{"id":1034,"date":"2003-04-04T13:31:18","date_gmt":"2003-04-04T18:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/04\/04\/1034.html"},"modified":"2003-04-04T13:31:18","modified_gmt":"2003-04-04T18:31:18","slug":"almost-entirely-about-gandhi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/04\/04\/almost-entirely-about-gandhi\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost Entirely about Gandhi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A friend writes, in response to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/journal\/show-entry.php?Entry_ID=990\">my earlier comment on Gandhi<\/a>:\n\n<p>\"In the process of slogging through lifetime after lifetime one closes in on the harmonic understanding; which is paradoxical; because the understanding (as put in Albert Brooks's movie <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/Title?0101698\">\"Defending Your Life\"<\/a> which seems as close as a lot of things I've read) is an absence of existential fear, not a conscious epiphany.\"\n\n<p>The absence of existential fear does strike pretty close to the Gandhi Thing, as far as I can tell. I've gotten maybe three-quarters of the way through <i>Satyagraha<\/i> (Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad 1951), a fascinating collection of essays and speeches, and my primary response is that he's an Easterner, talking to Easterners, and I'm a Westerner. I don't agree with a lot of what he says, not from an ethical standpoint, but because of a fundamentally different worldview.\n\n<p>Gandhi believes in the law of suffering, that is, that all good things come out of suffering, and that if the suffering is pure, the greater the suffering, the greater the good. A few quotes:\n\n<ul><li>We must, therefore, be ready for the repetition of the sufferings of the guiltless... (p. 106)\n<li>Non-co-operation as a voluntary movement can only succeed, if the feeling is genuine and strong enough to make people suffer to the utmost. (p.117)\n<li>Non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering. (p. 134)\n<li>I would risk, if necessary, a million lives so long as they are voluntary sufferers and are innocent, spotless victims. (p. 154)\n<li>A warrior's death is never a matter for sorrow, still less that of a Satyagrahi warrior. (p. 262)<\/ul>\n\n<p>Yes, yes, these are out of context, but I think that the sentiment within them is one that Gandhi would not deny, that is, that suffering is not a thing to be avoided, but embraced. To that end, here's a longer quote, from p. 262\n\n<blockquote>Thus did seven men, including Jairamdas, receive bullet wounds. Jairamdas's injury gave me unmixed joy. It is the injury to leaders that would bring relief. The law of sacrifice is uniform throughout the world. To be effective it demands the sacrifice of the bravest and the most spotless. And Jairamdas is of the bravest and the cleanest. I therefore could not help wiring when I heard of Jairamdas's wound that a wound in the thigh was better than prison and a wound in the heart better still.<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Now, this is stirring stuff. And I do not deny that there is something persuasive about a man who is willing to suffer for his cause. And even, in some senses, a person who is willing to watch others suffer, gladly, for the cause they share. Where I part ways is that I prefer achieving a cause without suffering, and that in many cases, I would give up the cause to relieve the suffering (either my own or others). I'm agin' suffering. In fact, there isn't much that I consider worse than human suffering (in the <a href=\" http:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/journal\/show-entry.php?Entry_ID=977\">hierarchy of human values and social purposes<\/a>), whether done in the right spirit or wrong.\n\n<p>Of course, I've gone afield from my correspondent's point, but he was talking about the Eastern world-view, and how it is essentially different from mine, and I think he's right.\n\n<p>Thank you,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend writes, in response to my earlier comment on Gandhi: &#8220;In the process of slogging through lifetime after lifetime one closes in on the harmonic understanding; which is paradoxical; because the understanding (as put in Albert Brooks&#8217;s movie &#8220;Defending&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}