K.P .Shankaran
Need for ethical Hinduism
T
he complexity of Gandhi’s Truth/God talk can be gauged from his response in the Harijan of 4 August 1946 to a correspondent, about Draupadi of the Mahabharata: “As for Draupadi, the Mahabharata in my opinion is an allegory and not history. Draupadi means the soul wedded to the five senses”. Even though Gandhi talked about the virtues of Ramanama, his Rama was not the Rama of the Hindu believers. In the Harijan of 14 June 1947, he wrote: “We call Rama and Krishna incarnations of God because people saw divinity in them. In truth Krishna and others exist in man’s imagination – they are creations of his imagination. Whether they were historical figures or not has nothing to do with man’s imagination. Sometimes we tread a dangerous path in believing that Rama and Krishna were historical entities and are compelled to take recourse to all manner of arguments to prove that”. For Gandhi, God cannot perform any miracles as a matter of logical necessity because God cannot break any natural regularities/laws: “I do not regard God as a person…God is an idea, Law Himself. Therefore, it is impossible to conceive God breaking the Law (Harijan 23 May 1940)”. Even though Gandhi did not object to Vigraharadhana (worshipping God in image form) it did not “excite any feeling of veneration” in him (Harijan 28 August 1924). His Anasakti Yoga, an introduction to the Bhagwat Gita, is an extraordinary interpretation of that text, where he produces a thoroughly secular and modern reading of the Gita. Gandhi’s assassin Godse understood that Gandhi’s Hinduism was not the one he and his breed of activists (Sangh Parivar) took to be Hinduism. Gandhi, Godse declared, was an enemy of Hinduism and the Indian state. He cited this “Sangh Parivar” view as one of the reasons to assassinate Gandhi (Why I assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, 1993).
It is clear from the above that Gandhi was a Hindu only by birth. He was not an enemy of Hinduism, of course, but constantly attempted to establish Hinduism on an ethical foundation – as he claimed in his free translation of WIlliam Macintire Salter’s Ethical Religion. From Gandhi’s point of view, all religions are to be grounded or re-established on an ethical foundation. Gandhi thought it was the job of the people within a religion to do that and, because he was a Hindu by birth, he took on the job of converting Hinduism into an ethical religion. The various dimensions of that enterprise – including the removal of untouchability (but not jativyavasta, because abolition of jativyavasta requires a total overhauling of Indian society, which he thought, in spite of Ambedkar’s insistence, would not be possible during the colonial period) and striving towards Hindu-Muslim unity – offended a large number of conservative/reactionary elements within Hinduism, and finally ended in the assassination of Gandhi by a “Sangh Parivar” man.
From Truth to Way of Life
If one treats Gandhi’s writings in isolation from his practices, one can detach a metaphysical picture which can be regarded as Gandhi’s philosophy of religion. For Gandhi, God was a necessary working assumption. Long before Karl Popper, Gandhi wrote in Harijan (21 September 1934):
“No search is possible without some workable assumptions. If we grant nothing, we find nothing …. Ever since its commencement, the world, the wise and the foolish included, has proceeded upon the assumption that, if we are, God is and that, if God is not, we are not. And since belief in God is co-existent with the humankind, existence of God is treated as a fact more definite than the fact that the Sun is. This living faith has solved the largest number of puzzles of life. It has alleviated our misery. It sustains us in life, it is our one solace in death. The very search for Truth becomes interesting, worthwhile, because of this belief”.
He never tried to defend this assumption but thought that without an assumption such as this, many people’s lives would quickly become meaningless and intimidating. For Gandhi, the working assumption that there exists a benevolent power was the theoretical part of his philosophical way of life till almost the very end. He thought that the meaning in life, as far as ordinary people are concerned, needed faith in some benevolent power as an ultimate reality to make their life less threatening. If one were to assess him from the overall perspective of his praxis, meaning in life for him was a function of the development/cultivation of ethical virtues, not a function of the intensity of one’s faith.
Gandhi reduced the overt use of the word God in his day to day interactions with people in late 1920s by giving prominence to the concept of Truth—holding that “Truth is God” instead of his earlier “God is Truth”. But he did not use the word Truth in an epistemological sense. He was right in believing that atheists like Charles Bradlaugh, whom he admired greatly, and Gandhi’s disciple Gora were metaphysical thinkers like him and thought that they would have no objection to the idea of Truth, instead of God, as the final reality. He understood them as ethically oriented people who dedicated their life for the service of suffering fellow beings, like him. He respected them and their working hypothesis, “Truth”. However, by shifting his metaphysical position from God as the ultimate reality to Truth as the ultimate reality, he only made a new tautology by identifying Truth with God.
Finally, however, he seems to have realised that it was not necessary to entertain a metaphysical view at all and it was then, in the last phase of his life, that Gandhi wrote “My life is my Message”. According to me, what Gandhi meant to convey through this was that he should be understood only from the point of view of what he did – and not from what he said and wrote. In other words, he was saying that he did not have any theory to leave behind other than a tested philosophical Way of Life.
A New Philosophic Way of Life
The statement “My life is my message” (Harijan, 7 September 1947) is perhaps Gandhi’s most significant declaration. It has great relevance when we study him as a philosopher. It is similar to Buddha’s “silence” and his simile of the “raft” in the Nikayas as well as to the literary technique of “adyaropa and apavada” (projection of a thesis and subsequent denial of it) which Sankara mentions in his Gita Bhasya (Chapter 13, Bhasya of verse 13) The demonstration of this can be seen in the stunning, Rigveda suktam, Nasadiyam (10:129).
Any study of Gandhi ought to also take into consideration his message to his readers in the Harijan of 29 April 1933:
“I would like to say to the diligent reader of my writings and to others who are interested in them that I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and, therefore, when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject.”
Gandhi was unlike contemporary university philosophers. He was more akin to the ancient philosophers of India, China, and Greece. For Gandhi, like Yanjavalkya, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Socrates and Plato, philosophy was a way of life; not just the construction of theories. The role of theory in philosophy-as-a-way-of-life, is less significant and subordinate to practice. A philosophical Way of Life is an art of living – a set of practices aimed at relieving misery and reinventing practitioners according to some ideal view of good. In other words, it is the know- how that transforms a person from her baser state of being, to an ethically higher state of existence.
Even though Gandhi was an inventor of a philosophical way of life, he was largely perceived as a sincere practitioner of the Hindu/Vaishnava way of life This is partially because the word “philosophy” was appropriated by universities as a theoretical discipline – leading to ancient philosophies being treated as theoretical disciplines and not as practices. Moreover, in what was perhaps a deliberate attempt to shed his Eurocentrism, Gandhi in his writings and his day to day discourses consciously discarded the enlightenment vocabulary of Europe (which was, and continues to be, the vocabulary of all once-colonised people) and resorted to his parental Vaishnava vocabulary.
There is a need to acknowledge Gandhi as a great Indian philosopher and give him credit for inventing a philosophical way of life, as significant as the Buddha’s. After the Buddha and Vardhamana Jaina, there was no one apart from Gandhi who can be said to have invented a philosophical way of life quite distinct from the pre-Buddhist Brahmanical ways of life: All previous inventions, which continued to be practiced, like Advaita Vedanta, were only variations of the latter.
Psychological Self Sufficiency
As an inventor of a philosophical way of life, Gandhi was a direct descendant of Socrates – as embodied in Plato’s early Dialogues – and the Buddha of the Nikayas. Gandhi was a voracious reader who not only read the Nikayas but was also familiar with Plato’s works. He even translated Plato’s ‘The Apology of Socrates’ into Gujarati. Gandhi was one of the very few people who understood the function of ethics in the philosophy of the Buddha and Socrates. He was a living embodiment of the implicit central theme of their ethics – the idea of psychological self-sufficiency.
Even though the Buddha was the first thinker to articulate the idea of psychological self-sufficiency, it was Socrates who expressed it as a quotable slogan “Nothing can harm a virtuous person”. It was the Buddha who discovered that, even though one cannot be physically self-sufficient, it is possible to achieve psychological self-sufficiency by reducing one’s self-centeredness/selfishness. What Buddha did was to eschew the human need to cling on to some belief of a benevolent everlasting ground of all that exists, in order to pacify the fear and unsatisfactoriness that invariably accompany all human activates. He was searching, so the Nikayas tell us, for something that would heal this unsatisfactoriness and its concomitant fears.
Without the aid of commentaries, the Nikayas show the Buddha making an empirical discovery: if one reduces self-centredness to a critical level, all the fears that emerge from self-centredness disappear automatically – since the intensity of all fears is directly proportional to the degree of one’s self-centeredness. The method of achieving psychological self-sufficiency is by removing all behaviour tendencies that implicitly or explicitly enhance one’s self-centredness and, at the same time, cultivating compassion by treating all beings as fellow sufferers (the Brahmajala Sutta (verse 8) ,the Samannaphala Sutta ( verse 63, 68) and Metta Sutta).
While others before the Buddha had also preached the need for an ethical life, compassion, and the reduction of selfishness, they had never treated these as foundational concerns. Instead they subordinated ethics to metaphysics – as in the case of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Buddha did not, however, totally discount the need for metaphysical props. So he generated a metaphysical scheme, “The Right View” (as the first of “The Eight-Fold Path”), as a heuristic device that novices could use and discard once they had achieved sufficient skill to function without that device. This is the theme of the “raft simile” in the Alagaddupama Sutta.
Gandhi’s Ethics, like the Buddha’s, is based on the idea of redemption from self-centeredness. Till the end of his life he constantly tried to get rid of his self-centred behaviour and thoughts. On numerous occasions he had said that he aspired to “reduce to zero”, that is, totally eliminate selfishness/self-centeredness. He linked this practice with the idea of Conscience or what he called the Inner Voice. The idea of Conscience, for him, was not a religious concept, but what Freud labelled the Super Ego. Making the Super Ego “egoless” was Gandhi’s project, and his post-South African life demonstrates that he was largely successful in this endeavour.
Unlike the Buddha, Gandhi needed the concept of conscience because of the political dimension of his philosophical way of life. Political activism demanded from Gandhi, unselfish, unbiased, and unprejudiced judgements. He, therefore, needed to have a concept of conscience that helped him to practice moral purification and rely on his own political judgements without any moral
hesitation.
This political dimension of Gandhi’s philosophical way of life brings Gandhi closer to the ancient Greek and Chinese philosophers, whose philosophical ways of life also had political dimensions. In the history of the subcontinental philosophical culture, however, his experiment was an exception.
An Ethical Society
An integral part of Gandhi’s philosophical way of life is an explicit desire for a socialist society – since an ethics based on the generation of psychological self-sufficiency can only approve a socialist way of life, for logical reasons. Anything that generated selfishness was anathema to Gandhi’s philosophical way of life. As a philosophical practitioner, a Gandhian philosopher can only live in a community based on the fundamental principles of socialism, such as equality and absence of private property. Even though socialist themes like the idea of a ‘simple life’ were part of all philosophical schools of the subcontinent, it was only in Gandhi that they achieved an explicit political/ideological dimension: Gandhi’s ashrams were such socialist communes. Because Gandhi’s philosophical way of life had political dimensions, his way of life aimed at the emancipation not only of the individual but also of society-at-large, from institutional structures of selfishness. Gandhi’s Constructive Program sought to generate socialist enclaves within a capitalist social set up and he called that Swaraj.
A philosophical way of life is a set of practices and “theory” oriented to transform a person from her baser state of being to an ethically higher state of existence. Gandhi’s was indeed such an enterprise. Like the Buddha and Mahavira before him, Gandhi identified Ahimsa, Satya, and Brahmacharya as the essential practices of his philosophical way of life. Gandhi did not consider yoga as a great spiritual practice :“I do not resort to any yogic practice firstly, because I have inward peace without it (It may be wrong on my part to be content with my present lot.) and, secondly, because I have not found a person whom I could implicitly trust and who could teach me the proper yogic exercises” (25.11. 1926, Young India).
Instead, Gandhi appears to have picked up ‘Meditation’ from ancient Greek/Rome spiritual practices and adapted it to suit his philosophical way of life. It was the practice of writing down, every day, one’s thoughts and all activities, good or bad, in a diary, for reflection. Gandhi believed that if one practices these diligently, self-centredness would reduce sharply leading the practitioner to develop concern for the well-being of all and thus helping him to attain psychological self-sufficiency. This would be beneficial not only for the practitioner but also help in the emergence of a socialist world with enough freedoms and well-being. One of Gandhi’s final thoughts was (Harijan, 13 July 1947):
“[O]nly truthful, non-violent and pure-hearted socialists will be able to establish a socialistic society in India and the world. To my knowledge there is no country in the world which is purely socialistic. Without the means described above, the existence of such a society is impossible.”
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K.P. Shankaran was Associate Professor at St. Stephen’s College New Delhi, where he taught Philosophy He also taught Political Philosophy and Gandhian Thought at Delhi University. He has written a book, “Marx and Freud on Religion” and many essays on Gandhi. K.P. Shankaran in The Beacon MICHELANGELO: CRAFTSMAN OR ARTIST? CRITIQUING CAPITALISM: GANDHI AND MARX
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