The Essential Gandhi (3 page)

For me, the burning question became: what was the secret of this alchemy? Everyone in India knew that Gandhi had transformed himself in South Africa, but most of these millions of followers had scarcely even laid eyes on him. How was it that ordinary people became heroes and heroines simply through his example?

Graduate studies took me to a university in central India very near Gandhi’s ashram, the little community he called Sevagram, “village of service.” For the first time for me he was actually within reach. One weekend I decided to visit him and perhaps find answers to my questions.

I had to walk the last few miles from the train station, and the sun was low on the horizon when we arrived. A crowd had gathered outside a little thatched cottage where Gandhi had been closeted in urgent national negotiations since early morning. My heart sank. He would be tired after all that, tense and irritable, with little time for guests like me.

But when the cottage door opened, out popped a lithe brown figure
of about seventy with the springy step and mischievous eyes of a teenager, laughing and joking with those around him. He might as well have been playing Bingo all day. Later I read that a journalist once asked Gandhi if he didn’t think he should take a vacation. Gandhi had laughed and replied, “I’m always on vacation.” That’s just what I saw.

He was striding off for his evening walk and motioned us to come along. But after a while most of the crowd fell away. He didn’t simply walk fast; he seemed to fly. With his white shawl flapping and his gawky bare legs he looked like a crane about to take off. I have always been a walker, but I had to keep breaking into a jog to keep up with him.

My list of questions was growing. This was a man in his seventies—the twilight of life by Indian standards of those days—burdened daily with responsibility for four hundred million people. He must have lived under intense pressure fifteen hours a day, every day, for probably fifty years. Why didn’t he get burned out? How was he able to maintain this freshness? What was the source of this apparently endless vitality and good humor?

After the walk and a meal it was time for Gandhi’s prayer meeting. By this time it was dark, and hurricane lanterns had been lit all around. Gandhi sat straight with his back against a tree, and I managed to get a seat close by, where I could fix my whole heart on him. A Japanese monk opened with a Buddhist chant and then a British lady began one of Gandhi’s favorite hymns, John Henry Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light.” Gandhi had closed his eyes in deep concentration, as if absorbed in the words.

Then his secretary, Mahadev Desai, began to recite from the Bhagavad Gita, India’s best-known scripture, which is set on a battlefield that Gandhi said represents the human heart. In the verses being recited, a warrior prince named Arjuna, who represents you and me, asks Sri Krishna, the Lord within, how one can recognize a person who is aware of God every moment of his life. And Sri Krishna replies in eighteen magnificent verses unparalleled in the spiritual literature of the world:

Sanskrit is a sonorous language, perfect for recitation. As Arjuna’s opening question reverberated through the night air, Gandhi became absolutely motionless. His absorption was so profound that he scarcely seemed to breathe, as if he had been lifted out of time. Suddenly the Gita’s question—“Tell me of the man established in wisdom”—became a living dialogue. I wasn’t just hearing the answer, I was seeing it, looking at a man who to the best of my knowledge fulfilled every condition the Gita lays down:

I had always loved the Gita for its literary beauty, and I must have read it and listened to commentaries on it many times. But seeing it illustrated by Gandhi opened its inner meaning. Not just “illustrated”: he had
become
those words, become a living embodiment of what they meant. “Free from selfish desires” didn’t mean indifference; it meant not trying to get anything for yourself, giving your best whatever comes without depending on anything except the Lord within. And the goal clearly wasn’t the extinction of personality. Gandhi practically defined personality. He was truly original; the rest of us seemed bland by comparison, as if living in our sleep. He spoke of making himself zero but seemed to have become instead a kind of cosmic conduit, a channel for some tremendous universal power, an “instrument of peace.”

These verses are the key to Gandhi’s life. They describe not a political leader but a man of God, in words that show this is the very height of human expression. They tell us not what to do with our lives but what to be. And they are universal. We see essentially the same portrait in all scriptures, reflected in the lives of spiritual aspirants everywhere.

The reason is that the experience itself is universal. The Bhagavad Gita is a comprehensive presentation of what Leibniz called the Perennial Philosophy because it crops up in every culture and every age. The Perennial Philosophy is characterized by three deep convictions born of direct experience. First, underlying everything in the phenomenal world is a changeless reality, which most religions call God. Second, this changeless reality is present in every living creature and can be personally discovered by following certain strenuous disciplines that remove the layers of conditioning that cover it. And third, this discovery is the real goal of life. Whatever else we may accomplish, nothing will satisfy us until we realize God in our own consciousness.

Gandhi himself expresses all this in famous words as carefully chosen as if he were drafting a legal brief:

But I have to confess that this insight, though inspiring, did not convey to me the significance it does today. I wasn’t really a religious person, and while I respected those who were, at that time in my life I had never given a thought to leading the spiritual life. I had seen that Gandhi was really a mystic and the living embodiment of the Bhagavad Gita, but how had he managed to translate the Gita into his very consciousness? Not until I took to meditation myself did the rest of the puzzle fall into place.

There are really two chapters in the story of Gandhi in South Africa. The second covers the eight years after 1906 in which Gandhi developed and tested his new method of nonviolent resistance. But the first chapter to me is even more important, because it holds the chrysalis of his transformation.

The crucial event came soon after his arrival in South Africa, when Gandhi was thrown off a train at Maritzburg station because of the color of his skin (
this page
). Something similar must have happened to every non-European in South Africa. But there are times in human affairs—sometimes in a profound external crisis, sometimes for no apparent reason at all—when superficial awareness is torn open and a channel into deeper consciousness is laid bare. That is what happened to Gandhi that night. It was bitter cold, and his coat and luggage were with the stationmaster, but he would not go and beg for them. He sat up all night thinking furiously about what had happened and what to do. He felt a strong impulse to turn around and go back to India rather than live in a place where he would be expected to put up with this kind of indignity.

By dawn he had made a curious resolve that came right from the depths of his heart: he would stay and he would fight, but against racial prejudice and on behalf of all, and in that fight he would not resort to any tactic that would diminish the humanity he was fighting for. He would cling to the truth and suffer the consequences in trying to “root out this disease” that was infecting all parties involved.

The following day he proceeded on the next leg of his journey by carriage. There again he met with prejudice; though there was room in the carriage, he was forced by the driver to sit in a degrading place outside. When he refused, the driver tried to drag him
off, alternately beating him and pulling at him; Gandhi refused to yield but refused also to defend himself and clung to the carriage rail until the white passengers were moved to pity and begged the driver to let him join them at their side. It was a curiously symbolic moment. No philosophy was involved; it would take years for him to make the “matchless weapon” of nonviolence out of this dogged determination never to retaliate but never to yield. But he had become a different man. The Sanskrit scriptures would say that on that night in Maritzburg “faith entered his heart.” In practice this means that in the very depths of his consciousness he had glimpsed a new image of himself. He was not just a separate, physical creature; he saw that he—and, crucially, every other human being—was essentially spiritual, with “strength [that] does not come from physical capacity [but] from an indomitable will.”

After this first instinctive “holding on to Truth,” Gandhi turned inward. He had met injustice; it degraded everyone, but everyone accepted it: How could he change
himself
to help everyone involved see more clearly? Somehow, dimly at first, but with increasing sureness, he had already grasped that a person can be an “instrument of peace,” a catalyst of understanding, by getting himself out of the way. This marks the beginning of his life as a spiritual aspirant, and in the years that follow, hidden under the affairs of a terribly busy life, we can see him working tirelessly on the business of mystics everywhere: training his mind, transforming personal passions, “reducing himself to zero.”

It is this spiritual aspirant who is the “essential Gandhi.” Without understanding this we cannot really understand what he was trying to do and how he was trying to do it, nor, more important, can we understand what his life offers for the modern world. It makes him blood brother to other, more clearly mystical figures like Francis of Assisi or Teresa of Avila. From this family relationship we can see that his transformation follows the traditional pattern of mystics everywhere.

Gandhi gives himself away at the very outset of this volume when, surprisingly, he says, “What I want to achieve—what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years—is self-realization, to see God face to face” (
this page
). Writing for Indians, he uses the word
moksha
, a Hindu term for a state of being that is not at all Hindu but universal. The dictionary definition, which
Louis Fischer understandably gives here, misses the point.
Moksha
, like the similarly misunderstood
nirvana
, refers to the state of being empty of oneself but full of God. One of the hallmarks of the Perennial Philosophy is the recognition that nothing separates us from God but self-will, the deep clinging to oneself as something separate from the rest of creation. The whole of the spiritual life is a systematic attempt to remove this illusion of separateness once and for all. The task sounds bleak until we see, through a living example, that this “zero” is what allows the infinitude of God to burst forth through the human personality. Meister Eckhart says inimitably, “God expects but one thing of you: that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.” And again: “God is
bound
to act, to pour himself into you, as soon as he finds you ready.”

St. Francis took the Gospels as his model; Gandhi took the Gita. For both it was a systematic daily practice. Translating the Gita into character, conduct, and consciousness was precisely what Gandhi was doing in South Africa. He knew it by heart, knew it
in
his heart, studied it over and over every day, used it in prayer until it became a living presence. It was, he says, his “dictionary of daily reference.” Whenever he had a question about what to do or how to act, he took it to the Gita. Then, with the willpower that was his surest gift, he set about bringing his life into conformity with its teachings, no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient that might have been. Those years in South Africa were a studio in which Gandhi worked every day like an artist, studying his model and chipping away at the block of stone that hid the vision he was striving to set free, painstakingly removing everything that is not Gita.