Chapter I; Part IV
Important Western Influences
Jesus
First of all, how can Jesus be classified as a Western influence on Gandhi?
Christianity was mediated to Gandhi and India through institutions
that carried the values of Western civilization. The English Raj itself
proudly and consciously proclaimed its Christian roots and values. The
Christian missionaries who went to India from the United States proud
set up many of their Western values, such as thrift, cleanliness, and hard
work, as virtues that India should emulate.
In many of the hundred volumes that comprise the collected works of
Gandhi, there are dozens and dozens of transcripts of talks that he was
constantly asked to give to Christian gatherings, especially Christian missionary
gatherings. The missionaries objected to Gandhi’s negative stance
toward religious conversion and asked him again and again how they could
best serve India. Gandhi always answered them straight on that they
should first stop denigrating the culture that they had entered and begin to
appreciate it instead. He then counseled them to live their faith instead of
In a talk to Christian missionaries in Calcutta at a YMCA meeting in
1925, for example, he said:
Bishop Heber wrote two lines which have always left a sting with
me: “Where every prospect pleases and only Man is vile.” I wish
he had not written them. My own experience in my travels
throughout India has been to the contrary. . . and I am not able to
say that here in this fair land, watered by the great Ganges, the
Brahmaputra, and the Jumna, man is vile. He is not vile. He is as
much a seeker after truth as you and I are, possibly more so . . . I
miss receptiveness, humility, willingness on your part to identify
with the masses of India.39
Gandhi was convinced that Christianity would be more appreciated in
India if Christians would do less preaching and more living of their faith
in a way that was consistent with what Jesus modeled in the New
Testament. He used the New Testament itself to make that point to the
missionaries:
It is not he who says, “Lord, Lord,” that is a Christian, but “he
who does the will of the Lord” that is a true Christian.40
He put it philosophically by reflecting on how far language falls from
a full representation of truth and how much more powerful is the example
of someone’s life for communicating what he or she believes.
Your whole life is more eloquent than your lips. Language is
always an obstacle to the full expression of thought . . . language is
a limitation of the truth which can only be represented by life.41
But his favorite way to make this point to Christians was through an
analogy:
A rose does not need to preach. It simply spreads its fragrance.
The fragrance is its own sermon . . . if it could engage a number of
preachers it would not be able to sell more roses than the fragrance
itself could do. The fragrance of religious and spiritual life
is much finer than that of the rose . . . “Fool don’t you see that I got
it from my maker.”42
Gandhi experienced Christianity through Western mediation: words,
actions, and writings. But when he read the New Testament he felt there
was a huge gap between the message he found there and the behavior of
Christians in the West. In fact, he struggled with its Westernization
because the country where Christianity originated, Palestine, is part of
Asia. As he explained:
But today I rebel at orthodox Christianity, as I am convinced that
it has distorted the message of Jesus. He was an Asiatic . . . when it
had the backing of a Roman Emperor it became an imperialist
faith as it remains to this day. Of course there are noble but rare
exceptions like Andrews.43 . . . Jesus caught a breath of wind from
Asia and gave it to the world. It has been diluted in the West. You
incorporated it into a system alien to it. That’s why I call myself
not Christian, because I do not hold with the system that you have
set up based on might.44
On the other hand, even if he criticized the Westernized version, he
was mightily influenced by Christianity and in particular the Sermon on
the Mount, the concept of the Kingdom of God, the events in Jesus’ life,
and the symbol of the cross.
We have already seen how the Sermon on the Mount went straight to
his heart when he first read it, even though related sentiments are found
in Indian sources. The teaching “do no harm” is to be found in the Jain
tradition. The Buddha taught, “Hatreds are not quenched by hatred. Nay
rather hatreds are quenched by love.” It also appears in the Gujurati
hymns that Gandhi heard in his youth. Nevertheless, the truth of nonviolence
jumped out at him in a fresh new way when he read the New
Testament.
Such passages as “Resist not him that is evil; but whosoever
smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” . . . I
was simply overjoyed.45
[A]s my contact with real Christians increased, I could see that the
Sermon on the Mount was the whole Christianity for him who
wanted to live a Christian life . . . It seems to me that Christianity
has yet to be lived.46
It disturbed him greatly when he heard Christians put aside the teaching
of the Sermon on the Mount as impractical or dreamy idealism or to
be practiced only by those called to be monks or the clergy—the typical
ways Catholics and Protestants make the Sermon on the Mount irrelevant
to daily life or realpolitik.
For many of them contend that the Sermon on the Mount does
not apply to mundane things, and that it was only meant for the
twelve disciples. Well I do not believe this. I think the Sermon on
the Mount has no meaning if it is not of vital use in everyday life
to everyone.47
Gandhi spent the whole of his life demonstrating that the Sermon on
the Mount could be eminently practical politics. The unthinking acceptance
of violence and wars as inevitable by Christians, even church leaders,
greatly disturbed him. He felt it made a mockery of the New Testament,
Jesus, and the clear teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. He wrote:
Christianity is no Christianity in which a vast number of Christians
believe in governments based on brute force and are denying
Christ every day of their lives.48
He saw the message of nonviolence and, as he came to call it, satyagraha,
as desperately important for the future of humankind. He understood
Jesus’ message in the Sermon on the Mount to be the sacred truth that the
world yearned for, the “wisdom hidden for all ages,” and yet it was taken
so cavalierly by professed Christians.
[I]t has yet to make a greater contribution. After all, what are 2000
years in the life of a religion? Just now, Christianity comes to a
yearning mankind in a tainted form. Fancy, bishops supporting
slaughter in the name of Christianity.49
Nonetheless, he continued to hope that Christianity would some day
be authentically lived and that the West would come to hear the message
of the Sermon on the Mount afresh—if, through “experiments with truth”
it could be demonstrated as a workable way to confront and overcome evil
and violence. In this regard he wrote:
[T]he frightful outrage that is just now going on in Europe, perhaps
shows that the message of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of
Peace, has been little understood in Europe and the light upon it
may have to be thrown from the East.50
Second, he found Jesus’ teaching on the “the Kingdom” helpful and
important. It signified for Gandhi that the work of religion was a work for
and of this world, not for the next. As he explained:
There is one thing which occurs to me, which came to me early in
my studies of the Bible. It seized me immediately when I read the
passage: “Make this world the Kingdom of God and his righteousness
and everything will be added to you.”51
The concept of the Kingdom, moreover, placed clear emphasis not on
thinking, not on contemplating, not on worshiping and praying, but on
acting. Gandhi saw Christianity as a religion that prized action and behavior;
its mottoes were “Do the work of my Father” and “Do this in memory
of me.” In 1927 he noted:
My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and
that we can realize it not by saying, “Lord, Lord” but by doing His
will and his work. If therefore, we wait for the Kingdom to come
as something coming from outside, we shall be sadly mistaken.52
Gandhi did not believe that the Kingdom of God could be built on
earth without the grace of God transforming human beings. But he believed
that that transformation enabled humans to build the Kingdom even in the
teeth of violent resistance. Only the grace of God could give humans the
strength. But the strength was given precisely for Kingdom building.
Service of others and nonviolent resistance to evil, not self-congratulations
or merely individual moksha—that was building the Kingdom. Speaking of
the nonviolent person, he wrote:
He or she must have a living faith in nonviolence. This is impossible
without a living faith in God. A nonviolent man can do nothing
save by the power and grace of God. Without it he won’t have the
courage to die without anger, without fear and without retaliation.
Such courage comes from the belief that God sits in the hearts of
all and that there should be no fear in the presence of God.53
Building that Kingdom had very practical implications for Gandhi. He
saw the teaching of the Kingdom to have both personal and social implications.
He was deeply moved when he read that the Kingdom belonged
to the humble and the poor, that the persecuted and the meek are its citizens.
In the words of K. L. Seshagiri Rao:
On the social side, the Kingdom of God meant to Gandhi the
ideal society in which justice is done . . . and institutions are geared
to encourage the best in men and women. He believed that those
institutions which permitted injustice, inequity and exploitation of
man by men were evil and that they needed to be changed.54
The idea of the Kingdom of God placed India’s freedom movement in
a much bigger context of human liberation. As S. K. George, an Indian
Christian, has pointed out:
The Christian ideal of the Kingdom of God is the culmination and
fulfillment of [the Christian’s] hope of God’s sovereignty on
earth . . . But Gandhi’s hope also included the extension of that
Kingdom over the whole earth, till the little leaven of it had leavened
the whole lump . . . He has had the courage to work out the
implications of it in modern life, to specify the politics and the
economics of the Kingdom of God.55
Gandhi’s goal of founding a nonviolent society was much closer to the
Christian idea of the Kingdom than the Hindu idea of moksha.
Third, Gandhi found the events of Jesus’ life illuminating. When
Gandhi set off on his momentous walk to the sea in 1930 launching the
Salt Satyagraha, he likened it to Jesus setting his face to Jerusalem. The
events of Jesus’ life were a constant source of strength and insight to him,
and he invoked them often. On the temptations of Jesus in the desert, he
observed that
[w]hen he (a man) conquers the first temptation (of hunger), he
gains mastery over his senses. That endows him with strength.
That strength itself is the second temptation . . . When a man thus
gains mastery over strength, he becomes a master of siddhu (miracle
working powers). These siddhis are his third temptation.56
Gandhi understood Jesus as a spiritual aspirant entering into his life of
ministry. The sequence of baptism, fasting, and temptations was understandable
to Gandhi in terms of progressive self-purification for the sake
of human service. Commenting on the baptism by John the Baptist, he
wrote that Jesus
was a servant of the people or a spiritual aspirant. The first lesson
He took through baptism at the hands of John, was that of humility
and self-purification. He thought of aligning himself with the
millions by taking baptism and a bath in the Jordan.57
Finally, for Gandhi the cross revealed the fate with which a person living
a life of aggressive nonviolence would be faced in an atmosphere of
violence. The cross said to Gandhi that Jesus was a person who, in his love
for the poor, oppressed, and outcast, stood against evil with his whole
being to the end, despite the threat of violence. Jesus died on the cross
because of the way he had lived.
The cross, undoubtedly, makes a universal appeal the moment you
give it a universal meaning in place of the narrow one that is often
heard at ordinary meetings. But then, you have to have the eyes of
the soul with which to contemplate it.58
Gandhi’s understanding of the cross illuminated aspects of Jesus’ message
and life that the West had overlooked or buried through the centuries.
As Stanley Jones put it:
Never in human history has so much light been shed on the Cross
as has been shed through this one man and that man not even
called a Christian. Had not our Christianity been so vitiated and
overlain by our identification with unchristian attitudes and policies
in public and private life, we would have seen at once the kinship
between Gandhi’s method and the Cross . . . A Hindu summed
it up for me with these words: “We should exchange sacred books.
The Gita gives philosophic reasons for war, while the New Testament
teaches peace, and yet we are more peace-minded and you
are more war-minded.”59
Gandhi understood the cross as a clarion call to discipleship. Anyone
who claims to be a Christian had better embrace the idea that they will
be in for a life of suffering—if they begin to oppose the forces of oppression.
You may certainly experience peace in the midst of strife, but this
happens only when . . . you crucify yourself . . . Living Christ means
a living Cross, without it life is a living death.60
S. K. George was inspired to look at the cross in a new way through
the teaching and praxis of Gandhi. George wrote:
Satyagraha is deliberate choice . . . aggressive love attacking evil in
its strongholds . . . The Cross of Christ is the supreme, perfect historic
example of such assault and victory over evil. But alas,
Christianity has made of it a creed, a doctrine, belief in which is to
secure a heaven of comfort and security! It was necessary. . . to set
it up again as a working principle of life.61
In a very famous scene, captured on film, Gandhi had stopped at the
Vatican on his way back from the 1931 Roundtable Conference held in
Britain when he happened to see a rough crucifix. His reaction was immediate
and emotional:
Chance threw Rome in my way. And I was able to see something
of that great and ancient city and Mussolini, the unquestioned dictator
of Italy. And what would not I have given to bow my head
before the living image at the Vatican of Christ crucified. It was
not without a wrench that I could tear myself away from that scene
of living tragedy. I saw there at once that nations, like individuals,
could only be made through the agony of the Cross and in no
other way. Joy comes not out of infliction of pain on others, but
out of pain voluntarily borne by oneself.62
Gandhi understood the cross not as passive resistance but as an
assertive act of love. In 1946 he wrote to Madame Privat:
Europe mistook the bold and brave resistance, full of wisdom, by
Jesus Christ for passive resistance, as it was of the weak. As I read
the New Testament I detected no weakness and no passivity about
Jesus as depicted in the four gospels.63
The impact of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ life, and the cross of
Jesus meant much to Gandhi and influenced his thought and work from
early on in his life. It all became even clearer and more powerful for him
when he read the works of Leo Tolstoy.
Leo Tolstoy
In a speech Gandhi gave in 1928 on the occasion of the centenary of
Tolstoy’s birth he stated:
I would say that three men have had a very great influence on my
life. Among them I give the first place to the poet Raychand, the
second to Tolstoy, and the third to Ruskin.64
Gandhi read Tolstoy during his first years in South Africa. He read
other works of Tolstoy while in jail in 1909. The three ideas of Tolstoy that
influenced Gandhi greatly were: that the Sermon on the Mount taught an
assertive version of nonviolence, the importance of service, and the idea of
“bread labor.”
Tolstoy’s book The Kingdom of God Is within You forcefully reclaims the
idea that nonviolence was central to the teaching of Jesus. In rejecting that
truth through the centuries in favor of nationalism, war, and imperialism,
Christianity lost its way.
Tolstoy had been an officer in the Crimean War and came to understand
that the further up the social ladder one lived, the further one was
from understanding the heroic life of the peasant. In the patient suffering
of the common soldier from the peasant class he saw heroism, truth, and
authentic love. It inspired him to throw over the trappings of society and
the church.
In the Kingdom of God Is within You, Tolstoy wrote:
Among the many points in which this doctrine falls short of the
doctrine of Christ I pointed out as the principal one the absence
of any commandment of non-resistance to evil by force. The perversion
of Christ’s teaching by the teaching of the Church is more
clearly apparent in this than in any other point of difference.65
In his letter to Madame Privat quoted above, Gandhi wrote:
[T]he meaning [of the New Testament] became clearer when I
read Tolstoy’s Harmony of the Gospels and his other kindred writings.
Has not the West paid too heavily in regarding Jesus as a
Passive Resister?66
Gandhi was in the middle of his early campaign of resistance when he
first read Tolstoy. In 1906, he and his colleagues had taken an oath to resist
even to death. At that time the campaign was not couched in or understood
by Gandhi to have any religious dimension. Gandhi’s reading of Thoreau
had started to influence his attitude toward what they were doing in terms
of conscience and a religious duty. By the time he read more of Tolstoy in
1909, he was beginning to formulate the campaign of resistance in more
religious terms. After reading Tolstoy, he put aside his doubts concerning
ahimsa and became a firm believer. As Raghavan Iyer noted:
His early hesitances about nonviolence were overcome by reading
Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is within You . . . He thought Tolstoy’s
remarkable development of the doctrine of nonviolence put to
shame the narrow and lopsided interpretations put upon it by its
votaries in India despite the great discoveries in the field of ahimsa
made by ancient Indian sages.67
Tolstoy emphasized that nonviolence, based on the fact that every
human life is sacred, is an outgrowth of the fundamental law of love that is
within the heart of each individual. Nonviolence is active and powerful in
the same way love is active and powerful. In 1909, on his way back from
England aboard ship, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, a withering critique, in a
Tolstoyan key, of Western civilization and a presentation of the idea of
active nonviolence as an alternative path of action for Indian youth who
were ready to embrace violent revolution against the British. He sent a
copy of the tract to Tolstoy and a correspondence between them began.
It was at this time that the idea of “soul force” emerged in Gandhi’s
mind. He was trying to get away from an interpretation of their movement
which made it a “way of the weak.” In a speech in June 1909 on “The
Ethics of Passive Resistance,” he said:
Passive Resistance, was a misnomer. . . The idea was more completely
and better expressed by the term “soul force.” As such it is
as old as the human race. Active resistance was better expressed by
the term “body force.” Jesus Christ, Daniel and Socrates represented
the purest form of passive resistance or soul force
. . .Tolstoy was the best and brightest exponent of the
doctrine . . . In India, the doctrine was understood and commonly
practiced long before it came into vogue in Europe.68
Tolstoy wrote back to Gandhi in 1910, the last letter he wrote in his
life, of how important for the future of humankind was the work that
Gandhi was doing in far-off Transvaal—applying satyagraha for the first
time to masses of men.
As Margaret Chatterjee expressed it, Gandhi had been looking for a
manly conception of love, which he did not always find in the literature of
Gujurat, his home state.69 He found it in Tolstoy.
The second idea that Gandhi received from Tolstoy was the idea of
service. Tolstoy’s concluding paragraph of The Kingdom of God Is within You
reads, “The only meaning of man’s life consists in serving the world by
cooperating in the establishment of the Kingdom of God.”70 That theme
of service pervades the book, and in another work of Tolstoy read by
Gandhi, The Gospel in Brief, it is again the theme:
My teaching is, that life is given to man not that others may serve
him, but that he should give his whole life to service of others.71
From 1910 on Gandhi began to speak of seva (service) to others as the
way to moksha. Not meditation, not bhakti (the devotional surrender to
God), but service. J. T. F. Jordens points out that
[w]hen Gandhi declared that service was the activity that leads to
the realisation of moksha, he made a statement nowhere to be
found in the Hindu tradition.72
The third idea of Tolstoy that heavily influenced Gandhi was that each
man should do the amount of bodily labor each day equivalent to his earning
his daily bread through the sweat of his brow—what Tolstoy called
“bread labor.” Gandhi found the same idea in the works of John Ruskin.
When books struck him as important and true, he acted upon them.
He straightaway made plans to begin his ashram, where each resident was
expected to contribute to the welfare of all through daily manual labor.
Gandhi was clearly, according to his own testimony, influenced by the
ideas and practices of a number of Western thinkers. He was such an independent
thinker, however, and so rooted in his own culture, that the ideas
from the West did not fall on absolutely virgin soil. Instead, ideas seemed
to give him confirmation of directions in which he had already been moving
or clarity on ideas that he had already been pondering. Some would
say, for example, that he received the idea of civil disobedience from
Thoreau, whereas, in actuality, he was already well into the first nonviolent
campaign before he had even read Thoreau for the first time—in jail, in
fact.
In any case, through the influence of these thinkers, Gandhi forged
something new . His central idea of satyagraha, for example, was a rich
synthesis with many contributing streams of thought and action. In the
words of William Robert Miller:
Like so many other great ideas in history, satyagraha was born of
the interplay of diverse traditions. Few Westerners realize the theological
richness of the term, which is generally translated as “soul
force,” but sat means not only soul in the western sense; it can also
be translated as “ultimate reality.” And this was just what Gandhi
had in mind, for his was a Hinduism strongly modified by a deep
encounter with Christian perfectionism, particularly that of Leo
Tolstoy.73
As Raghavan Iyer concluded:
Certainly no other influential Indian intellectual was as steeped as
Gandhi was in the religious and philosophical texts of the classical
Indian tradition as well as in the writings of daring Western
moralists of the nineteenth century like Tolstoy, Thoreau, Ruskin,
Emerson and Carlyle. It is hardly surprising that no other Indian
politician or religious man became as original in his thinking as
Gandhi. His ready response to unorthodox . . . moralists of the
nineteenth century in the West helped Gandhi to bring a pre-1914
standpoint—individualistic, heretical, heroic, humane—to the
civic life of the twentieth century.74
Hindu Concepts Infused by Gandhi with New Meaning
Before exploring how Gandhi gave new political meaning to traditional
concepts, it is important to review one other important interpretive lens
that Gandhi used. It was, according to him, the most important influence
of all on his life and praxis—the Bhagavad Gita, a popular religious poem
within the epic Mahabharata. The way he interpreted the Gita had all to
do with the way he conceptualized moksha, and understood ahimsa and
tapasya.
We have already seen that he was introduced to the Gita back in his
London student days. During his early years in South Africa he set out to
learn it by heart as he brushed his teeth; every morning for fifteen minutes
he stared at verses pinned to the wall. Recitations from the Gita were an
integral part of the prayer services in successive ashrams for the rest of his
life. He even published his own translation and extensively commented on
the Gita’s meaning. It was the most important document for the leading of
his daily and political life. As he wrote:
What, however, I have done is to put a new but natural and logical
interpretation upon the whole teaching of the Gita and the
spirit of Hinduism. Hinduism . . . has no one scripture like the
Quran or the Bible. Its scriptures are also evolving and suffering
addition. The Gita itself is an instance in point. It has given new
meaning to karma, sannasya, yajna, etc. It has breathed new life
into Hinduism.75
From the very beginning, Gandhi rejected the fundamentalist interpretation
that the Gita was a work justifying violence. He interpreted the
Gita not as a historical work but as an allegory. It describes not what one
should do on the battlefield but how one must act to resolve the battle
going on inside oneself.
The Gita is not a historical work, it is a great religious book, summarizing
the teaching of all religions. The poet has seized the
occasion of the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas . . . for
drawing attention to the war going on in our bodies between the
forces of Good and the forces of Evil.76
Gandhi turned most interpretations on their heads because he found
in the Gita not justification for violence but a strong message of nonviolence.
He explains:
The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the principle of
conquering hate by love, untruth by truth, can and must be
applied. If it be true that God metes out the same measure to us
that we mete out to others, it follows that if we would escape
condign punishment, we may not return anger for anger but gentleness
even against anger. And this is the law not for the unworldly
but for the worldly.77
According to Gandhi, the main message of the Gita is found in the last
nineteen verses of the second chapter. Arjuna asks Lord Krishna to
describe the person who has achieved perfect control over himself and
therefore is fully prepared to carry out the performance of his duty. The
response is: the one who works without being attached to the results of his
or her endeavors; the one who achieves perfect detachment.
There can be no doubt that non-attachment is the central core of
the Gita. I am certain that there is no other inspiration behind the
composition of the Gita. And I know from my own experience that
observance of truth or even ahimsa is impossible without nonattachment.
78
Gandhi’s interpretation of the Gita, along with the other influences
that we have already reviewed, led him to recast some of the fundamental
concepts of Hinduism: how to attain moksha; the meaning of ahimsa; the
meaning of tapasya.
The final freeing of the individual soul from karmic defilement for
oneness with the Spirit, or moksha, is not denied by Gandhi but enhanced.
For him, all the works of purification are not just for final release but also
for making the individual a more robust server of others. The goal is not
just individual attainment but the liberation of all. In the words of
Margaret Chatterjee:
The Mahayana “all or none” principle chimed with his own conviction
that if all living creatures are bound together in one great
chain of existence the liberation of each is tied up with the liberation
of all.79
It is in collective action with others that one generates and experiences
the gradual spirit of liberation. Gandhi finds in the Gita the message of
service and action for the sake of others. The struggle for freedom in one
country will accrue to the struggles for freedom in countries everywhere.
Through collective action in the spirit of service and nonviolence, the
circle of liberation and affection would keep expanding. Through the
influence of the Vaishnava poet-saints, Gandhi saw the religious life as a
horizontal expansion of fellow feeling, “an ocean of friendliness.” The pursuit
of perfection is an endless process but as one pursues it one would have
the experience of expansiveness and “sweetness.” Gandhi’s second favorite
Christian hymn was Cardinal Newman’s “Lead Kindly Light,” and its line
“one step enough for me”—which expressed for Gandhi the philosophy of
taking care, a step at a time, to make sure the means are pure; if they are,
the results will be as well. If humans concentrate on a life of service, following
the way of truth and duty where it leads them, that is sufficient for
finding the way to moksha. Gandhi wrote:
Life to me would lose all its interest if I felt I could not attain perfect
love on earth. After all, what matters is that our capacity for
loving ever expands.80
Gandhi therefore altered the older concept of moksha that stressed
pursuing individual salvation through contemplation and austerities to the
practical vision of serving others to change the conditions in which
humans live. For Gandhi, immersion in the world, not escape from it, was
the way to moksha.
Gandhi was confronting straight on the two errors that held the masses
of India in bondage. According to K. L. Seshagiri Rao:
First, the dangerous passivity brought about by the misunderstanding
of the law of karma, “that everyone has to suffer the consequences
of his deeds and there is no need to change things”
. . . The other error he saw was that meditation was considered
higher than work which made it possible for the able-bodied to eat
without work. Both these errors had reduced the masses of India
to poverty and helplessness.81
Second, Gandhi changed the meaning of ahimsa. The teaching of ahimsa,
whose etymological root is not “not-killing,” but “physical noninjury,”82
goes back as far as the Chandogya Upanishad in the seventh century BC. The
aphorism from the Mahabharata, “ahimsa paramo dharmah” (ahimsa is the
greatest duty), is known throughout India. As S. B. Mookherji points out:
The impact of the idea on India’s mass mind is reflected in a popular
Sanskrit saying: “What merit is there in the goodness of a
man who returns good for good? A good man, verily, is he who
returns good for evil.”83
The Jains made ahimsa central to their religion and took it to the
extremes of avoiding killing any living thing, even insects. They wear
masks to avoid inhaling any living thing that might be flying in the air. As
a people they ended up gravitating to business-related occupations and
away from agriculture. In the acts of plowing and harvesting the destruction
of life is unavoidable.
Gandhi accepted the tradition of ahimsa as a corollary of the central
teaching of the Upanishads that the subjective and the objective, atman
and Brahman, are identical. One should see the atman in all creatures. The
true self of our neighbor is one with our own true self. To inflict harm on
another is to inflict harm on ourselves. Gandhi, however, broadened the
concept in a number of ways.
He made the practice of ahimsa a common duty for all, not just the
saints. In addition, he made it a positive and dynamic method of political
action to challenge evils that had been allowed to fester—from the domination
by the British to the acceptance within Hinduism of untouchability. It
was a method, in fact, that could be used in every arena of life. Gandhi wrote
in 1940:
I have been practicing with scientific precision non-violence and
its possibilities for an unbroken period of over fifty years. I have
applied it in every walk of life, domestic, institutional, economic
and political . . . Its spread is my life mission.84
Gandhi made ahimsa into a positive force—equivalent to St. Paul’s
notion of charity but to be distinguished from the mere feeling of love in
that it involved an active fight against evil. In that fight, conducted nonviolently,
the expectation was that the opponent would be converted. Gandhi
was content with the negative words, ahimsa and nonviolence, because, as
Raghavan Iyer points out,
[t]he negative word had its advantages for Gandhi. He wanted the
acceptance of ahimsa to imply a deliberate stance against ill-will, a
method of action based on self-restraint.85
For Gandhi, ahimsa was power but power in a new key, power that
changed the situation, the opponent, and the practitioner all at once. The
traditional Hindu virtue of ahimsa, which had always been seen as virtue to
be cultivated for the sake of individual purification, was transformed by
Gandhi into the principle of social uplift for all.
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