friends requested him to allow them to celebrate his birthday, on 5 September. He replied, Instead of celebrating my birthday, it would be my proud privilege if September 5th is observed as Teachers' Day. His birthday has since been celebrated as Teacher's Day in India. Charity Along with G. D. Birla and some other social workers in the pre-independence era, Radhakrishnan formed the Krishnarpan Charity Trust. Role in Constituent Assembly He was against State institutions imparting denominational religious instruction as it was against the secular vision of the Indian State. Philosophy Radhakrishnan tried to bridge eastern and western thought, defending Hinduism against "uninformed Western criticism", but also incorporating Western philosophical and religious thought. Advaita Vedanta Radhakrishnan was one of the most prominent spokesmen of Neo-Vedanta. His metaphysics was grounded in Advaita Vedanta, but he reinterpreted Advaita Vedanta for a contemporary understanding. He acknowledged the reality and diversity of the world of experience, which he saw as grounded in and supported by the absolute or Brahman. Radhakrishnan also reinterpreted Shankara's notion of maya. According to Radhakrishnan, maya is not a strict absolute idealism, but "a subjective misperception of the world as ultimately real." Intuition and religious experience "Intuition", synonymously called "religious experience", has a central place in Radhakrishnan's philosophy as a source of knowledge which is not mediated by conscious thought. His specific interest in experience can be traced back to the works of William James (1842–1910), F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925), and to Vivekananda (1863–1902), who had a strong influence on Sarvepalli's thought. According to Radhakrishnan, intuition is of a self-certifying character (svatassiddha), self-evidencing (svāsaṃvedya), and self-luminous (svayam-prakāsa). In his book An Idealist View of Life, he made a powerful case for the importance of intuitive thinking as opposed to purely intellectual forms of thought. According to Radhakrishnan, intuition plays a specific role in all kinds of experience. Radhakrishnan discernes five sorts of experience: Cognitive Experience: Sense Experience Discursive Reasoning Intuitive Apprehension Psychic Experience Aesthetic Experience Ethical Experience Religious Experience Classification of religions For Radhakrishnan, theology and creeds are intellectual formulations, and symbols of religious experience or "religious intuitions". Radhakrishnan qualified the variety of religions hierarchically according to their apprehension of "religious experience", giving Advaita Vedanta the highest place: The worshippers of the Absolute The worshippers of the personal God The worshippers of the incarnations like Rama, Kṛiṣhṇa, Buddha Those who worship ancestors,