Gandhi riding the train.
Thank you for your inspiring reflections on last week’s reading from the Summer 2019 Blue Mountain Journal! We’re continuing our conversation as a community on cultivating an understanding of Gandhi’s transformation, through Easwaran’s eyes.
Last week, Easwaran tantalized us by telling us that it was Gandhi’s transformation and “utter remaking of personality” that holds his ultimate significance for us today. This week, we’ll delve into exploring his transformation in South Africa by reading further in the journal.
After reading the next excerpt, please share your reflections in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you, and by offering your ideas you’ll inspire others to do so, too! You might try:
Typing a line or two that really stood out for you – one you’d like to remember
Typing an overall message from Easwaran that resonates with you in some way
Sharing how this story from Gandhi’s life applies to your own context.
This is the second excerpt from the article entitled “Gandhi’s Message” by Easwaran from the Blue Mountain Journal, Summer 2019.
The night in Maritzburg
There are really two chapters in the story of Gandhi in South Africa. The second covers the eight years after 1906 in which Gandhi developed and tested his new method of nonviolent resistance. But the first chapter to me is even more important, because it hides the chrysalis of his transformation.
The crucial event came soon after his arrival in South Africa, when Gandhi was thrown off a train at Maritzburg station because of the color of his skin. Something similar must have happened to every non-European in South Africa. But there are times in human affairs — sometimes in a profound external crisis, sometimes for no apparent reason at all — when superficial awareness is torn open and a channel into deeper consciousness is laid bare. That is what happened to Gandhi that night. It was bitter cold, and his coat and luggage were with the stationmaster, but he would not go and beg for them. He sat up all night thinking furiously about what had happened and what to do. He felt a strong impulse to turn around and go back to India rather than live in a place where he would be expected to put up with this kind of indignity.
By dawn he had made a curious resolve that came right from the depths of his heart: he would stay and he would fight, but against racial prejudice and on behalf of all, and in that fight he would not resort to any tactic that would diminish the humanity he was fighting for. He would cling to the truth and suffer the consequences in trying to “root out this disease” which was infecting all parties involved.
The following day he proceeded on the next leg of his journey by carriage. There again he met with prejudice; though there was room in the carriage, he was forced by the driver to sit in a degrading place outside. When he refused, the driver tried to drag him off, alternately beating him and pulling at him; Gandhi refused to yield but refused also to defend himself and clung to the carriage rail until the white passengers were moved to pity and begged the driver to let him join them at their side.
It was a curiously symbolic moment. No philosophy was involved; it would take years for him to make the “matchless weapon” of nonviolence out of this dogged determination never to retaliate but never to yield. But he had become a different man. The Sanskrit scriptures would say that on that night in Maritzburg “faith entered his heart.” In practice this means that in the very depths of his consciousness he had glimpsed a new image of himself. He was not just a separate, physical creature; he saw that he — and, crucially, every other human being — was essentially spiritual, with “strength [that] does not come from physical capacity [but] from an indomitable will.”
“Reducing himself to zero”
After this first instinctive “holding on to Truth,” Gandhi turned inward. He had met injustice; it degraded everyone but everyone accepted it: How could he change himself to help everyone involved see more clearly? Somehow, dimly at first, but with increasing sureness, he had already grasped that a person can be an “instrument of peace,” a catalyst of understanding, by getting himself out of the way. This marks the beginning of his life as a spiritual aspirant, and in the years that follow, hidden under the affairs of a terribly busy life, we can see him working tirelessly on the business of mystics everywhere: training his mind, transforming personal passions, “reducing himself to zero.”
The task sounds bleak until we see, through a living example, that this “zero” is what allows the infinitude of God to burst forth through the human personality. Meister Eckhart says inimitably, “God expects but one thing of you: that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.” And again: “God is bound to act, to pour himself into you, as soon as he finds you ready.”
Around-the-clock love and service
St. Francis took the Gospels as his model; Gandhi took the Gita. For both it was a systematic daily practice. Translating the Gita into character, conduct, and consciousness was precisely what Gandhi was doing in South Africa. He knew it by heart, knew it in his heart, studied it over and over every day, used it in prayer until it became a living presence. It was, he says, his “dictionary of daily reference.” Whenever he had a question about what to do or how to act, he took it to the Gita. Then, with the willpower that is his surest gift, he set about bringing his life into conformity with its teachings, no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient that might be. Those years in South Africa were a studio in which Gandhi worked every day like an artist, studying his model and chipping away at the block of stone that hid the vision he was striving to set free, painstakingly removing everything that is not Gita.
In many ways, allowing for differences in personal style, Gandhi goes about this very much like every other mystic. The crucial difference is that he does not withdraw from public life to do it. All his training is in the midst of around-the-clock public service. In most mystics we see personal passions being consumed in the love of God. Gandhi was transformed by his deep-running, passionate love of other people, wherein he found God, and an increasing desire to lose himself in salving their wounds and sorrows. Many mystics abrade their selfishness away; Gandhi dissolved his in love and service.
The transformation of anger
He made astonishing personal discoveries in those years, and perhaps the most significant for us today is that anger can be transformed. It is raw energy that can be transformed and fed back into a positive channel. Anger transformed becomes compassion.
In South Africa, beginning in his own home, Gandhi learned to transform his anger and then harness it in service. All the furious indignation of that night at Maritzburg station gets channeled first into transforming his bursts of temper with his wife. In every tradition, by whatever name it is called — “training the mind,” “guarding the heart,” “transforming the passions” — this is the essence of the spiritual life. Gandhi was a terribly passionate young man with a hot, imperious temper. All that passion transformed is what fueled a passionate life of selfless service.
“I have learnt through bitter experience,” he says later, “the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.” That one sentence is enough to place him among the world’s greatest teachers. He is telling us this is a skill; it can be learned. And as it is learned, it changes everything in its field.
His “staff of life” through these transformations, Gandhi tells us, was repetition of the mantram — in his case Rama, Rama, Rama, the mantram that he learned in childhood from his nurse. Gradually, as it verified itself in his life, the mantram became his greatest support, an infallible source of strength. Nothing is more effective in transforming anger into compassion, ill will into good will, hatred into love.