Gandhi

The essence of all of the policies of all of the men I mentioned in the last post is aiming for non-violent solutions for political and social problems but Gandhi seems to have inspired all of the others so I’ll start with him (even if he was Hindu).

He was born and raised in the Indian region of Gujarat in the late 19^th Century where at the time the very non-violent religion Jainism that I mentioned in one of my earliest Buddhism posts was quite common. Jainism most likely influenced the young Gandhi. Incidentally, the founder of Jainism and Siddhartha may have been actual contemporaries and known of each other’s work. Gandhi thought at length about the concept noted as the main special focus of Jainism of doing no harm (expressed in Sanskrit as ahimsa). There is much written about Gandhi (and all of these men) but ahimsa is the central feature of his ideas (along with engagement with problems) that they all took on.

Another feature of his early ideas is that he recognised and regretted (as did others of my list of wise men) that, between Globalisation and the modern era population explosion, the environment was no longer conducive to the retreat into the wilderness of the wise person, which was so often the inspiration for religious regeneration in earlier eras. The wilderness had gone. Buddhism, too, could be mined (and was) in order to find the inspiration for the environmental movement that arose in the last century or so in the West. On a deeper level, he saw the environmental challenge as a destruction of habitat that would inevitably lead to conflict. Retreat was no longer possible. The question for our three thinkers was ‘how to be’ with the conflict.

The conflict Gandhi faced was between ‘Indian’ British Indians and their colonisers, the British Indians among the British Indians and Britain. His way to be was ‘peaceful’ yet ‘struggling’. A Muslim woman in a documentary recently compared this approach to her interpretation of jihad and indeed there was always significant Muslim support for Gandhi’s approach (and even for Gandhi himself). Thich Nhat Hanh’s problem was the colonialist Vietnam War (he led a Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks). The Dalai Lama’s problem was an alleged invasion and suppression of Tibet and its culture and politics by the Chinese pouvoirs-en-place-ont-été. MLK’s bug-bear was the colonisation of the poor of the US by the US ruling class (and globally) and of US ex-slaves. These men (and Aung San Suu Kyi – a Theravada Buddhist) have also contributed their non-violent ahimsa ideals directly to environmentalism.

Gandhi studied law in England and was then fortuitously invited to practise in South Africa in a practice that helped many Indians there. In England he had been especially influenced by learning of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” and Christianity more generally and the social ideas of people like Tolstoy.

In South Africa he became committed to the welfare of Indians and he tells of having been asked to leave a first class carriage despite holding a valid ticket. He cites what then happened as his first approach to non-violent protest. He at first refused and upon being manhandled out of the carriage attempted to resume it whereupon he was further ‘roughed up’ and later arrested.

In Hindu terms, he was a karma yogi, meaning an active practitioner, and is known to have said something to the effect of “whoever thinks religion has nothing to do with politics knows nothing about religion and nothing about politics”. He repeated the name of the god, Ram, as a general spiritual practice and was reportedly repeating it as he died at the hands of an assassin.

Returning to an India during the First World War that knew him well as a defender of the Indians of South Africa, he set up a “Tolstoy” ashram (commune). He apparently also had some correspondence with Tolstoy. He was immediately asked to join the independence movement and, with the Indian National Congress Party, set to work on organising non-violent civil disobedience. His belief was that a few hundred Brits could hardly resist the civil disobedience of (at that time) a population of 600 million British Indians for very long and that violence could thus easily be avoided. He also tried to establish ecumenism among Indian British Indians (the ‘Indians’ of ‘British India’ - now Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis but probably not so focused on the Burmese or the natives of the Aden Settlement which were also considered British Indians until 1937) especially working on the fraught relationship between Hindus and Muslims. He also worked to end discrimination against the ‘lower’ castes in Hinduism.

Some of his philosophising can be easily seen to compare to Mahayana Buddhism. He argued for non-violence based on the truth (satya) and compassion. The truth is known as a result of turning away from the exterior world in order to gain wisdom but compassion turns the wise person back to resolve the problems of the exterior world. He differs from it to the extent that he saw non-violence as a means inextricably causally linked to truth as an end whereas a Buddhist would tend to not make such a clear causal link between the two.

He saw non-violence not as a mere non-action but as a positive force. He encouraged ‘holding on to truth (Satyagraha)’ meaning in the case of struggles with others actually believing in the truth of the best nature of your ‘opponent’. As a theist, he saw this best nature as deriving in some way from the Ultimate Truth. So his model wasn’t adversarial; it wasn’t about “us” and “them”. Being ‘friends’ with the better nature of an adversary meant that one couldn’t contemplate violence against her or him and also that only these peaceful means could lead to peaceful ends. Here are three rough paraphrases of quotes that illustrate his philosophy:

There are no roads to peace; peace is the only road.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Befriending one who believes you to be an enemy is the quintessence of religion.

After a life of preaching non-violence as a Hindu (though he never regarded Jainist ahimsa as an absolute requirement in conflict) he was emphatically rejected by a member of his own faith when he was assassinated by a Hindu militant in 1947 who apparently thought he was too soft on Muslims.