MOHANDAS GANDHI: A HINDU AND MORE

MOHANDAS GANDHI: A HINDU AND MORE

Mohandas Gandhi was a Hindu who throughout all of his life associated with, learned from, and showed deep respect for people  who embraced the diverse religions of India, including Islam, Jainism, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Moreover, through his education in England and his association with the British who occupied his countrry, he came into contact with many currents of Western thought and practice. He had an experimental cast of mind: weighing, testing, trying ideas in practice. He ahd an experimental cast of mid: weighing, testing, trying ideas in practice, and judging them simply in terms of whether they imrpved the life of humanity. Consequently, he devoloped for himself a constantly evolving but passionately held set of beliefs and principles that guided his behaviour as he took  on structures of domination and oppression. It was his own personal synthesis rooted in what he found to be universal. Nonetheless, his belief system and mindset were predominantly Hindu. As put it:

I must tell you in all humility that Hinduism, as I know it, entirely satisfies my soul, fills my whole being, and I find solace in the Bhagavadgita and Upanishads that I miss even in the Sermon on the Mount.

To enter the mindset of another religion is no simple task. Hinduism is in some ways particularly challenging because it is not a creedal religion. Many would say it is more a culture, a lifestyle, than a religion. The tenets of the religion seamlessly weave themselves into everyday living. For example, the attitude toward the unity of all living beings plays out in many simple  daily ways. In the words of Ravindra Kumar:

[A] farmer of any country will not be seen allowing monkeys, birds and other wild animals to eat and uproot his blossoming crop. Probably, you won’t find anywhere except in India, people giving food to ants and other birds with great affection. It is India alone where parents never inspire their  children to drop eggs of birds out of their nests...practically you can well understand the uniqueness of Indian non-violence.

            Understanding another religion reguires, as Gandhi described it, a “passing over,” a letting oneself see the world through the other person’s religious eyes. As C. F. Andrews explains:

There are few things perhaps more difficult to accomplish than to put oneself in sympathetic touch with a religion which is not one’s own by birth-inheritance... there is strangeness about every mood and tone of worship, as well as in the words of the sacred texts of Scripture and the revealed doctrines held to be orthodox.

            An easy way of realizing this is to consider the instance of a Hindu... being told about the Holy communion Service, with its consecrated elements of bread and wine representing the Body and Blood of Christ.

            Fortunately, Gandhi meets us halfway, having already “passed over”  to understand not only Christianity but also the broader zeitgeist of Western civilization. To enter into Gandhian thought and praxis is to enter into a body of work that is already a synthesis of Hindu and Western thought.

GANDHI’S BELIEFS

Mohandas Gandhi grew up as a Hindu, but it was not until his early adult years that he was able to fully and richly appropriate it. He seriously considered other paths, in particular Christianity, before realizing that he had all that he wanted or needed in Hinduism.

Gandhi’s Childhoad Years

Gandhi’s mother’s example of faith and devotion, in particular, stayed vividly in his memory. She was a member of the Vaishnava sect, which was heavily influenced by both Buddhism and Jainism and thus palced a major emphasis on warmth of heart and compassion for all living things. According to his autobiography:

She was deeply religious. She would not think of taking her temple—was one of her daily duties... she would taje the hardest vows and keep them waiting flinching.  To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her.

            Gandhi’s father, a prime minister in Porbandar, one of the small proncely states of Kathiawad, kept a very open household in terms of religion. Gandhi remembered men of many religious traditons—Jain, Muslim, and Parsi—being welcomed into their home. All were respected as seekers after truth, all in their own ways. The Jain tradition was particularly strong in the area, and its emphasis on ahimsa (doing no harm) and the many-sidedness of truth became very important to Gandhi later in life. The only religion that he learned to think poorly of during his youth was Christianity because of the missionaries, who stood on the street corner near his school deriding the missionaries the beliefs and the gods of Hinduism. In his experience, converts to Christianity immediately took up meat eating and the drinking of liquor. So he came to associate Christianity with “beef and brandy.”

            The trappings and glitter of the temple held little appeal for Gandhi. What did capture his heart and stir his ideals were certain plays and songs. He read a tale about the folk hero Sharavana and admired the hero’s devotion to his parents. He saw a live performance of a play about King Harischandra, an Indian Job who refused to lie even through subjection to many afflictions. As Geoffrey Ashe notes:

It captured him. He went to it  several times, reenacted scenes himself, indentifed with Harischandra, and wished he could go throughthe same trials... The ideal  of Absolute Truth, and Absolute Duty corresponding to it, came to him with the charm, the excitement, the mad logic of a fairy tale.

            During this period, the final lines of a poem by the Gujurati poet Shamal Bhatt ran through his head constantly:

            For a bowl of water give a goodly meal;

            For a kindly greeting bow thou down with zeal;

            For a simple penny pay thou back with gold;

            If thy life be rescued, life do not withhold.

            Thus the words and actions of the wise regard;

            Every little service tenfold they reward.

But the truly noble know all men as one,

And return with gladness good for evil done.

The message of “return good for evil” is clearly stated and embraced by Gandhi years he read the Sermon on the Mount or Tolstoy. Even though religion did not have much appeal to him in these growing up years, the stories and poems conveying the values of Hinduism surely did.

Gandhi’s Years in England

Gandhi arrived in England in 1988 at age nineteen to study law. Leaving India was determined by his caste to be grounds for excommunication. His family allowed him to go only after his mother had secured an oath from him to refrain from wine, women, and meat. He kept the vow but, in his first months in england, went every hungry. His search for a decent vegetarian meal led him into the company of Vegetarian Society, where he met an interesting array of mavericks who launched him, through their beliefs and the readings they gave him, on a spiritual quest. Reading Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetarianism, for example, gave him a fresh understanding of and appreciation for his country’s tradition of vegetarianism.

            During his second year in England he met two Theosophists, bachelor brothers, who were reading Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of Bhagavad Gita, and they invited him to read it with them. Certain verses in the second chapter struck him strongly:

            If one ponders on objects of the sense, there springs

Atrraction; from attraction grows desire,

Desire flams to fierce passion, passion breeds

Recklessness; then the memory—all betrayed—

Lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind,

Till purpose, mind, and man are all Undone. (2:62—63)

            Gandhi wrote:

           

The book struck me as one of priceless worth, the impression has ever since been growing on me with the result that I regard it today as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth.

Another book by Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, and a personal meeting with Madame  Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant of the Theosophists, who highly valued the Gita and the learning of the East, prompted in him an interest to read books on Hinduism. At the same time, a vegetarian friend urged him to read the Bible. He plowed through the books of the Old Testament even though the chapters after Genesis put him to sleep. When read the New Terstament, however, it was a totally different story:

The New Testament produced  a different impression, especially the Sermon on the Mount which went straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita. The verses, “But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whoseever shall smite thee away thy coat let him have thy cloak too,” delighted me beyond measure and put me in mind of Shamal Bhatt’s “For a bowl of water give a goodly meal,” etc. My young mind tried to unify the teaching of the Gita, The Light of Asia and the Sermon on the Mount. That renunciation was the highest form of religion appealed to me greatly.

At this point in his life Gandhi had to postpone reading any more religious books to study deligently for his examinations, but he told himself that he would come back to the study of all the major religions as soon as he could. That time would not come until he found himself in South Africa.

The South African Years

            Gandhi passed his examinations returned to India in 1891 after two and a half eventual years. He could not find steady, lucrative employement, however, so when he recieved an invitation in 1893 from a Muslim trader in Natal, South Africa, who was in need of the services of an Indian lawyer trained in england, he jumped at the opportunity.

            In South Africa he made friends with many Christians, especially evangelicals and Quakers. They invited him ti services, entertained him in their homes, bombarded him with books, and engaged him in argumentation. He found the life and message of Jesus very attractive but he resisted person could be saved all in one go by calling on someone else for salvation. As a Hindu, Gandhi believed that individuals need to struggle to find their own unique way, doing good and dying well, to liberate themselves from the karma of past lives and to eventually enter into oneness with the divine. Given his sense that all human beings are called to be one with divinity, Gandhi did not understand how Jesus could be the only son of God.  Neither could he recognize the Sermon on the Mount in the history and practice of the Christian Church. He did not feel conversant enough with his own Hindu traditions to be able to engage his friends comfortably in disputations. Therefore, in 1891 in Bombay right after returning from England.

            That friend was a poet-jeweler named Raychand, a Jain, only slightly older than Gandhi. A superb businessman, Raychand, upon closing business for the day, would always turn to his spiritual diary and his religious books. He was intensely focused on seeing God face to face. Gandhi wrote of him:

During the two years I remained in close with him I felt in him every moment the spirit of vairagya (renunciation)... There was a strange power in his eyes; they were extremely bright and free from any sign of impatience or anxiety... These qualities can exist only in a man of self-control.

Gandhi asked Raychand a variety of questions ranging from the nature of the soul and God to the meaning of salvation and the nature of the scriptures. In all there are twenty-seven questions, twenty questions about Hinduism and the rest about Christianity. Raychand’s answer to the first question concerning the nature of the spirit is three times as long as any other. It begins:

Q....

In addition to this long letter, Raychand sent Gandhi three ancient Hindu texts that belonged to the Hindu system of Advaita Vendata, a system codified in the ninth century by the famous philosopher Shankara but originating in the ancient Upanishads of the pre-Christian era.

The works that Raycahand sent fully engaged Gandhi’s attention. He paid special attention to the practical issues concerning how one can achieve moksha (liberation) in this life, the moral and intellectual training required for climbing the seven stages of yogic exercises leading to the goal. Page after page of the Hindu texts emphasize personal exertion and reason-much different from the Vaishnava tradition that places the cause of liberation in the initiative of a loving God and his avatar Krishna. In the Hindu system of Advaita Vedanta, nonattachment and asceticism are the keys to moksha.

Gandhi found the letter and the readings very helpful. His belief in Hinduism recieved a solid intellectual foundation, and he began to make Hinduism his own on a more reflective level. What he found particularly important in Raychand’s teaching was his stress on action........to be continue