karmayogin: This sanatana dharma has many scriptures, Veda, Vedanta, Gita, Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the eternal has its dwelling.

In other words, what he seemed to be saying was that the universality of the sanatana dharma stemmed from the universality of spiritual experiences. And these could be accessed by people from many different religions, or even those with no religion at all.

What is striking, however, is that after Sri Aurobindo’s overtly political period of the early 1900s, he hardly ever used the phrase sanatana dharma. It doesn’t appear in any of his major works, or in his later writings, including the Letters on Yoga. Perhaps this is because he found the expression inadequate to encompass the transformative work he had embarked upon, or perhaps because he no longer consciously identified himself as a ‘Hindu’. For his attitude to Hinduism in general also seemed to change in the Pondicherry years.

He continued to admire and be inspired by what he termed the three fundamental ‘credos’ of Hinduism. “The awareness of the One, the Infinite that takes many forms. Next an acceptance of a multitude of ways of approach to this One. Finally, and most important…an understanding that while the Supreme or the Divine can be approached through a universal consciousness and by piercing through all inner and outer Nature, That or He can be met by each individual soul in itself, in its own spiritual part, because there is something in it that is intimately one or at least intimately related with the one divine Existence”. These three things were, he concluded, “the whole of Hindu religion, its essential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo”.

Yet he increasingly distanced himself from any formal adhesion to the religion. Underlining this, in a letter to his brother written in April 1920, he wrote, “I am not a saint, not a holy man — not even a religious man. I have no religion, no code of conduct, no morality.” What he wanted to establish was “not a fixed and rigid form like that of the old Aryan society, not a stagnant backwater, but a free form that can spread itself out like the sea in its multitudinous waves.”

He did not deter his followers from using sincere religious practices in their private lives, but he was adamant that the Ashram was not a ‘religious association’. “There is no creed or set of dogmas, no governing religious body at the Ashram”, he explained, “there are only the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and certain psychological practices of concentration and meditation, etc., for the enlarging of the consciousness, receptivity to the Truth, mastery over the desires, the discovery of the divine self and consciousness concealed within each human being, a higher evolution of the nature”.

To an English disciple who wondered whether his ‘un-Hindu’ nature somehow disqualified him for the yoga, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “It is not the Hindu outlook or the Western that fundamentally matters in yoga, but the psychic turn and the spiritual urge, and these are the same everywhere”.

When another disciple observed that the Ashram favoured Hinduism because most of the members were from Hindu backgrounds, Sri Aurobindo’s answer was unequivocal: “If this Asram (sic) were here only to serve Hinduism I would not be in it and the Mother who was never a Hindu would not be in it.”

“It is far from my purpose,” he wrote in 1935, “to propagate any religion new or old for humanity in the future. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded, is my conception of the matter.”

Surely, this is why The Mother was so emphatic that there was no place for religions in Auroville.

Perhaps, then, what the Chairman meant when he referred to the need for Aurovilians to take the sanatana dharma to the next level is not that we should create a new religion, or be bound by the forms of the old, but that we should elevate all what is true – ‘eternal’ – in religion to a new level in our individual and collective efforts to ‘unblock the way’ to a higher consciousness as a step towards the creation of gnostic beings.

In any event, whatever the Chairman’s intention and meaning, I’m grateful to him for encouraging me, through his remark, to embark on a process of discovery which has deepened my understanding of Sri Aurobindo.