Mahatma Gandhi, the universal soul

Kalakeerthi Edwin Ariyadasa

“As time passes, I find that history continually rewrites Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., transforming them into men of passive resistance. It is perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions common to both.

There was nothing passive about the motivation or the actions of either. Both men were driven by the fierce desire to create a just environment not only for their native people but for all humankind. My father was fond of saying in the spirit of Gandhi, that ‘peace does not mean the absence of violence. It means the absence of conditions which lead to violence’. Both men pursued this goal aggressively.”
- Martin Luther King III, Son of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Gandhi was no ordinary leader. There are those who believe he was divinely inspired and it is difficult not to believe them. He dared to exhort non-violence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us...”
- Nelson Mandela

India has bequeathed upon the totality of mankind two eternal gifts. Both are unparalleled human treasures. There is of course, Prince Siddhartha, who attained the status of Supremely Enlightened Buddha - opening the portals of Liberation (Moksha) to humanity at large.

Parallels

In our own day, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi - Mahatma the Great Soul, appeared. His unswerving mission was to drive home unerringly to the hearts and minds of all men, the sublime potentialities of Ahimsa (Non-Violence) and Satyagraha (Adherence to Truth).

The Buddha and The Mahatma share the same land of birth. When impressed by his obvious truth, many fail to observe a whole series of other intriguing similarities common to these phenomenal personalities.

The Dhamma Chakra (the Wheel of Truth) is a predominant symbol associated with the Buddha. The Chakra (the Spinning Wheel) is Mahatma Gandhi’s personality emblem, signifying noble simplicity and the commitment to physical exertion, eschewing debilitating lethargy.

In his youth Prince Siddhartha led a life of royal luxury. A cluster of three palaces, ensured him the ultra-comfort determined by his regal inheritance and his doting father. The child M. K. Gandhi was born in his ancestral home Kirti Mandir in Porbandar in the Bombay presidency. His father, a high state official, made it possible for young Mohandas Karamchand to enjoy above-the-average privileges.

In their youth, both Prince Siddhartha and M. K. Gandhi were given to reflection and looking inwards. Young Mohandas imbibed Indian classics avidly. When marriage happened, Mohandas was 13. Prince Siddhartha was 16 when he married his cousin Princess Yasodhara.

The surprising parallels between the two great souls do not end there. Instead of leading a tranquil private life, both the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, opted to walk among the men and women, as they went about their daily lives, sickened and made anxious by the imperatives of existence.

The legacy of doctrinal discourses left by the Buddha, is calculated by tradition to be in the region of 84,000. The declarations of Mahatma Gandhi have been collected in about 100 volumes.

Land of destiny

Young M. K. Gandhi’s education and his future career had been determined by his family. The family dictated that he should become a Barrister. He began life as a distinct Anglophile. Completing his legal studies in London, he returned to India. He was forced to migrate to South Africa in 1893. Circumstances cumulatively converted South Africa into his Land of destiny. In his early days in South Africa, he was ardently pro-British. But British attitude towards Indians in South Africa brought about disillusionment. The climactic point in his resentment was reached when he personally witnessed British brutality at its violent worst.

Determination

As a spiritual parallel, this experience is similar to Prince Siddhartha sighting old age, sickness, death and ascetic life, as the well-known four omens. President Nelson Mandela records this event:

Gandhi of 1982

“His (Gandhi’s) awakening came on the hilly terrain of the so-called Bambata Rebellion, whereas a passionate British patriot, he (Gandhi) led his Indian stretcher-bearer corps to serve the Empire, but British brutality against the Zulus roused his soul against violence as nothing had done before.

He determined on that battlefield to wrest himself of all material attachments and devote himself completely and totally to eliminating violence and serving humanity.

The sight of wounded and whipped Zulus mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled him that he turned a full circle from his admiration for all things British to celebrating the indigenous and the ethnic.

He resuscitated the culture of the colonised and the fullness of Indian resistance against the British; he revived Indian handicrafts and made them into an economic weapon against the coloniser in his call for Swadeshi - the use of one’s own and the boycott of the oppressor’s products which deprive the people of their skills and capital”.

This eloquent chronicling of the transformation of M.K. Gandhi into a universal saint of Ahimsa, issues from one of the greatest living disciples of the Mahatma, the globally - renowned freedom champion - President Nelson Mandela.

Read today, it makes a riveting, living document that can still raise ripples of admiration within you. Mahatma Gandhi’s battle against the stupendous array of globally-spread imperial power, has now been recounted a million times over - in all media and in most of the world’s languages.

But it has not lost its freshness and the eternal legendary impact. Historical narrations of his life and works - mostly adulatory and at times abusive, keep on coming.

Britain’s Winston Churchill, characterised him as ‘a half-naked fakir stirring up sedition’. To-date the most impressive cinematic work about the Mahatma is the English film epic Gandhi of 1982.

Consider this personality eternised by ancient Indian ideals of Ahimsa and Satyagraha. He was thin, brown and austere. He was clad mostly in a home-spun Kadar loin cloth. His personal possessions were few. He walked about leaving on a bamboo-stick.

He observes Mondays as days of silence. He was dedicated to cleanliness with a spiritual passion. He had spent cumulatively, 2,338 days in prison. He had with him the figures of three little monkeys. One covers one’s eyes with one’s hands. The other covers his mouth.

The third has his two ears covered with his hands. Those symbolised the dictum: “See no evil. Speak no evil. Hear no evil. Mahatma Gandhi led mankind along the path leading to peaceful co-existence and harmony.

Mankind failed him

But mankind foiled him. The eternal champion of Ahimsa was felled by an assassin’s bullets.

Today it is 143 years after his birth. The Buddha’s dispensation of compassion and loving kindness echoes and re-echoes through human history wherever the sense of the human prevails.

Mahatma Gandhi’s matram of Ahimsa, too will endure because non-violence is the core-component of human life.

Global leaders of humanity of yesterday, today and tomorrow - men in the calibre of Martin Luther King Jr. Nelson Mandela and our own A. T. Ariyaratna of Sarvodaya will continue to reflect the quintessence of the Mahatma’s Ahimsa.