Teachers

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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For an updated Mahatma Gandhi page see 

http://www.spiritwalk.org/gandhi.htm

Contents

Biography

Quotations

Writings

Notes

    Robert Thurman on Gandhi, Non-violence and Evil

Bibliography

Links

Biography

Quotations

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

                            ~

My commitment is to truth not consistency.

                                    ~

What is Truth? A difficult question;

but I have solved it for myself by saying

that it is what the "voice within" tells you.

                                ~

In the march toward Truth,

anger, selfishness, hatred, naturally give way,

for otherwise Truth would be impossible to attain.

A man who is swayed by negative emotions

may have good enough intentions,

may be truthful in word,

but he will never find the Truth.

                                ~

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you are

Are in harmony.

                                ~

As human beings,

our greatness lies not so much

in being able to remake the world…

as in being able to remake ourselves.

                            ~

I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me

is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying that change

a living power that is changeless, that holds all together,

that creates, dissolves, and re-creates.

That informing power is God.

Writings

Notes

Robert Thurman on Gandhi, Non-violence and Evil

Robert Thurman, in his book on Buddhism, Inner Revolution : The Politics of Enlightenment,

speaks of the problem of Tibet and the non-violence envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi.

I thought that this was especially interesting given the context of the situation in Kosovo.

 

["Tibet’s inward turn led to its neglect of outer realities and resulted in its isolation from

the rest of the world. Inner modernity would soon be overrun by the violent tendencies

of the twentieth century’s outer modernity."]

 

"One of the creative forces countering this wild destructiveness was Mahatma Gandhi,

who synthesized the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Thoreau, and Tolstoy into a political

method of nonviolent activism. A visionary clearly too far of this century of violence,

he did succeed in finally getting the British to withdraw from their most prized colonial

possession, but then was assassinated and could not prevent Indian independence from

leading to the violent schism between Hindu and Muslim."

 

"Gandhi argued that there are three responses to evil. The lowest and least recommended

response is to submit to evil, to surrender and do its bidding in abject docility. The second

response is to fight evil with evil, to oppose it violently. The best response to evil is non-

violent resistance, to fight against evil without adopting its evil tactics. It takes the

greatest courage of all, combined with unwavering intelligence and compassion, to

stand up against evil without fighting it violently. For people to resist the Nazis, they

would have had to have stood en masse in the streets in front of the tanks and firing

squads, letting themselves be killed rather than obeying any order. Gandhi’s experiences

in South Africa and India taught him that this action would eventually force the German

soldiers to come to terms with the fact that they were not fighting an enemy but

committing atrocities against all reason and all nature. Their evil command structure

would then crumble, and the war would end. Gandhi admitted that the high road of

nonviolence would result in many casualties before the killers relented, but he pointed

out that violent resistance also would cause high numbers of casualties; in fact, it

destroyed the whole of Europe and the flower of entire generations." (pp. 261-262)

 

Bibliography

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Thomas Merton, ed.; Gandhi on Non-Violence

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jack A. Homer, ed.; The Gandhi Reader

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jack A. Homer, ed.; All Men are Brothers

Erik Homburger Erikson, Gandhi's Truth

Yogesh Chadha; Gandhi: A Life

Eknath Easwaran, Michael N. Nagle; Gandhi, The man:  The Story of His Transformation

Leo Tolstoy,  The Kingdom of God is Within You

Links

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