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.

The ‘Priming’ of the West for ‘Engaged Buddhism’ – Indian Beginnings

Having now examined the history of Indian Buddhism (especially in its first millenium - c. 400 BCE to c. 600 CE) over the last thirty odd posts, the next several posts including this one will outline how the West came to know Buddhist history and philosophy and what Western thinkers (influenced by a Western history of thought as they have been and are) have made and continue to make of them.

The interest in Buddhism in the West begins with the economic, military, social and political invasion of India by the British in the 17^th Century but the route was somewhat circuitous. As so often, the ideas of the invader are often as influenced by the very indigenous ideas the invaders imagine themselves to be influencing. It’s about what ideas work and information is somewhat inevitably a two-way process. Let’s take a tour of that route.

The English had no knowledge at all of Buddhism at first. They formally wrested power from the Mughal Empire in 1765 and initially roughly the area of Bengal was the main area of British control and interest. This area extended from the Mughal capital Delhi to the east coast at Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was essentially the lower Ganges Valley and surrounds. As they sought to rule this area, they sought to understand its laws and customs and for this purpose in part they employed translators of Sanskrit. Indians generally had up until this time considered the language too sacred to translate for European interlopers so naturally British and other European linguists were employed for the purpose, principally the brilliant linguist, and competent lawyer, William Jones.

Jones had become a lawyer for the sole purpose of seeing service in India and learning its languages. He appears to have had a good knowledge of virtually all European languages and some Classical and ancient languages as well as at least Arabic and Persian and to have also started to learn the Chinese writing system at an early age.

Jones was the first European to learn Sanskrit (at first officially, so that he could read the Hindu law books). As a pioneer linguist, an expert in comparative linguistics and (by virtue of his work in India) the father of philology, he was quick to form a view of Sanskrit as related to many European languages and as belonging to a family of ‘Indo-European’ languages all with a common antecedent language relatively close to Sanskrit. He is also regarded today as a pioneer in the study of religion and comparative religion and culture. He set up the Asiatic Society of Bengal for the study of more Indian texts and is thereby also known today as the father of Indology. The Victorian German Indologist (and Oxford don of Sanskrit) Max Müller may arguable share some of these distinctions (especially with regard to paternity of the academic disciplines of comparative religion and Indology).

Jones famously regarded Sanskrit as a superior language in various ways to both of the then-revered languages of Classical Greek and Latin (“more perfect than Greek” and “more copious than Latin”, he said) and this idea proved quite revolutionary for many. The usual awe felt concerning the idealised Classical underpinnings of Western culture and even concerning ideas of European ‘exceptionalism’ and superiority were significantly diminished by Jones's work.

Schopenhauer, for one, certainly thought the discovery of Indian texts would be as influential in the West as the rediscovery of Classical texts there had been. He predicted a new Renaissance would be provoked (the old one had been essentially provoked firstly in Florence in the 14^th and 15^th Centuries by the rediscovery by Europeans of the works of Plato and Aristotle, of Classical literature more generally and of hermetic Egyptian works that themselves drew on Classical learning (partly due to the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans and partly due to Moorish sharing in (and their progressive withdrawal from) what is now Spain and Portugal)). It may be yet still to get underway even today.

Jones’s revelations, in particular, did spark serious European intellectual interest in Asia beyond mere interest in language but only later in Buddhism. His 18^th Century work revealing the religious thought of India, which in fact paid scant regard to Buddhism, is regarded in part as having inspired the 19^th Century Romantic movements that would be re-inspired by later interest in Buddhism. Romanticism as a fully formed viewpoint based on Indian ideas can be seen as derived from the philosophy of the brothers Schlegel from Germany, both earnest students of Sanskrit (the word for the movement was actually also coined by one of the brothers). They saw India as a great originator and a more spiritual and less empirical civilisation than the West’s. Despite their great interest in and idealisation of India, neither of the Schlegels ever visited it, however. Had they done so, they may have developed a perhaps more realistic view of it.

The Romantics loved India and held it up to Europe as a paragon. Their problems with the European way included its scientific method, its materialist philosophy and its Industrial Revolution (recall the “dark satanic mills” of Blake, an English Romantic poet) and they saw India as a nation living closer to their ideal. Other notable Romantics include Beethoven, Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth. They saw progress as a more complex animal that the mere utilitarian advancement of science, technology and material prosperity and their opponents as the Liberal and Enlightenment thinking that had recently come into fashion.

Romantics questioned both European empiricism and rationality (read Greek logic) as reliable bedrock and unalienable principles of any truly sane civilisation. Expressions like “the white man’s burden” and “mission civilisatrice” and colonialism generally are imbued with their urgency from those ‘progressive’ ideals that Romantics sought to question. In today's post-colonial, 'post modern' and warming world these ideas are beginning to gather more converts than they may have even among the formerly ‘enlightened’ thinkers of the 19th Century. One can certainly see Romantic ideas in the roots of later non-violence and environmental movements.

What remained after the removal of empiricism and logic (and which they valued more) was imagination, ‘intuition’ and the ‘divine’ within as also expressed in nature in its ‘wild’ state. These ideas inspired Freud’s idea of accessing the sub-conscious via psychoanalysis. The US ‘wilderness appreciation’ and ‘national parks’ movements of the late 19^th Century were early expressions of Romantic ideas that have ongoing effects today as the seeds of modern environmentalism.

Religion (and the psyche for Freudians) was to be experienced in the here-and-now rather than studied to within an inch of its life (albeit that Jones, while inspiring Romantics, had also instigated this study). 'Nature' became an idol of a sort. This ideal of inner searching corresponded almost exactly with the Indian way that I’ve been exploring throughout these posts including the earliest Buddhist way.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a noted 18^th Century and early 19^th Century Protestant thinker (considered the father of holistic hermeneutics) wrote the engaging On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers in an attempt to explain the meaning of this Romantic idea of the eternal moment derived partly, as I’ve said, from Jones’s 18^th Century work. Schleiermacher wrote: “it is to have a sense and taste for the infinite, to lie in the bosom of the universe and feel its boundless life and creative power within your own.” And Blake wrote, in Auguries of Innocence, “To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour” and, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the door of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” And how about this from William Wordsworth: “... a sense sublime, Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man” from Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye (published in 1798).

Imagination and internal searching were required both for the creation of and apprehension of this infinity. Less condescension to other ‘races’ than the other main strand of European thought, that of the Enlightenment, was inherent in this way of thinking concerning the paramountcy of thought itself over revealed doctrine (whether religious or scientific).

Truth was now an infinite subjectivity and not about control, for Romantics (as for Buddhists, I might argue, though Romantics did not yet know it). Mother Nature was thus not like a woman who, in the patriarchal and sexist way of Enlightenment thought, was seen as slowly yielding her secrets under the pressure of men of science (pressing in order that they might control her - Edward Said suggested that the Orient and ‘Orientals’ were viewed in the same way).

Only science and logic were limited and finite and therefore unable to comprehend, much less control, this infinity. Romanticism thus prefigures the ideas of Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh and others that control cannot be hoped to be achieved if it is even possible at all without first giving up control (in the limited rational and logical sense).