Sadhana: The Realisation of Life

Eight lectures in which Tagore explains, for Western listeners, the spiritual outlook of the ancient Indian Upanishads. The individual, he argues, is not set against the world but bound to it; evil and suffering are real but not final; the self finds its meaning by giving itself in love and in action, not by withdrawing; and beauty is a sign of the harmony at the heart of things. The tone is gentle and luminous, closer to poetry than to argument.

Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, gave most of these talks at Harvard and published them in English the same year. Four LibriVox volunteers read them in about four and a half hours.