Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
·
READ
·
Article
Alternate title: Mahatma Gandhi
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
The religious quest
Gandhi’s religious
quest dated back to his childhood, the influence of his mother and of his home
at Porbandar and Rajkot, but it received a great impetus after his arrival in
South Africa. His Quaker friends in Pretoria failed to convert him to
Christianity, but they quickened his appetite for religious studies. He was
fascinated by Tolstoy’s writings on Christianity, read theQuʾrān in translation, and delved into Hindu
scriptures and philosophy. The study of comparative religion, talks with
scholars, and his own reading of theological works brought him to the
conclusion that all religions were true and yet every one of them was imperfect
because they were “interpreted with poor intellects, sometimes with poor
hearts, and more often misinterpreted.”
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
Rajchandra, a
brilliant young philosopher who became Gandhi’s spiritual mentor, convinced him
of “the subtlety and profundity” of Hinduism, the religion of his birth. And it
was theBhagavadgita,
which Gandhi had first read in London, that became his “spiritual dictionary”
and exercised probably the greatest single influence on his life. Two Sanskrit words in the Gitaparticularly fascinated him. One was aparigraha (nonpossession), which implied that man had to
jettison the material goods that cramped the life of the spirit and to shake
off the bonds of money and property. The other was samabhava (equability), which enjoined him to remain unruffled
by pain or pleasure, victory or defeat, and to work without hope of success or
fear of failure.
These were not merely
counsels of perfection. In the civil case that had brought him to South Africa
in 1893, he had persuaded the antagonists to settle their differences out of
court. The true function of a lawyer seemed to him “to unite parties riven asunder.”
He soon regarded his clients not as purchasers of his services but as friends;
they consulted him not only on legal issues but on such matters as the best way
of weaning a baby or balancing the family budget. When an associate protested
that clients came even on Sundays, Gandhi replied: “A man in distress cannot have Sunday rest.”
Gandhi’s legal
earnings reached a peak figure of £5,000 a year, but he had little interest in
moneymaking, and his savings were often sunk in his public activities. In Durban
and later in Johannesburg, he kept an open table; his house was a virtual
hostel for younger colleagues and political coworkers. This was something of an
ordeal for his wife, without whose extraordinary patience, endurance, and
self-effacement Gandhi could hardly have devoted himself to public causes. As
he broke through the conventional bonds of family and property, their life
tended to shade into a community life.
Gandhi felt an
irresistible attraction to a life of simplicity, manual labour, and austerity.
In 1904, after reading John
Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a critique of capitalism, he set up a farm at Phoenix near Durban
where he and his friends could literally live by the sweat of their brow. Six
years later another colony grew up under Gandhi’s fostering care near
Johannesburg; it was namedTolstoy Farm after the Russian
writer and moralist, whom Gandhi admired and corresponded with. Those two
settlements were the precursors of the more famous ashrams (ashramas) in India, at Sabarmati near Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad) and at Sevagram
near Wardha.
South Africa had not only
prompted Gandhi to evolve a novel technique for political action but also
transformed him into a leader of men by freeing him from bonds that make
cowards of most men. “Persons in power,” Gilbert Murray prophetically wrote about Gandhi in the Hibbert Journal in 1918, “should be very careful how they deal
with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing
for comfort or praise, or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he
believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his
body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase upon his soul.”
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ