Unitarian Universalists of Clearwater Florida, where seekers find a home

I was born at Porbandar on 2nd October 1869. I passed my childhood in Porbandar. I recollect having been put to school. It was with some difficulty that I got through the multiplication tables. The fact that I recollect nothing more of those days than having learnt, in company with other boys, to call our teacher all kinds of names, would strongly suggest that my intellect must have been sluggish, and my memory raw.

He who devotes himself to service with a clear conscience, will day by day grasp the necessity for it in greater measure, and will continually grow richer in faith. The path of service can hardly be trodden by one who is not prepared to renounce self-interest and to recognize the conditions of his birth. Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only our own happiness but that of the world at large.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. I do not believe in short-violent-cuts to success...However much I may sympathize with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes...experience convinces me that permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.

My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. It is no nonviolence if we merely love those that love us. It is nonviolence only when we love those that hate us. I know how difficult it is to follow this grand law of love. Love of the hater is the most difficult of all.

What may appear as truth to one person will often appear as untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker. Where there is honest effort, it will be realized that what appear to be different truths are like the countless and apparently different leaves of the same tree...Truth is [God]. Hence there is nothing wrong in every person following Truth according to one's lights.

In satyagraha, it is never the numbers that count; it is always the quality, more so when the forces of violence are uppermost. Then it is often forgotten that it is never the intention of a satyagrahi to embarrass the wrongdoer. The appeal is never to his fear; it is, must be, always to his heart. The satyagrahi's object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrongdoer. [Satyagraha] is a force that works silently and apparently slowly. In reality, there is no force in the world that is so direct or so swift in working.

At the end of the 20th century, when Time magazine asked its readers to pick the person of the century, Mahatma Gandhi was a favorite nominee second only to Albert Einstein. Not surprising given that he is one of the most quoted people in the world; he is on everyone's short list of remarkable persons (including President Obama who recently told a group of students that if he could have dinner with anyone - dead or alive - his favorite would be Gandhi); and his name is invoked whenever and wherever there is violence, oppression, and injustice.

The Mahatma or the Great Soul endures in the best part of our minds, where our ideals are kept as the embodiment of non-violence, human rights, and civil disobedience. Hundreds of biographies and commentaries have been written about him in which he has been both canonized and criticized. His ideas and methods of civil disobedience and non-violent activism have been studied and emulated by many. Martin Luther King Jr. learned them; so did Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, the unknown Chinese who defied the tanks on Tiananmen Square in 1989, as well as the G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh last week. It may be that this most Indian and very Hindu of leaders, revered as Bapuji or Father of the Nation, means more now to the world at large than to his own country people. The people of the world don't have to wrestle with the baggage of guilt and confusion that we Indians feel today as we judge whether our nation has kept faith with his vision.

For the rest of the world, his image offers a shining set of ideals to emulate: Social justice. Peaceful activism. Commitment to truth and peace. Religious tolerance. Human rights. His work and his spirit awakened humanity to ideas that serve as a moral beacon for all ages.

However, on his 140th birth anniversary and 60 years after his assassination, most people know little of Gandhi's life story or how the Mahatma in our minds came to be. For example, many find it difficult to pronounce or spell his name: many in the West and even in India place the 'h' right after 'G' rather than where it should be (after 'd').

The flesh-and-blood Gandhi was a most unlikely saint. Just conjure up his portrait: a skinny, bent figure, nut brown and naked except for a white loincloth, cheap spectacles perched on his nose, frail hand grasping a tall bamboo staff. This was one of 20th century's greatest revolutionaries? Yet this strange figure swayed millions with his hypnotic spell. His garb was the perfect uniform for the kind of revolutionary he was, wielding weapons of mass devotion - prayer and nonviolence more powerful than guns.^[1]

Saints are hard to live with, and this one's personal habits were decidedly odd. Mondays were "days of silence," when he refused to speak. A devoted vegetarian, he indulged in faddish dietetic experiments that sometimes came near to killing him. He eschewed all spices as a discipline of the senses. He napped every day with a mud poultice on abdomen and brow. He was so insistent on absolute regularity in his daily regimen that he safety-pinned a watch to his homespun dhoti, synchronized with the clock at his ashram. He scheduled his bowel movements for 20 minutes morning and afternoon. "The bathroom is a temple," he said, and anyone was welcome to chat with him there. He had a cleansing enema every night. Every afternoon, he did an hour or two of spinning on his little handwheel, the charkha, sometimes 400 yards at a sitting. "I am spinning the destiny of India," he would say.

When I do memorial services, I like to use a quote from the philosopher George Santayana:

"When a man's life is over, it remains true that he has lived; it remains true that he has been one sort of man, and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would; for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains."

What is the truth of Gandhi that remains? I have considered what might be the many truths of his life that remain. First, the many bewilderingly contradictory truths:

a strict disciplinarian who challenged the established order in every field of life;

a generous man of very stingy habits who would counted his pennies and throw away his pounds;

a gentle spirit seeking to accommodate an amazing array of opinions and personalities and a high-handed patriarch insisting on total submission;

an intense seeker of spiritual bliss devoting most of his time and energy to mundane power politics;

a charismatic leader who could mobilize millions to march behind him but eschewed any kind of political position.

He was an expert dietician, an educationist of note, a zealous social reformer, a great public relations expert, a lover of humanity, and an apostle of peace and nonviolence recruiting soldiers for the British army - a convincing case can be built for either side of all such mutually exclusive alternatives while depicting Gandhi.

"In my search for Truth I have never cared for consistency...I must admit my many inconsistencies...I might well endorse Emerson's saying that 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.' There is, I fancy a method in my inconsistencies."

There is the truth of his religious tolerance and universalism. His daily prayers included Hindu chants, Quranic verses, Zoroastrian prayers, and the Christian hymn, 'Lead, Kindly light.' He said, "I do not want my house to be walled on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. Mine is not a religion of the prison-house."

He saw religion as a way of pursuing the Truth, a Truth that is individual, experimental and partial. And because our individual glimpses of Truth are incomplete and tentative, Truth may only be pursued through the means of ahimsa or the non-violent respect for the essence and the truth of other persons.

There is the truth of his peaceful activism, Satyagraha, truth-force or soul-force. Satya means truth in Sanskrit, and comes from sat, which means simply "that which is." The idea behind satya is that truth alone exists; for truth is not what holds good just at a certain time or place and under certain conditions, but that which never changes. Evil, injustice, hatred, Gandhi argued, exist only insofar as we support them; they have no existence of their own. Without our cooperation, unintentional or intentional, injustice cannot continue.

He said, "Satyagraha is gentle, it never wounds. It must not be the result of anger or malice. It is never fussy, never impatient, and never vociferous. It is the direct opposite of compulsion. It was conceived as a complete substitute for violence."

He first put those principles to political work in South Africa, where he had gone to practice law and tasted raw discrimination. Traveling to Johannesburg in a first-class train compartment, he was ordered to move to the "colored" cars in the rear. When he refused, he was thrown off the train and left to spend a freezing night in the station. The next day he was humiliated and cuffed by the white driver of a stagecoach. The experience steeled his resolve to fight for social justice.

South Africa was dress rehearsal for Gandhi's great cause, independence for India. From the day he arrived back home at 45, he dedicated himself to "Hind swaraj," Indian self-rule. More than independence, it meant a utopian blend of national liberty, individual self-reliance and social justice. Freedom entailed individual emancipation as well, the search for nobility of soul through self-discipline and denial. Most ordinary Indians, though, were just looking for an end to colonial rule. While his peace-and-love homilies may not have swayed them, they followed him because he made the British tremble.^[2]

There is the truth of his unwavering commitment to ahimsa or non-violence towards all living things. Gandhi's vision of non-violence was deeply influenced by Jainism, the religion that emerged in India around the same time as Buddhism. Central to the Jain world-view is the concept of ahimsa, avoiding harm to any creature.

He was concerned about freeing human society from the stranglehold of the culture of violence, a culture that is so deep rooted and pernicious that most of us have come to believe that violence is inherent to human nature.

Gandhi believed that anger, not violence, is part of human nature, the fuel that generates violence. He said, "anger is like electricity - just as powerful and useful when used intelligently, but as destructive and deadly when abused. Like electricity, the energy of anger must be channeled intelligently to serve humanity constructively."

However, the intention should not be simply to get the anger out of one's system but to find an equitable solution to the problem that caused the anger.

Gandhi also emphasized the need to understand the manifold ways in which humans practice violence. Apart from physical violence - wars, killings, beatings, murders, rape etc. - we commit an inordinately large amount of passive violence both consciously and unconsciously in the form of hate, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, name-calling, teasing, looking down on people, speaking to people impolitely, classifying people by their religion, their economic standing, their gender, their sexual orientation, their habits and the millions of other ways in which our actions or inaction hurt people. In a selfish, self-centered world we ignore the plight of people, we continue to over consume the resources of the world, and continue to create an economic imbalance and generate anger.

And there is the truth of his complete rejection of western civilization. When he was once asked by a reporter what he thought of western civilization, he replied, "I think it is a good idea." He railed against materialism, industrialization, and sought to rid India of all western influence. He never stopped calling for a nation that would turn away from technology and prosper through village self-sufficiency, but even he could not hold India back. Yet many today share his uneasiness with the way technology and materialism corrupt and sicken the human spirit.

We are building mega urban societies around the world that lack soul and substance. We ignore the basic question - can a society be cohesive, compassionate and caring if every member is taught to be selfish and self-centered? In Gandhian terms a society is an enlarged family and should possess the same positive characteristics - compassion and cohesiveness. However, the materialistic society we have created not only fosters selfishness but we encourage it in our children when we advise them to be successful at whatever cost. Passive violence festers in every society until it becomes unbearable and eventually explodes into physical violence. It incidentally, brings into question our concept of justice and equality. In a world steeped in the culture of violence justice has come to mean revenge - an eye for an eye, Gandhi said, only makes the whole world blind.

The story of the star fish has an appropriate moral lesson for us. A man once went early in the morning to the beach for a walk. Dawn was still minutes away from breaking. In the haze he saw a figure near the water's edge picking something up and throwing it into the water. Out of curiosity he went to enquire and was told that during the night the tide came in and washed all the star fish ashore and when the sun comes out they will all perish. The curious man looked at the shoreline and saw thousands of star fish stranded. He said: "You aren't going to be able to save all these starfish so what difference is it going to make?" The Good Samaritan was still busy throwing the star fish and had one in his hand that he was about to toss into the water as he turned and said: "It will make a big difference to this guy." The moral clearly is that we should not be overwhelmed by the state of the world and do nothing to change the world. Gandhi always believed that small acts of change can ultimately make a big difference. That is the essence of Gandhi's message.

The spirit of Gandhi lives on. The politician and saint go hand in hand, proclaiming the power of love, freedom, justice, equality, and peace. We have to persevere and build on it. I have come to the conclusion that it is the only way, the only sane way, and the only way in which we may be able to preserve our fragile planet from total destruction.

^[1]Quoted from a Time magazine article by Johanna McGeary, Dec. 31, 1999

^[2]Time Magazine, Dec. 31, 1999

Mahatma Gandhi: The Story of His Transformation

Rev. Abhi Janamanchi

October 4, 2009