Indian Youth and Victorian London
Presented on: Thursday, July 7, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 1 of 13
Gandhi's Indian Youth and Victorian London:
Questions of Interior Balance Between the Two Cultures
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 7, 1983
Transcript:
The day is July 7, 1983. This is the first lecture in a new series of lectures by Roger Weir on Gandhi. Tonight's lecture is entitled: Gandhi's Indian Youth and Victorian London: Questions of Interior Balance Between the Two Cultures.
This is the first session of a course on Mahatma Gandhi, and I think most of you who have come are familiar with the film presentation of his life, which was interesting, but I hope in the course to be able to deliver to you an insight into the quality of universality that was made manifest by the movement in the world at this at the time of Gandhi, and centered eventually and increasingly around him.
It is a point of great moment for us because we are still in the throes of the struggles and the problems which manifested themselves fully for the first time in human history in the late 19th century, early 20th century. So that we have a very serious matter on our hands. And it is difficult to talk with comprehension and fullness of any major figure in the 20th century. Because so much is required in the way of sensitivity, in the way of learning, in the perspective of history.
We have in fact a major problem in our time that we do not understand our lives and our time. The problem is compounded by the fact that we are living in the polyglot civilization that was only approached twice before in human history. And both times produced a travesty which eventually snuffed out the very complicated roots that gave rise to those polyglot civilizations. One of them of course was the Hellenistic era and the other was the confab of civilizations under the Mongols in China. Both times there were worldwide polyglot civilizations coming together to try to form some universal vision of life and both ended in abject failures. Both of them ended in dark ages. The Mongols permanently killed science in China. It wasn't until the 20th century Western influence that science arose again in the East Asian civilization area. And of course, when Hellenistic civilization went under it produced the dark ages.
So, we have a very serious matter on our hands in the 20th century and events are in fact coming to a head very rapidly. Gandhi is necessary to study because he of all the figures of our century put his finger upon the focus of all the problems. We may not agree with all of his stances, with all of his solutions offered, but the fact remains that his unflinching honesty and perspicacity of character highlight for us, spotlight for us, all the problems that need to be observed and solved in our time. So, he is important not as the representative of the solution so much as characterizing fearlessly the problems, and the problems are many.
And they are overshadowed by one great problem that has become so endemic by our time that we even live under its umbrella and scarcely notice its effect. Until we come into collision with aspects of our own lives or aspects around us and then we experience an incredible landslide of anxiety - an incredible weight of depression. And we realize that we are living underneath a sea of violence - a sea of terror of intimidation which weighs down upon us. Imperceptibly by now because it is so omnipotent. And that the entire planet is covered by an ocean in an atmosphere of violence, intimidation, and fear, and as long as we maintain ourselves in an ignorant obedience to the power structures that are, we do not notice this. But at any time when we begin to step outside of the regular frames of reference conditioned for us, we immediately begin to experience a feeling of anxiety that something is wrong - all is not well - and the more that we seek to escape from or create new avenues of life and freshness and naturality, the more this increases.
It was Gandhi who highlighted for us all of the complex problems that have come to the fore in human society by this time in man's career to produce this penumbra of terror. And so we live in a time so terrible that we dare not even recognize it until we have attained a perspective of spiritual growth an insight that allows us at last in some way to look up from the humdrum conditioning and confront in fact the specter of an unholy terror of man's possible true nature. This of course takes a great deal of courage. And courage is the concomitant of character that takes a long time to build, to grow.
And so, all of the activities which we will investigate and elucidate, as much as we can, will reveal to us progressively the story of the discovery of the condition of our times, that terror, and the way in which we can school ourselves patiently to resist enough at the beginnings to give ourselves a chance to grow in integrity. And finally, ways in which we can reach out and join with others who have made these realizations. And hopefully, transcendently offer some solutions to these conditions, to these problems.
India more than any other country in the 19th century suffered the brunt of the willful ambition of man's egotistical drive to dominate a situation totally. The British Empire by the middle of the nineteenth century under the aegis of the East India Company came to dominate the life of the Indian subcontinent. In 1857 there was a famous Indian Mutiny against these conditions. It was a cause célèbre treated in the world's press. There were many individuals who felt across Europe that somehow these injustices would have to be dealt with and attended to. And that a very subtle transference took place, one which is always characteristic of a maligned egoistic center. The transference was to take the reins of power from a part of the Empire, away from the East India Company, and transfer that to the government as a whole thinking that they had solved the problem. But what actually happened was that it took the infection from a part and transferred it to the whole so that the entire British government became infected with the social disease that the East India Company had finally come to manifest.
And increasingly as the nineteenth century went on this disease - like all psychological imbalances - began to project out its own balancing conditions in a fantasy world. So that one could establish in a life in this imbalance a sense that well it's justified after all because the rationalizing of imbalance is the speciality of the egotistical projection from the mind. So that by the late 19th century the phrase was that Victorian England had crawled ashore from the sea of evolution and that they were now matured human beings, no longer subject to the vicissitudes of history, or the developments of man. That somehow all of creation had come to comfortably reside in the apex of the parlors and drawing-rooms in London.
This cover-up attitude, this transferred monstrous untruth, was centered upon the ability of the English people economically to suck the energy of India through an economic and through a psychological vampiric process. And while England became raised to pinnacle of economic and military and social power, India was on the other side of this barbell and began to sink into incredible barbarity. The poverty was appalling, so appalling, because it applied to hundreds of millions of human beings that it was assumed that this was a condition that only animals could live in. And so, the subconscious mythology of the animalistic barbarian Asians became the concomitant of the clean, well-pressed cricketer, who with his troops and economic wealth deserved a place outside of the vicissitudes of history.
In this incredible imbalance and situation, as usually happens, they're stirred in the deepest levels of the impoverished area of humanity the spark of divinity because the divine always moves in this mysterious way. Always understanding the law of the universe that if anything is to be changed, if there is to be a growth, the seed that must begin must be the farthest away from the manifested and the accomplished. So, in the most out-of-the-way corners and the most obscure of areas came the beginning spark of the change that would manifest eventually into a landslide of confrontation.
The individual who sensed this change was an illiterate Indian whose name comes down to us today as Ramakrishna. And Ramakrishna was a man who became, as the Indians would say, God-possessed. He had incredible experiences. And they were not so much learning from books but through progressive accumulative encounters. One whole stage with a prophetic woman in India. One whole stage with another series of religious personages. But there came a time when Ramakrishna himself burst into a spiritual flame, and having survived this catastrophic awakening became able to see the spiritual nature of persons, and in this capacity of his to see the spiritual truth of a human being began to pick out certain individuals to become teachers of man for it was seen to be a problem of the human being and not just of a nationality. Although the nationality in India was the absolute lowest rung at the time. And one of the great individuals that was picked out by Ramakrishna and prepared was Vivekananda. Ramakrishna of course did not live very long. He hardly reached his fortieth year - he died - he died of cancer of the throat. Vivekananda also died when he was in his early 50s - I think he was 52.
But Vivekananda unlike Ramakrishna was extremely learned. He had read the books of the world. He had trained his mind. And all this time being a poor Swami in India he was searching for some way to initiate this spiritual motion in the world. The chance came in 1893 there was to be a World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Illinois. Vivekananda having absolutely no funds, no way of really going by plan, began just to move in certain spiritual ways. Trying one day some way, in the next day another way, and eventually made an orientation in the pattern for himself where he found that conditions were slowly opening up and he's made his way to the United States. And when the World Parliament of Religions opened in 1893, he had been put on the first day's docket by a quirk of circumstance. The night before he had actually slept in a boxcar in the freight yards in Chicago. And the next day when he delivered his first speech, he was a world-famous personage overnight. And Vivekananda went on to speak about the necessity of man waking up to his capacities, that man blinded to his capacities will simply squash the roots of his own nourishment in his ignorance and his blindness, and never know why he died.
When Vivekananda died in 1902 it left a vacuum. It was like a sweet song that had begun to rise to some crescendo suddenly blanked silent. And in that vacuum, in that deafness that followed, it was as if India and the world holding its breath waiting to hear - was there anyone else who could sing that song. And there were many, by this time, great individuals who had grown up under the tone that Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had established. There were great poets like Rabindranath Tagore and other great figures in India. And even great figures outside in the world - Tolstoy very much alive and we'll hear more of him. But none of these individuals was able to pick up the very specific particular tone of universal salvation, of the thread that has no substance by which spiritual man weaves the fabric of his enlightenment. And it was in this incredible lull that Gandhi became the Mahatma. It was in this lull that he was heard not just as a reformer in South Africa but as someone who like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda was, in the phrase of a great book, in tune with the infinite. And it was because of this tome that the great political genius of India at that time Gokhale began to single out Gandhi as the man of the century, the man of the time, the spiritual leader, who not so much in leading by rhetoric but by his example in humility could weave the fabric that was needed.
The story of the individual Gandhi is very difficult to trace in his earlier years. We have before us just a few volumes that really suffice. Romain Rolland, an excellent French writer, who did Life of Vivekananda and Life of Ramakrishna and a life of Mahatma Gandhi [titled Mahatma Gandhi: The Man who Became One with the Universal Being], wrote a fantastic book in 1930 called Prophets of the New India. And in Prophets of the New India you will find the account enlarged, about 700 pages, of most of what I've given you in the last 10 minutes. The most outstanding Western life of Gandhi is by Louis Fisher, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi published right at the midpoint of the 20th century. And it came out in 1950 and really is the best Western life of Gandhi.
In a large eight-volume Mahatma by D. G. Tendulkar is wonderful. But unfortunately for the beginnings of his life the first 20-25 years take up only about 20 or 25 pages. So, Tendulkar is not so important for the early, early life. But later on, we'll refer to Tendulkar quite a bit more. Which leaves only two books, two legs to stand on, two perspectives that are of service to our quest to try to see this phenomenon whole. To try to get a sense of the noumenon behind this event, behind this individual. The one is written by Gandhi himself - his autobiography is called The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and the other volume is by his great secretary Pyarelal [Nayar] in the first volume, Mahatma Gandhi: The Early Phase. Pyarelal is still alive in India.
When Gandhi's first great secretary Mahadev Desai died in 1942, Pyarelal became his secretary. Pyarelal has been with Gandhi since 1919 - He is still alive in 1983. Extremely refined. Learned as one of the real giants of the movement. His great book incidentally of about 200 pages Towards New Horizons, is one of the real guiding lights towards the next century. Pyarelal spends almost 200 pages before he gets to the birth of Gandhi. He likes for us to realize that in this tremendous tapestry of injustices there was also the rising green shoes of incredible disciplines - most of them in the sciences.
The science of anthropology was just getting born and coming to a realization. As in the title of one book by Gene Lisitzky, Four Ways of Being Human, that there are many ways to be human; there is not one way, there is not a right way, there are hundreds of appropriate, honest ways to be human. So that the pluralistic character of history in this world has to be understood. There is not a great consensus to reduce human nature down to a unity of one type or one kind that this meat-grinder approach is exactly wrong. There is a plurality of ways to be human; there is a complementarity of ways to be human together at the same time.
The science of psychology was being born and coming up. The discovery that we have tremendous capacities which are not visible, are not available for our control immediately or perhaps for a very long time and some perhaps never. That there are tremendous forces and energies that need to be modulated, and in this modulation, we need to conduct within ourselves a sense of personal presence that is very much like a prison that is able to contain and transmit and project a whole spectrum of possibilities. And not just a single ray. And not just a quality by which all other sources must be integrated. We must be multi-dimensional. The science of physics and chemistry, of course, rising at this time. The entire world seemed in the Edwardian period to be balanced in the pinnacle of ultimate success.
And then of course all of it swept again one grand landslide by the first world war into an oblivion. And since the first world war there has been absolutely no rest for the societies of the world. For the psychological condition of man. For the anthropological suppositions of planners. And increasingly the overwhelming reverberation of events have produced a cacophony. And in this chaos of perspective, we are reduced to a level of following the strongest conditioning of the moment. It is to break the dependence upon any conditioning that is the process of freedom. To see things as they are. And to be able to live in accordance with that.
When Gandhi was born on October 2nd, 1869, all of these movements were just beginning. It's almost as if someone, something, somewhere had thrown the pebble exactly into the center of the pool. Just as it's quietness seeming to spread into an infinite placidity of the British Empire. And by the time that placidity was a raging storm the ripples from that pebble had come to quell and organize the surface enough to at least allow life to go on. When he was born, he was born in the little town of Porbandar, and this area of India is called Gujarat, and this peninsula jutting out into the Arabian Sea, blunted on the end is the Kathiawar Peninsula. And from time immemorial this has been a trading nexus. That is to say there has been shipping and commerce from many civilizations in this area almost as far back as we can trace. For north of it is Karachi and the Indus Valley coming down. And of course, up the Indus River the great civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, which go back to 3000 BC and earlier, were civilized at a time when the first dynasty was beginning in Egypt. And of course, in between Egypt then in the Nile civilizations and Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa and the Indus civilizations, about midway in the Persian Gulf was an island today known as Bahrain. And at that time known as Dilmun. And in the Old Testament you will hear it referred to as the Dilmun. Very close to the concept of the Garden of Eden. It was a free port about 4,500 years ago, by which trade from all over the known world at that time came into an interchange, and so Porbandar was in this spectrum of civilized interchange for thousands of years.
When Gandhi was born, his religion was of a Vaishnava Hindu, but in the small religious temple near his house, the Quran and the Puranas were kept together and most of the audience was illiterate, and they didn't mind at all if one read from one book and then the other and back and forth and integrated them together. The Jains, the Parsees, the Muslims, the Hindus, even the Christians, and perhaps even a few Buddhists - all of these milieus of perspectives rested easy in the port city of Porbandar.
The Gandhi's were, for several generations, prime ministers of this whole area of India. Known for the capital of the area at Rajkot. So that the Gujarati speaking Kathiawar Peninsula Rajkot state was very familiar with the capacities of Gandhi's. But Gandhi's father [Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi] had married four times. Three times in his life his wife
wives had died. And his last wife was named Putlibai and she had several children. And the last child, the youngest of all, was Mohandas Gandhi. And little Mohandas Gandhi was a very shy sprout. His mother Putlibai used to take special care for him, and in fact, he had a nurse named Rambha who very often would notice that the shy little boy would not go out and play when it began to get dark. And in talking with him she learned very quickly that he was afraid to go out because the world for him was filled with ghosts and evil spirits. And so, she gave him a simple little child's code by which he could equalize the situation. She told him the story of the Ramayana. Not the Ramayana from the classical Valmiki from the 3rd-4th century BC, but the story of the Ramayana is retold in the 16th century by the great religious poet Tulsidas. Tulsidas' epic is translated into English as the record of the holy lake of the axe of Rama. It's a way of metaphorically saying that there is a pool of devotional wisdom within man and within the world and responsive by reverberation directly to God. And that if we collect ourselves on the shores of this presence, devotionally, we will have direct, immediate contact with the divine, with God.
And so, in Tulsidas, in his Ramayana, the nurse Rambha finally explained to the little Gandhi that all of this story, all of this realization, all of this capacity could be had again what is called a mantra - a word, a cue word - and she gave him the cue word Ramanama. And nama in the Hindi-Persian sphere means name. Like in ferdowsi shannama. The name of Rama. And
Rama of course being the incarnation of the Divine in the sense of bhakti. So that ramanama became a mantra word for Gandhi as the youngster, as a little one. And he says in his own account that very often he was saved as a child from total disbelief, from total just falling apart, by simply repeating this name.
And he began to realize progressively as he grew that there must be a structure manifesting within himself and within people by which this could operate and work. And this became increasingly as he grew a matter of curiosity. What is it in us that actually works by prayer? How is it that devotion really works in this world?
As a shy little youngster going to school, Gandhi, of course as he grew up, began to experiment as all little children do. And one of the strong boys in his class confessed to him that the reason that he was strong, like an Englishman, was that he ate meat. And that meat in fact was the thing that was the secret behind the British Raj. And that if Indians would only eat meat, they also would gain strength. So, Gandhi decided with his friend that he was secretly, behind the shed, he'd some meat. Well, it was unfortunate his first morsel was a tough burnt piece of goat. And he chewed that piece of goat. Chewed it and as he chewed it more it became just absolutely sickening to him. But trying to be courageous as a boy would, thinking about all those strong British boys who dominated, he swallowed that piece of goat. Well, he said he laid awake all night he could hear that goat bleating in his stomach
baaa, baaa. And he was certain that he had committed a great sin somehow against life. But he was determined that he was going to grow. So, he began to meet with his friend and they began to eat meat. And finally, he even grew to like meat - I think he ate it 4 or 5 times - but then he began to suffer pangs of conscience. He realized that his parents being strict religious vegetarians would not like this fact. And in fact, what was further bothering him, in order to purchase meat because he was a poor boy in India, he had to steal the coppers of the servants - the pennies. So finally, the crime went and got too much for him. And one day when his father was quite the all in debt Gandhi, the little Gandhi wrote out a confession. Exposing himself totally and took it in and handed it to his father and waited by the bedside. His father sat up in bed and read the note. And Gandhi says he simply tore up the note laid back down in his pillow and wept silently. And he said I stood there by the bedside of my father and wept silently with him - Not a word was said - and he said for the first time he had had a lesson in pure ahimsa, non-violence. That the purifying accord of truth that was struck between him, his father, and himself on that occasion convinced him somehow that this was exactly the way by which we redeem everything.
Time went on, the circumstance faded into one of those guiding stars from our childhood that bloom in the background for the adolescent years. And only later on when we grow enough to be able to look back in retrospect and look over the horizon of immediacy, that we see those guiding stars again. And we realized that they've been there all the time. Servicing us unconsciously all the time. And now rising again like some bright Sirius urging us to build an architecture in their lives. To prepare for the correlation of what that guiding star brings and what we might engender ourselves.
As Gandhi grew in adolescence, he discovered that he had a tremendous shyness. That whenever there were a number of people around, he clammed up. He couldn't say anything. Well, it was strange that his family should then prepare him to enter into a career of being a barrister, a lawyer. And even in connection with this they had arranged for Gandhi to be sent all the way to London to receive his education. Well, this caused a tremendous stir.
The caste system in India, especially at this time in the 1880s, the mid-1880s, was tremendously strong and they did not like the idea of Indians having to kowtow to the British in India. And much less going all the way to get a British education and then come back as British minds in Indian bodies to just increase the thumbscrews on the British Raj in India. And so, the caste held meetings in Rajkot and in Bombay forbidding anyone to help the Gandhi family to send Mohandas to London. In fact, it became such a tremendous storm of controversy that even up until the day that he sailed, in September 4th, 1888, it was up in the air whether or not he was going to have funds. He went from place to place, and person to person, to try and get enough funds to go. He was turned down politely and not so politely everywhere. And finally, at the last moment, as these circumstances usually happen, the circumstances opened, and he was able to proceed.
It seems to be a characteristic of the myth of the hero that we are intimidated by the roar of the lion until we actually look into his mouth. And then the roar disappears and so does the lion. and we were able to proceed. We just had to get ourselves the courage to look into the roar of the lion. There is a famous Buddhist story called The Lion's Roar of Queen Srimala which points that out.
Gandhi sailed and he turned out to be a very good sailor. The Arabian Sea, one leaves from Bombay and crossed the Arabian Sea to Aden on the Arabian Peninsula. And it's quite a long way across. And the Arabian Sea in some months of the year are satin smooth. And in some months of the year are short little choppy waves that drive everyone to sickness. But Gandhi proved to be a very good sailor. But he could not eat the food on board. And in fact, his mother in order to agree to let him go had forced upon him a triple vow that he would not touch wine. He would not touch meat. And of course, he would not touch women. In those days, women were like an image which could not be handled. And especially from the Hindu culture and Victorian civilization in India. It was something which leads to no good. So, the wine, meat and women vow was foisted upon him, in fact, encouraged in him. And from Gandhi's perspective we must say was offered to him. To save him from unravelling in an alien situation. And it was in fact these three vows that did save Gandhi and permitted him a chance to weave the fabric of his life together. Because even though they seemed on the surface initially to be impossible, to be non-productive and perhaps even culturally biased. They proved to be the very thread which Gandhi in his integrity wove together to create the character that we know as the Mahatma.
He was unable to eat the food on board. And so, he lived upon sweets and fruits. Dried fruits and so forth. That he had brought with him. In fact, he lived on them all the way to London. In those days it took about six weeks. Four to six weeks to go from Bombay to London by ship. And of course, every place that the boat would stop, in Aden and Port Sayyed, in Brindisi and Malta, Gibraltar, Gandhi would go ashore. And these ports of iniquity would just shock him of the conditions that would go on and the qualities of human life that were just all around him. And so, he withdrew more and more and ended up staying in his cabin almost all of the time.
When he landed in England in October of 1888, he gives us a wonderful account of what happened. "Dr. Mehta to whom I had wired from Southampton called me about eight o'clock the same evening. He gave me a hearty greeting. He smiled at my being in flannels. He was dressed in white flannels." For those who don't realize the etiquette of dress in the British Empire was the ultimate law. One simply was not mis-dressed, and to wear white flannels in England in October was a sign of a barbarian and a boor.
"He smiled at my being in flannels. As we were talking, I casually picked up his top hat to see how smooth it was. Passing my hand over it the wrong way and disturbed the fur." And of course, if you do this to an old Victorian top hat it also destroys the hat. "Yes, Dr. Mehta looked somewhat angrily at what I was doing and stopped me. But the mischief had been done. The incident was a warning for the future. This was my first lesson in European etiquette. Into the details of which Dr. Mehta humorously initiated me. Do not touch other people's things', he said." And incidentally one of the basic rules of English law at this time, which was one of the mainstays of the theory of property at this time. All these theories of property had come, of course, from [Jeremy] Bentham and [John Stuart] Mill and so forth. Developed from the old Roman. But one of the theories was that one must use one's property so that it does not damage others. This was the responsibility of property in the British Raj, you see, so, "Do not touch other people's things, he said. Do not ask questions, as we usually do in India, on first acquaintance. Do not talk loudly. Never address other people as sir while speaking to them, as we do in India. Only servants and subordinates address their masters that way. And so on, and so forth. He told me that it was very expensive to live in a hotel. And recommended that I should live with a private family. We deferred consideration of the matter until Monday."
So, his initial exposure to London with the good Dr. Mehta suddenly revealed to him that he was totally out of place. There wasn't one aspect of the society of Victorian London that he understood. He couldn't eat the food. He couldn't talk to the people. He had no confidence in himself. And he was committed to be there for three years and become a lawyer. He couldn't go back home. So, he was stuck. And he realized this and for a night upon night it stirred in him. The fact that he had gotten himself into a box canyon, as we would say today, an impasse. So, there was nothing to do but to begin patiently from nowhere and work his way out.
And this of course is the beginning revelation of the Gandhian technique which would grow up to be satyagraha. That you do not preconceive the way in which you will emancipate yourself. You do not preconceive the solution to a situation. But you begin where you are, as you are and have as your guide only the confidence that you will be nonviolent all the way through. In fact, we should say it in a positive. You will participate in ahimsa all the way through. And you will look for the truth, that in this quest if you are perceiving the situation in its fullness and analyzing in its completeness, what you will have eventually, ultimately, the only quality that will be left will be what is true that everything, that illusion, will go, will evaporate because it has no substance in and of itself. So that with truth and ahimsa together. And since we're using ahimsa, we should use the Sanskrit for truth, satya. Satya. And from satya we grasp the truth in graha. So, satyagraha, truth-grasping, is not to clutch it, but to reveal it. And one is revealing it not to others so much but to oneself and others at the same time - publicly. As the waters of illusion subside what is left is the gold of the discovered truth of the situation.
So, Gandhi began to work upon this. And the first consideration for him was the overwhelming one of what to eat. He took some rooms. And he told them he was a vegetarian. So, the good English house woman cooked some vegetables for him in the good English way. She boiled them until they were absolutely tasteless and had no nourishment left in them. And when she served up some cabbage and potatoes for him, he couldn't stand eating them. Or even the smell. And they gave him two slices of bread. And he said if only they had known that I could have eaten a loaf. And so, for almost a week Gandhi struggled with this situation. And then realized that there was no one that was going to help him. He would have to do something himself. On his own. And so, it occurred to him that there must be in a city the size of London others who were vegetarians. And therefore, there must be somewhere in London vegetarian restaurants. So, he began a program of walking. And he walked eight to ten miles a day looking for a vegetarian restaurant. Remember now he was so shy, almost wouldn't ask anyone. And he finally discovered what his dream was. And walking into this wonderful vegetarian restaurant he said he had his first real meal since leaving India. And felt so good at having discovered this. And having worked his way out of an incredible impasse. That he bought a book at this restaurant which was entitled A Plea for Vegetarianism by Henry Salt. And he said he went home filled inside and all through the night read H. S. Salt's A Plea for Vegetarianism. And he said for the first time he realized that he was a vegetarian now by choice. That he understood why. And he said from that moment on he was no longer a slave to the compulsion that he was merely obeying a vow to his mother, but that in fact she had given him a clue which was overwhelmingly important for him to unfold and he said it just dawned on him increasingly through the night that he was in possession of a great truth inside. If only he could find a way to unfold it. And so, he, of course, began following up by trying to find out where was H. S. Salt.
Well let's have a little break. And then we'll come back we will see as we go further along increasingly that one of the major tapped roots for Gandhi was the Bhagavad Gita. And Gandhi developed a translation and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, which was published, this is a first edition of it, The Gospel of Selfless Action, and in the very first discourse of the Bhagavad Gita we find his rendition of the sequence of man's destruction, and it runs very succinctly like this:
"With the destruction of the family, perish the eternal family virtues. And with the perishing of these virtues, unrighteousness seizes the whole family. When unrighteousness prevails of Krishna the women of the family become corrupt. And their corruption of varshneya causes a confusion. This confusion verily drags the family Slayer as well as the family to hell. So that there is a vicious whirlpool dragging man down. And the very cause of the beginnings of this whirlpool are dragged with the entire situation and we end up with nothing."
Pyarelal in his great Life of Gandhi has this written:
"There is a perpetual seesaw going on within the mind of man between the opposite movements of conventionalism and idealism. When the human spirit staled by custom and shrunk by usage loses its intervitality, it seeks to make up for its loss by an outward appearance of power. It surrounds itself with impressive externalities, material comforts, show of wealth conventions in manners and dress, a stereotyped code of morals based on tradition rather than on ethics, and finally a philosophy and religion adapted to its convenience."
This condition of course rings all too clear and true, and this projection of power and authority is always the illusion by which the balance is sought to be maintained. And so, one of wholeness and vision looks at hundred story skyscrapers and wonders on whose bones rest these monoliths. On whose tears rise these structures. Because there is a wholeness to life and by crimping or projecting or inflating one aspect some other aspect must suffer. And this consistent impairment of the wholeness is what the Gita is talking about leading to confusion. And the personages at the very fulcrum of the transition are the women. It is the women who diagnose and reverse the process. And so, it is very important to realize that is not prudishness in Gandhi that finally leads him to understanding that for some reformers searching for truth there must be a vow of chastity, brahmacarya. Because there is a poignancy in the relationship between men and women that must be understood. And while normal marriage and relations are a part of the wholeness of nature. In times of great universal crisis, in order to clarify that hidden thin thread of reality, one must sometimes revert to the classic asceticism, the brahmacaryan vow of chastity.
Now for Gandhi, in his experience he found when his father died - he was tending him, fanning him, cold compresses - he suddenly had the urge to go and almost literally attack his wife. So, he went in and she is pregnant with his first child and still he insisted and when he came back his father had already died, and it shocked him, it embarrassed him, and it seemed like another one of these guiding stars; that there was something wrong in treating his wife as property. In insisting upon his authority as the man where the structures of the family by tradition came to him and it was his right, that somehow there was a lesson, as they used to say there, there was a moral ethical star to be seen in the relationship with women.
When he went to England, like most Indian students of the time, he did not tell anyone that he was married and had a son. It was not the right etiquette. One had to be charming. In fact, if you're learning English manners, one would have to carry on and go for walks and various things. And several times this led to complications. One time the landlady of one of his places kept introducing a young woman to him and hoping for an engagement til finally Gandhi had to write her a letter revealing the fact. And he was surprised that there was an acceptance and a happiness and a maturity in both the woman - in the young woman and the landlady. And he realized that one must come clean - one must open this up.
Another time towards the end of his stay in England, having assured himself of passing the bar, he found himself in the seaport of Portsmouth at a vegetarian convention. And he said it hadn't occurred to him or perhaps to anyone in the vegetarian society that Portsmouth being a sailor's port for many years, that there was a different standard of morality there. And the widowed woman who ran the place and playing bridge with Gandhi and his young Indian friend. One thing led to another until a voice inside of him said, just as he was about to leave the card game, what are you doing? And he said it just mortified him. The sense of shame came to him. And he began to realize that he had almost just inadvertently, casually, by participating in a habitual flow had broken his vow. And that he realized that there was attentiveness that was needed.
Question from the room: How was he breaking his vow?
He was going to go to bed with the lady. Zorba the Greek said there is one sin God does not forgive: when a woman asked him to come to bed and he does not go. That is a different morality. In this case one should not, even if she asks politely no less.
The Gita is a document which appeared about the 3rd century BC and was written by the great Bhagavad Vyasa and put into his epic poem The Mahabharata, the great Indian war. And it received its first translation in western language in the early 19th century. But the translation that really stood out was by Sir Edwin Arnold, called The Song Celestial. And it was actually one of the first times that the Western world was able to appreciate an Asian spiritual classic on its own terms. Almost any Indian who reads that translation speaks very highly of the quality of realization that is in the words of Sir Edwin Arnold.
Gandhi got to know Sir Edwin in London. He was a vegetarian. He was a part of the circle of H. S. Salt. And with Salt and Edwin Arnold and Josiah Oldfield, Gandhi became increasingly a man comfortable with his life in London. And someone gave him a copy of Sir Edwin Arnold's The Song Celestial. And he read the Gita for the very first time with a couple of other vegetarian friends. And he put to use what little Sanskrit he had. And he realized that from what he could understand that sir Edwin Arnold had really mastered the tone and the feeling, the flavor of the Bhagavad-Gita.
So, he went to the next book by Sir Edwin Arnold which is The Light of Asia, which is the story of Buddha. And he said even more than The Song Celestial, The Light of Asia suddenly encouraged him that there was no shame in being an Asian. That there were gems of human attainment in Asia that were not even known there. And we have to realize however strange that is, that for most Indians of his day they had absolutely no understanding of their own heritage and tradition. But it was the third book in a row that he read with his vegetarian friends that really got to him. He read a little book called A Key to Theosophy. And he said he began to realize that some of the finest spirits of the West were understanding human wisdom at its finest in terms of Asia. And here he was an Asian trying to ape the Englishman. And he said he suddenly experienced the ridiculous gulf and the wanderlust ambition that he was pursuing.
So, his two friends took him in 1890 to meet Madame Blavatsky. And Annie Besant was there and he said he was so impressed with the fact that here were Westerners that could teach him about his own tradition. And he realized then that perhaps he had better study his own tradition as soon as opportunity arose. And we're going to see next week that this arose in South Africa.
The difficulties for Gandhi in England were not so much academic. The process of obtaining a law degree in those days was keeping terms.' One kept terms' by attending meals, dinners, you eat your way through to the degree. And in each term' you had to attend six meals. And it didn't matter whether you ate or not. But you had to sit through those six meals all the way. Now at some point in the past when there were smaller classes this dining together was a natural focus of interchange and matured somewhat the person's there. But Gandhi says in his day the dining hall was just packed with people and you never got to really talk to anyone. But he was very popular because he didn't drink. And they allowed two bottles of wine for every table of four. So, he was constantly sought as the fourth. And on special occasions when they gave a bottle of champagne per student, he said he could hardly refuse the invitations. Became well-known.
But even with all that, Gandhi was incredibly shy. He was, let's use the term pathologically shy. He was unable, not reluctant or unwilling. He was unable to speak to a group of people. He could talk to individuals. But when it came to say 5 or 6 or more, he suddenly was absolutely seized with the inability to speak. He became terrified, the pages blurred and he literally cringed within himself. And experienced this as a real trauma. He in fact relates. He said that at one time during his promotion of vegetarianism, he had become the secretary of the vegetarian society in England. He was well liked by everyone involved. Many of the very famous people of the England of that time were members of the vegetarian society. And Mr. Hill along the Thames Steel Works was the economic base for it. And he was favored by all of them. And yet at this meeting for the promotion of vegetarianism,
I had ascertained that it was not considered incorrect to read one speech. I knew that many did so to express themselves coherently and briefly. To speak extempore would 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. I trembled though the speech hardly covered a sheet of foolscap.
Foolscap. Foolscap was the watermark. In the late 18th century English paper was made in large sheets about 17 inches by 13 and a half inches and the watermark was the image of adjusters' foolscap. And so, they called that folio sheet foolscap.
It blurred so that his friend had to read it for me. And his friends own speech of course was excellent and received with applause. I was ashamed of myself and sat at heart for my incapacity.
And so, he felt that he had to work on this. And towards the end of his stay of three years in London he held a great dinner for all of his friends. It was to be a vegetarian banquet. And it wasn't to be held in a vegetarian restaurant but in a regular restaurant. Because he wanted to show that one could have a vegetarian way of life within the society as it was. And so, he had a tremendous speech memorized. He had a very cute sequence of humorous stories. He was going to use a famous speech that had been used some time back in Pitts(?) days where he began with three, I conceived, I conceived, I conceived and then someone would say you conceive but cannot deliver. And so, he was going to start this way. And he got the first I conceived out and he froze. Even among his friends. And so, he sat down glum and silent. And this of course lingered with him; stayed with him. But this shyness which he calls was also very much a shield for him.
At this time there came into his life, the situation where he realized that he was going back home. He had in fact passed. In those days he said it was hardly a task to pass the exams. You read in common law and you read in Roman law. And they passed about 95% of the people who took the exam. But Gandhi felt constrained he had to actually study the material. So, he read all of Roman law in Latin - the code of Justinian. And he said it was an incredibly difficult sequence for him because he had to learn a Latin. And then he had to wade through these tremendous volumes on Roman law. And it was an exquisite premonition on his inner spirits part, because the inner spirit is alive in his wholeness and knows all and moves comprehensively toward the wholeness, because when he would go unbeknownst to him to South Africa the Dutch Roman law was all based on the codes of Justinian. And he would become a mastermind in the law profession in South Africa because he knew the whole basis of it. And it was just done in London unbeknownst to him because he was holding to his oath of self-development.
In fact, he had realized in London that just as he had solved the problem of food and found a vegetarian restaurant, had become a vegetarian by intellectual understanding, had participated in the vegetarian society and risen up to being one of its members. He experimented also with all the other aspects of his way of life. He began to keep meticulous accounts of every cent, every pence that he would spend. And he was able to cut in half his daily expenditures by planning. And he finally began to move out of the family boarding situations into rented rooms. First there were two rooms and then there was just one room. And he began to cook for himself. He favored cocoa in those days. He went through a period where he ate cheese and milk and eggs. And then realized that the vow against meat was in terms of what his mother understood by meat and that her understanding included eggs. And so even though he wouldn't have included eggs he said I learned about vows, that the only way to keep them is to keep them in terms of the weakest member of the weakest part of the relation that goes together to make the vow. He said there is no other way to keep a vow, so that one has to look for the weakest or lowest part and not try to just skim the line. But one has to go to the very root of the matter, and it's there that integrity finds its wholeness. Which is of course a part of the process of truth finding. It's that one looks where is the weakest among us. Where is the least capable among us. Because it's there that the clue of truth has its foundation. And is only there, from there, that we may build the in truth and confidence that the center line of human society is with the poor not as a homily but as an architectural, spiritual reality. And so, the great spiritual teachers go to the poor not out of a mere social kindness. But out of an exactness of knowing what to do.
So, Gandhi in experimenting with his life, his diet, his places of living. He would change his address every two or three months so that he began to learn in London. He would live in various places. And then he would walk. And he said the walking was great exercise. He walked 8 to 10 miles every day. And he said he was never sick after that. And he realized also that walking has a very peculiar aptness for human beings. That walking is the correct pace of thinking. That the pace and rhythm, the alternation, the sine-wave of uprightness and consciousness in its fluid integrity reveals itself in the function of walking. That there is something anthropologically exact and spiritually true about man standing up and moving on his own two feet. And that in walking, just as Thoreau would say it his essay on walking, that until you have gone through the complete spiritual inventory of all your capacities you are not ready to take a walk.
So, Gandhi walked all over the London of his day, the 1890s. He left in 1891. And in doing this he thought through meticulously, every day, increasingly. And kept a diary every day, increasingly of the exact pattern of how he was living. What he was doing. And he began to construct this mirror for honesty in his writings. And he would keep this up all of his life. The Collected Works of Gandhi run to about 80 volumes of 6 or 7 hundred pages. And what they are is a meticulous accounting of what a human being does day in and day out. All of the little petty so-called actions. But it's when one looks with spiritual comprehension at the fluid flow of integrity of the wholeness of it, we have there something only hinted at in books like Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Thoreau's Journals and Emerson's Journals. It's in the detailed writings of Gandhi that we have a human being laid absolutely, honestly bare in his entire life. So that we may see him.
Someone asked Gandhi if you're such a spiritual leader why don't you go to the Himalayas and find a cave. He said I carry my cave within me. I am invisible because of my utter publicness, not because of any esoteric arcaneness.
So that this quality began to manifest itself more and more for Gandhi. And when he left England and took the ship back, he realized that he was in a quandary. He had passed, been called to the bar. He was a barrister but he was unable to speak. He was unable to conduct business. He got back to Bombay in 1891 and he found that his mother had died while he was away in London. They did not let him know. It was tremendous shock to him that she was gone. He started to take some beginning lawyer work of filling out forms and legal materials. But he was really unable to conduct himself in the court. He was unable to speak. He was unable to stand up. And so, he began to suffer again incredible embarrassment. And in this embarrassment, he was finally approached by the following. This is a quotation from Gandhi's autobiography,
In the meantime, a merman(sp?) firm from Porbandar wrote to my brother making the following offer. We have business in South Africa. Ours is a big firm and we have a big case there in the court. Our claim being 40,000 pounds. It has been going on for a long time. We have engaged the services of the best barristers and vicals(sp?).
That's a beginning lawyer in India. "If you sent your brother there, he would be useful to us and also to himself. He would be able to instruct our counsel better than ourselves. And he would have the advantage of seeing a new part of the world and of making new acquaintances. My brother" he says, he writes, "discussed the proposition with me I could not clearly make out whether I had simply to instruct the counsel, or to appear in court."
Can you see the quandary? We carry our fears with us because they are us. There are the unorganized anxiety which is our own vibration. But he says, "I was tempted. So, my brother introduced me to the late Sheth Abdul Karim Jhaveri, a partner of Dada Abdulla, (cough) the firm in question. Dada Abdulla and Company. It won't be a difficult job the Sheth assured me. We have big Europeans as our friends whose acquaintance you will make. You can be useful to us in our shop. Much of our correspondence is in English and you can help us with that too. You will of course be our guest and hence you will have no expense whatever. How long do you require my services, I asked and what will be the payment? Not more than a year. We will pay you a first-class return fare in the sum of 105 pounds all around."
So, he decided they would take this. It was going to be a pleasant year. He wasn't going to be required to stand up in court. He would shuffle papers carry on with the Indians. And so, he took the job and he sailed for South Africa. And he was to be there for more than 20 years. And when he would come back to India, he would be the Mahatma.
And we'll look at that story that growing up, that great transformation of the shy barrister into the Mahatma next week.
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