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Conference Theme: "The Force of Love: Creating a Peaceful World"
Title: "M. K. Gandhi and Interfaith Dialogue: What’s Love Got to do with it?"
Talk for Student Conference
W. P. Wagner High School, Edmonton
October 1, 2002
Dr. Anne M. Pearson
On Truth
The conference theme this year is "The Force of Love: Creating a Peaceful World," but I would like to start with another concept that was important to Gandhi, perhaps even more central to him than love, and that is truth. After all, he called his autobiography "The Story of My Experiments with Truth;" one of his key principles was "satya-graha" or "holding or grasping" the truth; and he famously inverted the statement "God is truth" to say "Truth is God," for truth is the very basis of the universe. "I found the nearest approach to Truth is through love. But I found also that love has many meanings… it is very difficult to understand ‘God is love’ because of the variety of meanings of love, but I never found a double meaning in connection with Truth…" (quoted in Iyer, 165). In other words, he is saying that it is more difficult to argue that truth does not exist than to argue that God does not exist. For Gandhi, commitment to truth had to be a core principle animating efforts towards the creation of a peaceful world, a civilization based on nonviolence.
Gandhi said: "Devotion to Truth is the sole justification for our existence. All our activities should be centred in Truth. Truth should be the very breath of our life. When once this stage in the pilgrim’s progress is reached, all other rules of correct living will come without effort and obedience to them will be instinctive. But without Truth it is impossible to observe any principles or rules in life" (quoted in Iyer, 162). Why? Because if we are not guided by the principle of truth, the foundation of all we do and who we are begins to erode. Think about your friendships. What is the surest thing to shake apart a friendship? It is when you discover that your friend has lied to you; or, when you have shown yourself to be untrustworthy to your friend. Love itself must rest or be secured on the foundation of truthfulness. What happens when someone in authority lies to you? When politicians lie? When a religious leader distorts truth or lies for selfish purposes? We lose trust, we lose confidence, we lose faith. When commitment to truth fades, as it did in the former Soviet Union when ideology became more important than truth and thousands died as a result of it (and I’m thinking here of the world’s most terrible nuclear accident in Chernobyl), when commitment to truth fades, false ideas and theories take root in individuals and institutions. Hope and trust start to crumble. Despair and corruption thrive. The lack of commitment to the principles of truth and trustworthiness precipitated the Enron and Worldcom scandals and the results have wreaked havoc on the lives of hundreds or thousands of individuals, to say nothing of the American economy.
The Search for Truth
Humans appear to have an instinctual urge to seek out truth. "Indeed, so strong is our drive to learn new things and grow in understanding that we sometimes willingly submit to suffering in order" to achieve it (think of some of the early explorers and scientists who suffered, even lost their lives, in their search for knowledge). "A seemingly unquenchable thirst for discovery, adventure, intellectual curiosity, experimentation and philosophical enquiry is a fundamental characteristic of the searching mind. Search is a prerequisite to discovery" (Gandhimohan, 20). For Gandhi, the search for truth is a divine search, for it is ultimately a search for God. "I am but a humble seeker after Truth and bent upon finding it," he said.
Truth: The One and the Many
Now, I would like to recount a story that you may have heard already, a story that comes from India. It is the story of the three blind men and the elephant. There were three blind men who one day encountered an elephant. One man touched the tail of the elephant, one man touched the ears and another the leg. Being blind, touch was their primary way of investigating reality. They got together and discussed what they had learned. ‘Well, the elephant is like a rope,’ said the man who had touched the tail. ‘Oh no, the elephant is like a thin but very tough cloth’ said the man who had touched the ear. ‘You’re both mistaken,’ said the man who had touched the leg. ‘The elephant is like the trunk of a good sized tree.’ They each argued their case, each unable to convince the other. Who was right? Who held the truth? Finally, a sighted man came along, listened to them argue and looked carefully at the elephant. ‘You are all right and you are all wrong,’ he said. The elephant is what each of you has described, but it is also more than that. You have described parts of the animal, let me try to describe to you the whole.’
The point of this story, and it’s a very ancient one that resonates with the teachings of the earliest sacred literature of India, the Vedas, is that each of us can at best only grasp parts of the Truth. Truth (with a capital "t") Gandhi said, transcends us all; it is certainly not the exclusive property of any one religion or philosophy (and I’ll return to this point).
Does this mean that you have your truth and I have my truth and I can change my mind about it and you can too and so truth is whatever we think it is at any given time, since we can never know the whole truth? Yes and no. No because Gandhi would very firmly say that truth is ultimately one, it cannot contradict itself. Furthermore, there are lots of ways of testing whether a proposition or a hypothesis is true or not. We can use the scientific method, employing "objective criteria;" we can use logic and our own experience as well. But "yes," because truth is relative insofar as we (our minds, our science, our methodologies of acquiring knowledge) have limited capacity to grasp it. We are constrained by our physical bodies, by the limitations imposed by language and culture which allow us to "see" through particular lenses. Those of you who speak more than one language know that there are some concepts, some words that are not translatable into other languages because those languages haven’t identified the concept in the same way.
In short, our understanding of reality, of truth, is developmental, evolving, and so we as individuals and as a species can only ever hold to ‘partial’ truths, always in need of correction and adjustment, and thus we need always to exercise great humility, Gandhi said. "The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust." Arrogance and self-righteousness are sure signs of ignorance (of a-vidhya: non-knowledge).
Yet Truth has its own laws. That is, as surely as there are physical laws in the universe, there are spiritual laws, with inevitable consequences if those laws are broken.]
[summary of points]
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Truth is God (as Gandhi would phrase it)
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Truth is the foundation of existence
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Search for truth is a uniquely human enterprise; it is also our obligation (independent investigation of truth/ reality)
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Truth is one, it is also many (partial truths; facets of one crystal); science can only take us so far (it is best at discovering truths about the material world; it is not very good at finding spiritual truths – ‘subjective’ truths; here, experience, and faith are significant)
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Sincerity and humility are necessary prerequisites to the search for truth
The Purpose of Religion
These days religion has a pretty bad rap, and understandably so. Many people of faith are even afraid now to publicly admit to being religious or to being identified with a particular religion. Many have left so-called ‘organized religion’ altogether and prefer to say simply that they are ‘spiritual’ instead. Now Gandhi was a profoundly religious man who was proud to identify himself as a Hindu, even though he was critical of some aspects of how Hinduism was practiced and interpreted. He didn’t mind this identification because he saw what the true purpose of religion is. The very purpose of religion is the education and promotion of the well-being of humankind. Religion has served throughout history as the ultimate authority in giving meaning to life. In reaching to the roots of motivation, religion has awakened in peoples the capacities to love, to forgive, to create, to dare greatly, to sacrifice for the common good, and to discipline the impulses of our baser instincts. It has and continues to represent a unique power in humanity’s collective life.
The Perversion of Religion (the disappearance of humility and the ascendancy of arrogance)
But, this power, when twisted for their own ends by leaders, whether political or religious, can be a source of evil as much as it has been a source of good. In particular, when the banner of religion is used to foster rather than overcome prejudice, its effects can be devastating. Blind forces of sectarian dogmatism, claims to superiority, exclusivity or finality, and so forth, often fanned by religious leaders, have led to the promotion of harmful attitudes of hatred, prejudice and acts of extreme violence against those of other faiths. [see Bahá'í Universal House of Justice "Letter to Religious Leaders," May 2002] A case in point is the recent outbreak of violence in the name of religion in India. In February of this year I and some of my colleagues here were in India attending a conference that had been organized by a Gandhian foundation to discuss with rural villagers and peace workers how to promote local democracy and the practice of nonviolence. During that time, on February 27, in the state of Gujarat, a mob of Muslims attacked a train stopped at the station carrying a large number of militant Hindu activists who had been visiting Ayodhya, the Indian pilgrimage town in Uttar Pradesh. The activists had been in Ayodhya in preparation for a mid-March plan to begin the rebuilding of a Rama temple on the site of the 16th mosque that had been demolished in 1991 by a crowd of Hindus. While it is difficult to be sure of the real facts, one report has it that on the morning of February 27, Hindu activists at the railway station reportedly refused to pay a Muslim tea vendor for the tea they had drunk until he said "Jai Sri Ram," or "victory to Lord Ram." A fight broke out between the vendor and the militants. Three minutes after the train pulled out of the station, a crowd of Muslims stopped the train and started throwing stones inside. Soon the train cars were set afire with rags soaked in gasoline. Fifty-eight Hindus, many of them women and children, were burned alive. The cry for revenge set in immediately, especially in the state of Gujarat. [Pankaj Mishra, "Murder in India," NY Review of Books, Aug. 15, 2002]. By the end of it all, some 2000 people, mostly Muslims, had been killed, many in extremely barbaric ways. About 230 mosques and shrines were razed to the ground and close to 100,000 Muslims displaced and are now living in relief camps. Retaliatory attacks by Muslim mobs across Gujarat have left 10,000 Hindus homeless.
The brutality and planning of the killings remind one not just of other incidents in India in recent years, but also of other recent planned mass murders undertaken in the name of religion, or under the banner of some sort of religious identity: NYC, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Ireland, Sri Lanka and others.
Though violence in the name of religion is certainly not a recent phenomenon (one can think of the thousands killed during the Crusades and Europe’s wars of religion between Christian sects that cost that continent the lives of some 30% of its entire population in the 16th and 17th centuries), its escalation in India and other parts of the world is a newer phenomenon and represents one of the gravest dangers facing humanity at the present time. Even while other forms of prejudice, such as racism and sexism, are gradually losing ground, religious prejudice continues to flourish. There are countless examples, beyond the Godhra incident, which one could cite. Close to home, last year, following "9-11" my community witnessed the burning down by religious bigots of its only Hindu temple.
Gandhi and other religions
Some years ago, the famous Catholic theologian Hans Kung said: "There can be no peace between the nations until there is peace between the religions. There can be no peace between the religions until there is dialogue between the religions;" a statement I believe Gandhi would have readily agreed with. The good news is that the interfaith movement, as it is called, is growing by the day around the world. The not so good news is that it may not be growing fast or coherently enough, and that religious leaders need to signal a move beyond mere calls for "tolerance."
Now Gandhi characteristically led by example more than by grandiose speeches. To him words are nothing if they are not demonstrated by action. He actively sought out people of other faiths, even as they sought him out. After his initial encounter with Christians in England, he read the Bible; after meeting and working with Muslims in South Africa, he read the Qur’an. He tried to learn what he could about the teachings of other religions and always welcomed dialogue, as long as it was pursued in the spirit of a sincere, friendly and respectful interchange of ideas and knowledge.
There are several principles that governed Gandhi’s interaction with those of other religions and I’d like to now go over them:
The first principle is that God is truth, and Truth is God, as I discussed earlier.
The second principle is the search for truth. For Gandhi this search, or the independent investigation of truth, was a lifelong passion. And he felt that it is an obligation of every human being. This is why we have the capacity to reason and to have a conscience. Truth must be weighed by reason and tested in practice.
The third principle is that every world religion has truth in it. A study of the world’s religious scriptures will show this to be the case as their teachings contain much that is in common. For example, all religions teach that we are essentially spiritual beings; that there is a divine intelligence at the heart of the universe to which we are intimately related; that love is the primary expression of spirituality (love of the divine, of oneself, of others).
Further, all religions teach about ethics, how we should conduct ourselves, and they identify many of the same virtues, such as: humility, compassion, kindness, self-control, truthfulness, not taking what does not belong to oneself, and, Gandhi would wish to say, ahimsa (non-violence).
The fourth principle is that no one religion can legitimately claim to be the exclusive bearer of truth. As early as 1905 Gandhi declared that "the time had passed when the followers of one religion could stand and say, ‘ours is the only true religion and all others are false’." He said, "God, Allah, Rama, Narayan, Ishwar, Khuda were descriptions of the same Being;" and in another place, "Gods’s grace and revelation were not the monopoly of any race or nation." For Gandhi, Truth is a reality larger than any one religion, but in which all are ultimately grounded.
At the same time, all religions are imperfect because they are transmitted, interpreted and practiced through imperfect vehicles. Thus, error enters into the religious beliefs and practices of all religions. "I came to the conclusion," Gandhi wrote in 1927, "that all religions were right but everyone of them was imperfect, imperfect naturally and necessarily, because they were interpreted with our poor intellects, sometimes with our poor hearts, and more often misinterpreted." And in another place he said: "We have not realized religion in its perfection, even as we have not realized God. Religion of our conception, being thus imperfect, is always subject to a process of evolution and reinterpretation. Progress towards Truth, towards God, is possible only because of such evolution. And if all faiths outlined by men are imperfect, the question of comparative merit does not arise. All faiths constitute a revelation of Truth… Reverence for other faiths does not blind us to their faults. We must be keenly alive to the defects of our own faiths also, yet not leave it on that account, but try to overcome those defects."
Fifth, the study of other religions can deepen one’s own faith and lead to sarva-dharma-samanvata, or, "having equal regard for all faiths and creeds." "I hold that it is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world," Gandhi said wrote in 1927. "If we are to respect others’ religions as we would have them to respect our own, a friendly study of the world’s religions is a sacred duty. … For myself, I regard my study of and reverence for the Bible, the Koran, and the other scriptures to be wholly consistent with my claim to be a staunch … Hindu. [Young India, Sept. 2, 1927]
"My position," Gandhi wrote in the Harijan in 1936, "is that all the great religions are fundamentally equal. We must have the innate respect for other religions as we have for our own. Mind you, not mutual toleration, but equal respect" [Nov. 28, ‘36]. It is through the cultivation of such attitudes and practices, Gandhi seemed to say, that we would be freed to live and work together in greater peace and harmony for the well-being of all.
What’s Love got to do with it?
It is, in the end, a matter of attitude. Do we fight over our little piece of truth, do we kill and maim and speak words of hatred to others who describe the elephant by its trunk when we wish to proclaim its leg? If we can see God or Truth as one, if we can see all members of the human race as members of our family, if we can see that there is truth in all religions, and remember that the purpose of all the great religions of the world is fundamentally to help us live lives that are more peaceful, more enriching, more fulfilling and that the one key way that this is done is through service to others, then… indeed violence in the name of religion is, as Gandhi said, "blasphemous" — it is insulting to God and to Truth.
As a last word, wait! I haven’t talked about love yet! Recall the quotation of Gandhi I mentioned towards the beginning of my talk: "I found the nearest approach to truth is through love;" and in another place he wrote: "when you want to find Truth as God the only inevitable means is love, ie., non-violence." Well, the way to transform our attitudes is not through thought alone, but through the transformative power of love, a power that binds the universe together and which is the practice of truthfulness and non-violence.
Gandhi said: "Scientists tell us that, without the presence of the cohesive force among the atoms that comprise this globe of ours, it would crumble and cease to exist; and even as there is cohesive force in blind matter, so must there be in all things animate, and the name for that cohesive force among animate beings is Love. We notice it between father and son, between brother and sister, friend and friend. But we have to learn to use that force among all that lives, and in the use of it consists our knowledge of God. Where there is love there is life; hatred leads to destruction" (quoted in Prabhu and Rao, 416-17).
[story of the sandal and colonel Smuts]
During his time in South Africa, Gandhi began his practice of civil
disobedience to unjust laws and he was put in jail by Colonel Smuts.
While in jail he got materials to make sandals. When he was released,
he visited Colonel Smuts and presented him with a gift: the pair
of sandals he had made while incarcerated.
To paraphrase Gandhi: ‘Be the change you want to see.’
* * * *
Sources:
M. V. Gandhimohan. 2000. Mahatma Gandhi and the Bahá'ís. New Delhi: Bahá'í Publishing Trust.
R. K. Prabhu and U. R. Rao, eds. 1967. The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
Raghavan Iyer, ed. 1986. The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford: Oxford U. Press.
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