The Essential Gandhi (36 page)

 … When it is difficult for millions to make even the two ends
meet, when millions are dying of starvation, it is monstrous to think of giving our relatives a costly education. Expansion of the mind will come from hard experience, not necessarily in the college or the schoolroom.… The golden rule to apply in all such cases is resolutely to refuse to have what millions cannot. This ability to refuse will not descend upon us all of a sudden. The first thing is to cultivate the mental attitude that we will not have possessions or facilities denied to millions, and the next immediate thing is to rearrange our lives as fast as possible in accordance with our mentality.

 … Progress towards self-rule will be in exact proportion to the increase in the number of workers who will dare to sacrifice their all for the cause of the poor.
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If America has to model her schools and colleges so as to enable students to earn their scholastic expenses, how much more necessary it must be for our schools and colleges? Is it not far better that we find work for poor students than that we pauperize them by providing free studentships? It is impossible to exaggerate the harm we do to India’s youth by filling their minds with the false notion that it is ungentlemanly to labor with one’s hands and feet for one’s livelihood or schooling.… No one likes to be reminded in after-life that he had to depend upon charity for his education.…
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I value education in the different sciences. Our children cannot have too much of chemistry and physics.…

 … I do regard spinning and weaving as the necessary part of any national system of education. I do not aim at taking the whole of the children’s time for this purpose. Like a skilled physician I tend, and concentrate my attention on, the diseased limb knowing that is the best way of looking after the others. I would develop in the child his hands, his brain and his soul. The hands have atrophied.…
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 … An academic grasp without practice behind it is like an embalmed corpse, perhaps lovely to look at but nothing to inspire or ennoble.…
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… [The British Government schools] have made us what we were intended to become—clerks and interpreters.…
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 … The worst thing that can happen to boys in school is to have to render blind obedience to everything the teacher says. On the contrary, if teachers are to stimulate the reasoning faculty of boys and girls under their care, they would continuously tax their reason and make them think for themselves.…

 … Pupils should … learn something about the deep poverty of the masses. They should have an ocular demonstration of some villages that are crumbling down to pieces. They should know the population of India. They should know the extent of this peninsula and they should know what it is that all the many millions can do to add to their scanty resources. They should learn to identify themselves with the poor and the downtrodden in the land. They should be taught to deny themselves, so far as possible, things the poorest cannot have.…
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[Please do] not look to my life, but take me even as a finger-post, a lamp-post on the road that indicates the way but cannot walk the way itself. I cannot present my life as an example.… Whomsoever you follow, howsoever great he might be, see to it that you follow the spirit of the master and not imitate him mechanically.… Let each follow … according to his individual development.…

 … Higher education stands for unity, for catholicity, for toleration and wide outlook. The culture a university imparts should make you find the points of contact, and avoid those of conflict. If you could see the inner springs of actions and not the outward manifestations thereof, you would find a wonderful unity.… Leave the outward expression, the doctrine, the dogma and the form and behold the unity and oneness of spirit.… Then there will be no need to divide this universe of ours between heaven and hell, no need to divide fellow-beings into virtuous and vicious, the eternally saved and the eternally damned. Love shall inform your actions and pervade your life.
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[Gandhi’s year as President of the Congress Party ended in December 1925. He then took a vow of a year’s “political silence.” In the silent year there were fifty-two silent Mondays when Gandhi did not speak. On those days, he would listen to an interviewer and occasionally tear off a corner of a piece of paper and pencil a few words in reply. Since this was not the best way to conduct a conversation, the weekly day of silence gave him some privacy.]

 … It has often occurred to me that a seeker after truth has to be silent. I know the wonderful efficacy of silence. I visited a Trappist monastery in South Africa. A beautiful place it was. Most of the inmates of that place were under a vow of silence. I enquired of the Father the motive of it, and he said the motive is apparent. We are frail human beings. We do not know very often what we say. If we want to listen to the still small voice that is always speaking within us, it will not be heard if we continually speak. I understood that precious lesson.…
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[The silences] happened when I was being torn to pieces. I was working very hard, traveling in hot trains incessantly, speaking at many meetings, and being approached in trains and elsewhere by thousands of people who asked questions, made pleas, and wished to pray with me. I wanted to rest for one day a week. So I instituted the day of silence. Later of course I clothed it with all kinds of virtues and gave it a spiritual cloak. But the motivation was really nothing more than that I wanted to have a day off.

Silence is very relaxing. It is not relaxing in itself. But when you can talk and don’t, it gives you great relief—and there is time for thought.
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Experience has taught me that silence is a part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth wittingly or unwittingly is a natural weakness of man and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech, he will measure every word.
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Silence of the sewn-up lips is no silence. One may achieve the same result by chopping off one’s tongue but that too would not be silence. He is silent who having the capacity to speak utters no idle word.
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[Apart from the fifty-two Mondays, the “silent” year was in no sense silent. He did not travel, he addressed no mass meetings, but he talked, wrote, received visitors and maintained a correspondence from the ashram at Ahmedabad with thousands of persons in India and other countries.

Taking advantage of relative leisure in the “silent year,” Gandhi read Havelock Ellis, Forel, Paul Bureau’s
Toward Moral Bankruptcy
and other European authorities on family and sex. Gandhi always advocated birth control. The method he favored, however, was self-control. In many articles that came from his pen or pencil in “silent” 1926 and often thereafter, Gandhi consistently opposed the use of contraceptives—they were a Western vice.]

 … It is dinned into one’s ears that the gratification of the sex urge is a solemn obligation like the obligation of discharging debts … and not to do so would involve the penalty of intellectual decay. This sex urge has been isolated from the desire for progeny and it is said by the protagonists of the use of contraceptives that conception is an accident to be prevented except when the parties desire to have children. I venture to suggest this is a most dangerous doctrine to preach anywhere, much more so in a country like India.… Marriage loses its sanctity when its purpose and highest use is conceived to be the satisfaction of the animal passion without contemplating the natural result of such satisfaction.
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There can be no two opinions about the necessity of birth-control. But the only method handed down from ages past is self-control or Brahmacharya.… The union is meant not for pleasure but for bringing forth progeny. And union is a crime when the desire for progeny is absent.

Artificial methods … make a man and woman reckless.… It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts. It is good for the person who over-eats to have an ache and then fast. It is bad for him to indulge his appetite and then escape the consequences by taking tonics or other medicine.…
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In my opinion, sexual union to be legitimate is permissible only when both parties desire it. I do not recognize the right of either party to compel satisfaction.…

 … I cannot help saying that the desire not to have more children is not enough reason for refusing satisfaction. It appears almost cowardly to reject one’s wife’s advances merely for fear of having to support children.…
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It is better to enjoy through the body than to be enjoying the thought of it. It is good to disapprove of sensual desires as soon as they arise in the mind and try to keep them down but if for want of physical enjoyment the mind wallows in thoughts of enjoyment then it is legitimate to satisfy the hunger of the body. About this I have no doubt.
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As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you. Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you, or when it seems to interfere with that which is more greatly desired.
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[Recognize] the limitations of your body and insist on having the
things it may need for its upkeep, even as a trustee would be bound to secure the well-being of his ward. Be sure that you do not pamper the body.…
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 … Though the external may have its use … I have all my life thought of growth from within. External appliances are perfectly useless if there is no internal reaction. When a body is perfect within, it becomes impervious to external adverse influences and is independent of external help.… If, therefore, we would all work to bring about internal perfection we need not take up any other activity at all.…
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I have learnt through bitter experience … to conserve my anger and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.
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