The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi

Mohandas Gandhi, Homer A. Jack

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486122410
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Assembled with skill and sensitivity by social activist Homer A. Jack, 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.

1. Religion

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

If we are imperfect ourselves, religion as conceived by us 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 for separating men from one another, they are meant to bind them. It is a 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.

ATHEISM

[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 over 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

See also the section on “Missionaries” in Chapter 12.

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 is 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 ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• GLOSSARY OF INDIAN TERMS
• 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
• Biographical Chronology
• Bibliographies
• SOURCES - INTRODUCTION
• INDEX OF TOPICS
• A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST