The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (48 page)

Civil disobedience, based on the principles of
satyagraha
, would become a staple of Gandhi’s tool kit for the rest of his life, and would be the central pillar of his strategy to end British colonial rule in India. This
satyagraha
—this “clinging to truth”—was an entirely new method of fighting injustice. Instead of fanning hatred with hatred, Gandhi insisted upon returning love for hatred and respect for contempt.

Any exploration of dharma that begins with Henry David Thoreau must end with Mohandas K. Gandhi. These two exemplars of “Soul Force” lived a century apart, but with the perspective of time they increasingly appear as brothers. Thoreau’s life and writing—especially his essay
On Civil Disobedience
and his masterpiece,
Walden
—profoundly influenced Gandhi. In many ways, we might say that Gandhi finished what Thoreau started.
Satyagraha
was, after all, the very embodiment of the doctrine of “truth in action” about which Thoreau had written so passionately almost a century earlier.

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Mohandas K. Gandhi began his adult life as a shy, tongue-tied Indian barrister who failed at most everything he tried. He was plagued by fears and doubts. He was socially inept. At the age of twenty-three, he had left his native India for South Africa—a last attempt to salvage a foundering legal career. (Young Gandhi had become famous in the Indian legal world for once fleeing a courtroom in terror when he had been called upon to present a difficult argument. He later became known as “the briefless barrister,” because after this embarrassment no one would give him a case.) Yet when Gandhi returned to India just ten years later, he was hailed as “Mahatma,” and quickly became the acknowledged leader of the hundreds of millions of Indian people hungry for self-respect, self-reliance, and independence from Great Britain.

How had this transformation happened? What precisely was Gandhi doing between his ignominious departure from India—tail between his legs—and his triumphant return? It’s a great story. The transformation was largely the result of one thing: his discovery of, and devotion to, the principles of the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi himself would later emphasize: It was not just that he
knew
the Gita, but that he actively put its precepts to work in his life. Gandhi studied the Gita constantly. He chanted it, he memorized it, and he practiced its instructions; he took a frayed copy with him everywhere. It became, as he later said, his “
spiritual reference book.” Everyone who knew him saw this: His longtime secretary, Mahadev Desai, would say, “
Every moment of Gandhi’s life is a conscious effort to live the message of the Gita.”

We might say that M. K. Gandhi engaged in
deliberate practice
of the Bhagavad Gita. He mastered it in just the way that Corot mastered landscape painting, or that Beethoven mastered the sonata form. The battlefield of life described in the opening chapter of the Gita was Gandhi’s canvas, and the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna was his instruction book. Gandhi’s life, then, must be for us an extraordinary living textbook of the Gita. It is where we will fittingly end our exploration.

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Mohandas Gandhi was a fear-obsessed little boy with big eyes, and mammoth ears that stood out almost at right angles from his body. He was terrified of the dark, and, as he said, “
haunted by the fear of thieves, ghosts, and serpents.” He could not bear to be in a room alone, and could not sleep at night without a light on nearby. Gandhi, later in life, acknowledged that as a boy he had been, in his own words, a “coward.” All the other boys on the playground knew it: He was a pushover. One could steal this guy’s lunch money with impunity.

And yet, the later Gandhi was fearless. He was renowned not only for his great moral courage, but for physical courage as well. A central pillar of his later teaching was that fearlessness is a prerequisite for nonviolence. “
Nonviolence and cowardice go ill together,” he said. It is fascinating, then, to dig down into the story of Gandhi’s mastery of his fear. How did he accomplish it?

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.

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