REVIVAL 1

MAHATMA Gandhi considered religion, spirituality, morality, and ethics, in fact, all activities of life, whether personal or public, to be integrated into the search for self-realization. He said in the introduction to his Autobiography; “What I want to achieve... what I have been striving and pining to achieve for 30 years—is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha.” In this search, he felt instinctively inspired by the life and teaching of Lord Buddha. He did not see Buddhism as a new religion but, historically, as the most daring effort made to reform and revitalize the sanatan Hindu tradition of India. He saw it as the most revolutionary attempt to propagate the doctrine of ahimsa, or nonviolence, in its widest sense. His concept of Truth as God and ahimsa as a sense of identification with all creation, attained through self-purification, was in line with the teaching of Lord Buddha. He wrote at the end of his Autobiography; “... a perfect vision of Truth can only follow a complete realization of ahimsa... identification with everything that lives is impossible without selfpurification...
God can never be realized by one who is not pure of heart.” Did not Siddhartha also say when quitting his family and palace: This golden prison where my heart lives caged, To find truth, which henceforth I will seek, For all men’s sake, until truth be found. Since there is hope for man only in man, And none hath sought for this as I will seek, Who cast away my world to save the world.1 The first two religious books that Gandhiji studied during his student days in London (1888–1891) were Sir Edwin Arnold’s English translation of the Bhagavad Gita—The Song Celestial (1885)—and The Light of Asia (1879)—which depicted the life and philosophy of Gautama Buddha. He writes in his Autobiography; “I read it [The Light of Asia] MAHATMA GANDHI AND BUDDHISM with even greater interest than I did the Bhagavad Gita. Once I had begun it, I could not leave off... My young mind tried to unify the teaching of the Gita, The Light of Asia, and the Sermon on the Mount. That renunciation was the highest form of religion appealed to me greatly.” Much later in India, while denying that his ‘philosophy’ was an indifferent mixture of Tolstoy and Buddha, he had written in 1925 that he owed much to Tolstoy and Buddha but he fancied that his philosophy represented the true meaning of the teaching of the Gita, and further that the source of his inspiration was of no consequence as long as he stood for unadulterated truth.
Hinduism and Buddhism During his long formative period in South Africa (1893–1914), where he organized a struggle against racial discrimination, and evolved his theory and practice of satyagraha, he made his first statements in appreciation of Lord Buddha and his teachings. In an ‘open letter’ addressed to the Members of the Legislative Council and Assembly at Durban [1894], while asserting the greatness of India, he wrote; “Add to this the facts that India has produced the Buddha, whose life some consider the best and the holiest by a mortal, and to some second only to that lived by Jesus.” In Durban, he once upset his hostess when he said that Gautama’s
compassion was extended to all living beings while one failed to notice this love in the life of Jesus. He repeated this conviction in a letter written on July 2, 1913: “It is difficult to say who was the greatest among Krishna, Rama, the Buddha, the Jesus, etc.... In point of character alone possibly the Buddha was the greatest. But who can say?” Speaking in a lecture on ‘Hinduism’ in Johannesburg on March 4, 1905,5 he explained the indissoluble link between Hinduism and Buddhism. Gautama Buddha came into this world when Hinduism had become too rigid. He taught that animal sacrifice was despiritualizing and that toleration of all life was the highest form of love. Buddhism was to Hinduism what Protestantism was to Catholicism; a movement of reform. The jealousy of the Hindu priesthood having been aroused, Buddhism as a formal creed declined but its spirit remained in India and
actuated every principle professed by the Hindus. Gandhiji reiterated this view later in his life. Paying homage to the Buddha for his renunciation of worldly attachments, Gandhi wrote in the Indian Opinion on July 7, 1907, how in the sixth century B.C., Lord Buddha, after “suffering many privations, attained self-realization... and spread ideas of spiritual welfare among the people.”6 In letters written on January 28, 1909, July 19, 1913, and
MAHATMA GANDHI AND BUDDHISM June 10, 1914, he praised how the Buddha had left his wife and parents and brought deliverance to them as well; and how they were admired by the world for this act of sacrifice and also how his own freedom from attachment with Kasturba (his wife) permitted him to serve her better. In a letter dated August 23, 1911, he praised his own state of voluntary poverty, as this was the state of the Buddha and the way to self-realization. After returning to India in 1915, until his imprisonment in 1922, Mahatma Gandhi had led local satyagrahi in Champaran, Ahmedabad, and Kaira, an all-India movement against the Rowlatt Bills, and the noncooperation movement.