The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (49 page)

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.