Frithjof Schuon is best known as the foremost spokesman of the religio perennis and as a philosopher in the metaphysical current of Shankara and Plato. Schuon was born in 1907 in Basle, Switzerland, of German parents. As a youth, he went to Paris, where he studied for a few years before undertaking a number of trips to North Africa, the Near East and India in order to contact spiritual authorities and witness traditional cultures.

Robert Bolton "My main interest was more like a sense of mission, so much so that I could never go very far with social activities without feeling that I was deserting my post...What attracted me was not just what some metaphysicians had said, but the experience that their words conveyed. My aim was to recreate that experience and to improve my understanding of the big ideas..."