The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi

By Mahatma Gandhi and GP Editors

Assembled with skill and sensitivity, this selection of brief and incisive quotations range from religion and theology, personal and social ethics, service, and international and political affairs, to the family, education, culture, Indian problems, and Gandhi's most original concept, satyagraha — group nonviolent direct action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: GENERAL PRESS
• Release date: May 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9789387669765

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) was an Indian lawyer, nationalist, and civil rights activist. Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, he was first given the honorary title of Mahatma—Sanskrit for “great-souled”—in 1914 while living in South Africa. Raised in Gujarat in a prominent Hindu family, he travelled to London and studied law at the Inner Temple. Called to the Bar in 1891, Gandhi returned to India for a brief time before settling in South Africa. There, he started a family while perfecting his style of nonviolent resistance grounded in civil disobedience. In 1915, he returned to his native country to join the fight against British rule, organizing peasants across India to take a stand against taxation, racism, and other forms of colonial oppression. He became the leader of the Indian National Congress in 1921 and increased his involvement with the movements for women’s rights, religious and ethnic equality, and the elimination of India’s caste system, which unjustly effected Dalits deemed untouchable from birth. His central cause, however, was Swaraj, which can be translated as self-governance or democracy. As his popularity increased, he simplified his lifestyle in solidarity with the Indian poor, wearing traditional clothing, eating vegetarian food, and fasting as a matter of personal hygiene and protest. In 1930, he led the twenty-five day Dandi Salt March or Salt Satyagraha, in response to a British salt tax, inspiring millions of Indians to take direct action against British rule. A proponent of religious pluralism, he lamented the interfaith violence between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims that broke out following independence and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. At 78 years old, he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist for his outreach to the Muslim community.

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Contents

About the Author

1. Religion

2. Theology

3. Personal Ethics

4. Social Ethics

5. Service

6. Satyagraha

7. International Affairs

8. Political Affairs

9. The Family

10. Education

11. Culture and the Professions

12. Indian Problems

13. About Himself

About the Author

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was the prominent figure in the freedom struggle in India from the British rule. He is also known as the The Father Of The Nation, in the nation of India.

The author has written a number of books and some of them include Character & Nation Building, India Of My Dreams, and All Men Are Brothers (Complete Book Online).

The author was born on the 2nd of October, 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat. In the year 1942, he played a key role in launching the Quit India movement, which was intended at forcing the British to leave the nation. As a result of launching this movement, he was thrown in prison and remained there for several years, due to other political offenses allegedly committed by him. At all times, he practised satyagraha, which is the teaching of non-violence. As the British rule ended, he was saddened by India’s partition, and tried his best to bring peace among the Sikhs and Muslims. On the 30th of January, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist, for allegedly being highly concerned about the nation’s Muslim population.

1. Religion

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Religion

Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal? In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals.

Humbug there undoubtedly is about all religions. Where there is light, there is also shadow.

It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and which ever purifies.

Religion which takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

I came to the conclusion that all religions were right, and every one of them imperfect, because they were interpreted with our poor intellects, sometimes with our poor hearts, and more often misinterpreted. In all religion I found to my grief that there were various and even contradictory interpretations of some texts.

A man who aspires after [Truth] cannot afford to keep out of any field of life, That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.

The test of the possession of the religious sense really consists in one’s being able to pick out the rightest thing out of many things which are all right more or less.

The study of other religions besides one’s own will give a grasp of the rock-bottom unity of all religions and afford a glimpse also of the universal and absolute truth which lies beyond the dust of creeds and faiths. Let no one even for a moment entertain the fear that a reverent study of other religions is likely to weaken or shake one’s faith in one’s own.

After long study and experience, I have come to the conclusion that (1) all religions are true; (2) all religions have some error in them; (3) all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism, in as much as all human beings should be as dear to one as one’s own close relatives.

One’s own religions is after all a matter between oneself and one’s Maker.

If we are imperfect ourselves, religions as conceived by as must also be imperfect. We have not realized religion in its perfection, even as we have not realized God. Religion of our conception, being thus imperfect, is always subject to a process of evolution and reinterpretation. Progress towards Truth, towards God, is possible only because of such evolution.

For me religion is one in essence, but it has many branches, and if I, the Hindu branch, fail in my duty to the parent trunk, I am an unworthy follower of that one indivisible, visible religion.

A religion has to be judged not by its worst specimens but by the best it might have produced. For that and that alone can be used as the standard to aspire to, if not to improve upon,

Religion deals with the science of the soul.

The most spiritual act is the most practical in the true sense of the term.

I cannot conceive politics as divorced from religion. Indeed religion should pervade every one of our actions. Here religion does not mean sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe…. This religion transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and gives them reality.

Religions are not separating men from one another, they are meant to bind them. It is misfortune that today they are so distorted that they have become a potent cause of strife and mutual slaughter.

His own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophic comparison.

Antheism

[God] is even the atheism of the atheist.

There are some who in the egotism of their reason declare that they have nothing to do with religion. But it is like a man saying that he breathes but that he has no nose. Whether By reason, or by instinct, or by superstition, man acknowledges some sort of relationship with the Divine. The rankest agnostic or atheist does acknowledge the need of moral principle, and associates something good with its observance and something bad with its non-observance…. Even a man who disowns religion cannot, and does not, live without religion.

It is the fashion, now-a-days, to dismiss God from life altogether and insist on the possibility of reaching the highest kind of life without the necessity of a living faith in a living God.

Tolerance

I tolerate unreasonable religious sentiment when it is not Immoral.

Intolerance is a species of violence and therefore against our creed.

Intolerance betrays want of faith in one’s cause.

The golden rule of conduct is mutual toleration, seeing that we will never all think alike and we shall see Truth in fragments and from different angles of vision. Conscience is not the same thing for all. Whilst, therefore, it is a good guide for individual conduct, imposition of that conduct upon all will be an insufferable interference with everybody’s freedom of conscience.

If you cannot feel that the other faith is as true as yours, you should feel at least that the men are as true as you.

So long as there are different religions, every one of them may need some outward distinctive symbol. But when the symbol is made into a fetish and an instrument of proving the superiority of one’s religion ever others, it is fit only to be discarded.

Just as preservation of one’s own culture does not mean contempt for that of others, but requires assimilation of the best that there may be in all the other cultures, even so should be the case with religion.

Even as a tree has a single trunk, but many branches and leaves, so there is one true and perfect religion, but it becomes many, as it passes through the human medium. The one religion is beyond all speech. Imperfect men put it into such language as they can command, and their words are interpreted by other men equally imperfect. Whose interpretation is to be held to be the right one? Everybody is right from his own standpoint, but it is not possible that everybody is wrong. Hence the necessity of tolerance, which does not mean indifference to one’s own faith, but a more intelligent and purer love for it…. True knowledge of religion breaks down the barriers between faith and faith.

I do not like the word tolerance…. Tolerance may imply a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one’s own, whereas ahimsa teaches us to entertain the same respect for the religious faiths of others as we accord to our own, thus admitting the imperfections of the latter.

If all faiths outlined by men are imperfect, the question of comparative merit does not arise. All faiths constitute a revelation of Truth, but all are imperfect and liable to error. Reverence for other faiths need not blind us to their faults. We must be keenly alive to the defects of our own faith also, yet not leave it on that account, but try to overcome those defects. Looking at all religions with an equal eye, we would not only not hesitate, but would think it our duty, to blend into our faith every acceptable feature of other faiths.

Conversion

Many of the conversions are only so-called. In some cases the appeal has gone not to the heart but to the stomach; and in every case a conversion leaves a sore behind it.

Converts are those who are born again or should be. A higher standard is expected of those who change their faith, if the change is a matter of the heart and not of convenience.

I do not believe in people telling others of their faith, especially with a view to conversion. Faith does not admit of telling. It has to be lived and then it becomes self-propagating.

A convert’s enthusiasm for his new religion is greater than that of a person who his born in it.

I should not think of embracing another religion before I had fully understood my own.

My own veneration for other faiths is the same as that for my own faith; therefore no thought of conversion is possible.

We do not need to proselytize either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

If a person, through fear, compulsion, starvation or for material gain or consideration, goes over to another faith, it is a misnomer to call it conversion. Real conversion springs from the heart and at the prompting of God, not of a stranger. The voice of God can always be distinguished from the voice of man.

Scriptures

Scriptures cannot transcend reason and truth. They are intended to purify reason and illuminate truth.

Spirituality is not a matter of knowing scriptures and engaging in philosophical discussions.

Divine knowledge is not borrowed from books. It has to be realized in oneself. Books are at best an aid, often a hindrance.

Error can claim no exemption even if it can be supported by the scriptures of the world.

Knowledge of religious books is not equivalent of that religion.

Nothing can be accepted as the word of God which cannot be tested by reason or be capable of being spiritually experienced…. Learning … lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentators of the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide and be an inspiration for ages to come.

Truth is the exclusive property of no single scripture.

Hinduism

Hinduism … is the most tolerant creed because it is non-proselytizing and it is as capable of expansion today as it has been found to be in the past. It has succeeded, not in driving out (as I think it has been erroneously held), but in absorbing Buddhism. By reason of the Swadeshi spirit a Hindu refuses to change his religion, not necessarily because he considers it to be the best, but because he knows that he can complement it by introducing reforms.

Unfortunately, Hinduism seems to consist today merely in eating and not eating…. Hinduism is in danger of losing its substance if it resolves itself into a matter of elaborate rules as to what and with whom to eat.

Hinduism is not an exclusive religion. In it, there is room for the worship of all the prophets of the world. It is not a missionary in the ordinary sense of the term…. Hinduism tells everyone to worship God according to his own faith or dharma, and so it lives at peace with all religions.

A man may not believe even in God and still call himself a Hindu. Hinduism is a relentless pursuit after Truth and if today it has become moribund, inactive, irresponsive to growth, it is because we are fatigued and as soon as the fatigue is over, Hinduism will burst forth upon the world with a brilliance perhaps unknown before.

Hinduism is like the Ganges, pure and unsullied as its source, but taking in its course the impurities in the way. Even like the Ganges it is beneficent in its total effect. It takes a provincial from in every province, but the inner substance is retained everywhere.

The Gita is, in my opinion, a very easy book to understand…. The general trend of the Gita is unmistakable. It is accepted by all Hindu sects as authoritative. It is free from any form of dogma. In a short compass it gives a complete, reasoned, moral code. It satisfies both the intellect and the heart. It is thus both philosophical and devotional. Its appeal is universal. The language is incredibly simple.

Brahmanism that can tolerate untouchability, virgin widowhood, spoliation of virgins, stinks in my nostrils. It is a parody of Brahmanism. There is no knowledge of Brahman therein. There is no true interpretation of the scriptures. It is undiluted animalism. Brahmanism is made of sterner stuff.

The Gita is the Universal Mother. She turns away nobody. Her door is wide open to anyone who knocks. A true votary of the Gita does not know what disappointment is. He ever swells in perennial joy and peace that passeth understanding.

Hinduism is not a religion…. It is a way of life. Many who do not practice formal religion are nearer to this way of life than some who do.

Christianity

God did