Abstract
This essay will examine Gandhian ahimsa in its inseparability from truth. In this context, it will take issue with those who have argued that Gandhian ahimsa was either (entirely or in part) drawn from Tolstoy or (entirely or in part) from the anekantavada of the Jains; arguing that while Gandhi was influenced by both these sources, his ahimsa was drawn (in his own admission) from an altogether different source, i.e. from the metaphysics and ethics of the Bhagavad Gita. Even if one were to disregard for the moment the differences between Gandhi and the other interpreters of the Gita (specially from those who were his contemporaries), Gandhi’s drawing of ahimsa as non-violence and a non-passionate universal love from the context of the war between cousins in the Gita might seem surprising. Gandhi’s contemporaries like Tilak and Sri Aurobindo (among others) had argued that the Gita had justified the exception to the law of harmlessness for the sake of duty and suggested that the aim of the Gita was to undertake a critique of the ethical and confirm it’s subordination to the political. Gandhi however had argued (to the contrary) that the metaphysics of oneness in the Gita brought out in the vision of Sri Krishna’s divine form recommended both desireless action and absolute ahimsa; given that to harm anyone or anything in the universe was, quite literally, to harm oneself.
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Notes
- 1.
Gandhi was introduced to the Bhagavad Gita in England in 1888–1889 when he read Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation. It made such an impact on his thinking that he went on to engage systematically with it across the next few decades of his life. In 1919, he commented on the Gita in one of the Satyagraha leaflets. In 1926, he gave a series of almost daily talks on the Gita between February and November during morning prayers at the Satyagraha Ashram. They were posthumously published under the title Gandhijijinu Gitashikshan (Gandhi’s Teaching of the Gita). Gitashikshan seems to have been translated by the editors of the collected works as “Discourses on the Gita”. It was later published in English as a book The Bhagavadgita (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1980). Gandhi’s Gujarati translation of the Gita the Anasaktiyoga literally “the yoga of non- attachment” was completed in Yeravada jail in 1929. The Anasaktiyoga was a “rendering” of the Gita with short glosses on some passages and an additional preface. The English translation of the book by Mahadev Desai was published in 1931 by Navajivan Press under the title The Gita according to Gandhi. There were also two other publications. Faced with complaints that Anasaktiyoga was too difficult to follow, Gandhi wrote a series of letters on the Gita. These were later published under the title Gitabodh. To help readers understand the Anasaktiyoga, he published a glossary to the terms in it, which was published in1936 as the Gitapadarthkosa.
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Puri, B. (2023). Satya and Ahimsa: Learning Non-violence from the Gita. In: Gandhi for the 21st Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3792-9_2
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