Panikkar's father was a freedom fighter during British colonial rule in India, who later escaped from Britain and married into a Catalan family.

He earned a third doctorate in theology at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome in 1961, in which he compared St. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy with the 8th-century Hindu philosopher Ādi Śańkara's interpretation of the Brahma Sutras.

[3][2] While in Jerusalem during 1962, he was summoned to Rome by the Opus Dei founder and director, Josemaría Escrivá, who expelled him after a brief trial where he was charged with disobedience to the organization.

In 1987 he moved to Tavertet in Catalonia, in the hills north of Barcelona, where he founded the Raimon Panikkar Vivarium Foundation, a center for intercultural studies.

I would like to communicate with you that I believe the moment has come (put off time and again), to withdraw from all public activity, both the direct and the intellectual participation, to which I have dedicated all my life as a way of sharing my reflections.