The Essential Gandhi (4 page)

In many ways, allowing for differences in personal style, Gandhi goes about this very much like every other mystic. The crucial difference is that he does not withdraw from public life to do it. All his training is in the midst of around-the-clock public service. In most mystics we see personal passions being consumed in the love of God. Gandhi was transformed by his deep-running, passionate love of other people, wherein he found God, and an increasing desire to lose himself in salving their wounds and sorrows. Many mystics abrade their selfishness away; Gandhi dissolved his in love and service.

He made astonishing personal discoveries in those years, and perhaps the most significant for us today is that anger can be transformed.
It is raw energy that can be transformed and fed back into a positive channel. Anger transformed becomes compassion. In South Africa, beginning in his own home, Gandhi learned to transform his anger and then harness it in service. All the furious indignation of that night at Maritzburg station gets channeled first into transforming his bursts of temper with his wife.

In every tradition, by whatever name it is called—“training the mind,” “guarding the heart,” “transforming the passions”—this is the essence of the spiritual life. Gandhi was a terribly passionate young man with a hot, imperious temper. All that passion transformed is what fueled a passionate life of selfless service. “I have learnt through bitter experience,” he says later, “the one supreme lesson 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.” That one sentence is enough to place him among the world’s greatest teachers. He is telling us this is a skill; it can be learned. And as it is learned, it changes everything in its field.

His “staff of life” through these transformations, Gandhi tells us, was prayer, but not petitionary prayer in the usual sense. Though he writes about prayer in the language of a Protestant Christian, “there is nothing in it analogous to the Christian prayers in which people ask for definite things.” When he describes his prayer as “inward communion,” he seems more to be talking about what the Spanish mystics call “the prayer of quiet” or contemplation. In any case he makes it clear over and over that for him “prayer is nothing else but an intense longing of the heart.” Such prayer could be wordless, and sometimes was, but most often his prayer seems to be absorption in the words of the Gita (“the constant reading of the Gita has filled my life with prayer”) or a most important practice that is easy to miss in his writings:
Ramanama
, the repetition of the name of God, a kind of rosary that Gandhi learned in childhood from his nurse.

This technique of purifying the heart by repetition of the Holy Name is found in all major spiritual traditions. In the West today, it is probably most familiar from the little book known as
The Way of a Pilgrim
, which describes the use of the Jesus Prayer. We do not know when Gandhi began this practice regularly, but it is clearly part of his life in South Africa from the earliest years.

The Way of a Pilgrim
describes vividly the state in which this kind of prayer becomes “self-acting”: begins to repeat itself, so to speak, which is the traditional understanding of St. Paul’s injunction to “pray without ceasing.” There are signs by which this can be recognized, and I have very little doubt that Gandhi was established in unbroken prayer when he launched his first
satyagraha
campaign in South Africa in 1906. To my knowledge, when the “heartfelt yearning” that Gandhi described is poured into the repetition of the name of God—precisely as in the mystical traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism—nothing is more effective in transforming anger into compassion, ill will into good will, hatred into love.

It is important for us in the modern world that there is absolutely nothing in this of conventional religion. Gandhi observed no rituals, didn’t go to temple, read all scriptures, found Truth in all religions and “some error” in all as well. His God, though a living presence, is an impersonal force—Law rather than Lawgiver; Truth, Love, Goodness, the unity of life. When he repeated the name of God in Ramanama, he was calling not on the Rama of traditional Hindu devotion but on “an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything,” “the eternal, the unborn, the one without a second,” and that sustaining Power, present in the heart of every creature, is within; there is no appeal to an external power. I do not know at what point in his life he began to say “I am not only a Hindu; I am a Moslem, a Christian, a Jew,” but I think it would be true at any point once he “crossed the Sahara of atheism” as a youth.

For Gandhi, as for almost all mystics, the last personal passion to be transformed was sexual desire. Characteristically, the point of decision came not in seclusion but during the long days and nights of bearing stretchers as a medic during the brutal suppression of a Zulu rebellion against the British in South Africa. Gandhi’s agony over the suffering released a desire to serve that swept every personal desire into its path. It is no coincidence that just weeks after he took his vow of celibacy—for the third but last time, he tells us with dry humor—came the great scene in Johannesburg’s Imperial Theatre when he rose to address a crowd of angry Indians protesting a new piece of anti-Indian legislation and hit on the idea of offering nonviolent resistance. From that day (September 11, 1906) he stepped out onto the world stage.

“It was only when I had learned to reduce myself to zero,” Gandhi says, “that I was able to evolve the power of
satyagraha
in South Africa.”
Satyagraha—
literally “holding on to Truth”—is the name he coined for this method of fighting without violence or retaliation.

Gandhi had a genius for making abstruse ideas practical, and one of the best examples comes when he explains the basis of
satyagraha
. In Sanskrit the word
satya
, “truth,” is derived from
sat
, “that which is.” Truth
is;
untruth merely appears to be. Gandhi brought this out of the realm of Ph.D. dissertations and into the middle of politics. It means, he said, that evil is real only insofar as we support it. The essence of holding on to Truth is to withdraw support of what is wrong. If enough people do this—if, he maintained, even one person does it from a great enough depth—evil has to collapse from lack of support.

Gandhi was never theoretical. He learned by doing.
Satyagraha
continued to be refined in action all his life; he was experimenting up to the day he was assassinated. But the essentials are present from the very beginning in South Africa.

First is the heartfelt conviction that a wrong situation wrongs both sides. Europeans and Indians alike were degraded by race prejudice; a lasting solution, therefore, had to relieve this burden for all involved. In spiritual terms this follows from the unity of life, which is what Gandhi’s Truth means in practice. But it is also profoundly practical, because only a solution for everyone can actually resolve the problem and move the situation forward. More than just both sides “winning,” everyone is a little nobler, a little more human, for the outcome.

Equally essential but hardest to grasp intellectually, nonviolent action means voluntary suffering. That in fact is how it works. Gandhi discovered in South Africa that reason is ultimately impotent to change the heart. Race prejudice was already causing suffering; the task of
satyagraha
was to make that suffering visible. Then, sooner or later, opposition had to turn to sympathy, because deep in everyone, however hidden, is embedded an awareness of our common humanity.

Clearly there is nothing passive about this kind of resistance. “The nonviolence of my conception,” Gandhi says, “is a more
active and a more real fighting than retaliation, whose very nature is to increase wickedness.” That is the point: violence only makes a situation worse. It cannot help but provoke a violent response.

Strictly speaking,
satyagraha
is not “nonviolence.” It is a means, a method. The word we translate as “nonviolence” is a Sanskrit word central in Buddhism as well:
ahimsa
, the complete absence of violence in word and even thought as well as action. This sounds negative, just as “nonviolence” sounds passive. But like the English word “flawless,”
ahimsa
denotes perfection.
Ahimsa
is unconditional love;
satyagraha
is love in action.

I said at the outset that every mystic seems to have a unique mission. Gandhi’s was not really the liberation of India. That was a tremendous achievement, but India was essentially a showcase, a stage for the world to see what nonviolence can accomplish in the highly imperfect world of real life. I haven’t even touched the surface of those achievements; there are miracles enough in Gandhi’s story to show that human nature is much loftier than we imagine. Our future depends on making that discovery.

“There is nothing new about
ahimsa
,” Gandhi insisted. “It is as old as the hills.” Throughout history all lasting relationships, all communities and societies, even civilization itself, have been built on the renunciation of violence for the sake of some greater good. Every conflict large or small is an opportunity to advance a little in evolution or move backwards. In this sense I believe civilization has reached a crossroads. A handful of angry people today, perhaps even one angry person, can wreak destruction on the other side of the globe. Violence has ceased to surprise us even in our homes and schools. We have made a culture of violence, and unless we change direction, it can destroy a great deal of progress that has been painstakingly built up over centuries of human evolution.

In today’s language, Gandhi gave us the basis for a technology of peace. He gave us tools for resolving conflicts of all kinds, which anyone can learn to use. But it is urgent to understand his message that nonviolence is a way of thinking, a way of life—not a tactic, but a way of putting love to work in resolving problems, healing relationships, and generally raising the quality of our lives. We don’t begin on the grand stage he acted on; he did not begin that way himself. He began with his personal relationships, aware that he could not expect to put out the fires of anger and hatred elsewhere if the
same fires smoldered in his own home and heart. His nonviolence is not a political weapon or a technique for social change so much as it is an essential art—perhaps
the
essential art—of civilization.

In other words, nonviolence is a skill, just like learning to read. Love is a skill. Forgiveness is a skill. The transformation of anger is a skill. All these can be learned. We cannot say we aren’t capable of nonviolence; all we can say is we are not willing to do what is necessary to learn.

Finally, for spiritual seekers of all persuasions, Gandhi showed us that the spiritual life need not mean retiring to a monastery or cave. It can be pursued in the midst of family, community, and a career of selfless service. Even without reference to spirituality, if we look upon the overriding purpose of life as making a lasting contribution to our family and society, Gandhi gave us a higher image for ourselves, a glorification of the innate goodness in the human being, whose joy lies in living for the welfare of all.

It has been said that the world’s great mystics must come from the same country because they all speak the same language. Gandhi and St. Francis, Teresa of Avila and the Compassionate Buddha are brothers and sisters. They seem so lofty that we sometimes feel they belong to another race or come from a different realm of being. But this does them a great disservice, for their message is just the contrary. They are our kinsfolk as well, and the country they come from is our own. They are like a relative who has disappeared for years and then returns to tell of a fabulous land. They give us maps, fill our ears with tips about which roads are safe and where the hostels are, tell us stories, show us their slides: anything to convince us that this country they have discovered is our real home and that, until we find our way there, as Augustine says, nothing else can fill the homesickness in our hearts.

This is Gandhi’s ultimate message for us, and no sentence of his is more significant than where he says—and remember, this fussy old man never let so much as a single word stand if he did not know it to be true from his own experience—“I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.”