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Spiritual Stars of The Golden Age
- Mahatma Gandhi "When
quite young, Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi witnessed along with his
mother a drama on "Sravana and his devotion to his parents" and he
resolved that he must also become a Sravana. He witnessed a play
onHarischandra and that drama impressed him so deeply that he
resolved to become as heroically devoted to virtue as Harischandra
himself. These transformed him so much that he became a Mahatma.
Gandhi had a teacher when he was attending school who taught him
wrong paths. But Gandhi did not adopt his advice. As a consequence,
he was able to bring freedom (Swaraj) to the country" (Sathya Sai
Baba, Vidya Vahini.)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in the town of Porbander in
the state of what is now Gujarat on 2 October 1869. He had his
schooling in nearby Rajkot, where his father served as the adviser
or prime minister to the local ruler. Though India was then under
British rule, over 500 kingdoms, principalities, and states were
allowed autonomy in domestic and internal affairs: these were the
so-called 'native states'. Rajkot was one such state.
ON Repeating the Name of the Lord
Being born in the Vaisnava faith, I had often to go to the Haveli,
But it never appealed to me. I did not like its glitter and pomp.
Also I heard rumours of immmorality practised there, and lost all
interest in it. Hence, I could gain nothing from the Haveli. But
what I failed to get there, I obtained from my nurse, an old
servant of the family, whose affection for me I still recall. I
have said before that there was a fear within me of spirits and
ghosts. Rambha, for that was her name, suggested, as a remedy for
this fear, the repitition of Ramanama. I had more faith in her
than in her remedy, so at a tender age, I began repeating the
Ramanama to cure my fear of ghosts and spirits. This of course was
short-lived, but the good seed sown in childhood was not sown in
vain. I think that it is due the seed sown by that good woman
Rambha that today, Ramanama is an infallible remedy for me.
Gandhi's Mother, Putlibai
You must have heard about Putlibai, the mother of Mahatma Gandhi,
who spent her life in the contemplation of God. She used to
observe a vow wherein she would not partake of food unless she
would hear the singing of cuckoo. One day it so happened that the
song of cuckoo was not heard. Seeing his mother sticking to her
vow and not taking food, Gandhi who was a small boy then, went
behind the house and mimicked the singing of cuckoo. He came
inside and told his mother that she could have her food as she
heard the song of cuckoo. Mother Putlibai felt very sad, as she
knew that her son was uttering a lie. She cried, "O God! What sin
have I committed to give birth to a son who speaks untruth?"
Realizing that he had caused immense grief to his mother by
uttering a lie, Gandhi took a vow that he would never indulge in
falsehood thenceforth. (Sathya Sai Baba, Ladies Day, 1997).
In London, Gandhi encountered theosophists, vegetarians, and
others who were disenchanted not only with industrialism, but with
the legacy of Enlightenment thought. They themselves represented
the fringe elements of English society. Gandhi was powerfully
attracted to them, as he was to the texts of the major religious
traditions; and ironically it is in London that he was introduced
to the Bhagavad Gita. Here, too, Gandhi showed determination and
single-minded pursuit of his purpose, and accomplished his
objective of finishing his degree from the Inner Temple. He was
called to the bar in 1891, and even enrolled in the High Court of
London; but later that year he left for India.
Shyness as a student
This shyness I retained throughout my stay in England. Even when I
paid a social call, the presence of half a dozen or more people
would strike me dumb. I once went to Ventnor with Sjt. Mazmudar.
We stayed there with a vegetarian family. Mr Howard, the author of
'The Ethics of Diet', was also staying at the same watering place.
We met him, and he invited us to speak at a meeting for the
promotion of vegetarianism. I has ascertained that it was not
considered incorrect to read one's speech. I knew that many did
so to express themselves coherently and briefly. To speak
ex-tempore world have been out of the question for me. I had
therefore written down my speech. I stood up to read it, but could
not. My vision became blurred and I trembled, though the speech
hardly covered a sheet of foolscap. Sjt. Mazmudar had to read it
for me. His own speech was of course excellent and received with
applause. I was ashamed at myself and sad at heart for my
incapacity. (My Experiments With Truth)
The Sermon on the Mount
About the same time, I met a good Christian from Manchester in a
vegetarian boarding house. He talked to me about Christianity. I
narrated to him my Rajkot recollections. He was pained to hear
them. He said, 'I am a vegetarian. I do not drink. Many Christians
are meat eaters and drink, no doubt; but neither meat-eating nor
drinking is enjoined by scripture. Do please read the Bible.' I
accepted his advice and he got me a copy. I have a faint
recollection that he himself used to sell copies of the Bible, and
I purchased from him an edition containing maps, concordance, and
other aids. I began reading it but I could not possible read
through the Old Testament. I read the book of Genesis, and the
chapters that followed invariably sent me to sleep. But just for
the sake o being able to say that I had read it, I plodded through
the other books with much difficulty and without the least
interest or understanding. I disliked reading the book of Numbers.
But the New Testament produced a different impression, especially
the sermon on the Mount which went straight to my heart. I
compared it with the Gita. The verses, 'But I say unto you, that
ye resist not evil, but whosoever smite thee on thy right cheek,
turn to him the other also. And if any man take away thy coat, let
him have thy cloak too' delighted me beyond measure and put me in
mind of Shamal Bhatt's 'For a bowl of water, give a goodly meal',
etc. My young mind tried to unify the teaching of the Gita, the
"Light of Asia" and the Sermon on the Mount. That renunciation was
the greatest form of religion appealed to me greatly. (My
Experiments with Truth)
After one year of a none too successful law practice, Gandhi
decided to accept an offer from an Indian businessman in South
Africa, Dada Abdulla, to join him as a legal adviser. Unbeknown to
him, this was to become an exceedingly lengthy stay, and
altogether Gandhi was to stay in South Africa for over twenty
years. The Indians who had been living in South Africa were
without political rights, and were generally known by the
derogatory name of 'coolies'. Gandhi himself came to an awareness
of the frightening force and fury of European racism, and how far
Indians were from being considered full human beings, when he when
thrown out of a first-class railway compartment car, though he
held a first-class ticket, at Pietermaritzburg. From this
political awakening Gandhi was to emerge as the leader of the
Indian community, and it is in South Africa that he first coined
the term satyagraha to signify his theory and practice of
non-violent resistance. Gandhi was to describe himself
preeminently as a votary or seeker of satya (truth), which could
not be attained other than through ahimsa (non-violence, love) and
brahmacharya (celibacy, striving towards God).
Gandhi conceived of his own life as a series of experiments to
forge the use of satyagraha in such a manner as to make the
oppressor and the oppressed alike recognize their common bonding
and humanity: as he recognized, freedom is only freedom when it is
indivisible. In his book Satyagraha in South Africa he was to
detail the struggles of the Indians to claim their rights, and
their resistance to oppressive legislation and executive measures,
such as the imposition of a poll tax on them, or the declaration
by the government that all non-Christian marriages were to be
construed as invalid. In 1909, on a trip back to India, Gandhi
authored a short treatise entitled Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule,
where he all but initiated the critique, not only of industrial
civilization, but of modernity in all itsaspects.
Gandhi returned to India in early 1915, and was never to leave the
country again except for a short trip that took him to Europe in
1931. Though he was not completely unknown in India, Gandhi
followed the advice of his political mentor, Gokhale, and took it
upon himself to acquire a familiarity with Indian conditions. He
traveled widely for one year. Over the next few years, he was to
become involved in numerous local struggles, such as at Champaran
in Bihar, where workers on indigo plantations complained of
oppressive working conditions, and at Ahmedabad, where a dispute
had broken out between management and workers at textile mills.
His interventions earned Gandhi a considerable reputation, and his
rapid ascendancy to the helm of nationalist politics is signified
by his leadership of the opposition to repressive legislation (known
as the "Rowlatt Acts") in 1919. His saintliness was not uncommon,
except in someone like him who immersed himself in politics, and
by this time he had earned from no less a person than Rabindranath
Tagore, India's most well-known writer, the title of Mahatma, or 'Great
Soul'. When 'disturbances' broke out in the Punjab, leading to the
massacre of a large crowd of unarmed Indians at the Jallianwala
Bagh in Amritsar and other atrocities, Gandhi wrote the report of
the Punjab Congress Inquiry Committee. Over the next two years,
Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation movement, which called upon
Indians to withdraw from British institutions, to return honors
conferred by the British, and to learn the art of self-reliance;
though the British administration was at places paralyzed, the
movement was suspended in February 1922 when a score of
Indian policemen were brutally killed by a large crowd at Chauri
Chaura, a small market town in the United Provinces. Gandhi
himself was arrested shortly thereafter, tried on charges of
sedition, and sentenced to imprisonment for six years. At The
Great Trial, as it is known to his biographers, Gandhi delivered a
masterful indictment of British rule.
Owing to his poor health, Gandhi was released from prison in 1925.
Over the following years, he worked hard to preserve Hindu-Muslim
relations, and in 1924 he observed, from his prison cell, a 21-day
fast when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out at Kohat, a military
barracks on the Northwest Frontier. This was to be of his many
major public fasts, and in 1932 he was to commence the so-called
Epic Fast unto death, since he thought of "separate electorates"
for the oppressed class of what were then called untouchables (or
Harijans in Gandhi's vocabulary, and dalits in today's language)
as a retrograde measure meant to produce permanent divisions
within Hindu society. Gandhi earned the hostility of Ambedkar, the
leader of the untouchables, but few doubted that Gandhi was
genuinely interested in removing the serious disabilities from
which they suffered, just as no one doubted that Gandhi never
accepted the argument that Hindus and Muslims constituted two
separate elements in Indian society. These were some of the
concerns most prominent in Gandhi's mind, but he was also to
initiate a constructive program for social reform. Gandhi had
ideas -- mostly sound -- on every subject, from hygiene and
nutrition to education and labor, and he relentlessly pursued his
ideas in one of the many newspapers which he founded. Indeed, were
Gandhi known for nothing else in India, he would still be
remembered as one of the principal figures in the history of
Indian journalism.
How this story is written
"This chapter has brought me to a stage where it becomes necessary
for me to explain to the read how this story is written from week
to week. When I began writing it, I had no definite plan before
me. I have do diary or documents, on which to base the story of my
experiments. I write just as the Spirit moves me at the time of
writing. I do not claim to know definitely that all conscious
thought and action on my part is directed by the Spirit. But on
examination of the greatest steps I have taken in my life, as also
those which may be regarded as the least, I think it will not be
improper to say that all of them were directed by the Spirit.
I have not seen Him, neither have I known Him. I have the world's
faith in God my own, as as my faith in ineffaceable, I regard that
faith as amounting to experience. However, as it may be said that
to describe faith as experience is to tamper with truth, it may
perhaps be more correct to say that I have no word for
characterizing my belief in God." (My Experiments With Truth)
In early 1930, as the nationalist movement was revived, the Indian
National Congress, the preeminent body of nationalist opinion,
declared that it would now be satisfied with nothing short of
complete independence (purna swaraj). Once the clarion call had
been issued, it was perforce necessary to launch a movement of
resistance against British rule. On March 2, Gandhi addressed a
letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing him that unless
Indian demands were met, he would be compelled to break the "salt
laws". Predictably, his letter was received with bewildered
amusement, and accordingly Gandhi set off, on the early morning of
March 12, with a small group of followers towards Dandi on the sea.
They arrived there on April 5th: Gandhi picked up a small lump of
natural salt, and so gave the signal to hundreds of thousands of
people to similarly defy the law, since the British exercised a
monopoly on the production and sale of salt. This was the
beginning of the civil disobedience movement: Gandhi himself was
arrested, and thousands of others were also hauled into jail. It
is to break this deadlock that Irwin agreed to hold talks with
Gandhi, and subsequently the British agreed to hold a Round Table
Conference in London to negotiate the possible terms of Indian
independence. Gandhi went to London in 1931 and met some of his
admirers in Europe, but the negotiations proved inconclusive. On
his return to India, he was once again arrested.
For the next few years, Gandhi would be engaged mainly in the
constructive reform of Indian society. He had vowed upon
undertaking the salt march that he would not return to Sabarmati
Ashram in Ahmedabad, where he had made his home, if India did not
attain its independence, and in the mid-1930s he established
himself in a remote village, in the dead center of India, by the
name of Segaon [known as Sevagram]. It is to this obscure village,
which was without electricity or running water, that India's
political leaders made their way to engage in discussions with
Gandhi about the future of the independence movement.
At the outset of World War II, Gandhi and the Congress leadership
assumed a position of neutrality: while clearly critical of
fascism, they could not find it in themselves to support British
imperialism. In 1942, Gandhi issued the last call for independence
from British rule. On the grounds of what is now known as August
Kranti Maidan, he delivered a stirring speech, asking every Indian
to lay down their life, if necessary, in the cause of freedom. He
gave them this mantra: "Do or Die"; at the same time, he asked the
British to 'Quit India'. The response of the British government
was to place Gandhi under arrest, and virtually the entire
Congress leadership was to find itself behind bars, not to be
released until after the conclusion of the war.
A few months after Gandhi and Kasturba had been placed in
confinement in the Aga Khan's Palace in Pune, Kasturba passed away:
this was a terrible blow to Gandhi, following closely on the heels
of the death of his private secretary of many years, the gifted
Mahadev Desai. In the period from 1942 to 1945, the Muslim League,
which represented the interest of certain Muslims and by now
advocated the creation of a separate homeland for Muslims,
increasingly gained the attention of the British, and supported
them in their war effort. The new government that came to power in
Britain under Clement Atlee was committed to the independence of
India, and negotiations for India's future began in earnest.
Sensing that the political leaders were now craving for power,
Gandhi largely distanced himself from the negotiations. He
declared his opposition to the vivisection of India. It is
generally conceded, even by his detractors, that the last years of
his life were in some respects his finest. He walked from village
to village in riot-torn Noakhali, where Hindus were being killed
in retaliation for the killing of Muslims in Bihar, and nursed the
wounded and consoled the widowed; and in Calcutta he came to
constitute, in the famous words of the last viceroy, Mountbatten,
a "one-man boundary force" between Hindus and Muslims.
"Man has been endowed with buddhi or intelligence, so that he
might at every turn decide what is beneficent for observance and
what is detrimental. Gandhi while going through hate ridden
regions, prayed, "Sabko san-mati de Bhagwan!" (O Lord! Give
everyone Good intelligence!) The intelligence has to be kept sharp,
clear and straight" (Sathya Sai Baba).
The ferocious fighting in Calcutta came to a halt, almost entirely
on account of Gandhi's efforts, and even his critics were wont to
speak of the Gandhi's 'miracle of Calcutta'. When the moment of
freedom came, on 15 August 1947, Gandhi was nowhere to be seen in
the capital, though Nehru and the entire Constituent Assembly were
to salute him as the architect of Indian independence, as the 'father
of the nation'.
The last few months of Gandhi's life were to be spent mainly in
the capital city of Delhi. There he divided his time between the 'Bhangi
colony', where the sweepers and the lowest of the low stayed, and
Birla House, the residence of one of the wealthiest men in India
and one of the benefactors of Gandhi's ashrams. Hindu and Sikh
refugees had streamed into the capital from what had become
Pakistan, and there was much resentment, which easily translated
into violence, against Muslims. It was partly in an attempt to put
an end to the killings in Delhi, and more generally to the
bloodshed following the partition, which may have taken the lives
of as many as 1 million people, besides causing the dislocation of
no fewer than 11 million, that Gandhi was to commence the last
fast unto death of his life. The fast was terminated when
representatives of all the communities signed a statement that
they were prepared to live in "perfect amity", and that the lives,
property, and faith of the Muslims would be safeguarded. A few
days later, a bomb exploded in Birla House where Gandhi was
holding his evening prayers, but it caused no injuries. However,
his assassin, a Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin by the name of Nathuram
Godse, was not so easily deterred. Gandhi, quite
characteristically, refused additional security, and no one could
defy his wish to be allowed to move around unhindered.
In the early evening hours of
30 January 1948, Gandhi met with India's Deputy Prime Minister and
his close associate in the freedom struggle, Vallabhai Patel, and
then proceeded to his prayers. "To see the Universal and all
pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love
the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after
that cannot afford do keep out of any field of life. That is why
my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and
I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet with all
humility, that those who say religion has nothing to do with
politics do not know what religion means."
Gandhi sought trikaranasuddhi, purity of thought, word and deed.
In the words of the Sai Avatar, this is the definition and the
embodiment of integrity. Listen to Gandhi speak of his (our)
journey toward purity:
"But the path to self purification is hard and steep. To attain to
perfect purity, one has to become absolutely passion free in
thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of
love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not
in me as yet that triple purity (tri-karana suddhi) in spite of
constant and ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's
praise fails to move me, indeed, it very often stings me. To
conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be harder than the
physical conquest of the world by force of arms. Ever since my
return to India, I have had experience of dormant passions lying
hidden within me. The knowledge of them has made me feel
humiliated, though not defeated. The experiences and experiments
have sustained me and given me great joy. But I know that I have
still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself
to zero." (My Experiments With Truth, last page).
That evening, as Gandhi's time-piece, which hung from one of the
folds of his dhoti [loin-cloth], was to reveal to him, he was
uncharacteristically late to his prayers, and he fretted about his
inability to be punctual. At 10 minutes past 5 o'clock, with one
hand each on the shoulders of Abha and Manu, who were known as his
'walking sticks', Gandhi commenced his walk towards the garden
where the prayer meeting was held. As he was about to mount the
steps of the podium, Gandhi folded his hands and greeted his
audience with a namaskar; at that moment, a young man came up to
him and roughly pushed aside Manu. Nathuram Godse bent down in the
gesture of an obeisance, took a revolver out of his pocket, and
shot Gandhi three times in his chest. Bloodstains appeared over
Gandhi's white woolen shawl; his hands still folded in a greeting,
Gandhi blessed his assassin: He Ram! He Ram!
As Gandhi fell, his faithful time-piece struck the ground, and the
hands of the watch came to a standstill. They showed, as they had
done before, the precise time: 5:12 P.M.
On the afternoon of the 30th of January, Baba led a few people to
the Chitravathi River. Suddenly, He ran back to the mandir and
bolted the door. He emerged intermittently, until 7.30 p.m., when
He finally came out and spoke a few words to the devotees to the
effect that a great soul had passed away. No one knew exactly what
had happened. A remote village like Puttaparthi did not have
methods of instant communication with the rest of the world.
Periodically, Balapattabi would go to Bukkapatnam to collect
mail. After a couple of days, one of the devotees read in The
Hindu newspaper that Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, had
been assassinated at about 5.30 p.m., on the 30th of January, in
New Delhi. It happened almost at the very time when Baba behaved
in a strange manner. (Love is My Form, Chapter XIV)
Source:
http://www.geocities.com/saicenter_us/snl/snl_101502.htm
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