TWELVE
TWELVE
On August 16, 1908, more than two thousand Indian nationals living in Transvaal, South Africa, joined at a local Hindu temple to burn their South African registration certificates. They were protesting recently enacted legislation—called the Black Act—that would dramatically limit their civil rights in South Africa. The thousands of Indian men and women who participated in this action were no doubt terrified, fearing the reprisals of the notoriously repressive South African government. And they were also very likely astonished at their own actions that day, and at the fact that they had summoned the courage to take a risky stand against tyranny. Much of their courage issued from the trust they had in their leader and champion in this action. He was a powerful and compelling little Indian barrister whom they had come to love. He was Mohandas K. Gandhi—who would later come to be known as “Mahatma Gandhi,” or Great Soul, and who would eventually lead 400 million Indians out of bondage to the British Empire. The protest against the Black Act in South Africa was young Gandhi’s first act of mass civil disobedience.
The act of civil disobedience carried out in Transvaal on that August day more than a century ago was more successful than anyone in the Indian community could have hoped. The international press covered the event widely, and compared it to the Boston Tea Party. Gandhi and his fellows had deftly painted the government into a corner—all without violence of any kind. Even Gandhi himself was surprised at the power—he would later call it Soul Force—of this kind of action. What began that day was his development of the art of satyagraha (literally, “clinging to truth”) that would, over the course of the next two decades, change the face of the world. “Thus came into being,” wrote Gandhi much later in his life, “the moral equivalent of war.”
Civil disobedience, based on the principles of satyagraha, would become a staple of Gandhi’s tool kit for the rest of his life, and would be the central pillar of his strategy to end British colonial rule in India. This satyagraha—this “clinging to truth”—was an entirely new method of fighting injustice. Instead of fanning hatred with hatred, Gandhi insisted upon returning love for hatred and respect for contempt.
Any exploration of dharma that begins with Henry David Thoreau must end with Mohandas K. Gandhi. These two exemplars of “Soul Force” lived a century apart, but with the perspective of time they increasingly appear as brothers. Thoreau’s life and writing—especially his essay On Civil Disobedience and his masterpiece, Walden—profoundly influenced Gandhi. In many ways, we might say that Gandhi finished what Thoreau started. Satyagraha was, after all, the very embodiment of the doctrine of “truth in action” about which Thoreau had written so passionately almost a century earlier.
2
Mohandas K. Gandhi began his adult life as a shy, tongue-tied Indian barrister who failed at most everything he tried. He was plagued by fears and doubts. He was socially inept. At the age of twenty-three, he had left his native India for South Africa—a last attempt to salvage a foundering legal career. (Young Gandhi had become famous in the Indian legal world for once fleeing a courtroom in terror when he had been called upon to present a difficult argument. He later became known as “the briefless barrister,” because after this embarrassment no one would give him a case.) Yet when Gandhi returned to India just ten years later, he was hailed as “Mahatma,” and quickly became the acknowledged leader of the hundreds of millions of Indian people hungry for self-respect, self-reliance, and independence from Great Britain.
How had this transformation happened? What precisely was Gandhi doing between his ignominious departure from India—tail between his legs—and his triumphant return? It’s a great story. The transformation was largely the result of one thing: his discovery of, and devotion to, the principles of the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi himself would later emphasize: It was not just that he knew the Gita, but that he actively put its precepts to work in his life. Gandhi studied the Gita constantly. He chanted it, he memorized it, and he practiced its instructions; he took a frayed copy with him everywhere. It became, as he later said, his “spiritual reference book.” Everyone who knew him saw this: His longtime secretary, Mahadev Desai, would say, “Every moment of Gandhi’s life is a conscious effort to live the message of the Gita.”
We might say that M. K. Gandhi engaged in deliberate practice of the Bhagavad Gita. He mastered it in just the way that Corot mastered landscape painting, or that Beethoven mastered the sonata form. The battlefield of life described in the opening chapter of the Gita was Gandhi’s canvas, and the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna was his instruction book. Gandhi’s life, then, must be for us an extraordinary living textbook of the Gita. It is where we will fittingly end our exploration.
3
Mohandas Gandhi was a fear-obsessed little boy with big eyes, and mammoth ears that stood out almost at right angles from his body. He was terrified of the dark, and, as he said, “haunted by the fear of thieves, ghosts, and serpents.” He could not bear to be in a room alone, and could not sleep at night without a light on nearby. Gandhi, later in life, acknowledged that as a boy he had been, in his own words, a “coward.” All the other boys on the playground knew it: He was a pushover. One could steal this guy’s lunch money with impunity.
And yet, the later Gandhi was fearless. He was renowned not only for his great moral courage, but for physical courage as well. A central pillar of his later teaching was that fearlessness is a prerequisite for nonviolence. “Nonviolence and cowardice go ill together,” he said. It is fascinating, then, to dig down into the story of Gandhi’s mastery of his fear. How did he accomplish it?
Gandhi himself often told the story. It turns out that as a boy, he was under the care of an old family servant named Rambha. Rambha was touched—and somewhat irritated—by this scrawny kid who came running to her in tears every day after school, pummeled once again by the bullies. She was going to put an end to this.
“It’s perfectly all right to admit that you’re afraid,” she said. “There’s no shame in fear. But try this: Whenever you’re threatened, instead of running away, stand firm, and repeat the mantra, Rama, Rama, Rama. This will turn your fear into courage.” Rama, of course, is one of the many names of God in the Hindu tradition—and so both the word itself, as well as the process of its repetition, had magic in it.
Gandhi-the-boy tried the technique halfheartedly. He found it useful. But he did not discover its true genius until a decade later when Gandhi-the-man was beginning his work with nonviolent noncooperation in South Africa. In the stress of those years he remembered Rambha’s advice, and put it to work in earnest. He began to practice the mantra, chanting Rama, Rama, Rama over and over again to himself—both aloud and silently. The mantra eased his fear—calmed his mind and body. He began to rely on it, and eventually began to systematically practice chanting mantra not just in extremis, but as a part of his regular daily schedule.
For a period of time after this discovery, Gandhi walked many miles each day, repeating the mantra to himself until it began to coordinate itself with the movement of his body and breath. The practice not only calmed him, but brought him into periods of bliss and rapture—and, as he said, “opened the doorway to God.” Rama, Rama, Rama. Eventually, the mantra developed a life of its own within him. The mantra began to chant itself, arising spontaneously whenever he needed it. “The mantra becomes one’s staff of life,” he wrote, “and carries one through every ordeal … Each repetition … has a new meaning, each repetition carries you nearer and nearer to God.”
How important was mantra to Gandhi’s transformation? Extremely. When done systematically, mantra has a powerful effect on the brain. It gathers and focuses the energy of the mind. It teaches the mind to focus on one point, and it cultivates a steadiness that over time becomes an unshakable evenness of temper. The cultivation of this quality of “evenness” is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita. It is called samatva in Sanskrit, and it is a central pillar of Krishna’s practice. When the mind develops steadiness, teaches Krishna, it is not shaken by fear or greed.
So, in his early twenties, Gandhi had already begun to develop a still-point at the center of his consciousness—a still-point that could not be shaken. This little seed of inner stillness would grow into a mighty oak. Gandhi would become an immovable object.
Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She compared the practice of mantra to the training of an elephant. “As the elephant walks through the market,” taught Rambha, “he swings his trunk from side to side and creates havoc with it wherever he goes—knocking over fruit stands and scattering vendors, snatching bananas and coconuts wherever possible. His trunk is naturally restless, hungry, scattered, undisciplined. This is just like the mind—constantly causing trouble.”
“But the wise elephant trainer,” said Rambha, “will give the elephant a stick of bamboo to hold in his trunk. The elephant likes this. He holds it fast. And as soon as the elephant wraps his trunk around the bamboo, the trunk begins to settle. Now the elephant strides through the market like a prince: calm, collected, focused, serene. Bananas and coconuts no longer distract.”
So too with the mind. As soon as the mind grabs hold of the mantra, it begins to settle. The mind holds the mantra gently, and it becomes focused, calm, centered. Gradually this mind becomes extremely concentrated. This is the beginning stage of meditation. All meditation traditions prescribe some beginning practice of gathering, focusing, and concentration—and in the yoga tradition this is most often achieved precisely through mantra.
The whole of Chapter Six in the Bhagavad Gita is devoted to Krishna’s teachings on this practice: “Whenever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self,” instructs Krishna. “When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.”
In the midst of Krishna’s teaching on meditation, Arjuna whines: “This is too hard! Krishna,” he gripes, “the mind is restless, turbulent, powerful, violent; trying to control it is like trying to tame the wind.” Krishna takes a deep breath: “Just keep practicing,” he says, and he prescribes “regular practice and detachment.”
After Krishna has taught Arjuna the basics of meditation, he makes an important connection for him—a connection that Gandhi will later make as well. When the mind is still, says Krishna, the True Self begins to reveal its nature. In the depths of meditation, we begin to recognize again that we are One with Brahman—that we are that wave that is nonseparate from the sea. Memory is restored!
In his early twenties, then, Gandhi had already appropriated the meditative tool that would serve him for the rest of his life. He was practicing the only meditation technique taught in the Bhagavad Gita, and was building the foundation of his contemplative practice. In the midst of terrifying circumstances to come, Gandhi held on to the mantra like an elephant grasping bamboo. Friends who knew him well acknowledged that Gandhi repeated his mantra continually, night and day. The name of God invaded the deepest parts of his mind.
4
Gandhi graduated from high school with an underwhelming record, and he went on to college, falteringly. There, too, he failed. After five months he gave up, dropped out, and came home. Gandhi’s family was worried: This boy was on the brink of becoming a serious loser—more of a ne’er-do-well than even Thoreau. (No credit to his town!) As a last resort, an uncle suggested that Gandhi go to London to study the law.
What could go wrong with this plan? Plenty. Gandhi fared no better in London. He felt out of place. His textbook English did not suffice. He was more socially inept than ever. For a while he tried to masquerade as an English gentleman. This ruse, however, was patently laughable. He looked ridiculous in his high starched collars, with his enormous ears protruding just above.
In London, Gandhi suffered a painful identity crisis. Who the heck was he? Who was he meant to be in this world? During this period, a desperate Gandhi launched himself into an intense investigation of world religions—searching for answers. He was acutely aware that his life had no unifying principle. Like Arjuna, he did not understand how to act. He read the Bible, but was bored with everything except the Sermon on the Mount (which, he said, overwhelmed him with its obvious truth). He looked into Theosophy. He read parts of the Koran. He attended various spiritual groups. But it was not until a young English friend introduced him to the Bhagavad Gita that he felt he had connected with something important. He would never forget his first reading of the Gita. “It went straight to my heart,” he declared.
Why, he wondered, had he not read it before? To his shame, he later said, he had not read “Mother Gita” in India, but had to come to London to read it with English friends, in an English translation. “What effect this reading of the Gita had on my friends, only they can say,” he wrote, “but to me the Gita became an infallible guide of conduct. It became my dictionary of daily reference. Just as I turned to the English dictionary for the meanings of English words that I did not understand, I turned to this dictionary of conduct for a ready solution of all my troubles and trials.”
Gandhi, of course, identified with Arjuna. He was often overcome by doubt, and perpetually on the floor of his own chariot. But he found that reading Mother Gita took some of the rough edges off his self-division. It unified him. “When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.”
Is it a coincidence that Mohandas Gandhi’s life force began to stir at precisely the time he discovered the Gita? I don’t think so. The scripture startled him. It woke him up.
By his midtwenties, two of the pillars of Gandhi’s transformation were in place: his mantra and his spiritual reference book. With these two, Gandhi began to throw off what he later called the “sluggishness” and “drowsiness” of his mind and body. He would soon discover the third pillar of his transformation: the systematic cultivation of energy.
5
As he woke up, Gandhi became interested in ways to build strength and resilience in his eighty-pound-weakling body. Gandhi, very much like Thoreau before him, began to create what he called “experiments in living.” His first series of experiments centered around diet. In London, he fell in with a group of vegetarians, and he became fascinated with the health-giving effects of “eating no living beings.” He tried every conceivable combination of fruits and vegetables, of beans and rice. What food would give him the most energy, the most stamina? He gave up eating as a recreation and took it up as a spiritual practice. No more living to eat. Now, it was eating to live.
Gandhi found that he felt most energetic when he ate sparsely. Eventually he would settle on goat’s milk and vegetables as the diet that gave him the most vitality. (His diet became notorious in India. When, later in life, he was routinely jailed by the viceroy of India, the viceroy himself made sure that the imprisoned Gandhi was always provided with a goat to milk.)
Gandhi was an inveterate experimenter, and he would tinker with his diet for the rest of his life. There are countless stories of friends who came to dine and were given some inedible mélange, which Gandhi at that time believed to be supremely health giving. There was apparently much rolling of eyes at these dinners. Gandhi was not interested in taste, but in effect. He discovered, he said, an “inner relish, distinctly more healthy, delicate, and permanent than food.”
In London, Gandhi began, too, an experiment in simplifying his life—another way of sustaining his energy. Gandhi had a vegetarian friend—a real minimalist—who lived in one room and cooked his own meals. This was a practice that was unheard of among the scholar class in England. But Gandhi was attracted to the simplicity of this approach. He decided to adopt it himself.
Gandhi rented a single room that was centrally located in London so that he could walk wherever he went, obviating the need for bus fare, and giving him lots of daily exercise. As a result, he walked miles and miles in London, even in the harsh winters. He began to develop the habit of vigorous walking that would last the rest of his life. In this, too, he was like Thoreau, except that Thoreau, famously, “rambled.” Gandhi decidedly did not ramble. He practically flew. All of his walking companions commented on this. Gandhi was famous, later in life, for out-walking even his young companions. “His feet barely touched the ground,” they would complain. One can only imagine the sight of this somewhat strange-looking little Indian man walking furiously around London, chanting his Sanskrit mantra all the while. Proper London must have been amused.
Gandhi was discovering the power of simplification and renunciation. He stumbled onto a truth widely known by yogis: Every time we discerningly renounce a possession, we free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of dharma. Renunciation was never meant to be for its own sake, but for the sake of dharma. Thoreau discovered precisely this same principle at Walden, where he gradually pared away every possession that was not absolutely necessary (Keep only one spoon! Plant fewer beans!) and where he experienced the same resulting increase in energy that Gandhi did.
Gandhi, without knowing it, was beginning to adopt the worldview of the yogi. The yogi’s chief concern is with the art of living, systematically cultivating energy and health. More than anything, he is concerned with living an optimal human life. This was becoming Gandhi’s concern, too. But for the yogi, this concern comes with a proviso: Optimal health and well being are not for their own sake, but rather to be used in the service of others. This would be Gandhi’s next discovery.
6
Now comes what we might call the end of the beginning of Gandhi’s transformation: his fourteen years in South Africa. It was in South Africa that he would discover the fourth leg of the four-legged dharma stool of his life: the ideal of selfless service.
After three years of legal studies in London, Gandhi passed the notoriously easy bar exams, and enrolled in the High Court. He returned to India briefly—just long enough to embarrass himself and his family one more time. He soon left India again, this time for a legal post that had been arranged for him far off in South Africa by another generous uncle.
Early on in his tenure in South Africa, Gandhi stumbled his way into a particularly complex legal case. The case was almost certainly beyond his slim legal skills. However, knowing that if he failed here he might in fact never get another case in South Africa (and thus become a briefless barrister on two continents), he brought every bit of resolve he had to the task. He mastered the complex arguments involved. Some of his London discipline began to pay off.
For the very first time, in his conduct of this case, we see a spark of the later great man. Gandhi found himself defending a client whose argument was strong. But Gandhi knew enough about the law to know that, strong as the argument was, this complex case was likely to drag out for years in the courts, draining the clients while enriching the lawyers. Gandhi had an idea: He implored his client to submit the case to arbitration and to settle out of court (even though Gandhi himself had much to gain financially by continuing the court battle). Gandhi’s client and the opposing client were related to each other, and Gandhi could see that with every month that passed, this divided family plunged deeper and deeper into suffering. This moved Gandhi’s heart—and his conscience. After much cajoling, Gandhi finally convinced both sides to enter into arbitration. The result was a peaceful ending to the family strife.
Gandhi was ecstatic. “I had learnt,” he said, “the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”
To unite parties riven asunder! Gandhi had had the first taste of his dharma. His calling would be to heal separation wherever he found it—separation between family members, between members of different races, between conflicting parties of all kinds. Once he got a taste of this dharma, he was on fire. This is what he could do with his life! For the first time he had a taste of real purpose.
Eknath Easwaran describes the outcome of this discovery: “Without realizing it, Gandhi had found the secret of success. He began to look on every difficulty as an opportunity for service, a challenge that could draw out of him greater resources of intelligence and imagination. In turning his back on personal profit or prestige in his work, he found he had won the trust and even the love of white and Indian South Africans alike.”
Gandhi had now encountered the ideal of selfless service. He was seriously lit up. What’s more, this work of healing human division and conflict lined up perfectly with the wisdom of the Gita. Now he began to see separation and conflict everywhere, particularly in the suffering of the Indian community in South Africa. He began to identify with the suffering of his community. He devoted more and more of his time to service. The natural culmination of this effort would be his discovery of the principles of satyagraha, and his use of mass civil disobedience.
But there was more. His first successful legal case helped him toward another insight. He saw that his energies and intelligence and training did not belong to him. They belonged to the world. He came to believe that a human being is really just a trustee of all that he has—that his gifts are entrusted to him for the good of the world. “My study of English law came to my help,” he said. “I understood the Gita teaching of nonpossession to mean that those who desired salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” He saw that true living was living for the sake of others. He was freed from the bondage of his awkward, inept, fearful self.
Gandhi grasped the paradox: The more he gave away, the more he had. “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 … If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only for our own happiness but that of the world at large.”
Out of Gandhi’s fantastic discovery of selfless service very quickly emerged many other changes in his life. Gandhi’s experiments in truth, and in simple living, now became supercharged. He became fascinated with the results of simplification: The more he gave up, the freer he felt, the more energy he had, and the happier he was. The simpler he got, the simpler he wanted to be.
During this period, Gandhi says about the true satyagrahi: “He will take only what he strictly needs and leave the rest. One must not possess anything which one does not really need. It would be a breach of this principle to possess unnecessary foodstuffs, clothing, or furniture. For instance, one must not keep a chair if one can do without it. In observing this principle one is led to a progressive simplification of one’s own life.”
At first glance, this exaggerated simplification looks like some strange new form of Puritanism. But it wasn’t. Gandhi was not doing this as a “should.” For Gandhi, it was a direct road to freedom.
7
At about the time of her retirement from the deanship, our friend Katherine had entered into her own search for truth, not unlike the search Gandhi conducted in London. I suggested that she read Gandhi’s autobiography, which she did—and she gradually caught fire with Gandhi’s thinking. Katherine particularly identified with Gandhi’s discovery of the truth of trusteeship. “You know how one little idea can change your life?” she said to me one day. This one had changed hers.
Katherine had been—indeed still was—a trustee for a number of schools and community institutions. This was a role she played well. She understood what it meant to be responsible for the best use of an organization’s assets. In fact, she’d been notoriously ferocious in conserving the assets of every organization on whose board she’d sat. And she understood that the assets were to be used for one thing only: to maximize the mission. When she transferred this frame of thinking to her own life, it was as if a light switched on in her brain. She saw that she was the sole trustee of her own gifts, opportunities, and assets. It was up to her to put these to work in the very best interests of the world. What was her mission?
I reminded Katherine of Teilhard de Chardin’s identical conclusion: “My life does not belong to me.” Chardin would have said, “My life belongs to God.” Katherine found it closer to the truth to say, “My life belongs to the world.” This reframed the struggle of her life. It set her free. As she internalized this insight, she realized that she had made a small but crucial error in her understanding of her life. Up until this point, she had been dedicating her gifts, her assets, and her opportunities, to herself. She had taken her self as her primary project in life. And this had caused suffering.
One evening she called me, excited. “Stephen, I’ve discovered something that’s probably totally obvious to you.” She went on to explain her insight. If you don’t find your work in the world and throw yourself wholeheartedly into it, you will inevitably make your self your work. There’s no way around it: You will take your self as your primary project. You will, in the very best case, dedicate your life to the perfection of your self. To the perfection of your health, intelligence, beauty, home, or even spiritual prowess. And the problem is simply this: This self-dedication is too small a work. It inevitably becomes a prison.
Katherine had been startled by this discovery, and she began to see its manifestations everywhere. She saw it, most of all, among her friends. “We’re all constantly preoccupied with ‘How am I doing?’ ‘How am I measuring up?’ ” she said to me. And she realized that no matter how well-perfected it was, her self was never going to be enough. She would forever have to struggle with her aging body, her aging mind, and the increasingly limited accomplishments of her day-to-day life. She would never be enough!
This insight is brilliantly expressed in the Tao te Ching. “Hope and fear,” it teaches, “are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don’t see the self as self, what do we have to fear?”
Then, the author of the Tao te Ching, Lao-Tzu, makes a stunning prescription for living a fulfilled life:
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
Then you can care for all things.
See the world as your self. Then you can care for all things! As we age, we will always be losing the “How am I doing?” game—the “How am I measuring up?” game. Old age, illness, and death heighten our awareness of the inevitable failure of the self project. It is all going down to the grave. But when we throw ourselves into our work for the world, the project of self—with all its disappointments—disappears. When we lavish our love on the world, it doesn’t matter whether we succeed or fail. It’s inherently fulfilling.
This was precisely Gandhi’s discovery in South Africa. And the insight changed his life. Prior to this, Gandhi had been taking himself as his own project. And he had been a dramatic failure. When he took the world as his project, and gave up any clinging to outcome, he saw that he could not possibly lose.
See the world as your self. Love the world as your self. This is a simple reframe—like taking one small step to the side. You only have to love what you already love. For Katherine: Gardening. Editing. Writing. The magazine. You only have to love your little corner of the world. But you have to do it intentionally. And full out. And you have to get yourself out of the way. Then you can care for all things.
Gandhi came to believe that any power he might have to affect the world only emerged when he got himself out of the way, and let God do the work. He came to call this “reducing yourself to zero.” “There comes a time,” he wrote in the peak of his maturity, “when an individual becomes irresistible and his action becomes all-pervasive in its effects. This comes when he reduces himself to zero.”
It’s a wonderful phrase. Gandhi’s meaning was simple: Only the human being who acts in a way that is empty of self can be the instrument of Soul Force. And it is only Soul Force that can establish a harmonious world. Human beings alone are helpless to resolve conflicts without it. With it, however, Gandhi came to believe that harmony is inevitable. Because harmony, Oneness with all beings, is our true nature.
Gandhi discovered to his delight that when his own self was not in the way—when he was not clinging to any fixed views about the outcome of his actions—he could be hugely creative. He was free to move on a dime, very much as Harriet Tubman moved. Like Tubman, Gandhi began to listen carefully to his inner guidance and to trust this guidance. As a result, his actions were highly creative, and also wildly unpredictable. Gandhi himself often had no idea what creative solutions would emerge from his inner guidance—or when they would emerge. (In later years, when he was back in India leading the resistance to British domination, he would have all of India waiting with bated breath—sometimes for weeks or months—while he sat quietly in his ashram spinning cotton, praying, and waiting for guidance about the next action.)
Eknath Easwaran wrote about this phenomenon: “Gandhi was the most bewildering opponent any nation ever faced. Every move he made was spontaneous; every year that passed found him more youthful, more radical, more experimental. British administrators were baffled and exasperated by this little man who withdrew when they would have attacked, attacked when they would have withdrawn, and seemed to be getting stronger day by day. No one knew what he was going to do next, for his actions were prompted not by calculations of what seemed politically expedient, but by a deep intuition which often came to him only at the eleventh hour.”
8
Take yourself to zero. Not for yourself, but for the world. Having taken yourself to zero, you are free to act. And Gandhi was a man of action. Indeed, for him, it was action aligned with truth that had true power, true Soul Force.
Gandhi identified with Thoreau’s near-mystic view of the power of action aligned with Truth. Thoreau, he believed, had fully grasped and articulated his own view of Soul Force. Soul Force means holding to Truth no matter how fierce the storm. Because he wants nothing for himself, the true satyagrahi is not afraid of entering any conflict for the sake of those around him—and he enters it without hostility, without resentment, without resorting even to violent words. In the face of the fiercest provocation, he never lets himself forget that he and his attacker are one. This is the true spirit of ahimsa, or “nonviolence.” But ahimsa is more than just the absence of violence: It is the presence of justice and of love. Gandhi always made it perfectly clear that “the satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrongdoer.”
In South Africa, Gandhi had brought this understanding to maturity. His movement of nonviolent resistance in South Africa was spectacularly successful. Six years after his first civil disobedience—and after many other such actions—he and the South African president, General Jan Smuts, signed a pact that led, at last, to the so-called “Indian Relief Bill,” which restored Indians’ civil rights. Gandhi would call it the Magna Carta of South African Indians, and it was a mammoth victory for Soul Force.
By the year 1915 Gandhi knew that he was complete with his work in South Africa. He felt called to return to India, where his people were suffering under the increasingly onerous burden of British rule. Gandhi returned to India a seasoned veteran of satyagraha, and he believed that the principles he had tried so successfully in South Africa could be put into action in India. He believed that they would inevitably result in the political freedom and self-determination of the Indian people. He knew that this could be done without war, without violence, and without contempt for the British. And he knew that it was his dharma to lead the way.
Gandhi had left India a fearful, befuddled young attorney. He returned a masterful satyagrahi. More than anything else, he had mastered his disabling fear. He had become an exemplar of courage. And he knew that this kind of courage would be required of the whole Indian people in order to throw off British rule. “Greater courage is required of the satyagrahi,” he often said, “than the run-of-the mill soldier with a gun in his hand. Any coward can be brave when holding a rifle.”
Gandhi’s courage surprised no one more than himself. He sometimes wondered just how far his own courage would hold. He really did not know. He wrote: “Have I that nonviolence of the brave in me? My death alone will show that. If someone killed me and I died with a prayer for the assassin on my lips, and God’s remembrance and consciousness of His living presence in the sanctuary of my heart, then alone would I be said to have had the nonviolence of the brave.”
Krishna taught Arjuna that the origin of all fearlessness is the facing of death. Indeed, their entire conversation took place just on the edge of death—on the edge of the great battlefield on which Arjuna might well die. Gandhi himself had to wrestle with death almost constantly throughout his career. Indeed, it is likely that Gandhi knew he would face a violent death. He wrote presciently: “Death is the appointed end of all life. To die by the hand of a brother rather than by disease or in such other way, cannot be for me a matter of sorrow. And if, even in such a case, I am free from the thought of anger or hatred against my assailant, I know that it will redound to my eternal welfare, and even the assailant will later on realize my perfect innocence.”
This is exactly how Gandhi did die, of course. Then seventy-eight years old, he was in Delhi, working—as ever—for unity. He had had a particularly busy day. And as he was hurrying to evening prayers, arm in arm with two young disciples, a young man approached him, offered him a gesture of respect, and then fired a gun point-blank into his heart.
As the Great Soul crumpled to the ground, his mantra emerged spontaneously from his lips: Rama, Rama, Rama.
10
For Mahatma Gandhi, all of his courage, all of his trust in God, all of his capacity to love the world as himself issued from the pages of the Bhagavad Gita.
No human being living in the twentieth century has lived the precepts of this great text with more fidelity and passion than Gandhi. “Select your purpose,” he challenged, “selfless, without any thought of personal pleasure or personal profit, and then use selfless means to attain your goal.”
“Do not resort to violence,” Gandhi wrote, “even if it seems at first to promise success; it can only contradict your purpose. Use the means of love and respect even if the result seems far off or uncertain. Then throw yourself heart and soul into the campaign, counting no price too high for working for the welfare of those around you, and every reverse, every defeat, will send you deeper into your own deepest resources. Violence can never bring an end to violence; all it can do is provoke more violence. But if we can adhere to complete nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, India’s freedom is assured.”
And assured, indeed, it was, largely as a result of the faith and integrity of this one small man who took himself to zero—and who simply put into practice the words of his divine mentor, Krishna.
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When Gandhi first discovered his dharma—“to unite parties riven asunder”—he realized that this calling would somehow save him—give him something to live for—give him a focus for his life. Gandhi’s sacred calling showed up just in the nick of time. It appeared to him as a lifeboat in a stormy sea. At last! Something reliable to cling to. Something that actually floats. Beethoven’s music occurred for him, too, as a welcome raft in a gale. And Keats’s poetry. And Mark’s playwriting.
Many of us have precisely this experience of dharma: a lifeboat! You cling to it because it is the only boat you have and the storm is rising. You work at it—you row as hard as you possibly can against the storm, because you have to survive. But gradually the seas calm, and you don’t have to row quite so hard, and you actually begin to enjoy the exercise. You get stronger from the exertion—as Gandhi did. Finally, the storm abates. You have a spell of beautiful weather. You feel your strength. You begin to love this rowing. You begin to love the sea itself. You see things in the waves that others do not see. You begin to see that rowing this little boat of dharma connects you to very life. Gradually the task of rowing itself begins to ease. At times it is effortless. There are moments of rapture.
Dharma is very much like Gandhi’s mantra. Rama, Rama, Rama. Eventually it takes on a life of its own. It does things spontaneously that you had no reason to expect. It begins to drill down into the deepest parts of your mind. Soon you begin to see that this dharma is not just any old stick of bamboo. It is a magic wand. A wish-fulfilling wand. It is a way to know—to interact with, to be in relationship with—the deepest parts of yourself. It is a vehicle to know the world.
Eventually your dharma takes you into a new land, as Gandhi’s did. A land where you can rely only upon God. You cross a bridge, and you are suspended in the air. Only God is holding you up now.
“Abandon all supports,” says Krishna to Arjuna in one of his great final teachings. “Cast off your dependency on everything external, Arjuna, and rely on the Self alone.”
We work first because we have to work. Then because we want to work. Then because we love to work. Then the work simply does us. Difficult at the beginning. Inevitable at the end.