Traditional religious discourses have failed to account for the biological process involved in the attaining of Nirvana. Drawing from sources as varied as the Pali canon, Mahayana texts, Zen Buddhism, J. Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, U.G. Krishnamurti, Nietzsche, postmodernist thinkers and biological sciences, The Buddha retells the story of the Buddha and discusses his teachings in physical and physiological terms. This radical new reading turns most of the central spiritual concepts on their head, and hopes, in the course of time, to put an end to the rivalry between science and religion and, indeed, among the various religions.
IJ 5.0 out of 5 stars A treasure trove...Reviewed in the United States on 4 May 2020 Verified Purchase An insight into what actually might have happened to Siddharth Gautama on his flowering to a “Tathagatha” . This books retells the story of how Gautama became a Buddha in the language that today’s world can grasp in contrast to the various Buddhists metaphysical texts which are always difficult to understand ... Report
J D 5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful BookReviewed in India on 20 July 2023 Verified Purchase What a beautiful book? I loved every word of it. The author explains esoteric concepts in a lucid, unconventional manner. Recommended. Report
Ninoslav R. 5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book!!!!Reviewed in the United States on 31 October 2019 Verified Purchase Well-written, inspiring and informative book on all relevant aspects of Buddhism. Anyone who sincerely wants to study Buddhism this book will be valuable for all the right reasons. Report
Sb 5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative. Well written. Approach it like a spiritual novel.Reviewed in India on 28 October 2022 Verified Purchase I really enjoyed reading this book. Rao is threading through and weaving together a lot of human wisdom history from the Buddha to UG. Never an easy task. I particularly enjoyed the deep dives into what the Buddha thought/said. Thank you Rao. Sb
Sandeep 4.0 out of 5 stars An essential readReviewed in India on 31 August 2017 Verified Purchase The title aroused curiosity in me. As the title suggests this is really an alternative narrative about Buddha. Probably years of research, learning and insightful thoughts are distilled to form this book. Considered reading too as a journey. When started there was a multi storeyed building, author slowly dismantles it floor by floor with turn of pages. The core of Buddha's /enlightened ones teaching is touched upon with sincerity. Divulging any other details would be a spoiler. Happy reading!!
Pendyala Jayakumar(JK) 5.0 out of 5 stars ExcellentReviewed in India on 31 December 2017 Verified Purchase This book gives the gist of real understanding of what we all call as spirituality.
Muralidharan 5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in India on 26 May 2017 Verified Purchase Excellent book !!! Go for it. Report
Satish 2.0 out of 5 stars PassableReviewed in India on 10 December 2023 Verified Purchase It's more of a documentary. The title Buddha should be appended with the names of other great sages like U.G. Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharishi as there quotes are equally highlighted and explained as Buddha's. A lot of open questions without solution/explanation. Report
Follow July 12, 2018 I agree with the basic premise of this book. The Buddha’s life is exemplary, not strictly factual, and we can fill it in any way we want. (Thich Nhat Hanh, to mention one more “biographer,” created a much larger story.) Mukunda Rao is knowledgeable about religion and spiritual practice, and has some interesting things to say about both. He focuses on the body, a bias which I share. But by the time we finish this book we have the feeling that he was really writing a biography of U.G. Krishnamurti, the subject of three other books that he has published. He just dropped the details into the story of the Buddha.
U.G. is the man I think of as the “other” Krishnamurti; it’s as if he’s J. Krishnamurti’s evil cousin (the two men met, but were not related). But while J. Krishnamurti sometimes got a little grouchy as he got older, perhaps because he kept saying the same thing again and again and nobody got it—as if he were talking to an overgrown moron called The Human Race and the guy just kept looking at him with a dull expression on his face, drooling a little—U. G. Krishnamurti seemed to become grouchy at the moment of enlightenment. He had a spiritually transformative experience and came out of it saying, Get away from me, I have nothing to talk about, there’s no message, it’s all a lot of horseshit. In a way other spiritual teachers had similar reactions. But no one with as much vehemence as U.G.[1]
I was glad that Rao did away with a number of the details of the early years. Apparently the Buddha came from a well-off family, was sheltered from many of the exigencies of life, had some extreme experience of impermanence right after his first son was born and decided he had to leave his family, wandered among spiritual practitioners for a number of years, trying one thing and another. All of that makes perfect sense, including the story that he learned to go into very deep states of meditation but believed they weren’t what he was looking for. It was after he went too far in an ascetic direction that he decided to do something more moderate, and then made the discovery that would answer his questions and lead to his teaching.
Rao has a theory that everyone who becomes enlightened has some kind of near death experience. He cites Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo’s the Mother, and U.G. himself; he could have mentioned various other people, including Eckhart Tolle, whose awakening was preceded by a dark night. Weirdly enough, though, instead of mentioning that the Buddha nearly died from his ascetic practices, Ray regard his near-death experience as the meditative experience that came before that, when he was young and sat under a tree in a field and experienced a feeling of peace. That was an important moment, but it hardly sounds near death. Rao then says—rightly, I think—that we don’t really know what happened to the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. There are teachings, but they don’t describe an actual experience.
Rao believes that enlightenment involves a physical change. It’s not something that happens just to the mind; it happens to the body. Again, he cites the Mother, Ramana Maharshi, U.G. Krishnamurti (he could just as easily have mentioned J. Krishnamurti, who went through something that he called The Process for much of his life, also involving severe physical pain). He gives the most space to U.G., perhaps because he knows his teaching the best. Here is how he describes that physical transformation.
“His skin turned soft, and when he rubbed any part of his body with his palm, it produced a sort of ash. His eyes stopped blinking and his senses started functioning at the peak of their sensitivity. He developed a female breast on his left side. And the hitherto dormant ductless glands such as the thymus, pituitary and pineal, referred to as chakras in kundalini yoga, were reactivated. On the eighth day, he ‘died.’”
Rao goes into much more detail about this “death,” which lasted for “about” 48 minutes (?). Supposedly his heartbeat slowed down and his hands and feet grew cold. “All thoughts, all experiences undergone by humanity from primordial times, whether good or bad, blissful or miserable, mystical or commonplace—the whole ‘collective consciousness’—were flushed out of his system. He . . . was reborn in the state of ‘undivided consciousness’, untouched by thought. It was a most profound journey and a sudden great leap into the state of primordial awareness without primitivism[2]’.” U.G. preferred to call this the natural state, rather than enlightenment.
I make it a practice not to contradict someone who says something or other happened to them. If someone tells me they had an enlightenment experience, or they saw the truth of all things, or they had an experience of God, I don’t sell all I have and give the guy the proceeds, but I don’t say No that didn’t happen to you. In this case, however, I’m biting my tongue to keep from contradicting the man or bursting into laughter. Especially that part about the left breast. What was that all about?
I can see how that might have made him grouchy. Though it would make auto-eroticism a lot more interesting.
What Rao seems to be saying about all these people is that a physical transformation takes place that wipes away the process of thinking. They don’t sit around having thoughts the way you and I do. They can think if they want but otherwise their minds are blank. That’s what he says happened to the Buddha, and to various other great beings throughout history, including Jesus. They become a different kind of being. Their slate is wiped clean.
That is Mukanda Rao’s central thesis, which contradicts my experience (hardly a reason not to believe it) but also contradicts a number of teachers—including the great Kosho Uchiyama—who say that no such thing ever happens, and that hoping for such a thing, or waiting for it, ruins the act of meditation and makes it just like any other human activity. You’re sitting there wanting things to be other than they are. You’ve turned spiritual practice into suffering.
Rao continues with a number of other chapters with such titles as “Is there a Middle Path?” “Where is the Mind Located?” “Is there a Soul?” but his answers to those questions, though interesting, all seem speculative. By the end of the book he’s completely reductive, seeming to say that there’s no validity in religion or any spiritual path whatsoever; his final chapter, entitled “The Way,” takes incoherence to a new level.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to re-interpret the life of the Buddha. But you don’t need to turn it into a life of U.G. Krishnamurti.
[1] If I may refer to him thus informally. I have no idea what these letters stand for.
[2] This final phrase, though it sounds deep, is also rather vague. What the hell is primordial awareness with primitivism?
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Profile Image for Srikanth. Srikanth 177 reviews
Follow March 2, 2018 A nice and refreshing approach to the life and teachings of Buddha without any glorification or suppression of information.
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Profile Image for Sumit. Sumit 98 reviews · 2 followers
Follow March 19, 2018 This book is truly a different narrative of life and teachings of Buddha. The author is disciple of U G Krishnamurti and hence each and every chapter reconcile U G teachings with Buddha's teachings.
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Profile Image for Chandrashekar BC. Chandrashekar BC 65 reviews · 8 followers
Follow November 11, 2017 "Physical vision is central to understanding mind and spirituality. This is what many previous spiritual theories have failed to understand," says author Mukunda Rao. The author in his current book "The Buddha - An Alternative Narrative of His Life and Teaching"- Pali, Mahayana, Zen Writings, J. Krishnamurthy, Ramana Maharshi, U. G. Discusses the Buddha and his teachings through biological foundations, surveying the foundations of Krishnamurti, Aurobindo, Nietzsche and modern thinkers. The reasons for the many decisions he may have taken are found in the same ground of thought. What was Buddha like? How could he be different from other priests? Is he a superhuman? Maharshi? Avatar? A strict person with no sense of humor as described by the Buddhist scriptures? A yogi? Does he believe in reincarnation? Or is the meaning of 'rebirth' different from what he said? Is he the construction of Bhikshu Sangha? Motivated to convert? Many such questions are discussed in this book. Through the enlightened thoughts of Talasparshi studies of Buddhism, science and philosophy, Mukund Rao presents here many ideas of Buddha from different perspectives. Apart from just Buddhism, meditation, yoga and food practices, which are well-known in today's times, have gained importance in different ways in the religions of the past, and how every religion and philosophy has used them to achieve their goals. Also, in the eyes of today's modern spiritual thinkers, the Buddha and his religion have been reexamined in the light of a scientific attitude. Scientism provides grounds for possibilities to respect spirituality. The ideas here give solid hope to many lay people who are trying to incorporate spirituality into their lives. !!
U. G. 크리슈나무르티는 인도의 사상가로 영성체험, 깨달음, 자기계발에 대한 가혹한 비판으로 유명하다.
2. 생애[편집]
인도의 안드라프라데시주 마살린파트남에서 중상류 가문에서 태어나 어렸을 때부터 다양한 경전을 섭렵하는 등 구루가 되기 위한 체계적 교육을 받았으며 이 과정에서 자신의 가족을 포함한 수많은 존경받는 종교지도자들이 위선자임을 간파하였다.
성인들이 도달했다고 알려진 상태에 이르기 위해 이루 말할 수 없는 노력을 하였고, 그 과정에서 지쳐 런던에서 방랑을 하는 생활을 하게 된다. 스위스인과 결혼을 하게되고 평범한 일상을 보내던 중 자신이 재난(calamity)으로 칭한 의식의 대격변을 겪게 되고, 이 것이 붓다나 예수, 라마나 마하리쉬가 경험한 것과 동일하다는 추측적 결론을 내리게 된다. 그러나 이 '재난'은 개인이 마음의 평화를 얻거나, 사회를 변혁하는 데 등 무언가 현실적 결과를 얻기 위해서는 아무짝에도 쓸모 없다는 그의 확신을 더욱 공고하게 만들었다.
3. 종교 및 영성 비판 활동[편집]
인터뷰를 통해 힌두교, 베단타 계통의 철학에 대해 신랄하게 논평하였다. 지두 크리슈나무르티와 7년 동안 교류하였으나 결국 절교하고 그의 사상이 대중을 현혹한다고 비판한다.
라마나 마하리쉬를 실제 만나보고 질문과 대답을 나누기도 하였다. 마하리쉬 또한 별볼일 없다는 주장이지만, 그가 서구사회에 끼친 영향이나 비이원론을 설파한 방식에 대해서는 긍정적이다.
그는 모든 종교적 텍스트의 가치를 부정하는 입장이므로, 자신의 주장을 전개할 때 타인의 말이나 텍스트를 인용하지 않고 순수하게 자신이 경험한 것을 자신의 언어로 말한다. 다만 종교가 인류를 구원할 수 없음을 지적할 때에는 에머슨을 인용하며 유구한 역사와 수많은 성자(구루)를 자랑하는 인도철학이 정작 시궁창 같은 인도의 현실을 개선하는 데 아무 도움이 되지 않음을 지적한다.
깨달음의 무용함을 주장한다는 점에서 설지의 주장과 상통하는 면이 많다.
4. 주장[편집]
철학적 관점에서 불이일원론은 반박될 수 없다고 본다.
소위 말하는 깨달음(자신에게 일어난)은 고통스러운 생리적인 변화이며, 이는 세간에서 기대하는 지복 상태나 다른 차원의 인간이 되는 것과는 거리가 멀다. 이는 생각과 자신과의 동일시에서 벗어난 상태이며, 생각과 신체가 자연스럽게 기능하는 것이다. 바꿔 말하면 깨달음이나 영성, 종교 따위에 관심 없이 '일없이' 살아가는 사람이라면 이미 깨달은 상태이며 정신 변혁을 위해 인위적으로 무언가를 더 한다는 것이 무의미하다.[1]
LSD를 하는 것은 의식을 확장하는 데 기여한다. 다시 말해 LSD는 깨달은 상태가 무엇인지를 잠시동안 경험하게 해준다. 그러나 이 또한 하나의 체험일 뿐이며, 종교나 영성적 관점에서 깨달음에 대해 기대하는 가치를 얻는 수단이 될 수 없다고 본다.
깨달음은 도덕과는 아무런 관련이 없으며 사회적으로도 쓸모가 없다.
깨달음을 얻으려고 하는 행위만큼 어리석은 것은 없다. 따라서 명상을 포함한 각종 종교적 수행은 의미가 없다.
5. 어록[편집]
여러분은 샹카라나 붓다의 싸구려 모조품이 되고 싶어 합니다. 여러분은 자기 자신이 되기를 원치 않습니다. 대체 왜 그러는 걸까요? 여러분은 인류의 구원자들과 성자들을 모두 합친 것보다도 훨씬 더 독특하고 특별한 존재들입니다. 그런데 어째서 그런 이들의 싸구려 모조품이 되고 싶어 하는 겁니까? 그런 이들은 신화일 뿐입니다. 그런 신화는 잊어주세요. 샹카라는 몇 백 년 전에 죽은 사람입니다. 여러분도 그만한 잠재력을 갖고 있습니다. 그러니 제일 먼저 해야 할 일은 샹카라를 버리는 겁니다. 물론 여러분이 샹카라의 가르침을 생계수단으로 활용하고 있다면 얘기가 달라집니다만.
<그런 깨달음은 없다>
여러분이 찾고 있는 것은 존재하지 않습니다. 여러분은 신비한 주문 같은 것을 통해서 자신을 단번에 무아 상태로 진입시키는 것이 가능하리라는 황홀한 환상을 품고서 마법의 땅을 밟고 싶어 합니다. 한데 그런 짓은 여러분을 자연스러운 상태에서 멀어지게 합니다. 그것은 스스로에게서 벗어나는 움직임입니다. 진정한 자신이 되는 데는 특별한 지혜가 필요한데 여러분은 이미 그런 지혜를 갖추고 있습니다. 누구도 여러분에게 그런 지혜를 줄 필요가 없고 누구도 그것을 빼앗아갈 수 없습니다. 그런 지혜가 저절로 드러나게 하는 사람이야말로 자연스러운 사람입니다.
깨달음은 어떤 상태일까? 깨달은 사람의 공통적인 특징은 무엇일까? 깨달으면 잡생각이 사라지고 사랑으로 가득하게 될까? 깨달음이 심리적인 것이 아니라 오히려 육체적인 현상이라는 의미는? 어떤 사람이 정상인이며, 우리 삶의 궁극적 목적은 무엇일까? 형식화된 모든 종교와 수행에 대해 강렬한 독설을 쏟아내어 ‘안티 구루’로 유명한 U.G. 크리슈나무르티의 놀랍고 경이로운 인생역정과 통찰을 담아냈다.
라마나 마하리쉬, 지두 크리슈나무르티 등 전설적인 인물들과의 생생한 만남과 그에 얽힌 뒷이야기, 신비한 온갖 체험 속에서도 버리지 못했던 날카로운 문제의식을 고스란히 담았다. 인간의 본성과 마음의 구조를 시원하게 드러내는 그와의 대화를 통해 우리는 스스로 싸안고 있던 온갖 관념과 가설들, 변화에 대한 막연한 욕구들을 정확하게 직시할 수 있게 된다. 접기
==== 목차
들어가며 / 6
=== chapter 1 U.G. / 13 - 1973년에서 1976년 사이에 인도와 스위스에서 대화한 내용 chapter 2 깨달음의 신비 / 89 - 1973년, 인도와 스위스에서 진행된 대화들을 제임스 브로드스키가 편집한 내용 chapter 3 우리 외부에는 어떤 힘도 존재하지 않는다 / 127 - 1980년, 인도 마이소르에서 HSK 교수와 인터뷰한 내용 chapter 4 당혹과 이해 사이에서 / 169 - 1972년에서 1980년까지 스위스와 인도에서 사람들과 나눈 이야기들 중에서 가려 뽑음
=== 옮긴이의 글 : 남의 노래를 부르지 말라 / 331 찾아보기 / 340 접기
==== 책속에서
찾으려는 노력은 항상 잘못된 방향으로 가게 하기 때문에, 여러분이 성스럽다 거룩하다 심오하다고 여기는 모든 것은 지저분한 ‘때’ 같은 것입니다. 18쪽
‘생각은 우리가 원하는 어떤 경험이든 다 만들어낼 수 있다. 엄청난 기쁨, 지복, 무아지경, 무無로 녹아 사라지는 등 온갖 신비체험들을. 그러니 이런 것은 해탈이 될 수 없다. 나는 여전히 같은 사람이고, 이런 체험들은 생각에 따라 자동적으로 일어날 뿐이니까. 명상은 나를 어디로도 인도해주지 못한다.’ 26쪽
그가 자신의 근본적인 의문에는 어떤 답도 없다는 것을 깨달으면서 그 의문이 갑자기 사라진 것은 일종의 생리적인 현상이었다. UG는 그것이 “내부에서의 갑작스러운 ‘폭발’, 말하자면 몸의 모든 세포와 신경과 내분비선의 폭발”이었다고 말했다. 그 폭발과 함께 생각의 연속성, 내면의 어떤 중심, 생각들을 연결시켜주는 ‘내’가 있다는 환상은 더 이상 존재하지 않았다. 57쪽
닷새 동안 다섯 가지 감각이 변했습니다. 그리고 여섯째 날, 갑자기 내 몸이 사라졌습니다. 몸이 없는 겁니다. 나는 내 손을 바라보며 “이게 내 손인가?”라고 중얼거렸습니다. 그건 내 손임이 분명했지만 내 것 같지가 않았습니다. 이 몸도 만져봤지만 거기에는 아무것도 없었습니다. 손가락 끝에 느껴지는 촉감 말고는 거기 뭔가 있다는 느낌이 들지 않았습니다. “내 몸이 보여? 내 안에는 이게 내 몸이라고 말해주는 게 전혀 없어.” 65쪽
이 상태는 내 상태나 신의 상태, 깨달은 사람의 상태, 남다른 변화를 이룬 사람의 상태가 아니라 바로 여러분의 상태, 여러분 자신의 자연스러운 상태입니다. 이것은 여러분의 자연스러운 상태지만 여러분이 뭔가를 얻으려 안간힘을 쓰고, 있는 그대로의 자기가 아니라 다른 무엇인가가 되려고 애쓰는 것은 그런 상태가 저절로 드러나는 것을 방해하는 짓이 됩니다. 90쪽
자연스러운 상태는 생각 없는 상태가 아닙니다. 자연스러운 상태에서는 생각이 여러분을 짓누르지 않고 자체의 자연스러운 리듬을 따라 흘러갑니다. 생각을 판독하고 생각을 ‘나의 것’이라고 여기는 ‘나’는 더 이상 존재하지 않습니다. 115쪽
여러분이 찾고 있는 것은 존재하지 않습니다. 여러분은 신비한 주문 같은 것을 통해서 자신을 단번에 무아 상태로 진입시키는 것이 가능하리라는 황홀한 환상을 품고서 마법의 땅을 밟고 싶어 합니다. 한데 그런 짓은 여러분을 자연스러운 상태에서 멀어지게 합니다. 그것은 스스로에게서 벗어나는 움직임입니다. 진정한 자신이 되는 데는 특별한 지혜가 필요한데 여러분은 이미 그런 지혜를 갖추고 있습니다. 누구도 여러분에게 그런 지혜를 줄 필요가 없고 누구도 그것을 빼앗아갈 수 없습니다. 그런 지혜가 저절로 드러나게 하는 사람이야말로 자연스러운 사람입니다. 125쪽
“나는 누구입니까?”가 정말로 당신 자신의 질문거립니까? 전혀 그렇지 않죠. 그건 어딘가에서 주워온 겁니다. 여기서 골칫거리는 물음이 아니라 묻는 자입니다. 물음과 묻는 자는 같습니다. 만일 당신이 이런 사실을 받아들인다면 일은 아주 간단합니다. 묻는 자의 관심은 답을 얻는 데 있는 게 아니라 계속 존재하는 데 있습니다. 176쪽
술집에 가든 사원에 가든 둘 다 현실도피예요. 이 길로 도망치든 저 길로 도망치든 간에 다 도피입니다. 사람들은 자기 자신에게서 도망치고 있죠. 219쪽
의식의 확장은 아무것도 아닙니다만 사람들은 그것을 너무나 대단한 것으로 여깁니다. 여러분에게 깨달음의 새벽이 밝아오면 그런 체험은 제아무리 심오한 것이라 해도 전혀 아무 가치가 없습니다. 인도의 성자들은 열락의 상태나 몸 의식의 부재라고 하는 아주 사소한 것을 체험하고는 뭔가 대단한 일이 일어나고 있다고 생각합니다. 그런 모든 체험은 의식을 제한하는 것이며, 따라서 아무 도움도 되지 않습니다. 하지만 사람들은 늘 그렇게 제한된 의식 속에서 움직이고 있기 때문에 아마 당신들은 그런 것들에 큰 관심을 갖고 있을 겁니다. 243쪽
당신들이 비참하고 불행한 신세가 되는 것은 바로 당신들이 누군가로부터 무엇인가를 얻고 싶어 하기 때문입니다. 환상의 종말은 곧 ‘나’의 종말입니다. 그러니 당신들은 환상 없이는 존재할 수 없습니다. 기껏 할 수 있는 일이라고는 하나의 환상을 또 다른 환상으로 바꿔놓는 것뿐 입니다. 251쪽
여러분이 이런 상태에 들기 위해 하는 모든 행위는 여러분을 고통스럽게 할 겁니다. 해탈을 추구하는 것이 최고의 고통이라고 내가 말하는 건 그 때문입니다. (웃음) 263쪽
여러분이 자기로 알고 있고 자기로 경험하고 있는 ‘나’는 자기 존재가 끝장나기를 원치 않습니다. ‘나’는 계속 이어지를 바랍니다. 모든 영적 추구들은 그런 연속성을 강화하는 방향으로 나아갑니다. 그것은 자아중심적인 활동입니다. 어떻게 자아중심적인 활동을 통해서 ‘자아’의 활동으로부터 자유로워질 수 있겠어요? 268쪽
‘어떻게?’라는 질문을 통해서 ‘나’라는 구조는 연속성을 얻고 영구히 자리를 잡습니다. 어떻게 하면 좋겠느냐구요? 295쪽
당신은 자기 자신한테로 돌아오며, 참으로 모르는 상태가 됩니다. 306쪽 접기
밑줄긋기 revoman ...이라는 것은 참 우스꽝스러운 짓거리로군. 그런 걸 한다는 사람들의 삶은 얄팍하고 공허해. 입으로는 온갖 근사하고 아름다운 말을 주워섬기지만 그 사람들의 삶의 실상은 과연 어떻지? 그 사람들의 삶에는 이런 식의 신경질적인 두려움이 내재해 있어. 접기
추천글 왓킨스 리뷰: “U.G.의 견해를 가장 잘 요약한 단 한 권의 책!”
미드웨스트 북 리뷰: “강렬하고 솔직담백한 스토리를 담고 있는 이 책은 우리 안팎의 우주를 더 잘 이해할 수 있게 해주는 자서전적 안내서이자 현대의 영적 수행풍토에 대한 철학적 비판서다. 스스로의 한계를 넘어서고자 하는 모든 이를 위한 매혹적이고 통찰력 넘치는 책.” 제프리 미시러브 (내셔널 퍼블릭 텔레비전 [Thinking allowed] 진행자, 임상심리학 박사): “U.G.는 우리가 깨달음을 추구하는 걸 자신이 도와줄 수 없다고 말한다. 역설적이게도 나는 그 말에 속이 뻥 뚫리는 것 같은 청량함을 느낀다. 이 책은 영적 추구의 길에서 만나기 쉬운 수많은 환상을 꿰뚫어볼 수 있는 U.G.의 예리한 능력의 한 표현이다.”
뉴에이지 리테일러: “심장이 약한 사람들이나 책을 대충 읽어 버릇하는 사람들이 읽을 만한 책은 아니다. 스스로 깨달았다고 여기거나 그런 상태에 이르는 길을 가고 있다고 생각하는 독자들의 일부는 U.G.가 말한 내용의 상당부분에 크게 공감할 것이고 또 다른 일부는 거부하거나 찬동하지 않을 것이다. 이 책은 그런 독자들을 곤혹스럽게도 하고 지적 자극을 주기도 할 것이다.”
돈 래틴 (<샌프란시스코 크로니클> 종교담당 논설위원): “U.G.는 어떤 범주에 집어넣기가 쉽지 않은 인물이다. 그를 구루로 여기는 이들도 있고, ‘전혀 구루 같지 않은 이’로 여기는 이들도 있다. U.G. 크리슈나무르티는 종교계의 돈 리클스(독설과 풍자로 유명한 미국의 희극배우)이다.”
아마존 리뷰: “경이로운 체험이 놀랍도록 드라마틱하게 펼쳐진다.” 동아일보: 동아일보 2015년 3월 7일자 '새로나온 책' 접기
‘세계의 스승’으로 지목된 지두 크리슈나무르티와 마찬가지로 어릴 때부터 영적인 스승이 될 사람으로 선택되어 양육되었다. 지두와도 7년을 교류하는 등 진지하게 ‘깨달음’을 추구하였다. 49세 때 스위스의 어느 벤치에서 스스로 ‘재난’이라 부른 어떤 것과 맞닥뜨린다. 이후, 생각의 연속성에 대한 환상과 자기라는 중심체에 대한 감각을 상실하고 일련의 신체적 변화를 경험한다. ‘나’라는 자아의 연속성이 사라진 이 상태를 ‘자연스러운 상태’라 부르면서 종교적이고 관념화된 ‘깨달음’과 구분하였다.
라마나 마하리쉬, 지두 크리슈나무르티 등 깨달았다고 알려진 영적인 인물들을 만났고, 깨달음으로 착각할 수도 있는 다양한 초능력과 신비체험을 두루 거쳤지만, 그 체험들을 특별하고 거룩한 것으로 꾸며 ‘영적인 사업’을 하기 보다는 한 사람 한 사람이 솔직하게 현실을 직시하여 착각에서 깨어날 것을 촉구하였다. 지금까지 알려진 모든 형식과 전통을 거부하며, 특히 깨달음과 깨달은 스승(구루)을 우상화하고 신비화하는 것을 조롱하면서 강렬한 독설을 쏟아내어 ‘안티 구루’로 불린다. 접기
옮긴이: 김훈 저자파일신간알리미 신청 최근작 : <세상에 하나밖에 없는 학교> … 총 99종 (모두보기) 고려대학교 사학과를 졸업. 1981년 동아일보 신춘문예 희곡 부문 〈빈방〉으로 당선. 옮긴 책으로 《희박한 공기 속으로》 《바람이 너를 지나가게 하라》 《세상 끝 천 개의 얼굴》 《성난 물소 놓아주기》 《그런 깨달음은 없다》 《모든 것의 목격자》 《켄 윌버, 진실 없는 진실의 시대》 《늘 깨어나는 지금》 외 100여 권이 있다. 현재 부여에서 번역 작업을 하면서 파트타임 농부로 지속 가능한 자연생태 농업에도 관심을 갖고 있다. 접기
==== 출판사 제공 책소개
깨달음에 대한 환상을 가장 깊고 적나라하게 깨부순 문제작! 신비화된 이 시대의 영적 수행풍토에 일침을 주는 전설적인 마스터의 귀환
깨달음은 어떤 상태일까? 깨달은 사람의 공통적인 특징은 무엇일까? 깨달으면 잡생각이 사라지고 사랑으로 가득하게 될까? 깨달음이 심리적인 것이 아니라 오히려 육체적인 현상이라는 의미는? 어떤 사람이 정상인이며, 우리 삶의 궁극적 목적은 무엇일까? 깨달음은 이 시대에 어떤 가치가 있는가? 형식화된 모든 종교와 수행에 대해 강렬한 독설을 쏟아내어 ‘안티 구루’로 유명한 U.G. 크리슈나무르티의 놀랍고 경이로운 인생역정과 통찰을 담아낸 단 한 권의 책. 라마나 마하리쉬, 지두 크리슈나무르티 등 전설적인 인물들과의 생생한 만남과 그에 얽힌 뒷이야기, 신비한 온갖 체험 속에서도 버리지 못했던 날카로운 문제의식을 고스란히 담았다. 인간의 본성과 마음의 구조를 시원하게 드러내는 그와의 대화를 통해 우리는 스스로 싸안고 있던 온갖 관념과 가설들, 변화에 대한 막연한 욕구들을 정확하게 직시할 수 있게 된다. ‘자기 자신’으로 바로 설 수 있는 용기를 얻고자 하는 이들을 위한 냉철한 삶의 지침서. 마침내 재난처럼 찾아올 ‘깨달음’에 관한 대담하고 의미심장한 인터뷰.
수행의 거품을 시원하게 걷어내는 전설적인 마스터와의 인터뷰 신비화된 이 시대의 수행풍토에 일침을 주는 책
"여러분은 모두 호기심에서 이곳에 왔을 겁니다. 여러분은 깨달은 사람들과 같은 얘기를 하기도 하고 다르게 얘기하기도 하는, 성질 사납고 난폭하며 지두 크리슈나무르티를 맹렬히 비난하는 별난 사람이 있다는 얘기를 들었을 겁니다. 여러분은 어떤 즐거움을 위해 여기 왔겠지요. 즐거움이 나쁜 것이라고 얘기하는 게 아닙니다. 그러나 남자들이 창녀에게 가는 것과 꼭 같은 이유로 여러분이 여기 왔다는 사실을 인정한다면, 그것은 여러분에게 엄청난 충격이 될 겁니다. 그 둘 사이에는 아무런 차이가 없습니다." 323쪽
평생을 지독하게 ‘깨달음의 상태’와 인간의 작동방식을 철저히 파헤친 사람이 있다. ‘예수나 붓다와 같은 존재’라며 추앙받던 라마나 마하리쉬와의 첫 대면에서 “당신이 갖고 계신 걸 제게 주실 수 있습니까?”라며 당돌한 질문을 던진 사람, 인도대통령을 지낸 철학자 라다크리슈난이 ‘인도가 낳은 가장 뛰어난 설법자’라며 극찬했던 U.G. 크리슈나무르티이다. ‘세계의 스승’ 지두 크리슈나무르티와 7년을 매일 교류했으면서도 깨달음 이후 이 세상 누구보다 지두에게 맹렬한 비난을 퍼부었던 사람. 파격적 언행으로 자신을 드러내기 보다는 "내게는 사람들에게 전할 메시지가 없습니다. 나는 당신을 도울 수 없어요"라며 구루의 역할을 피해 다닌 사람. 그러나 역설적이게도 ‘진짜 깨달은 사람’으로 인간적인 사랑을 받았던 안티 구루, U.G. 크리슈나무르티. 이 책은 무협지처럼 드라마틱한 인생역정과 누구보다 철저했던 그의 견해를 가장 잘 요약한 단 한 권의 책이다.
책은 그의 깨달음을 궁금해하는 사람들의 질문을 받고 자신의 인생역정을 진솔하게 밝히는 내용으로 시작한다. 그 인터뷰 내용은 마음공부와 수행에 관심 있는 이들이라면 누구나 읽어보라고 권할 수 있을 정도로 생생하고 날카롭다. 마치 세상에 보기 드문 현자가 직접 출연한 한편의 휴먼다큐멘터리, 혹은 <힐링캠프>처럼 흥미롭고 리얼하다. 당대에 ‘성자’라고 일컬어지던 수많은 유명인들과의 만남, 섹스에 대한 고민, 깨달음을 위한 방랑 생활, 종교를 포함한 모든 전통적 권위에 대한 거부, 자유롭고 도발적인 언행, 다양한 종류의 신비체험을 통해 유지(U.G.)는 수많은 종교와 전통에서 신성시하는 ‘깨달음’이 우리 문화가 만들어낸 환상임을 알게 된다. 스스로 ‘재난’으로 부른 런던에서의 결정적인 체험 이후, 그는 깨달아야 할 ‘나’가 없으며 이른바 ‘자연스러운 상태’라고 부르는 것이 있기는 하지만 그 상태는 노력이나 느낌, 인과를 통해서는 얻을 수 없다는 이야기를 전하기 시작한다. 그렇다면 도대체 무엇이 그토록 수많은 사람들이 평생을 바쳐 찾아다니는 ‘깨달음’일까?
이 상태는 내 상태나 신의 상태, 깨달은 사람의 상태, 남다른 변화를 이룬 사람의 상태가 아니라 바로 여러분의 상태, 여러분 자신의 자연스러운 상태입니다. 이것은 여러분의 자연스러운 상태지만 여러분이 뭔가를 얻으려 안간힘을 쓰고, 있는 그대로의 자기가 아니라 다른 무엇인가가 되려고 애쓰는 것은 그런 상태가 저절로 드러나는 것을 방해하는 짓이 됩니다. 90쪽
자연스러운 상태는 이른바 열락이나 지복, 희열 같은 종교적인 상태들과는 아무 관계도 없습니다. 그런 것들은 체험의 장 속에 있습니다. 내가 말하는 상태는 모종의 심리적인 변화가 아닙니다. 그것은 우리가 어느 날 들어갔다가 그 이튿날 빠져나올 수 있는 마음 상태 같은 것이 아닙니다. 이 상태는 체험이 아닙니다. 94쪽
자연스러운 상태는 생각 없는 상태가 아닙니다. 자연스러운 상태에서는 생각이 여러분을 짓누르지 않고 자체의 자연스러운 리듬을 따라 흘러갑니다. 생각을 판독하고 생각을 ‘나의 것’이라고 여기는 ‘나’는 더 이상 존재하지 않습니다. 115쪽
모든 형식과 전통을 거부한 안티 구루 깨달음에 대한 환상을 가장 깊고 적나라하게 깨부순 문제작
그가 소위 ‘안티 구루’로 알려지게 된 것은 모든 형식과 전통을 거부하는 우상파괴적인 언행을 일삼았기 때문이다. 어릴 때부터 영적인 자질을 인정받아 소위 ‘성자’라는 분들을 만나며 영적 훈련을 받았던 U.G.는 20대 때 이미 니르비칼파 사마디(무상 삼매)까지 체험하게 되지만, 분노와 성욕을 비롯한 다양한 욕구들이 자신에게 끊임없이 일어나는 것에 자연스런 의문을 가지게 된다.
우리 집은 모든 성자들이 자유롭게 드나들 수 있는 집이었어요. 그렇게 해서 나는 아주 어렸을 때 이미 그 사람들이 하나같이 위선자들이라는 사실을 알게 되었죠. 그들은 그럴싸한 온갖 이야기를 늘어놓고 그럴싸한 온갖 믿음을 가졌지만, 그들의 삶은 얄팍하기 그지없었어요. 그 바람에 나는 추구의 길로 나서기 시작했습니다. 24쪽
나는 거짓된 삶을 살고 싶지 않아. 나는 탐욕스러운데 그 사람들은 무욕無慾을 이야기해. 그러니 뭔가 잘못된 거야. 내 안의 탐욕은 아주 생생하고 자연스러워 보이는 데 반해서 그들이 이야기하는 내용은 부자연스러워 보여. 그러니 뭔가 잘못된 거야. 무욕의 상태에 이르기 위해서 나 자신을 변화시키거나 오도하고 싶지 않아. 나한테는 내 탐욕이 있는 그대로의 진실이야. 29쪽
대부분의 수행자들이 자신의 상태를 바꾸려고 욕망을 다스리려 하는 반면, 그는 독특하게도 자신에게 일어나는 그 탐진치를 ‘있는 그대로의 진실’로 인정하고는, 욕망을 끊지도 욕망에 좌우되지도 않은 채 ‘자기 자신이 되는’ 길을 선택한다. 스스로의 위선에 대한 솔직한 고백은 이윽고 종교적으로 덧씌운 모든 거룩한 것들에 대한 통렬한 비판으로 이어진다.
한편, 직설적이면서도 때로는 익살맞게, 때로는 공격적으로까지 표현되는 그의 통찰들은 불교의 선문답이나 조사 어록을 떠올리게 한다. 어려운 용어를 쓰지 않고 평범한 언어를 통해 스스럼없이 대답하는 그의 메시지는 때로는 그리스의 현인들을, 때로는 이슬람의 신비주의자들을, 때로는 동양의 눈 밝은 선사들을 떠올리게 할 만큼 현실적이면서도 명징하다.
여러분이 진리나 궁극적인 실체 등 무엇을 추구하든 간에 그런 모든 노력은 늘 있는 그대로의 아주 자연스러운 상태에서 벗어나게 만듭니다. 그것은 여러분이 노력한 결과로 얻거나 도달하거나 성취할 수 있는 것이 아닙니다. 내가 ‘인과와는 무관한acausal’이라는 말을 쓰는 이유는 바로 거기에 있어요. 그것은 어떤 원인의 작용에 의해서 일어나는 것이 아니며, 아무튼 일단 일어나면 찾아다니는 일은 끝납니다. 16쪽
여러분은 자신의 내면에 항상 존재하는 놀라운 평화, 곧 여러분의 자연스러운 상태를 결코 이해하지 못합니다. 여러분이 마음의 평화로운 상태를 조성하려고 애쓰는 것은 사실, 내면에 동요와 혼란을 빚어내는 짓입니다. 여러분은 평화에 관해서 얘기할 수 있고, 어떤 마음상태를 빚어놓고는 자기 마음이 아주 평화롭다고 얘기할 수 있습니다. 하지만 그것은 평화가 아니라 폭력입니다. 그러므로 평화로워지는 연습을 하고 고요해지는 훈련을 하는 것은 전혀 쓸데없는 짓입니다. 참된 고요함(적정寂靜)은 폭발적인 것입니다. 그것은 영적인 추구자들이 생각하는 죽은 마음상태 같은 것이 아닙니다. 95쪽
여러분이 어떤 답을 진리로 받아들이든 거부하든 본질은 똑같습니다. 받아들이거나 거부하는 건 개인적인 편견, 편향성에 달려있습니다. 따라서 여러분이 어떤 진리든 간에 직접 진리를 발견하고 싶어 한다면 받아들이거나 거부하는 식의 양자택일적 입장에 서 있는 사람이 아닌 겁니다. 231쪽
어째서 여러분은 세상을 바꾸고 싶어 하죠? 이 세상은 놀랍도록 아름다워요! 여러분은 자신의 관념으로 지어낸 세상에서 살고 싶어서 이 세상을 바꾸고 싶어 하는 겁니다. 진짜 문제는 여러분이 자기 자신을 바꾸고 싶어 하는데 그렇게 하는 것이 불가능하다는 것을 알고서 세상을 자기가 원하는 틀에 맞출 수 있게 하기 위해 세상을 변화시키고 싶어 하는 데 있습니다. 289쪽
이 세상에 깨달음이 무슨 소용이란 말인가? 그러나 우선 진정한 자기 자신이 되라
깨달음은 어떤 상태일까? 깨달은 사람들의 공통적인 특징은 무엇일까? 깨달으면 잡생각이 사라지고 사랑으로 가득하게 될까? 깨달은 사람은 지금 이 순간에 살고 있을까? 죽은 뒤에는 어떤 일이 일어날까? 깨달음이 심리적인 현상이 아니라 감각적이고 육체적인 현상이라는 의미는? 어떤 사람이 정상인이며, 우리 삶의 목적은 무엇일까? 깨달음은 사회적으로 어떤 가치가 있을까? 사람들이 찾아와 던지는 이러한 질문들에 대해 U.G.는 그 질문을 재정의하는 방식을 통해 다채로운 메시지를 전달한다. 독자들은 이 책에서 특정 종교나 도덕, 관점을 고집하지 않고 정말로 자신에게 솔직한 사람으로부터 흘러나오는 독특한 메시지의 힘을 접하게 될 것이다. 논란이 될 수 있는 자극적인 내용들도 포함되어 있지만, 그 날것 그대로의 관점은 마음공부에 관심있는 모든 사람들에게 새로운 시각을 열어준다. U.G.의 목소리에 귀를 기울이다보면, 우리는 그가 ‘깨달음’ 또는 ‘자연스러운 상태’에 대해 이야기하면서 강조하는 남다른 가르침을 하나 발견하게 된다. 바로 ‘자기 자신이 되라’는 것.
당신들이 비참하고 불행한 신세가 되는 것은 바로 당신들이 누군가로부터 무엇인가를 얻고 싶어 하기 때문입니다. 환상의 종말은 곧 ‘나’의 종말입니다. 그러니 당신들은 환상 없이는 존재할 수 없습니다. 기껏 할 수 있는 일이라고는 하나의 환상을 또 다른 환상으로 바꿔놓는 것뿐 입니다. 251쪽
용기는 여러분의 이전 사람들이 느끼고 체험한 모든 것을 쓸어내 버리는 것을 뜻합니다. 여러분 각자는 유일무이한 존재이자 과거의 모든 것보다 더 위대한 존재입니다. 제아무리 거룩하고 성스러운 전통들일지라도 모든 전통을 쓸어내 버려야 합니다. 그러고 나서야 비로소 여러분은 자기 자신이 될 수 있습니다. 250쪽
당신은 자기 자신한테로 돌아오며, 참으로 모르는 상태가 됩니다. 306쪽
진정한 길은 자기 자신의 길이어야 합니다. 그러므로 모든 길을 다 버려야 합니다. 다른 누군가의 길을 따라가는 한 그 길은 생각의 소산이며, 따라서 사실은 새 길이 아닙니다. 그것은 전에 늘 다니던 옛 길입니다. 전에 하던 게임을 새로운 방식으로 하는 것뿐입니다. 317쪽
모든 거룩함과 전통을 거부하는 그의 직설적인 메시지는 서구에서도 많은 논란을 불러일으켰다. 전 세계 거의 모든 주요 언어로 번역된 그의 책들은 모든 종류의 ‘영적인 장사와 수행’을 비판했지만 역설적이게도 인도와 유럽에서 높은 평가를 받았다. 특히 이 책 《그런 깨달음은 없다》는 U.G.의 견해를 가장 잘 요약한 책으로 평가받고 있으며, 놀랍고 경이로운 삶의 역정과 통찰들이 수록되어 있다. U.G.는 아주 독창적인 인물로, 우리는 그의 덕에 인간의 본성과 마음의 구조, 이 시대의 영적 수행들을 새로운 방식으로 이해할 기회를 얻었다. 우리는 그의 말에 힘입어 자신들이 싸안고 있는 온갖 관념과 가설들, 깨닫고자 하는 욕구들과 정면으로 직면하고, 참된 것을 스스로의 힘으로 찾고자 하는 용기를 얻게 된다.
‘생각’에 대한 U.G.의 통찰들
대다수 종교나 수행단체에서는 ‘생각(잡념)’을 없애기 위한 많은 방법을 가르치고 있다. 생각을 주시하거나 사라지게 하는 그런 수행들에 대해, 그는 다른 곳에서는 찾아보기 힘든, 핵심을 찌르는 명쾌함을 보여준다.
여러분이 생각을 주시하는 게 가능할까요? 가능하지 않습니다. 주시하는 또 다른 생각이 있습니다. 그 문제의 교묘한 측면이 바로 그겁니다. 생각은 자체를 둘로 나눕니다. 그렇게 하지 않으면 여러분은 생각을 주시할 수 없습니다. 한 생각이 또 다른 생각을 주시할 때 두 생각이 있는 게 아니라 한 생각만 있습니다. 그런 주시는 두 개의 생각이 있다는 느낌을 안겨주지만, 사실은 하나의 움직임만 있을 따름입니다. 192쪽
어떤 레벨에서 어떤 방향으로 어떤 행동을 하건 간에 여러분이 하는 모든 것은 생각의 구조에 지속성을 부여해줍니다. 정신과 육체의 분리 상태는 끝장나야 합니다. 사실 정신mind과 육체는 전혀 분리되어 있지 않습니다. 196쪽
여러분과 알아차림mindfulness은 공존할 수 없습니다. 만일 여러분이 평생 단 한 번, 1초라도 알아차림의 상태에 있을 수 있다면 ‘나’라는 연속성은 끊어질 겁니다. 체험구조가 빚어낸 망상, 곧 ‘나’라고 하는 것은 부서져버리고 모든 것이 자연스러운 리듬에 따라 흘러갈 겁니다. 자연스러운 상태에서는 자신이 뭘 보고 있는지 알지 못합니다. 그것이 바로 알아차림입니다. 만일 자신이 뭘 보고 있는지 알고 있다면 여러분은 존재하게 되고, 다시 자신이 이미 알고 있는 낡은 것을 체험하게 될 겁니다. 123쪽
※ 다양한 주제에 대한 U.G.의 견해들은 책 뒤쪽의 ‘찾아보기’를 통해 쉽게 확인할 수 있다. 접기
바다 2016-01-19 메뉴 U.G.의 개성이 무척 강하다. 부정을 통한 메시지라 끌린다. 영적수행에의 환상과 추구하려는 마음의 싹을 모조리 잘라버리려는 것 같다. 실상을 낱낱이 공개함으로써... 공감 (6) 댓글 (0)
hjcoffee 2016-02-02 메뉴 그 어떤 말로도 이 책의 가치를 논할 수 없을듯하다. 읽고 또 읽고 또 읽어야 유지가 하는 말을 조금씩 정확히 이해하게 될것 같다. 물론 이해라는 말 또한 내 생각일 뿐이지만.평생 내가 죽음에 이르기까지 이 책과 함께 할것 같다. 정말 유지에 그리고 번역해주신 분과 출판사에
유지의 無我체험은 벼락을 맞는 것처럼 특이한 경우이기에 감당하기 힘들어 하는 모습입니다 사마타와 위빠사나의 수행력이 없는 無我체험임을 여실히 보여주고 있습니다 벼락을 맞을 확률은 거의 없기에 벼락맞은 유지는 길이 없다고 하는 것입니다
유지는 불교를 피상적으로만 알고 있기 때문이지 불교에 사마타라는 선정수행에 멸진정이 있습니다 유지가 현실적으로 불가능하다는 생각과 마음이 완전히 사라진 경지입니다 멸진정은 붓다가 여타의 깨달았다고 하는 분들과 다른 차원입니다 멸진정을 인정하는 것은 힌두교 뿐만 아니고 무슨 종교 교리가 되었든 통채로 부정하는 것입니다
깨달음도 없고 길도 없다는 것은 유지가 얼마나 힌두교에 매몰되어 있는지 알 수 있습니다 힌두교를 포맷한 것이 불교이고 이것이 붓다가 깨달은 無我입니다
無我체험에 의해서 유지의 골수에 밖혀있는 힌두교가 포맷당한 것입니다 그러니 깨달음도 없고 길도 없다고 할 수 밖에 없습니다 힌두교든 기독교든 이처럼 벼락맞기 전에는 無我를 받아들이기도 어렵지만 감당할 수 없는 것입니다 유지처럼 힌두교및 여타 종교교리가 골수에 박혀 있지 않으면 벼락맞지 않아도 깨달음에 이를 수 있습니다
無我체험이 이토록 강력하게 다가온 것은 유지의 머리가 그만큼 꽉 차있었다는 반증입니다
기독교인은 한번의 벼락으로는 안될 것입니다 어쩌면 벼락으로도 안될 것 같습니다
사마타라는 선정수행을 통해 생각이나 마음을 완전히 지울 수 있고 위빠사나 수행을 통해 無我에 이를 수 있습니다 생사를 해결한 것이 無我입니다 생사문제를 해결했는데 다른 할 일이 또 남았는지요 이를 일러 할 일을 다 해 마쳤고 더이상 할 일이 없다는 것입니다
revoman 2016-10-10메뉴 나를 향한 목소리. 나를 향한 목소리....이라는 것은 참 우스꽝스러운 짓거리로군. 그런 걸 한다는 사람들의 삶은 얄팍하고 공허해. 입으로는 온갖 근사하고 아름다운 말을 주워섬기지만 그 사람들의 삶의 실상은 과연 어떻지? 그 사람들의 삶에는 이런 식의 신경질적인 두려움이 내재해 있어. 더보기
읽었던 영성 책들의 내용과 다른 통찰로 이야기를 풀어가는 것이 재밌습니다. 명상과 현존, 영적 스승을 중요시 여기는 영성의 분위기를 뒤집어 버리네요.
저자는 책에서 자신은 아무것도 해줄 수 없으며, 모든 앎은 자신만이 갖고 있음에 대해 여러번 언급합니다. 호킨스 박사 책을 볼때도 느꼈지만 시원하지만 또 시원하지는 않은 느낌으로 긁으며 읽게 되는 책입니다.
이 리뷰가 도움이 되었나요?공감0 댓글 0접어보기
eBook 구매 한 번 읽어서는 이해하기가 힘든 책.
평점8점 | w*****s | 2019-07-13
원문주소 : https://blog.yes24.com/document/11461395
3번 이상 읽은 책인데, 매번 읽을 때마다 또 다른 이해가 다가옵니다. 처음에는 저자가 전하는 내용이 어려워서 어쩌면 저자의 경험을 이해하기 힘들어 거부반응이 일어날 수도 있습니다. 그러나 이런 깨달음에 분야에 관심이 있는 사람이라면 부정적 시각을 잠시 내려놓고 읽어볼 만한 가치가 충분합니다. 이해가 안되는 문장에서 자꾸 되돌아가서 재차 읽게 만든 문장들이 있는데, 그렇다고 손에서 내려놓고 싶은 책은 아니었습니다. 깨달음의 관점을 다른 시각에가 바라보고자 한다면 충분히 읽어볼 만한 책이라고 생각합니다.
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종이책 안티-구루가 깨버리는 깨달음의 정의
평점10점 | k***y | 2015-03-04
원문주소 : https://blog.yes24.com/document/7970964
지두 크리슈나무르티와 7년을 교류하는 등 진지하게 ‘깨달음’을 추구해온 U.G는 49세, 스위스의 어느 벤치에서 스스로 ‘재난’이라 부른 어떤 것을 고민해왔고, .‘자연스러운 상태’를 체험하여 종교적이고 관념화된 ‘깨달음’과 구분하였다. 지금까지 알려진 모든 형식과 전통을 거부하고, 깨달음과 깨달은 스승을 우상화, 신비화하는 것을 조롱하여 붙여진 '안티-구루‘ U.G
책의 내용은 제자들이 구성한 것으로 보인다.
한 번의 책을 펼침으로 그it 깨달음을 얼마나 파악할 수 있겠느냐마는 문답식으로 이루어진 그들의 짜임이 이론서와 같은 어렵게 접근하고 있지 않기에 철학적인 부분의 접근을 그나마 쉽게 가져갈 수 있다. 현자와 젊은이가 대화를 주고받는 듯한 <미움받을 용기>와 비슷한 느낌이기도.
‘깨달음의 여행 같은 건 없습니다. 그런 여행길로 여러분을 인도해주는 척하니 사람들이나 그런 여행을 하려고 시도하는 사람들 모두가 다 스스로를 속이고 있는 겁니다. 여러분은 나하고 같이 걸을 수 없습니다. 어떻게 나하고 같이 걸을 수 있겠어요? 여러분은 가시덤불이나 돌멩이들에 잔뜩 겁을 집어먹고 있는 판인데...’ (ch4. 당혹과 이해 사이에서)
붙잡거나 매달릴 수 있을 만한 모든 걸 내 던져 버리고, 접점을 찾는 것, 그리고 색인이 뒤에 등장하는 부분은 주석과 같은 느낌으로 다시 접근해볼 수 있는 책이다.
3명이 이 리뷰를 추천합니다.공감3 댓글 0접어보기
종이책 그런 깨달음은 없다
평점8점 | c*****a | 2015-03-28
원문주소 : https://blog.yes24.com/document/7996391
작가는 태어난 직후 어머니의 사망으로 외조부모 슬하에서 자랍니다.
어릴때부터 많은 성자들을 만나게 되나 위선자들임을 깨달고 해탈에 이르고자 노력하게 됩니다. 이후 라마나 마하리쉬를 만나게 되나 깨달음을 얻지 못한채 석사학위 과정을 밟게 되나 외조부가 돌아가시자 그만두고 결혼을 하게 됩니다.
후에 지두 크리슈나무르티를 만나게 되고 7년 동안 교류하게 되나 아무소득없이 헤어지게 됩니다.
그후로 많은 신비로운 체험을 하지만 갑자기 어느날 모든것이 끝나버리게 됩니다. 어느 순간부터는 변화가 시작되어 고통을 겪고 새로운 리듬을 갖게 되기까지 3년이 걸렸습니다.
완벽한 인간이 될려고 자신의 행동과 생각을 통제해서 부자연스러운 존재가 될려고 한다는 말과 함께 생각이 무엇인지에 대한 저자의 견해와 인도가 무력한 처지에 있지만 희망은 있따는 견해, 인간의 외부에는 어떤한 힘이 없다면서 신과 인간이 무관하다고 말하고 있습니다.
이 外 여러가지 개인적인 견해를 밝힘으로써 깨달음이란 진정 무엇이고 인간은 어떻게 해야 하는지에 대한 생각을 말씀해주고 있습니다. 모든 사람이 같은 생각, 같은 방식으로 행동하고 사고할수는 없습니다.
다양한 사람들이 공존하는 세상에서 깨달음과 생각에 대해 많이 생각하는 계기가 된 서적이었습니다.
2명이 이 리뷰를 추천합니다.공감2 댓글 0접어보기
종이책 그런 깨달음은 없다.
평점10점 | r******b | 2015-04-20
원문주소 : https://blog.yes24.com/document/8021039
공부 좀 해본 동네형의 직설적인 충고?^^;;
종교적 신비체험에대한 환상은 깨지고 현실적인 모습으로 다시 돌아온 느낌입니다.
그동안 염불보다는 잿밥에 관심있는것 처럼 허황될 정도의 환상이 깨지고
균형이 잡혀가면서 다시 현실로 돌아와 질문을 던지게 만들어주는 좋은 책입니다.
1명이 이 리뷰를 추천합니다.공감1 댓글 0접어보기
eBook 구매 깨닮은 없다
평점10점 | YES마니아 : 플래티넘 k******6 | 2019-12-17
원문주소 : https://blog.yes24.com/document/11898393
읽었던 영성 책들의 내용과 다른 통찰로 이야기를 풀어가는 것이 재밌습니다. 명상과 현존, 영적 스승을 중요시 여기는 영성의 분위기를 뒤집어 버리네요.
저자는 책에서 자신은 아무것도 해줄 수 없으며, 모든 앎은 자신만이 갖고 있음에 대해 여러번 언급합니다. 호킨스 박사 책을 볼때도 느꼈지만 시원하지만 또 시원하지는 않은 느낌으로 긁으며 읽게 되는 책입니다.
이 리뷰가 도움이 되었나요?공감0 댓글 0접어보기
eBook 구매 한 번 읽어서는 이해하기가 힘든 책.
평점8점 | w*****s | 2019-07-13
원문주소 : https://blog.yes24.com/document/11461395
3번 이상 읽은 책인데, 매번 읽을 때마다 또 다른 이해가 다가옵니다. 처음에는 저자가 전하는 내용이 어려워서 어쩌면 저자의 경험을 이해하기 힘들어 거부반응이 일어날 수도 있습니다. 그러나 이런 깨달음에 분야에 관심이 있는 사람이라면 부정적 시각을 잠시 내려놓고 읽어볼 만한 가치가 충분합니다. 이해가 안되는 문장에서 자꾸 되돌아가서 재차 읽게 만든 문장들이 있는데, 그렇다고 손에서 내려놓고 싶은 책은 아니었습니다. 깨달음의 관점을 다른 시각에가 바라보고자 한다면 충분히 읽어볼 만한 책이라고 생각합니다.
Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, Gandhi trained in the law at the Inner Temple in London, and was called to the bar in June 1891, at the age of 22. After two uncertain years in India, where he was unable to start a successful law practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He went on to live in South Africa for 21 years. There, Gandhi raised a family and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India and soon set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against discrimination and excessive land-tax.
Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and, above all, achieving swaraj or self-rule. Gandhi adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn as a mark of identification with India's rural poor. He began to live in a self-sufficient residential community, to eat simple food, and undertake long fasts as a means of both introspection and political protest. Bringing anti-colonial nationalism to the common Indians, Gandhi led them in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 and in calling for the British to quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.
Gandhi's vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was challenged in the early 1940s by a Muslim nationalism which demanded a separate homeland for Muslims within British India. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Abstaining from the official celebration of independence, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to alleviate distress. In the months following, he undertook several hunger strikes to stop the religious violence. The last of these was begun in Delhi on 12 January 1948, when he was 78. The belief that Gandhi had been too resolute in his defense of both Pakistan and Indian Muslims spread among some Hindus in India. Among these was Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from Pune, western India, who assassinated Gandhi by firing three bullets into his chest at an interfaith prayer meeting in Delhi on 30 January 1948.
Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. Gandhi is considered to be the Father of the Nation in post-colonial India. During India's nationalist movement and in several decades immediately after, he was also commonly called Bapu (Gujarati endearment for "father", roughly "papa",[2] "daddy"[3]).
Early life and background
Parents
Gandhi's father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi (1822–1885), served as the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar state.[4][5] His family originated from the then village of Kutiana in what was then Junagadh State.[6] Although he only had been a clerk in the state administration and had an elementary education, Karamchand proved a capable chief minister.[7]
During his tenure, Karamchand married four times. His first two wives died young, after each had given birth to a daughter, and his third marriage was childless. In 1857, he sought his third wife's permission to remarry; that year, he married Putlibai (1844–1891), who also came from Junagadh,[7] and was from a PranamiVaishnava family.[8] Karamchand and Putlibai had four children: a son, Laxmidas (c. 1860–1914); a daughter, Raliatbehn (1862–1960); a second son, Karsandas (c. 1866–1913).[9][10] and a third son, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi[11][12] who was born on 2 October 1869[13] in Porbandar (also known as Sudamapuri), a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula and then part of the small princely state of Porbandar in the Kathiawar Agency of the British Raj.
In 1874, Gandhi's father Karamchand left Porbandar for the smaller state of Rajkot, where he became a counsellor to its ruler, the Thakur Sahib; though Rajkot was a less prestigious state than Porbandar, the British regional political agency was located there, which gave the state's diwan a measure of security.[14] In 1876, Karamchand became diwan of Rajkot and was succeeded as diwan of Porbandar by his brother Tulsidas. His family then rejoined him in Rajkot.[15]
Childhood
As a child, Gandhi was described by his sister Raliat as "restless as mercury, either playing or roaming about. One of his favourite pastimes was twisting dogs' ears."[16] The Indian classics, especially the stories of Shravana and king Harishchandra, had a great impact on Gandhi in his childhood. In his autobiography, he states that they left an indelible impression on his mind. He writes: "It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number." Gandhi's early self-identification with truth and love as supreme values is traceable to these epic characters.[17][18]
The family's religious background was eclectic. Mohandas was born into a GujaratiHinduModhBania family.[19][20] Gandhi's father Karamchand was Hindu and his mother Putlibai was from a Pranami Vaishnava Hindu family.[21][22] Gandhi's father was of Modh Baniya caste in the varna of Vaishya.[23] His mother came from the medieval Krishna bhakti-based Pranami tradition, whose religious texts include the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavata Purana, and a collection of 14 texts with teachings that the tradition believes to include the essence of the Vedas, the Quran and the Bible.[22][24] Gandhi was deeply influenced by his mother, an extremely pious lady who "would not think of taking her meals without her daily prayers... she would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching. To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her."[25]
At age 9, Gandhi entered the local school in Rajkot, near his home. There, he studied the rudiments of arithmetic, history, the Gujarati language and geography.[15] At the age of 11, he joined the High School in Rajkot, Alfred High School.[27] He was an average student, won some prizes, but was a shy and tongue tied student, with no interest in games; his only companions were books and school lessons.[28]
Marriage
In May 1883, the 13-year-old Mohandas was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Gokuldas Kapadia (her first name was usually shortened to "Kasturba", and affectionately to "Ba") in an arranged marriage, according to the custom of the region at that time.[29] In the process, he lost a year at school but was later allowed to make up by accelerating his studies.[30] His wedding was a joint event, where his brother and cousin were also married. Recalling the day of their marriage, he once said, "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." As was the prevailing tradition, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband.[31]
Writing many years later, Mohandas described with regret the lustful feelings he felt for his young bride: "even at school I used to think of her, and the thought of nightfall and our subsequent meeting was ever haunting me." He later recalled feeling jealous and possessive of her, such as when she would visit a temple with her girlfriends, and being sexually lustful in his feelings for her.[32]
In late 1885, Gandhi's father Karamchand died.[33] Gandhi, then 16 years old, and his wife of age 17 had their first baby, who survived only a few days. The two deaths anguished Gandhi.[33] The Gandhi couple had four more children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900.[29]
In November 1887, the 18-year-old Gandhi graduated from high school in Ahmedabad.[34] In January 1888, he enrolled at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar State, then the sole degree-granting institution of higher education in the region. However, he dropped out, and returned to his family in Porbandar.[35]
Three years in London
Student of law
Gandhi had dropped out of the cheapest college he could afford in Bombay.[36] Mavji Dave Joshiji, a Brahmin priest and family friend, advised Gandhi and his family that he should consider law studies in London.[37][38] In July 1888, his wife Kasturba gave birth to their first surviving son, Harilal.[39] His mother was not comfortable about Gandhi leaving his wife and family, and going so far from home. Gandhi's uncle Tulsidas also tried to dissuade his nephew. Gandhi wanted to go. To persuade his wife and mother, Gandhi made a vow in front of his mother that he would abstain from meat, alcohol and women. Gandhi's brother Laxmidas, who was already a lawyer, cheered Gandhi's London studies plan and offered to support him. Putlibai gave Gandhi her permission and blessing.[35][40]
On 10 August 1888, Gandhi, aged 18, left Porbandar for Mumbai, then known as Bombay. Upon arrival, he stayed with the local Modh Bania community whose elders warned him that England would tempt him to compromise his religion, and eat and drink in Western ways. Despite Gandhi informing them of his promise to his mother and her blessings, he was excommunicated from his caste. Gandhi ignored this, and on 4 September, he sailed from Bombay to London, with his brother seeing him off.[39][36] Gandhi attended University College, London, where he took classes in English literature with Henry Morley in 1888–1889.[41]
He also enrolled at the Inns of Court School of Law in Inner Temple with the intention of becoming a barrister.[38] His childhood shyness and self-withdrawal had continued through his teens. He retained these traits when he arrived in London, but joined a public speaking practice group and overcame his shyness sufficiently to practise law.[42]
He demonstrated a keen interest in the welfare of London's impoverished dockland communities. In 1889, a bitter trade dispute broke out in London, with dockers striking for better pay and conditions, and seamen, shipbuilders, factory girls and other joining the strike in solidarity. The strikers were successful, in part due to the mediation of Cardinal Manning, leading Gandhi and an Indian friend to make a point of visiting the cardinal and thanking him for his work.[43]
Vegetarianism and committee work
Gandhi's time in London was influenced by the vow he had made to his mother. He tried to adopt "English" customs, including taking dancing lessons. However, he did not appreciate the bland vegetarian food offered by his landlady and was frequently hungry until he found one of London's few vegetarian restaurants. Influenced by Henry Salt's writing, he joined the London Vegetarian Society, and was elected to its executive committee[44] under the aegis of its president and benefactor Arnold Hills. An achievement while on the committee was the establishment of a Bayswater chapter.[45] Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 to further universal brotherhood, and which was devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu literature. They encouraged Gandhi to join them in reading the Bhagavad Gita both in translation as well as in the original.[44]
Gandhi had a friendly and productive relationship with Hills, but the two men took a different view on the continued LVS membership of fellow committee member Thomas Allinson. Their disagreement is the first known example of Gandhi challenging authority, despite his shyness and temperamental disinclination towards confrontation.
Allinson had been promoting newly available birth control methods, but Hills disapproved of these, believing they undermined public morality. He believed vegetarianism to be a moral movement and that Allinson should therefore no longer remain a member of the LVS. Gandhi shared Hills' views on the dangers of birth control, but defended Allinson's right to differ.[46] It would have been hard for Gandhi to challenge Hills; Hills was 12 years his senior and unlike Gandhi, highly eloquent. He bankrolled the LVS and was a captain of industry with his Thames Ironworks company employing more than 6,000 people in the East End of London. He was also a highly accomplished sportsman who later founded the football club West Ham United. In his 1927 An Autobiography, Vol. I, Gandhi wrote:
The question deeply interested me...I had a high regard for Mr. Hills and his generosity. But I thought it was quite improper to exclude a man from a vegetarian society simply because he refused to regard puritan morals as one of the objects of the society[46]
A motion to remove Allinson was raised, and was debated and voted on by the committee. Gandhi's shyness was an obstacle to his defence of Allinson at the committee meeting. He wrote his views down on paper but shyness prevented him from reading out his arguments, so Hills, the President, asked another committee member to read them out for him. Although some other members of the committee agreed with Gandhi, the vote was lost and Allinson excluded. There were no hard feelings, with Hills proposing the toast at the LVS farewell dinner in honour of Gandhi's return to India.[47]
Called to the bar
Gandhi, at age 22, was called to the bar in June 1891 and then left London for India, where he learned that his mother had died while he was in London and that his family had kept the news from him.[44] His attempts at establishing a law practice in Bombay failed because he was psychologically unable to cross-examine witnesses. He returned to Rajkot to make a modest living drafting petitions for litigants, but he was forced to stop when he ran afoul of British officer Sam Sunny.[45][44]
In 1893, a Muslim merchant in Kathiawar named Dada Abdullah contacted Gandhi. Abdullah owned a large successful shipping business in South Africa. His distant cousin in Johannesburg needed a lawyer, and they preferred someone with Kathiawari heritage. Gandhi inquired about his pay for the work. They offered a total salary of £105 (~$4,143.31 2023 money) plus travel expenses. He accepted it, knowing that it would be at least a one-year commitment in the Colony of Natal, South Africa, also a part of the British Empire.[45][48]
Civil rights activist in South Africa (1893–1914)
In April 1893, Gandhi, aged 23, set sail for South Africa to be the lawyer for Abdullah's cousin.[48][49] He spent 21 years in South Africa, where he developed his political views, ethics and politics.[50][51]
Immediately upon arriving in South Africa, Gandhi faced discrimination because of his skin colour and heritage.[52] He was not allowed to sit with European passengers in the stagecoach and told to sit on the floor near the driver, then beaten when he refused; elsewhere he was kicked into a gutter for daring to walk near a house, in another instance thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg after refusing to leave the first-class.[36][53] He sat in the train station, shivering all night and pondering if he should return to India or protest for his rights.[53] He chose to protest and was allowed to board the train the next day.[54] In another incident, the magistrate of a Durban court ordered Gandhi to remove his turban, which he refused to do.[36] Indians were not allowed to walk on public footpaths in South Africa. Gandhi was kicked by a police officer out of the footpath onto the street without warning.[36]
When Gandhi arrived in South Africa, according to Herman, he thought of himself as "a Briton first, and an Indian second".[55] However, the prejudice against him and his fellow Indians from British people that Gandhi experienced and observed deeply bothered him. He found it humiliating, struggling to understand how some people can feel honour or superiority or pleasure in such inhumane practices.[53] Gandhi began to question his people's standing in the British Empire.[56]
The Abdullah case that had brought him to South Africa concluded in May 1894, and the Indian community organised a farewell party for Gandhi as he prepared to return to India.[57] However, a new Natal government discriminatory proposal led to Gandhi extending his original period of stay in South Africa. He planned to assist Indians in opposing a bill to deny them the right to vote, a right then proposed to be an exclusive European right. He asked Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, to reconsider his position on this bill.[50] Though unable to halt the bill's passage, his campaign was successful in drawing attention to the grievances of Indians in South Africa. He helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894,[45][54] and through this organisation, he moulded the Indian community of South Africa into a unified political force. In January 1897, when Gandhi landed in Durban, a mob of white settlers attacked him[58] and he escaped only through the efforts of the wife of the police superintendent. However, he refused to press charges against any member of the mob.[45]
During the Boer War, Gandhi volunteered in 1900 to form a group of stretcher-bearers as the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps. According to Arthur Herman, Gandhi wanted to disprove the British colonial stereotype that Hindus were not fit for "manly" activities involving danger and exertion, unlike the Muslim "martial races".[59] Gandhi raised eleven hundred Indian volunteers, to support British combat troops against the Boers. They were trained and medically certified to serve on the front lines. They were auxiliaries at the Battle of Colenso to a White volunteer ambulance corps. At the battle of Spion Kop Gandhi and his bearers moved to the front line and had to carry wounded soldiers for miles to a field hospital because the terrain was too rough for the ambulances. Gandhi and thirty-seven other Indians received the Queen's South Africa Medal.[60][61]
In 1906, the Transvaal government promulgated a new Act compelling registration of the colony's Indian and Chinese populations. At a mass protest meeting held in Johannesburg on 11 September that year, Gandhi adopted his still evolving methodology of Satyagraha (devotion to the truth), or nonviolent protest, for the first time.[62] According to Anthony Parel, Gandhi was also influenced by the Tamil moral text Tirukkuṛaḷ after Leo Tolstoy mentioned it in their correspondence that began with "A Letter to a Hindu".[63][64] Gandhi urged Indians to defy the new law and to suffer the punishments for doing so. Gandhi's ideas of protests, persuasion skills and public relations had emerged. He took these back to India in 1915.[65][66]
Europeans, Indians and Africans
Gandhi focused his attention on Indians and Africans while he was in South Africa. He initially was not interested in politics. This changed, however, after he was discriminated against and bullied, such as by being thrown out of a train coach because of his skin colour by a white train official. After several such incidents with Whites in South Africa, Gandhi's thinking and focus changed, and he felt he must resist this and fight for rights. He entered politics by forming the Natal Indian Congress.[67] According to Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Gandhi's views on racism are contentious in some cases, but that changed afterward.[further explanation needed] Gandhi suffered persecution from the beginning in South Africa. Like with other coloured people, white officials denied him his rights, and the press and those in the streets bullied and called him a "parasite", "semi-barbarous", "canker", "squalid coolie", "yellow man", and other epithets. People would spit on him as an expression of racial hate.[68]
While in South Africa, Gandhi focused on the racial persecution of Indians before he started to focus on racism against Africans. In some cases, state Desai and Vahed, his behaviour was one of being a willing part of racial stereotyping and African exploitation.[68] During a speech in September 1896, Gandhi complained that the whites in the British colony of South Africa were "degrading the Indian to the level of a raw Kaffir".[69] Scholars cite it as an example of evidence that Gandhi at that time thought of Indians and black South Africans differently.[68] As another example given by Herman, Gandhi, at the age of 24, prepared a legal brief for the Natal Assembly in 1895, seeking voting rights for Indians. Gandhi cited race history and European Orientalists' opinions that "Anglo-Saxons and Indians are sprung from the same Aryan stock or rather the Indo-European peoples", and argued that Indians should not be grouped with the Africans.[57]
Years later, Gandhi and his colleagues served and helped Africans as nurses and by opposing racism. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela is among admirers of Gandhi's efforts to fight against racism in Africa.[70] The general image of Gandhi, state Desai and Vahed, has been reinvented since his assassination as though he was always a saint, when in reality his life was more complex, contained inconvenient truths, and was one that changed over time.[68] Scholars have also pointed the evidence to a rich history of co-operation and efforts by Gandhi and Indian people with nonwhite South Africans against persecution of Africans and the Apartheid.[71]
In 1906, when the Bambatha Rebellion broke out in the colony of Natal, the then 36-year-old Gandhi, despite sympathising with the Zulu rebels, encouraged Indian South Africans to form a volunteer stretcher-bearer unit.[72] Writing in the Indian Opinion, Gandhi argued that military service would be beneficial to the Indian community and claimed it would give them "health and happiness".[73] Gandhi eventually led a volunteer mixed unit of Indian and African stretcher-bearers to treat wounded combatants during the suppression of the rebellion.[72]
The medical unit commanded by Gandhi operated for less than two months before being disbanded.[72] After the suppression of the rebellion, the colonial establishment showed no interest in extending to the Indian community the civil rights granted to white South Africans. This led Gandhi to becoming disillusioned with the Empire and aroused a spiritual awakening with him; historian Arthur L. Herman wrote that his African experience was a part of his great disillusionment with the West, transforming him into an "uncompromising non-cooperator".[73]
By 1910, Gandhi's newspaper, Indian Opinion, was covering reports on discrimination against Africans by the colonial regime. Gandhi remarked that the Africans are "alone are the original inhabitants of the land. … The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the land forcibly and appropriated it to themselves."[74]
In 1910, Gandhi established, with the help of his friend Hermann Kallenbach, an idealistic community they named Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg.[75][76] There he nurtured his policy of peaceful resistance.[77]
In the years after black South Africans gained the right to vote in South Africa (1994), Gandhi was proclaimed a national hero with numerous monuments.[78]
At the request of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, conveyed to him by C. F. Andrews, Gandhi returned to India in 1915. He brought an international reputation as a leading Indian nationalist, theorist and community organiser.
Gandhi joined the Indian National Congress and was introduced to Indian issues, politics and the Indian people primarily by Gokhale. Gokhale was a key leader of the Congress Party best known for his restraint and moderation, and his insistence on working inside the system. Gandhi took Gokhale's liberal approach based on British Whiggish traditions and transformed it to make it look Indian.[79]
Gandhi took leadership of the Congress in 1920 and began escalating demands until on 26 January 1930 the Indian National Congress declared the independence of India. The British did not recognise the declaration but negotiations ensued, with the Congress taking a role in provincial government in the late 1930s. Gandhi and the Congress withdrew their support of the Raj when the Viceroy declared war on Germany in September 1939 without consultation. Tensions escalated until Gandhi demanded immediate independence in 1942 and the British responded by imprisoning him and tens of thousands of Congress leaders. Meanwhile, the Muslim League did co-operate with Britain and moved, against Gandhi's strong opposition, to demands for a totally separate Muslim state of Pakistan. In August 1947 the British partitioned the land with India and Pakistan each achieving independence on terms that Gandhi disapproved.[80]
In April 1918, during the latter part of World War I, the Viceroy invited Gandhi to a War Conference in Delhi.[81] Gandhi agreed to actively recruit Indians for the war effort.[82][36] In contrast to the Zulu War of 1906 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he recruited volunteers for the Ambulance Corps, this time Gandhi attempted to recruit combatants. In a June 1918 leaflet entitled "Appeal for Enlistment", Gandhi wrote "To bring about such a state of things we should have the ability to defend ourselves, that is, the ability to bear arms and to use them... If we want to learn the use of arms with the greatest possible despatch, it is our duty to enlist ourselves in the army."[83] He did, however, stipulate in a letter to the Viceroy's private secretary that he "personally will not kill or injure anybody, friend or foe."[84]
Gandhi's war recruitment campaign brought into question his consistency on nonviolence. Gandhi's private secretary noted that "The question of the consistency between his creed of 'Ahimsa' (nonviolence) and his recruiting campaign was raised not only then but has been discussed ever since."[82]
In July 1918, Gandhi admitted that he couldn't persuade even one individual to enlist for the world war. "So far I have not a single recruit to my credit apart," Gandhi wrote. He added: "They object because they fear to die."[85]
Gandhi's first major achievement came in 1917 with the Champaran agitation in Bihar. The Champaran agitation pitted the local peasantry against largely Anglo-Indian plantation owners who were backed by the local administration. The peasants were forced to grow indigo (Indigofera sp.), a cash crop for Indigo dye whose demand had been declining over two decades, and were forced to sell their crops to the planters at a fixed price. Unhappy with this, the peasantry appealed to Gandhi at his ashram in Ahmedabad. Pursuing a strategy of nonviolent protest, Gandhi took the administration by surprise and won concessions from the authorities.[86]
In 1918, Kheda was hit by floods and famine and the peasantry was demanding relief from taxes. Gandhi moved his headquarters to Nadiad,[87] organising scores of supporters and fresh volunteers from the region, the most notable being Vallabhbhai Patel.[88] Using non-co-operation as a technique, Gandhi initiated a signature campaign where peasants pledged non-payment of revenue even under the threat of confiscation of land. A social boycott of mamlatdars and talatdars (revenue officials within the district) accompanied the agitation. Gandhi worked hard to win public support for the agitation across the country. For five months, the administration refused, but by the end of May 1918, the Government gave way on important provisions and relaxed the conditions of payment of revenue tax until the famine ended. In Kheda, Vallabhbhai Patel represented the farmers in negotiations with the British, who suspended revenue collection and released all the prisoners.[89]
In 1919, following World War I, Gandhi (aged 49) sought political co-operation from Muslims in his fight against British imperialism by supporting the Ottoman Empire that had been defeated in the World War. Before this initiative of Gandhi, communal disputes and religious riots between Hindus and Muslims were common in British India, such as the riots of 1917–18. Gandhi had already supported the British crown with resources and by recruiting Indian soldiers to fight the war in Europe on the British side. This effort of Gandhi was in part motivated by the British promise to reciprocate the help with swaraj (self-government) to Indians after the end of World War I.[90] The British government had offered, instead of self-government, minor reforms instead, disappointing Gandhi.[91] Gandhi announced his satyagraha (civil disobedience) intentions. The British colonial officials made their counter move by passing the Rowlatt Act, to block Gandhi's movement. The Act allowed the British government to treat civil disobedience participants as criminals and gave it the legal basis to arrest anyone for "preventive indefinite detention, incarceration without judicial review or any need for a trial".[92]
Gandhi felt that Hindu-Muslim co-operation was necessary for political progress against the British. He leveraged the Khilafat movement, wherein Sunni Muslims in India, their leaders such as the sultans of princely states in India and Ali brothers championed the Turkish Caliph as a solidarity symbol of Sunni Islamic community (ummah). They saw the Caliph as their means to support Islam and the Islamic law after the defeat of Ottoman Empire in World War I.[93][94][95] Gandhi's support to the Khilafat movement led to mixed results. It initially led to a strong Muslim support for Gandhi. However, the Hindu leaders including Rabindranath Tagore questioned Gandhi's leadership because they were largely against recognising or supporting the Sunni Islamic Caliph in Turkey.[c]
The increasing Muslim support for Gandhi, after he championed the Caliph's cause, temporarily stopped the Hindu-Muslim communal violence. It offered evidence of inter-communal harmony in joint Rowlatt satyagraha demonstration rallies, raising Gandhi's stature as the political leader to the British.[99][100] His support for the Khilafat movement also helped him sideline Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had announced his opposition to the satyagraha non-co-operation movement approach of Gandhi. Jinnah began creating his independent support, and later went on to lead the demand for West and East Pakistan. Though they agreed in general terms on Indian independence, they disagreed on the means of achieving this. Jinnah was mainly interested in dealing with the British via constitutional negotiation, rather than attempting to agitate the masses.[101][102][103]
In 1922 the Khilafat movement gradually collapsed following the end of the non-cooperation movement with the arrest of Gandhi.[104] A number of Muslim leaders and delegates abandoned Gandhi and Congress.[105] Hindu-Muslim communal conflicts reignited. Deadly religious riots re-appeared in numerous cities, with 91 in United Provinces of Agra and Oudh alone.[106][107]
With his book Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi, aged 40, declared that British rule was established in India with the co-operation of Indians and had survived only because of this co-operation. If Indians refused to co-operate, British rule would collapse and swaraj (Indian independence) would come.[108][5]
In February 1919, Gandhi cautioned the Viceroy of India with a cable communication that if the British were to pass the Rowlatt Act, he would appeal to Indians to start civil disobedience.[109] The British government ignored him and passed the law, stating it would not yield to threats. The satyagraha civil disobedience followed, with people assembling to protest the Rowlatt Act. On 30 March 1919, British law officers opened fire on an assembly of unarmed people, peacefully gathered, participating in satyagraha in Delhi.[109]
People rioted in retaliation. On 6 April 1919, a Hindu festival day, he asked a crowd to remember not to injure or kill British people, but to express their frustration with peace, to boycott British goods and burn any British clothing they owned. He emphasised the use of non-violence to the British and towards each other, even if the other side used violence. Communities across India announced plans to gather in greater numbers to protest. Government warned him to not enter Delhi. Gandhi defied the order. On 9 April, Gandhi was arrested.[109]
On 13 April 1919, people including women with children gathered in an Amritsar park, and British Indian Army officer Reginald Dyer surrounded them and ordered troops under his command to fire on them. The resulting Jallianwala Bagh massacre (or Amritsar massacre) of hundreds of Sikh and Hindu civilians enraged the subcontinent, but was supported by some Britons and parts of the British media as a necessary response. Gandhi in Ahmedabad, on the day after the massacre in Amritsar, did not criticise the British and instead criticised his fellow countrymen for not exclusively using 'love' to deal with the 'hate' of the British government.[109] Gandhi demanded that the Indian people stop all violence, stop all property destruction, and went on fast-to-death to pressure Indians to stop their rioting.[110]
The massacre and Gandhi's non-violent response to it moved many, but also made some Sikhs and Hindus upset that Dyer was getting away with murder. Investigation committees were formed by the British, which Gandhi asked Indians to boycott.[109] The unfolding events, the massacre and the British response, led Gandhi to the belief that Indians will never get a fair equal treatment under British rulers, and he shifted his attention to swaraj and political independence for India.[111] In 1921, Gandhi was the leader of the Indian National Congress.[95] He reorganised the Congress. With Congress now behind him, and Muslim support triggered by his backing the Khilafat movement to restore the Caliph in Turkey,[95] Gandhi had the political support and the attention of the British Raj.[98][92][94]
Gandhi expanded his nonviolent non-co-operation platform to include the swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his advocacy that khadi (homespun cloth) be worn by all Indians instead of British-made textiles. Gandhi exhorted Indian men and women, rich or poor, to spend time each day spinning khadi in support of the independence movement.[112] In addition to boycotting British products, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British institutions and law courts, to resign from government employment, and to forsake British titles and honours. Gandhi thus began his journey aimed at crippling the British India government economically, politically and administratively.[113]
The appeal of "Non-cooperation" grew, its social popularity drew participation from all strata of Indian society. Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He began his sentence on 18 March 1922. With Gandhi isolated in prison, the Indian National Congress split into two factions, one led by Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal Nehru favouring party participation in the legislatures, and the other led by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, opposing this move.[114] Furthermore, co-operation among Hindus and Muslims ended as Khilafat movement collapsed with the rise of Atatürk in Turkey. Muslim leaders left the Congress and began forming Muslim organisations. The political base behind Gandhi had broken into factions. Gandhi was released in February 1924 for an appendicitis operation, having served only two years.[115][116]
After his early release from prison for political crimes in 1924, over the second half of the 1920s Gandhi continued to pursue swaraj. He pushed through a resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 calling on the British government to grant India dominion status or face a new campaign of non-cooperation with complete independence for the country as its goal.[117] After his support for World War I with Indian combat troops, and the failure of Khilafat movement in preserving the rule of Caliph in Turkey, followed by a collapse in Muslim support for his leadership, some such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh questioned his values and non-violent approach.[94][118] While many Hindu leaders championed a demand for immediate independence, Gandhi revised his own call to a one-year wait, instead of two.[117]
The British did not respond favourably to Gandhi's proposal. British political leaders such as Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill announced opposition to "the appeasers of Gandhi" in their discussions with European diplomats who sympathised with Indian demands.[119] On 31 December 1929, an Indian flag was unfurled in Lahore. Gandhi led Congress in a celebration on 26 January 1930 of India's Independence Day in Lahore. This day was commemorated by almost every other Indian organisation. Gandhi then launched a new Satyagraha against the British salt tax in March 1930. Gandhi sent an ultimatum in the form of a letter personally addressed to Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, on 2 March. Gandhi condemned British rule in the letter, describing it as "a curse" that "has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration...It has reduced us politically to serfdom." Gandhi also mentioned in the letter that the viceroy received a salary "over five thousand times India's average income." In the letter, Gandhi also stressed his continued adherence to non-violent forms of protest.[120]
This was highlighted by the Salt March to Dandi from 12 March to 6 April, where, together with 78 volunteers, he marched 388 kilometres (241 mi) from Ahmedabad to Dandi, Gujarat to make salt himself, with the declared intention of breaking the salt laws. The march took 25 days to cover 240 miles with Gandhi speaking to often huge crowds along the way. Thousands of Indians joined him in Dandi. On 5 May he was interned under a regulation dating from 1827 in anticipation of a protest that he had planned. The protest at Dharasana salt works on 21 May went ahead without him see. A horrified American journalist, Webb Miller, described the British response thus:
In complete silence the Gandhi men drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. A picked column advanced from the crowd, waded the ditches and approached the barbed wire stockade... at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shot lathis [long bamboo sticks]. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off blows. They went down like ninepins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls... Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.[121]
This went on for hours until some 300 or more protesters had been beaten, many seriously injured and two killed. At no time did they offer any resistance.
This campaign was one of his most successful at upsetting British hold on India; Britain responded by imprisoning over 60,000 people.[122] Congress estimates, however, put the figure at 90,000. Among them was one of Gandhi's lieutenants, Jawaharlal Nehru.
According to Sarma, Gandhi recruited women to participate in the salt tax campaigns and the boycott of foreign products, which gave many women a new self-confidence and dignity in the mainstream of Indian public life.[123] However, other scholars such as Marilyn French state that Gandhi barred women from joining his civil disobedience movement because he feared he would be accused of using women as a political shield.[124] When women insisted on joining the movement and participating in public demonstrations, Gandhi asked the volunteers to get permissions of their guardians and only those women who can arrange child-care should join him.[125] Regardless of Gandhi's apprehensions and views, Indian women joined the Salt March by the thousands to defy the British salt taxes and monopoly on salt mining. After Gandhi's arrest, the women marched and picketed shops on their own, accepting violence and verbal abuse from British authorities for the cause in the manner Gandhi inspired.[124]
Gandhi as folk hero
Indian Congress in the 1920s appealed to Andhra Pradesh peasants by creating Telugu language plays that combined Indian mythology and legends, linked them to Gandhi's ideas, and portrayed Gandhi as a messiah, a reincarnation of ancient and medieval Indian nationalist leaders and saints. The plays built support among peasants steeped in traditional Hindu culture, according to Murali, and this effort made Gandhi a folk hero in Telugu speaking villages, a sacred messiah-like figure.[126]
According to Dennis Dalton, it was Gandhi's ideas that were responsible for his wide following. Gandhi criticised Western civilisation as one driven by "brute force and immorality", contrasting it with his categorisation of Indian civilisation as one driven by "soul force and morality".[127] Gandhi captured the imagination of the people of his heritage with his ideas about winning "hate with love". These ideas are evidenced in his pamphlets from the 1890s, in South Africa, where too he was popular among the Indian indentured workers. After he returned to India, people flocked to him because he reflected their values.[127]
Gandhi also campaigned hard going from one rural corner of the Indian subcontinent to another. He used terminology and phrases such as Rama-rajya from Ramayana, Prahlada as a paradigmatic icon, and such cultural symbols as another facet of swaraj and satyagraha.[128] During his lifetime, these ideas sounded strange outside India, but they readily and deeply resonated with the culture and historic values of his people.[127][129]
Negotiations
The government, represented by Lord Irwin, decided to negotiate with Gandhi. The Gandhi–Irwin Pact was signed in March 1931. The British Government agreed to free all political prisoners, in return for the suspension of the civil disobedience movement. According to the pact, Gandhi was invited to attend the Round Table Conference in London for discussions and as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The conference was a disappointment to Gandhi and the nationalists. Gandhi expected to discuss India's independence, while the British side focused on the Indian princes and Indian minorities rather than on a transfer of power. Lord Irwin's successor, Lord Willingdon, took a hard line against India as an independent nation, began a new campaign of controlling and subduing the nationalist movement. Gandhi was again arrested, and the government tried and failed to negate his influence by completely isolating him from his followers.[130]
In Britain, Winston Churchill, a prominent Conservative politician who was then out of office but later became its prime minister, became a vigorous and articulate critic of Gandhi and opponent of his long-term plans. Churchill often ridiculed Gandhi, saying in a widely reported 1931 speech:
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace....to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.[131]
Churchill's bitterness against Gandhi grew in the 1930s. He called Gandhi as the one who was "seditious in aim" whose evil genius and multiform menace was attacking the British empire. Churchill called him a dictator, a "Hindu Mussolini", fomenting a race war, trying to replace the Raj with Brahmin cronies, playing on the ignorance of Indian masses, all for selfish gain.[132] Churchill attempted to isolate Gandhi, and his criticism of Gandhi was widely covered by European and American press. It gained Churchill sympathetic support, but it also increased support for Gandhi among Europeans. The developments heightened Churchill's anxiety that the "British themselves would give up out of pacifism and misplaced conscience".[132]
Round Table Conferences
During the discussions between Gandhi and the British government over 1931–32 at the Round Table Conferences, Gandhi, now aged about 62, sought constitutional reforms as a preparation to the end of colonial British rule, and begin the self-rule by Indians.[133] The British side sought reforms that would keep the Indian subcontinent as a colony. The British negotiators proposed constitutional reforms on a British Dominion model that established separate electorates based on religious and social divisions. The British questioned the Congress party and Gandhi's authority to speak for all of India.[134] They invited Indian religious leaders, such as Muslims and Sikhs, to press their demands along religious lines, as well as B. R. Ambedkar as the representative leader of the untouchables.[133] Gandhi vehemently opposed a constitution that enshrined rights or representations based on communal divisions, because he feared that it would not bring people together but divide them, perpetuate their status, and divert the attention from India's struggle to end the colonial rule.[135][136]
The Second Round Table conference was the only time he left India between 1914 and his death in 1948. He declined the government's offer of accommodation in an expensive West End hotel, preferring to stay in the East End, to live among working-class people, as he did in India.[137] He based himself in a small cell-bedroom at Kingsley Hall for the three-month duration of his stay and was enthusiastically received by East Enders.[138] During this time he renewed his links with the British vegetarian movement.
After Gandhi returned from the Second Round Table conference, he started a new satyagraha. He was arrested and imprisoned at the Yerwada Jail, Pune. While he was in prison, the British government enacted a new law that granted untouchables a separate electorate. It came to be known as the Communal Award.[139] In protest, Gandhi started a fast-unto-death, while he was held in prison.[140] The resulting public outcry forced the government, in consultations with Ambedkar, to replace the Communal Award with a compromise Poona Pact.[141][142]
Congress politics
In 1934 Gandhi resigned from Congress party membership. He did not disagree with the party's position but felt that if he resigned, his popularity with Indians would cease to stifle the party's membership, which actually varied, including communists, socialists, trade unionists, students, religious conservatives, and those with pro-business convictions, and that these various voices would get a chance to make themselves heard. Gandhi also wanted to avoid being a target for Raj propaganda by leading a party that had temporarily accepted political accommodation with the Raj.[143]
Gandhi returned to active politics again in 1936, with the Nehru presidency and the Lucknow session of the Congress. Although Gandhi wanted a total focus on the task of winning independence and not speculation about India's future, he did not restrain the Congress from adopting socialism as its goal. Gandhi had a clash with Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been elected president in 1938, and who had previously expressed a lack of faith in nonviolence as a means of protest.[144] Despite Gandhi's opposition, Bose won a second term as Congress President, against Gandhi's nominee, Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Gandhi declared that Sitaramayya's defeat was his defeat.[145] Bose later left the Congress when the All-India leaders resigned en masse in protest of his abandonment of the principles introduced by Gandhi.[146][147]
Gandhi opposed providing any help to the British war effort and he campaigned against any Indian participation in World War II.[148] The British government responded with the arrests of Gandhi and many other Congress leaders and killed over 1,000 Indians who participated in this movement.[149] A number of violent attacks were also carried out by the nationalists against the British government.[150] While Gandhi's campaign did not enjoy the support of a number of Indian leaders, and over 2.5 million Indians volunteered and joined the British military to fight on various fronts of the Allied Forces, the movement played a role in weakening the control over the South Asian region by the British regime and it ultimately paved the way for Indian independence.[150][148]
Gandhi's opposition to the Indian participation in World War II was motivated by his belief that India could not be party to a war ostensibly being fought for democratic freedom while that freedom was denied to India itself.[151] He also condemned Nazism and Fascism, a view which won endorsement of other Indian leaders. As the war progressed, Gandhi intensified his demand for independence, calling for the British to Quit India in a 1942 speech in Mumbai.[152] This was Gandhi's and the Congress Party's most definitive revolt aimed at securing the British exit from India.[153] The British government responded quickly to the Quit India speech, and within hours after Gandhi's speech arrested Gandhi and all the members of the Congress Working Committee.[154] His countrymen retaliated the arrests by damaging or burning down hundreds of government owned railway stations, police stations, and cutting down telegraph wires.[155]
In 1942, Gandhi now nearing age 73, urged his people to completely stop co-operating with the imperial government. In this effort, he urged that they neither kill nor injure British people, but be willing to suffer and die if violence is initiated by the British officials.[152] He clarified that the movement would not be stopped because of any individual acts of violence, saying that the "ordered anarchy" of "the present system of administration" was "worse than real anarchy."[156][157] He urged Indians to karo ya maro ("do or die") in the cause of their rights and freedoms.[152][158]
Gandhi's arrest lasted two years, as he was held in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. During this period, his long time secretary Mahadev Desai died of a heart attack, his wife Kasturba died after 18 months' imprisonment on 22 February 1944; and Gandhi suffered a severe malaria attack.[155] While in jail, he agreed to an interview with Stuart Gelder, a British journalist. Gelder then composed and released an interview summary, cabled it to the mainstream press, that announced sudden concessions Gandhi was willing to make, comments that shocked his countrymen, the Congress workers and even Gandhi. The latter two claimed that it distorted what Gandhi actually said on a range of topics and falsely repudiated the Quit India movement.[155]
Gandhi was released before the end of the war on 6 May 1944 because of his failing health and necessary surgery; the Raj did not want him to die in prison and enrage the nation. He came out of detention to an altered political scene – the Muslim League for example, which a few years earlier had appeared marginal, "now occupied the centre of the political stage"[159] and the topic of Jinnah's campaign for Pakistan was a major talking point. Gandhi and Jinnah had extensive correspondence and the two men met several times over a period of two weeks in September 1944 at Jinnah's house in Bombay, where Gandhi insisted on a united religiously plural and independent India which included Muslims and non-Muslims of the Indian subcontinent coexisting. Jinnah rejected this proposal and insisted instead for partitioning the subcontinent on religious lines to create a separate Muslim homeland (later Pakistan).[160] These discussions continued through 1947.[161]
While the leaders of Congress languished in jail, the other parties supported the war and gained organisational strength. Underground publications flailed at the ruthless suppression of Congress, but it had little control over events.[162] At the end of the war, the British gave clear indications that power would be transferred to Indian hands. At this point Gandhi called off the struggle, and around 100,000 political prisoners were released, including the Congress's leadership.[163]
Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines.[164][160][165] The Indian National Congress and Gandhi called for the British to Quit India. However, the All-India Muslim League demanded "Divide and Quit India".[166][167] Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and the Muslim League to co-operate and attain independence under a provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim majority.[168]
Jinnah rejected Gandhi's proposal and called for Direct Action Day, on 16 August 1946, to press Muslims to publicly gather in cities and support his proposal for the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim state and non-Muslim state. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal – now Bangladesh and West Bengal, gave Calcutta's police special holiday to celebrate the Direct Action Day.[169] The Direct Action Day triggered a mass murder of Calcutta Hindus and the torching of their property, and holidaying police were missing to contain or stop the conflict.[170] The British government did not order its army to move in to contain the violence.[169] The violence on Direct Action Day led to retaliatory violence against Muslims across India. Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands were injured in the cycle of violence in the days that followed.[171] Gandhi visited the most riot-prone areas to appeal a stop to the massacres.[170]
Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy and Governor-General of British India for three years through February 1947, had worked with Gandhi and Jinnah to find a common ground, before and after accepting Indian independence in principle. Wavell condemned Gandhi's character and motives as well as his ideas. Wavell accused Gandhi of harbouring the single minded idea to "overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu raj", and called Gandhi a "malignant, malevolent, exceedingly shrewd" politician.[172] Wavell feared a civil war on the Indian subcontinent, and doubted Gandhi would be able to stop it.[172]
The British reluctantly agreed to grant independence to the people of the Indian subcontinent, but accepted Jinnah's proposal of partitioning the land into Pakistan and India. Gandhi was involved in the final negotiations, but Stanley Wolpert states the "plan to carve up British India was never approved of or accepted by Gandhi".[173]
The partition was controversial and violently disputed. More than half a million were killed in religious riots as 10 million to 12 million non-Muslims (Hindus and Sikhs mostly) migrated from Pakistan into India, and Muslims migrated from India into Pakistan, across the newly created borders of India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan.[174]
Gandhi spent the day of independence not celebrating the end of the British rule but appealing for peace among his countrymen by fasting and spinning in Calcutta on 15 August 1947. The partition had gripped the Indian subcontinent with religious violence and the streets were filled with corpses.[175] Gandhi's fasting and protests are credited for stopping the religious riots and communal violence.[172][176][177][178][179][180][181][182][183]
At 5:17 pm on 30 January 1948, Gandhi was with his grandnieces in the garden of Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti), on his way to address a prayer meeting, when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, fired three bullets into his chest from a pistol at close range.[184][185] According to some accounts, Gandhi died instantly.[186][187] In other accounts, such as one prepared by an eyewitness journalist, Gandhi was carried into the Birla House, into a bedroom. There he died about 30 minutes later as one of Gandhi's family members read verses from Hindu scriptures.[188][189][190][191][176]
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed his countrymen over the All-India Radio saying:[192]
Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that; nevertheless, we will not see him again, as we have seen him for these many years, we will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not only for me, but for millions and millions in this country.[193]
The trial began on 27May 1948 and ran for eight months before Justice Atma Charan passed his final order on 10February 1949. The prosecution called 149 witnesses, the defense none.[204] The court found all of the defendants except one guilty as charged. Eight men were convicted for the murder conspiracy, and others were convicted for violation of the Explosive Substances Act. Savarkar was acquitted and set free. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were sentenced to death by hanging[205] and the remaining six (including Godse's brother, Gopal) were sentenced to life imprisonment.[206]
Funeral and memorials
Gandhi's death was mourned nationwide.[189][190][191][176] Over a million people joined the five-mile-long funeral procession that took over five hours to reach Raj Ghat from Birla house, where he was assassinated, and another million watched the procession pass by.[207] Gandhi's body was transported on a weapons carrier, whose chassis was dismantled overnight to allow a high-floor to be installed so that people could catch a glimpse of his body. The engine of the vehicle was not used; instead four drag-ropes held by 50 people each pulled the vehicle.[208] All Indian-owned establishments in London remained closed in mourning as thousands of people from all faiths and denominations and Indians from all over Britain converged at India House in London.[209]
Gandhi was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition. His ashes were poured into urns which were sent across India for memorial services.[211] Most of the ashes were immersed at the Sangam at Allahabad on 12 February 1948, but some were secretly taken away. In 1997, Tushar Gandhi immersed the contents of one urn, found in a bank vault and reclaimed through the courts, at the Sangam at Allahabad.[212][213] Some of Gandhi's ashes were scattered at the source of the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, and a memorial plaque marks the event. On 30 January 2008, the contents of another urn were immersed at Girgaum Chowpatty. Another urn is at the palace of the Aga Khan in Pune (where Gandhi was held as a political prisoner from 1942 to 1944[214][215]) and another in the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Los Angeles.[212][216][217]
The Birla House site where Gandhi was assassinated is now a memorial called Gandhi Smriti. The place near Yamuna river where he was cremated is the Rāj Ghāt memorial in New Delhi.[218] A black marble platform, it bears the epigraph "Hē Rāma" (Devanagari: हे ! राम or, Hey Raam). These are said to be Gandhi's last words after he was shot.[219]
Gandhi's statements, letters and life have attracted much political and scholarly analysis of his principles, practices and beliefs, including what influenced him. Some writers present him as a paragon of ethical living and pacifism, while others present him as a more complex, contradictory and evolving character influenced by his culture and circumstances.[220][221]
Truth and Satyagraha
Gandhi dedicated his life to discovering and pursuing truth, or Satya, and called his movement satyagraha, which means "appeal to, insistence on, or reliance on the Truth".[222] The first formulation of the satyagraha as a political movement and principle occurred in 1920, which he tabled as "Resolution on Non-cooperation" in September that year before a session of the Indian Congress. It was the satyagraha formulation and step, states Dennis Dalton, that deeply resonated with beliefs and culture of his people, embedded him into the popular consciousness, transforming him quickly into Mahatma.[223]
Gandhi based Satyagraha on the Vedantic ideal of self-realisation, ahimsa (nonviolence), vegetarianism, and universal love. William Borman states that the key to his satyagraha is rooted in the Hindu Upanishadic texts.[224] According to Indira Carr, Gandhi's ideas on ahimsa and satyagraha were founded on the philosophical foundations of Advaita Vedanta.[225] I. Bruce Watson states that some of these ideas are found not only in traditions within Hinduism, but also in Jainism or Buddhism, particularly those about non-violence, vegetarianism and universal love, but Gandhi's synthesis was to politicise these ideas.[226] Gandhi's concept of satya as a civil movement, states Glyn Richards, are best understood in the context of the Hindu terminology of Dharma and Ṛta.[227]
Gandhi stated that the most important battle to fight was overcoming his own demons, fears, and insecurities. Gandhi summarised his beliefs first when he said "God is Truth". He would later change this statement to "Truth is God". Thus, satya (truth) in Gandhi's philosophy is "God".[228] Gandhi, states Richards, described the term "God" not as a separate power, but as the Being (Brahman, Atman) of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, a nondual universal that pervades in all things, in each person and all life.[227] According to Nicholas Gier, this to Gandhi meant the unity of God and humans, that all beings have the same one soul and therefore equality, that atman exists and is same as everything in the universe, ahimsa (non-violence) is the very nature of this atman.[229]
The essence of Satyagraha is "soul force" as a political means, refusing to use brute force against the oppressor, seeking to eliminate antagonisms between the oppressor and the oppressed, aiming to transform or "purify" the oppressor. It is not inaction but determined passive resistance and non-co-operation where, states Arthur Herman, "love conquers hate".[232] A euphemism sometimes used for Satyagraha is that it is a "silent force" or a "soul force" (a term also used by Martin Luther King Jr. during his "I Have a Dream" speech). It arms the individual with moral power rather than physical power. Satyagraha is also termed a "universal force", as it essentially "makes no distinction between kinsmen and strangers, young and old, man and woman, friend and foe."[233]
Gandhi wrote: "There must be no impatience, no barbarity, no insolence, no undue pressure. If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy, we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause."[234]Civil disobedience and non-co-operation as practised under Satyagraha are based on the "law of suffering",[235] a doctrine that the endurance of suffering is a means to an end. This end usually implies a moral upliftment or progress of an individual or society. Therefore, non-co-operation in Satyagraha is in fact a means to secure the co-operation of the opponent consistently with truth and justice.[236]
While Gandhi's idea of satyagraha as a political means attracted a widespread following among Indians, the support was not universal. For example, Muslim leaders such as Jinnah opposed the satyagraha idea, accused Gandhi to be reviving Hinduism through political activism, and began effort to counter Gandhi with Muslim nationalism and a demand for Muslim homeland.[237][238][239] The untouchability leader Ambedkar, in June 1945, after his decision to convert to Buddhism and the first Law and Justice minister of modern India, dismissed Gandhi's ideas as loved by "blind Hindu devotees", primitive, influenced by spurious brew of Tolstoy and Ruskin, and "there is always some simpleton to preach them".[240][241]Winston Churchill caricatured Gandhi as a "cunning huckster" seeking selfish gain, an "aspiring dictator", and an "atavistic spokesman of a pagan Hinduism". Churchill stated that the civil disobedience movement spectacle of Gandhi only increased "the danger to which white people there [British India] are exposed".[242]
Nonviolence
Although Gandhi was not the originator of the principle of nonviolence, he was the first to apply it in the political field on a large scale.[243][12] The concept of nonviolence (ahimsa) has a long history in Indian religious thought, and is considered the highest dharma (ethical value virtue), a precept to be observed towards all living beings (sarvbhuta), at all times (sarvada), in all respects (sarvatha), in action, words and thought.[244] Gandhi explains his philosophy and ideas about ahimsa as a political means in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth.[245][246][247][248]
Even though Gandhi considered non-violence to be "infinitely superior to violence", he preferred violence to cowardice.[249][250] He added that he "would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor".[250]
Literary works
Gandhi was a prolific writer. His signature style was simple, precise, clear and as devoid of artificialities.[251] One of Gandhi's earliest publications, Hind Swaraj, published in Gujarati in 1909, became "the intellectual blueprint" for India's independence movement. The book was translated into English the next year, with a copyright legend that read "No Rights Reserved".[252] For decades he edited several newspapers including Harijan in Gujarati, in Hindi and in the English language; Indian Opinion while in South Africa and, Young India, in English, and Navajivan, a Gujarati monthly, on his return to India. Later, Navajivan was also published in Hindi. In addition, he wrote letters almost every day to individuals and newspapers.[253]
Gandhi also wrote several books including his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gujarātī "સત્યના પ્રયોગો અથવા આત્મકથા"), of which he bought the entire first edition to make sure it was reprinted.[254] His other autobiographies included: Satyagraha in South Africa about his struggle there, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, a political pamphlet, and a paraphrase in Gujarati of John Ruskin's Unto This Last which was an early critique of political economy.[255] This last essay can be considered his programme on economics. He also wrote extensively on vegetarianism, diet and health, religion, social reforms, etc. Gandhi usually wrote in Gujarati, though he also revised the Hindi and English translations of his books.[256] In 1934, he wrote Songs from Prison while prisoned in Yerawada jail in Maharashtra.[257]
Gandhi's complete works were published by the Indian government under the name The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1960s. The writings comprise about 50,000 pages published in about a hundred volumes. In 2000, a revised edition of the complete works sparked a controversy, as it contained a large number of errors and omissions.[258] The Indian government later withdrew the revised edition.[259]
Gandhi is noted as the greatest figure of the successful Indian independence movement against the British rule. He is also hailed as the greatest figure of modern India.[260][261][262][263][264][265] American historian Stanley Wolpert described Gandhi as "India's greatest revolutionary nationalist leader" and the greatest Indian since the Buddha.[266] In 1999, Gandhi was named "Asian of the century" by Asiaweek.[267] In a 2000 BBC poll, he was voted as the greatest man of the millennium.[268][269]
The word Mahatma, while often mistaken for Gandhi's given name in the West, is taken from the Sanskrit words maha (meaning Great) and atma (meaning Soul).[270][271] He was publicly bestowed with the honorific title "Mahatma" in July 1914 at farewell meeting in Town Hall, Durban.[272][273]Rabindranath Tagore is said to have accorded the title to Gandhi by 1915.[274][d] In his autobiography, Gandhi nevertheless explains that he never valued the title, and was often pained by it.[277][278][279]
Florian asteroid 120461 Gandhi was named in his honour in September 2020.[287] In October 2022, a statue of Gandhi was installed in Astana on the embankment of the rowing canal, opposite the cult monument to the defenders of Kazakhstan.[288]
On 15 December 2022, the United Nations headquarters in New York unveiled the statue of Gandhi. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called Gandhi an "uncompromising advocate for peaceful co-existence".[289]
In his early years, the former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela was a follower of the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi.[295] Bhana and Vahed commented on these events as "Gandhi inspired succeeding generations of South African activists seeking to end White rule. This legacy connects him to Nelson Mandela...in a sense, Mandela completed what Gandhi started."[298]
Gandhi's life and teachings inspired many who specifically referred to Gandhi as their mentor or who dedicated their lives to spreading Gandhi's ideas. In Europe, Romain Rolland was the first to discuss Gandhi in his 1924 book Mahatma Gandhi, and Brazilian anarchist and feminist Maria Lacerda de Moura wrote about Gandhi in her work on pacifism. In 1931, physicist Albert Einstein exchanged letters with Gandhi, and called him "a role model for the generations to come" in a letter writing about him.[299] Einstein said of Gandhi:
Mahatma Gandhi's life achievement stands unique in political history. He has invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country, and practised it with greatest energy and devotion. The moral influence he had on the consciously thinking human being of the entire civilised world will probably be much more lasting than it seems in our time with its overestimation of brutal violent forces. Because lasting will only be the work of such statesmen who wake up and strengthen the moral power of their people through their example and educational works. We may all be happy and grateful that destiny gifted us with such an enlightened contemporary, a role model for the generations to come. Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.
Farah Omar, a political activist from Somaliland, visited India in 1930, where he met Gandhi and was influenced by Gandhi's non-violent philosophy, which he adopted in his campaign in British Somaliland.[300]
Lanza del Vasto went to India in 1936 intending to live with Gandhi; he later returned to Europe to spread Gandhi's philosophy and founded the Community of the Ark in 1948 (modelled after Gandhi's ashrams). Madeleine Slade (known as "Mirabehn") was the daughter of a British admiral who spent much of her adult life in India as a devotee of Gandhi.[301][302]
In addition, the British musician John Lennon referred to Gandhi when discussing his views on nonviolence.[303] In 2007, former US Vice President and environmentalist Al Gore drew upon Gandhi's idea of satyagraha in a speech on climate change.[304] 44th President of the United States Barack Obama said in September 2009 that his biggest inspiration came from Gandhi. His reply was in response to the question "Who was the one person, dead or live, that you would choose to dine with?". He continued that "He's somebody I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King with his message of nonviolence. He ended up doing so much and changed the world just by the power of his ethics."[305]
Gandhi did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize, although he was nominated five times between 1937 and 1948, including the first-ever nomination by the American Friends Service Committee,[315] though he made the short list only twice, in 1937 and 1947.[316] Decades later, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission, and admitted to deeply divided nationalistic opinion denying the award.[316] Gandhi was nominated in 1948 but was assassinated before nominations closed. That year, the committee chose not to award the peace prize stating that "there was no suitable living candidate" and later research shows that the possibility of awarding the prize posthumously to Gandhi was discussed and that the reference to no suitable living candidate was to Gandhi.[316] Geir Lundestad, Secretary of Norwegian Nobel Committee in 2006 said, "The greatest omission in our 106-year history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace prize. Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace prize, whether Nobel committee can do without Gandhi is the question".[317] When the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi".[316] In the summer of 1995, the North American Vegetarian Society inducted him posthumously into the Vegetarian Hall of Fame.[318]
In the tale Le Jour du Jugement Dernier, in the collection Les Mémoires de Satan et autres contes loufoques, by Pierre Cormon, God tries to judge Gandhi at the Last Judgement but realises that the character is more complex than he appears.
In 1967, Gandhi was set to be featured on the album cover of one of the best selling albums of The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, however this idea was later cancelled due to respect for Gandhi.[335]
The 1995 Marathi play Gandhi Virudh Gandhi explored the relationship between Gandhi and his son Harilal. The 2007 film, Gandhi, My Father was inspired on the same theme. The 1989 Marathi play Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy and the 1997 Hindi play Gandhi Ambedkar criticised Gandhi and his principles.[339][340]
Several biographers have undertaken the task of describing Gandhi's life. Among them are D. G. Tendulkar with his Mahatma. Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in eight volumes, Chaman Nahal's Gandhi Quartet, and Pyarelal and Sushila Nayyar with their Mahatma Gandhi in 10 volumes. The 2010 biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India by Joseph Lelyveld contained controversial material speculating about Gandhi's sexual life.[341] Lelyveld, however, stated that the press coverage "grossly distort[s]" the overall message of the book.[342] The 2014 film Welcome Back Gandhi takes a fictionalised look at how Gandhi might react to modern day India.[343] The 2019 play Bharat Bhagya Vidhata, inspired by Pujya Gurudevshri Rakeshbhai and produced by Sangeet Natak Akademi and Shrimad Rajchandra Mission Dharampur takes a look at how Gandhi cultivated the values of truth and non-violence.[344]
"Mahatma Gandhi" is used by Cole Porter in his lyrics for the song "You're the Top" which is included in the 1934 musical Anything Goes. In the song, Porter rhymes 'Mahatma Gandhi' with 'Napoleon Brandy.'[345]
India, with its rapid economic modernisation and urbanisation, has rejected Gandhi's economics[346] but accepted much of his politics and continues to revere his memory. Reporter Jim Yardley notes that, "modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power." By contrast, Gandhi is "given full credit for India's political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy."[347]
Gandhi's children and grandchildren live in India and other countries. Grandson Rajmohan Gandhi is a professor in Illinois and an author of Gandhi's biography titled Mohandas,[353] while another, Tarun Gandhi, has authored several authoritative books on his grandfather. Another grandson, Kanu Ramdas Gandhi (the son of Gandhi's third son Ramdas), was found living in an old age home in Delhi despite having taught earlier in the United States.[354][355]
^McAllister, Pam (1982). Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence. New Society Publishers. p. 194. ISBN978-0-86571-017-7. Retrieved 31 August 2013. Quote: "With love, Yours, Bapu (You closed with the term of endearment used by your close friends, the term you used with all the movement leaders, roughly meaning 'Papa.'" Another letter written in 1940 shows similar tenderness and caring.
^Todd, Anne M. (2012). Mohandas Gandhi. Infobase Publishing. p. 8. ISBN978-1-4381-0662-5. The name Gandhi means "grocer", although Mohandas's father and grandfather were politicians not grocers.
^ Jump up to:abParel, Anthony J (2016), Pax Gandhiana: The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, pp. 202–, ISBN978-0-19-049146-8 Quote: "Gandhi staked his reputation as an original political thinker on this specific issue. Hitherto, violence had been used in the name of political rights, such as in street riots, regicide, or armed revolutions. Gandhi believes there is a better way of securing political rights, that of nonviolence, and that this new way marks an advance in political ethics."
^Guha, Ramachandra (15 October 2014). Gandhi before India. Penguin Books Limited. p. 42. ISBN978-93-5118-322-8. The subcaste the Gandhis belonged to was known as Modh Bania, the prefix apparently referring to the town of Modhera, in Southern Gujarat
^Rajmohan Gandhi (2015). Gandhi before India. Vintage Books. p. 32. ISBN978-0-385-53230-3.
^ Jump up to:abB. R. Nanda (2019), "Mahatma Gandhi", Encyclopædia Britannica Quote: "Mahatma Gandhi, byname of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, (born October 2, 1869, Porbandar, India – died January 30, 1948, Delhi), Indian lawyer, politician, ..."
^Hardiman, David (April 2001). "Champaran and Gandhi: Planters, Peasants and Gandhian Politics by Jacques Pouchepadass (Review)". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 11 (1): 99–101. doi:10.1017/S1356186301450152. JSTOR25188108. S2CID154941166.
^Roderick Matthews (2012). Jinnah vs. Gandhi. Hachette. p. 31. ISBN978-93-5009-078-7. Rabindranath Tagore heavily criticized Gandhi at the time in private letters (...). They reveal Tagore's belief that Gandhi had committed the Indian political nation to a cause that was mistakenly anti-Western and fundamentally negative.
^Kham, Aqeeluzzafar (1990). "The All-India Muslim Conference and the Origin of the Khilafat Movement in India". Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society. 38 (2): 155–162.
^Murali, Atlury (January 1985). "Non-Cooperation in Andhra in 1920–22: Nationalist Intelligentsia and the Mobilization of Peasantry". Indian Historical Review. 12 (1/2): 188–217. ISSN0376-9836.
^ Jump up to:abKhan, Yasmin (2007). The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press. p. 18. ISBN978-0-300-12078-3. Retrieved 1 September 2013. Quote: "the Muslim League had only caught on among South Asian Muslims during the Second World War. ... By the late 1940s, the League and the Congress had impressed in the British their own visions of a free future for Indian people. ... one, articulated by the Congress, rested on the idea of a united, plural India as a home for all Indians and the other, spelt out by the League, rested on the foundation of Muslim nationalism and the carving out of a separate Muslim homeland." (p. 18)
^Khan, Yasmin (2007). The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press. p. 1. ISBN978-0-300-12078-3. Retrieved 1 September 2013. Quote: "South Asians learned that the British Indian Empire would be partitioned on 3 June 1947. They heard about it on the radio, from relations and friends, by reading newspapers and, later, through government pamphlets. Among a population of almost four hundred million, where the vast majority lived in the countryside, ..., it is hardly surprising that many ... did not hear the news for many weeks afterward. For some, the butchery and forced relocation of the summer months of 1947 may have been the first they know about the creation of the two new states rising from the fragmentary and terminally weakened British empire in India." (p. 1)
^ Jump up to:abcdeBrown (1991), p. 380: "Despite and indeed because of his sense of helplessness Delhi was to be the scene of what he called his greatest fast. ... His decision was made suddenly, though after considerable thought – he gave no hint of it even to Nehru and Patel who were with him shortly before he announced his intention at a prayer-meeting on 12 January 1948. He said he would fast until communal peace was restored, real peace rather than the calm of a dead city imposed by police and troops. Patel and the government took the fast partly as condemnation of their decision to withhold a considerable cash sum still outstanding to Pakistan as a result of the allocation of undivided India's assets because the hostilities that had broken out in Kashmir; ... But even when the government agreed to pay out the cash, Gandhi would not break his fast: that he would only do after a large number of important politicians and leaders of communal bodies agreed to a joint plan for restoration of normal life in the city."
^Talbot, Ian (2016). A History of Modern South Asia, Politics, States, Diasporas. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p. 183. ISBN978-0-300-19694-8. LCCN2015937886. Disputes over Kashmir and the division of assets and water in the aftermath of Partition increased Pakistan's anxieties regarding its much larger neighbor. Kashmir's significance for Pakistan far exceeded its strategic value; its "illegal" accession to India challenged the state's ideological foundations and pointed to a lack of sovereign fulfillment. The "K" in Pakistan's name stood for Kashmir. Of less symbolic significance was the division of post-Partition assets. Not until December 1947 was an agreement reached on Pakistan's share of the sterling assets held by the undivided Government of India at the time of independence. The bulk of these (550 million rupees) was held back by New Delhi because of the Kashmir conflict and paid only following Gandhi's intervention and fasting. India delivered Pakistan's military equipment even more tardily, and less than a sixth of the 160,000 tons of ordnance allotted to Pakistan by the Joint Defence Council was actually delivered.
^Elkins, Caroline (2022). Violence: A History of the British Empire. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN9780307272423. LCCN2021018550. A few months later, with war-fueled tensions over Kashmir mounting and India refusing to pay Pakistan 550 million rupees, Pakistan's share of Britain's outstanding war debt, Gandhi began to fast. "This time my fast is not only against Hindus and Muslims," the Mahatma said, "but also against the Judases who put on false appearances and betray themselves, myself and society." The elderly and frail man who was India's symbolic political and spiritual leader went three days without food before India's cabinet agreed to pay Pakistan, something Nehru had long promised Jinnah he would do.
^Blinkenberg, Lars (2022). India-Pakistan: The History of Unsolved Conflicts: Volume I. Lindhardt og Ringhof. ISBN9788726894707. Sardar Patel decided, in the middle of December 1947, that the recent financial agreements with Pakistan should not be followed, unless Pakistan ceased to support the raiders. ... Gandhi was not convinced and he felt—like Mountbatten and Nehru—that the agreed transfer to Pakistan of a cash amount of Rs. 550 million should be implemented despite the Kashmir crisis. Gandhi started a fast unto death, which was officially done to stop communal trouble, especially in Delhi, but "word went round that it was directed against Sardar Patel's decision to withhold the cash balances"... Only because of Gandhi's interference, which was soon to cause his death, Sardar Patel gave in and the money was handed over to Pakistan.
^Sarkar, Sumit (2014). Modern India: 1885–1947. Delhi and Chennai: Pearson Education. p. 375. ISBN9789332535749. This last fast seems to have been directed in part also against Patel's increasingly communal attitudes (the Home Minister had started thinking in terms of a total transfer of population in the Punjab, and was refusing to honour a prior agreement by which India was obliged to give 55 crores of pre-Partition Government of India financial assets to Pakistan). 'You are not the Sardar I once knew,' Gandhi is said to have remarked during the fast.
^Gandhi, Gopalkrishna; Suhrud, Tridip (2022). Scorching Love: Letters from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to his son, Devadas. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. The national capital and its surrounding areas are gripped by massacres and the spewing of hate. The two Punjabs on either side of the border are aflame. On 1 January 1948, a Thai visitor comes and compliments him on India's independence. "Today . . . Indian fears his brother Indian. Is this independence?', Gandhi asks in response. Gandhi smarts at the Government of India's new cabinet headed by Jawaharlal Nehru deciding to withhold the transfer of Pakistan's share (Rs 55 crores) of the 'sterling balance' that undivided India has held at independence. The attack on Kashmur is cited as a reason for this. Patel says India cannot give money to Pakistan 'for making bullets to be shot at us'. Gandhi's intense agitation settles into an inner quiet on 12 January when the clear thought comes to him that he must fast. And indefinitely. ‘It will end when and if I am satisfied that there is a reunion of hearts of all communities...’
^Singh, Gurharpal; Shani, Georgio (2022). Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora. Cambridge University Press. p. 107. ISBN978-1-107-13654-0. LCCN2021017207. For further evidence of Patel's involvement in the clearing of Muslims in north India, see Pandey (2001, 196). Against the background of the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir, the dispute between the two countries over the division of cash balances and Gandhi's fast in early 1948, Mountbatten noted the following of his interview with Patel: 'He expressed the view that the only way to re-establish decent relationship between the Muslims and non-Muslim communities was to remove Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan and drive out the Muslims of the East Punjab and the affected neighbouring areas.' MB1/D76/1. Mountbatten Papers, University of Southampton.
^Stein, Burton; Arnold, David (2010). A History of India. Blackwell History of the World Series (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 352–353. ISBN978-1-4051-9509-6. He undertook a fast not only to restrain those bent on communal reprisal but also to influence the powerful Home Minister, Sardar Patel, who was refusing to share out the assets of the former imperial treasury with Pakistan, as had been agreed. Gandhi's insistence on justice for Pakistan now that the partition was a fact ... had prompted Godse's fanatical action.
^Ahmed, Raja Qaiser (2022). Pakistan Factor and the Competing Perspectives in India: Party Centric View. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 11. ISBN978-981-16-7051-0.
^Babb, Lawrence A. (2020). Religion in India: Past and Present. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. ISBN9781780466231.
^Sarkar, Sumit (2014). Modern India: 1885–1947. Delhi and Chennai: Pearson Education. p. 375. ISBN9789332535749. Three days later the Mahatma was dead, murdered by a Hindu fanatic, Nathuram Godse, as a climax to a conspiracy hatched by a Poona Brahman group originally inspired by V.D. Savarkar—a conspiracy which, despite ample warnings, the police of Bombay and Delhi had done nothing to foil.
^Geva, Rotem (2022). Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India's Capital. Stanford University Press. pp. 130–131. ISBN9781503631199. LCCN2021051794.
^ Jump up to:abTalbot, Ian; Singh, Gurharpal (2009), The Partition of India, Cambridge University Press, pp. 118–119, ISBN978-0-521-85661-4, It is now almost a cliché that the Partition transformed Delhi from a Mughal to a Punjabi city. The bitter experiences of the refugees encouraged them to support right-wing Hindu parties. ... Trouble began in September (1947) after the arrival from refugees from Pakistan who were determined on revenge and driving Muslims out of properties which they could then occupy. Gandhi in his prayer meetings in Birla House denounced the 'crooked and ungentlemanly' squeezing out of Muslims. Despite these exhortations, two-thirds of the city's Muslims were to eventually abandon India's capital.
^Misra, R.P. (2007). Rediscovering Gandhi. Gandhian studies and peace research series (in Maltese). Concept Publishing Company in collaboration with Gandhi Smriti & Darshan Samiti. p. 102. ISBN978-81-8069-375-5. Retrieved 6 August 2023.
^Dennis Dalton (2012). Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action. Columbia University Press. pp. 30–35. ISBN978-0-231-15959-3. Yet he [Gandhi] must bear some of the responsibility for losing his followers along the way. The sheer vagueness and contradictions recurrent throughout his writing made it easier to accept him as a saint than to fathom the challenge posed by his demanding beliefs. Gandhi saw no harm in self-contradictions: life was a series of experiments, and any principle might change if Truth so dictated.
^Gandhi, M.K. (1982) [Young India, 16 June 1920]. "156. The Law of Suffering"(PDF). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 20 (electronic ed.). New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India. pp. 396–99. Archived(PDF) from the original on 28 January 2012. Retrieved 14 January 2012.
^Blamberger, G.; Kakar, S. (2018). Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe. Springer Nature Singapore. p. 3. ISBN978-981-10-6707-5. Mahatma Gandhi, modern India's greatest icon, elevated his search for moksha above any of his social or political goals, including India's freedom from colonial rule.
^McGregor, Ronald Stuart (1993). The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. p. 799. ISBN978-0-19-864339-5. Retrieved 31 August 2013. Quote: (mahā- (S. "great, mighty, large, ..., eminent") + ātmā (S. "1. soul, spirit; the self, the individual; the mind, the heart; 2. the ultimate being."): "high-souled, of noble nature; a noble or venerable man."
^Gandhi, Rajmohan (2006). Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire. University of California Press. p. 172. ISBN978-0-520-25570-8. ...Kasturba would accompany Gandhi on his departure from Cape Town for England in July 1914 en route to India. ... In different South African towns (Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and the Natal cities of Durban and Verulam), the struggle's martyrs were honoured and the Gandhi's bade farewell. Addresses in Durban and Verulam referred to Gandhi as a 'Mahatma', 'great soul'. He was seen as a great soul because he had taken up the poor's cause. The whites too said good things about Gandhi, who predicted a future for the Empire if it respected justice.
^Charan Shandilya. India-China Relations. Pt. Sunderlal Institute of Asian Studies. p. 187.
^Tagore, Rabindranath (1998). Dutta, Krishna (ed.). Rabindranath Tagore: an anthology. Robinson, Andrew. Macmillan. p. 2. ISBN978-0-312-20079-4.
^Guha, Ramachandra (2013). Gandhi Before India. Allen Lane. pp. 362, 662. ISBN978-0-670-08387-9. During my last trip to Europe I saw a great deal of Mr Gandhi. From year to year (I have known him intimately for over twenty years) I have found him getting more and more selfless. He is now leading almost an ascetic sort of life – not the life of an ordinary ascetic that we usually see but that of a great Mahatma and the one idea that engrosses his mind is his motherland.
^Pranjivan Mehta to G. K. Gokhale, dated Rangoon, 8 November 1909, File No. 4, Servants of India Society Papers, NMML.
^Basu Majumdar, A. K. (1993), Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of India, Indus Publishing, ISBN81-85182-92-2, p. 83: "When Gandhi returned to India, Rabindranath's eldest brother Dwijendranath, was perhaps the first to address him as Mahatma. Rabindranath followed suit and then the whole of India called him Mahatma Gandhi."
^Ghose, Sankar (1991). Mahatma Gandhi. Allied Publishers. p. 158. ISBN978-81-7023-205-6. So Tagore differed from many of Gandhi's ideas, but yet he had great regard for him and Tagore was perhaps the first important Indian who called Gandhi a Mahatma. But in 1921 when Gandhi was asked whether he was really a Mahatma Gandhi replied that he did not feel like one, and that, in any event, he could not define a Mahatma for he had never met any.
^Gilmore, Mikal (5 December 2005). "Lennon Lives Forever". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 28 May 2007. Retrieved 24 January 2012.
^Applebome, Peter (30 March 2008). "Applying Gandhi's Ideas to Climate Change". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 December 2021. Al Gore cited both Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln in a speech on climate change in 2007. He noted Gandhi's sense of satyagraha ...
^"School Day of Nonviolence And Peace". Letter of Peace addressed to the UN. cartadelapaz.org. 30 January 2009. Archived from the original on 1 November 2011. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
^Elkins, Zachary; Ginsburg, Tom; Melton, Melton (2009), The Endurance of National Constitutions, Cambridge University Press, p. 158, ISBN978-0-521-51550-4, Whereas Pakistan's leaders died early, India's founding triumvirate of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and Rajendra Prasad provided a stable hand for the early years, and a personal continuity with the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi
^ Jump up to:abNehru, Jawaharlal. An Autobiography. Bodley Head.
^ Jump up to:abcMcAllister, Pam (1982). Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence. New Society Publishers. p. 194. ISBN978-0-86571-017-7. Retrieved 31 August 2013. Quote: "With love, Yours, Bapu (You closed with the term of endearment used by your close friends, the term you used with all the movement leaders, roughly meaning 'Papa'." Another letter written in 1940 shows similar tenderness and caring.
^Dutt, Devina (20 February 2009). "Drama king". Live Mint. Archived from the original on 30 April 2013. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
^Kunzru, Hari (29 March 2011). "Appreciating Gandhi Through His Human Side". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 31 January 2012. Retrieved 26 January 2012. (Review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India by Joseph Lelyveld).
Brown, Judith M. (2004). "Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand [Mahatma Gandhi] (1869–1948)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.[ISBN missing]
Brown, Judith M., and Anthony Parel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (2012); 14 essays by scholars
'Gandhi the Great'(2013) by Fevin Mohammed (PhD in Historical Research, Coordinated under Prof. Ram Prasad Sharma)
Danielson, Leilah C. "'In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi': American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915–1941". Church History 72.2 (2003): 361–388.
Du Toit, Brian M. "The Mahatma Gandhi and South Africa." Journal of Modern African Studies 34#4 (1996): 643–660. JSTOR161593.
Gokhale, B. G. "Gandhi and the British Empire", History Today (Nov 1969), 19#11 pp 744–751 online.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. "The Gandhi Revival – A Review Article." The Journal of Asian Studies 43#2 (Feb. 1984), pp. 293–298. JSTOR2055315
Kishwar, Madhu. "Gandhi on Women." Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 41 (1985): 1753–758. JSTOR4374920.
Murthy, C. S. H. N., Oinam Bedajit Meitei, and Dapkupar Tariang. "The Tale Of Gandhi Through The Lens: An Inter-Textual Analytical Study Of Three Major Films-Gandhi, The Making Of The Mahatma, And Gandhi, My Father." CINEJ Cinema Journal 2.2 (2013): 4–37. online
Power, Paul F. "Toward a Revaluation of Gandhi's Political Thought." Western Political Quarterly 16.1 (1963): 99–108 excerpt.
Rudolph, Lloyd I. "Gandhi in the Mind of America." Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 47 (2010): 23–26. JSTOR25764146.
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1928). Satyagraha in South Africa (in Gujarati) (1 ed.). Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. Translated by Valji G. Desai
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1994). The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India. ISBN978-81-230-0239-2. (100 volumes). Free online access from Gandhiserve.
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1928). "Drain Inspector's Report". The United States of India. 5 (6–8): 3–4.