by Stephen Cope
Gandhi himself often told the story. It turns out that as a boy, he was under the care of an old family servant named Rambha. Rambha was touched—and somewhat irritated—by this scrawny kid who came running to her in tears every day after school, pummeled once again by the bullies. She was going to put an end to this.
“It’s perfectly all right to admit that you’re afraid,” she said. “There’s no shame in fear. But try this: Whenever you’re threatened, instead of running away, stand firm, and repeat the mantra, Rama, Rama, Rama. This will turn your fear into courage.” Rama, of course, is one of the many names of God in the Hindu tradition—and so both the word itself, as well as the process of its repetition, had magic in it.
Gandhi-the-boy tried the technique halfheartedly. He found it useful. But he did not discover its true genius until a decade later when Gandhi-the-man was beginning his work with nonviolent noncooperation in South Africa. In the stress of those years he remembered Rambha’s advice, and put it to work in earnest. He began to practice the mantra, chanting Rama, Rama, Rama over and over again to himself—both aloud and silently. The mantra eased his fear—calmed his mind and body. He began to rely on it, and eventually began to systematically practice chanting mantra not just in extremis, but as a part of his regular daily schedule.
For a period of time after this discovery, Gandhi walked many miles each day, repeating the mantra to himself until it began to coordinate itself with the movement of his body and breath. The practice not only calmed him, but brought him into periods of bliss and rapture—and, as he said, “opened the doorway to God.” Rama, Rama, Rama. Eventually, the mantra developed a life of its own within him. The mantra began to chant itself, arising spontaneously whenever he needed it. “The mantra becomes one’s staff of life,” he wrote, “and carries one through every ordeal … Each repetition … has a new meaning, each repetition carries you nearer and nearer to God.”
How important was mantra to Gandhi’s transformation? Extremely. When done systematically, mantra has a powerful effect on the brain. It gathers and focuses the energy of the mind. It teaches the mind to focus on one point, and it cultivates a steadiness that over time becomes an unshakable evenness of temper. The cultivation of this quality of “evenness” is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita. It is called samatva in Sanskrit, and it is a central pillar of Krishna’s practice. When the mind develops steadiness, teaches Krishna, it is not shaken by fear or greed.
So, in his early twenties, Gandhi had already begun to develop a still-point at the center of his consciousness—a still-point that could not be shaken. This little seed of inner stillness would grow into a mighty oak. Gandhi would become an immovable object.
Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She compared the practice of mantra to the training of an elephant. “As the elephant walks through the market,” taught Rambha, “he swings his trunk from side to side and creates havoc with it wherever he goes—knocking over fruit stands and scattering vendors, snatching bananas and coconuts wherever possible. His trunk is naturally restless, hungry, scattered, undisciplined. This is just like the mind—constantly causing trouble.”
“But the wise elephant trainer,” said Rambha, “will give the elephant a stick of bamboo to hold in his trunk. The elephant likes this. He holds it fast. And as soon as the elephant wraps his trunk around the bamboo, the trunk begins to settle. Now the elephant strides through the market like a prince: calm, collected, focused, serene. Bananas and coconuts no longer distract.”
So too with the mind. As soon as the mind grabs hold of the mantra, it begins to settle. The mind holds the mantra gently, and it becomes focused, calm, centered. Gradually this mind becomes extremely concentrated. This is the beginning stage of meditation. All meditation traditions prescribe some beginning practice of gathering, focusing, and concentration—and in the yoga tradition this is most often achieved precisely through mantra.
The whole of Chapter Six in the Bhagavad Gita is devoted to Krishna’s teachings on this practice: “Whenever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self,” instructs Krishna. “When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.”
In the midst of Krishna’s teaching on meditation, Arjuna whines: “This is too hard! Krishna,” he gripes, “the mind is restless, turbulent, powerful, violent; trying to control it is like trying to tame the wind.” Krishna takes a deep breath: “Just keep practicing,” he says, and he prescribes “regular practice and detachment.”
After Krishna has taught Arjuna the basics of meditation, he makes an important connection for him—a connection that Gandhi will later make as well. When the mind is still, says Krishna, the True Self begins to reveal its nature. In the depths of meditation, we begin to recognize again that we are One with Brahman—that we are that wave that is nonseparate from the sea. Memory is restored!
In his early twenties, then, Gandhi had already appropriated the meditative tool that would serve him for the rest of his life. He was practicing the only meditation technique taught in the Bhagavad Gita, and was building the foundation of his contemplative practice. In the midst of terrifying circumstances to come, Gandhi held on to the mantra like an elephant grasping bamboo. Friends who knew him well acknowledged that Gandhi repeated his mantra continually, night and day. The name of God invaded the deepest parts of his mind.
4
Gandhi graduated from high school with an underwhelming record, and he went on to college, falteringly. There, too, he failed. After five months he gave up, dropped out, and came home. Gandhi’s family was worried: This boy was on the brink of becoming a serious loser—more of a ne’er-do-well than even Thoreau. (No credit to his town!) As a last resort, an uncle suggested that Gandhi go to London to study the law.
What could go wrong with this plan? Plenty. Gandhi fared no better in London. He felt out of place. His textbook English did not suffice. He was more socially inept than ever. For a while he tried to masquerade as an English gentleman. This ruse, however, was patently laughable. He looked ridiculous in his high starched collars, with his enormous ears protruding just above.
In London, Gandhi suffered a painful identity crisis. Who the heck was he? Who was he meant to be in this world? During this period, a desperate Gandhi launched himself into an intense investigation of world religions—searching for answers. He was acutely aware that his life had no unifying principle. Like Arjuna, he did not understand how to act. He read the Bible, but was bored with everything except the Sermon on the Mount (which, he said, overwhelmed him with its obvious truth). He looked into Theosophy. He read parts of the Koran. He attended various spiritual groups. But it was not until a young English friend introduced him to the Bhagavad Gita that he felt he had connected with something important. He would never forget his first reading of the Gita. “It went straight to my heart,” he declared.
Why, he wondered, had he not read it before? To his shame, he later said, he had not read “Mother Gita” in India, but had to come to London to read it with English friends, in an English translation. “What effect this reading of the Gita had on my friends, only they can say,” he wrote, “but to me the Gita became an infallible guide of conduct. It became my dictionary of daily reference. Just as I turned to the English dictionary for the meanings of English words that I did not understand, I turned to this dictionary of conduct for a ready solution of all my troubles and trials.”
Gandhi, of course, identified with Arjuna. He was often overcome by doubt, and perpetually on the floor of his own chariot. But he found that reading Mother Gita took some of the rough edges off his self-division. It unified him. “When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.”
Is it a coincidence that Mohandas Gandhi’s life force began to stir at precisely the time he discovered the Gita? I don’t think so. The scripture startled him. It woke him up.
By his midtwenties, two of the pillars of Gandhi’s transformation were in place: his mantra and his spiritual reference book. With these two, Gandhi began to throw off what he later called the “sluggishness” and “drowsiness” of his mind and body. He would soon discover the third pillar of his transformation: the systematic cultivation of energy.
5
As he woke up, Gandhi became interested in ways to build strength and resilience in his eighty-pound-weakling body. Gandhi, very much like Thoreau before him, began to create what he called “experiments in living.” His first series of experiments centered around diet. In London, he fell in with a group of vegetarians, and he became fascinated with the health-giving effects of “eating no living beings.” He tried every conceivable combination of fruits and vegetables, of beans and rice. What food would give him the most energy, the most stamina? He gave up eating as a recreation and took it up as a spiritual practice. No more living to eat. Now, it was eating to live.
Gandhi found that he felt most energetic when he ate sparsely. Eventually he would settle on goat’s milk and vegetables as the diet that gave him the most vitality. (His diet became notorious in India. When, later in life, he was routinely jailed by the viceroy of India, the viceroy himself made sure that the imprisoned Gandhi was always provided with a goat to milk.)
Gandhi was an inveterate experimenter, and he would tinker with his diet for the rest of his life. There are countless stories of friends who came to dine and were given some inedible mélange, which Gandhi at that time believed to be supremely health giving. There was apparently much rolling of eyes at these dinners. Gandhi was not interested in taste, but in effect. He discovered, he said, an “inner relish, distinctly more healthy, delicate, and permanent than food.”
In London, Gandhi began, too, an experiment in simplifying his life—another way of sustaining his energy. Gandhi had a vegetarian friend—a real minimalist—who lived in one room and cooked his own meals. This was a practice that was unheard of among the scholar class in England. But Gandhi was attracted to the simplicity of this approach. He decided to adopt it himself.
Gandhi rented a single room that was centrally located in London so that he could walk wherever he went, obviating the need for bus fare, and giving him lots of daily exercise. As a result, he walked miles and miles in London, even in the harsh winters. He began to develop the habit of vigorous walking that would last the rest of his life. In this, too, he was like Thoreau, except that Thoreau, famously, “rambled.” Gandhi decidedly did not ramble. He practically flew. All of his walking companions commented on this. Gandhi was famous, later in life, for out-walking even his young companions. “His feet barely touched the ground,” they would complain. One can only imagine the sight of this somewhat strange-looking little Indian man walking furiously around London, chanting his Sanskrit mantra all the while. Proper London must have been amused.
Gandhi was discovering the power of simplification and renunciation. He stumbled onto a truth widely known by yogis: Every time we discerningly renounce a possession, we free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of dharma. Renunciation was never meant to be for its own sake, but for the sake of dharma. Thoreau discovered precisely this same principle at Walden, where he gradually pared away every possession that was not absolutely necessary (Keep only one spoon! Plant fewer beans!) and where he experienced the same resulting increase in energy that Gandhi did.
Gandhi, without knowing it, was beginning to adopt the worldview of the yogi. The yogi’s chief concern is with the art of living, systematically cultivating energy and health. More than anything, he is concerned with living an optimal human life. This was becoming Gandhi’s concern, too. But for the yogi, this concern comes with a proviso: Optimal health and well being are not for their own sake, but rather to be used in the service of others. This would be Gandhi’s next discovery.
6
Now comes what we might call the end of the beginning of Gandhi’s transformation: his fourteen years in South Africa. It was in South Africa that he would discover the fourth leg of the four-legged dharma stool of his life: the ideal of selfless service.
After three years of legal studies in London, Gandhi passed the notoriously easy bar exams, and enrolled in the High Court. He returned to India briefly—just long enough to embarrass himself and his family one more time. He soon left India again, this time for a legal post that had been arranged for him far off in South Africa by another generous uncle.
Early on in his tenure in South Africa, Gandhi stumbled his way into a particularly complex legal case. The case was almost certainly beyond his slim legal skills. However, knowing that if he failed here he might in fact never get another case in South Africa (and thus become a briefless barrister on two continents), he brought every bit of resolve he had to the task. He mastered the complex arguments involved. Some of his London discipline began to pay off.
For the very first time, in his conduct of this case, we see a spark of the later great man. Gandhi found himself defending a client whose argument was strong. But Gandhi knew enough about the law to know that, strong as the argument was, this complex case was likely to drag out for years in the courts, draining the clients while enriching the lawyers. Gandhi had an idea: He implored his client to submit the case to arbitration and to settle out of court (even though Gandhi himself had much to gain financially by continuing the court battle). Gandhi’s client and the opposing client were related to each other, and Gandhi could see that with every month that passed, this divided family plunged deeper and deeper into suffering. This moved Gandhi’s heart—and his conscience. After much cajoling, Gandhi finally convinced both sides to enter into arbitration. The result was a peaceful ending to the family strife.
Gandhi was ecstatic. “I had learnt,” he said, “the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”
To unite parties riven asunder! Gandhi had had the first taste of his dharma. His calling would be to heal separation wherever he found it—separation between family members, between members of different races, between conflicting parties of all kinds. Once he got a taste of this dharma, he was on fire. This is what he could do with his life! For the first time he had a taste of real purpose.
Eknath Easwaran describes the outcome of this discovery: “Without realizing it, Gandhi had found the secret of success. He began to look on every difficulty as an opportunity for service, a challenge that could draw out of him greater resources of intelligence and imagination. In turning his back on personal profit or prestige in his work, he found he had won the trust and even the love of white and Indian South Africans alike.”
Gandhi had now encountered the ideal of selfless service. He was seriously lit up. What’s more, this work of healing human division and conflict lined up perfectly with the wisdom of the Gita. Now he began to see separation and conflict everywhere, particularly in the suffering of the Indian community in South Africa. He began to identify with the suffering of his community. He devoted more and more of his time to service. The natural culmination of this effort would be his discovery of the principles of satyagraha, and his use of mass civil disobedience.
But there was more. His first successful legal case helped him toward another insight. He saw that his energies and intelligence and training did not belong to him. They belonged to the world. He came to believe that a human being is really just a trustee of all that he has—that his gifts are entrusted to him for the good of the world. “My study of English law came to my help,” he said. “I understood the Gita teaching of nonpossession to mean that those who desired salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great posse
ssions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” He saw that true living was living for the sake of others. He was freed from the bondage of his awkward, inept, fearful self.
Gandhi grasped the paradox: The more he gave away, the more he had. “He who devotes himself to service with a clear conscience, will day by day grasp the necessity for it in greater measure, and will continually grow richer in faith … If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only for our own happiness but that of the world at large.”
Out of Gandhi’s fantastic discovery of selfless service very quickly emerged many other changes in his life. Gandhi’s experiments in truth, and in simple living, now became supercharged. He became fascinated with the results of simplification: The more he gave up, the freer he felt, the more energy he had, and the happier he was. The simpler he got, the simpler he wanted to be.
During this period, Gandhi says about the true satyagrahi: “He will take only what he strictly needs and leave the rest. One must not possess anything which one does not really need. It would be a breach of this principle to possess unnecessary foodstuffs, clothing, or furniture. For instance, one must not keep a chair if one can do without it. In observing this principle one is led to a progressive simplification of one’s own life.”
At first glance, this exaggerated simplification looks like some strange new form of Puritanism. But it wasn’t. Gandhi was not doing this as a “should.” For Gandhi, it was a direct road to freedom.
7
At about the time of her retirement from the deanship, our friend Katherine had entered into her own search for truth, not unlike the search Gandhi conducted in London. I suggested that she read Gandhi’s autobiography, which she did—and she gradually caught fire with Gandhi’s thinking. Katherine particularly identified with Gandhi’s discovery of the truth of trusteeship. “You know how one little idea can change your life?” she said to me one day. This one had changed hers.
