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.
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