by Rasoul Sorkhabi

Dustwrapper art courtesy Shambhala Publications; shambhala.com

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi in 1948 (sixty years ago as of this writing) and the renowned Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton was killed in a tragic accident in 1968 (forty years ago). These anniversaries are valuable opportunities to reflect on the legacies, works, and teachings of these two great men of peace. Gandhi has influenced many minds and movements of the twentieth century. In this article, we review Merton’s impressions of Gandhi and how they are helpful for our century and generation.

Thomas Merton, born in 1915, was 46 years younger than Gandhi. Merton spent the first two decades of his life in France, UK and USA. In 1939, he received his MA in English literature from Columbia University, and the following year accepted a teaching position at the Franciscan run Saint Bonaventure University in southwest New York State. In 1942 he decided to become a priest and entered the Abbey of Gethsemane, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky; the Trappist are strict observance Franciscans, and having taught at St. Bonaventure might have influenced his decision. Merton, or rather Father Louis as he was to be called at Gethsemane, lived the rest of his life there, a quiet and contemplative life in an inspiring natural environment. He kept journals and published innumerable essays, poems, and books. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948 became a best seller. In the 1960s, Merton was attracted to Eastern religious thoughts and traditions, including Gandhi’s ideas.

Merton wrote two articles about Gandhi. The first entitled “Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary” was published in Ramparts (December 1964), and also included in his The Seeds of Destruction (1964). It also appears in the Merton anthology Passion for Peace (edited by William Shannon, New York: Crossroad, 1995; abridged edition, 2006). The second article, “Gandhi and the One-Eyed Giant” appeared in the January 1965 issue of Jubilee, a magazine founded in 1953 by Ed Rice, Merton’s friend from school days in Columbia. This article also serves as an introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence (New York: New Directions, 1965), a selection of Gandhi quotes that Merton excerpted from the two volume Non-Violence in Peace and War (Hyderabad: Navajivan, 1942; revised in 1949).

In both articles, Merton analyzes Gandhi’s thought mainly from a Christian standpoint with references to Jesus’s teachings. As an example Merton quotes Gandhi as saying: “Jesus died in vain if he did not teach us to regulate the whole life by the eternal law of love.” This is understandable given Merton’s background and the fact that both Ramparts and Jubilee were Catholic intellectual magazines. Nevertheless, Merton’s underscoring of Christian elements in Gandhian thought is significant as most of the writings about Gandhi’s life and works have been either political history or Indian religious philosophy.

In “Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary” Merton remembers his first encounter with Gandhi in 1931 when Gandhi was visiting London as a representative of the Indian Congress to the Round Table Conference that the British government had convened to discuss the issue of India’s demands for independence. Merton was then a student at Oakham boarding school in Rutland, England. He was sympathetic to Gandhi’s ideals about a free India and recalls an argument he had with his school football coach who believed that Indians were primitive people and needed to be governed by the British Raj. Merton writes that “a dozen years after Gandhi’s visit to London there were more hideous barbarities perpetuated in Europe, with greater violence and more unmitigated fury than all that has ever been attributed by the wildest imaginations to the despots of Asia. The British Empire collapsed. India attained self-rule. It did so peacefully and with dignity. Gandhi paid with his life for the ideals in which he believed.”

Merton devotes the rest of his article to the significance of Gandhi’s political thought and action. He singles out Gandhi “as a great leader, one of the noblest men of our century”, because he was truly and sincerely (not opportunistically or verbally) committed to peace politics. Gandhi objected to politics as a means to empower oneself and to humiliate or wipe out the other party in battle, and instead suggested svadharma (personal responsibility) as characterizing a political action based on a religious understanding of being, life, love and our place in the world. Merton quotes Gandhi: “If love is not the law of our being, the whole of my argument falls to pieces.” Merton refers to Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (Truth Force) and defines it as “simply conforming one’s words to one’s inner thought.” Merton then explains that “our aims, our plans of actions, our outlook, our attitudes, our habitual response to the problems and challenges of life” more effectively than words speak of our inner being.” Merton also refers to Gandhi’s other formula, ahimsa (nonviolence) and remarks that unlike hypocritical politicians who wage wars in the name of catch phrases like liberation, Gandhi did not use the word ahimsa deceitfully against the English; Gandhi really meant and intended it, and “did not think that peace and justice could be attained through violent or selfish means.” In short, Merton remarks that “Gandhi is not above all criticism, no man is. But he was unlike all the other world leaders of his time in that his life was marked by a wholeness and a wisdom, an integrity and a spiritual consistency.”

Merton opens his second article, “Gandhi and the One-Eyed Giant” with the remark that the white man came to Africa, Asia, and America like a one-eyed giant, “bringing with him the characteristic split and blindness which were at once his strength, his torment, and his ruin.” Gandhi emerged against this background in world history and Asian-African geography. Merton then discusses the salient features of Gandhi’s life mission and legacy, which may be outlined as follows:

• Gandhi discovered the East through the West. He was educated in England, read Tolstoy, Thoreau and the New Testament, and rediscovered many Christian values in his own Indian religions.
• In his rediscovery of “the true mind” in Indian religions, Gandhi’s approach was not that of a bookish scholar but as a simple human in touch with the Indian people and life. Therefore, “the Indian people were awakening in him” as well.
• Unlike the re-awakening process of some Asian nations (for example, Japan), Gandhi did not lead the Indian mind toward intolerance, extreme nationalism or exclusive religion. He reached out for humanity, unity, love and peace both nationally and internationally.
• Gandhi’s life was “eminently active rather than merely contemplative.” Although Gandhi prayed, fasted and practiced his religion, his spiritual life was not separate from his political life; he participated “in the life and dharma of his people . . . for him the public realm was not secular, it was sacred.”
• Gandhi adopted nonviolent methods of struggle against injustice and oppression, not out of naivety, escapism or cowardice, but out of love, caring, bravery, “a kind of bravery far different from violence”, and the wisdom that “to punish and destroy the oppressor is merely to initiate a new cycle of violence and oppression; the only real liberation is that which liberates both the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time.”

As well, Gandhi considered his Indian experience not as a limited national cause but as an example of a world experiment to create a new human history. He did not consider political liberty and social freedoms as end products of his mission, but stressed (and showed by his own example) that inner freedom from selfishness and seeing “all life as one in a sacred cosmic family” are both crucially important for the spiritual and social development of humanity. It was for all these causes and ideals that Gandhi lived and stood, and gave his life in the end. And Merton concludes his essay, “Gandhi’s principles are, then, extremely pertinent today, more pertinent even than when they were conceived and worked out in practice in the ashrams, villages and highways of India.”

Merton’s Gandhi on Non-Violence also brings out the essence of Gandhi’s doctrine and practice of ahimsa. Merton divides his selection into five sections: (1) Principles of nonviolence; (2) Nonviolence: True and false; (3) The spiritual dimension of nonviolence; (4) The political scope of nonviolence; and (5) The purity of nonviolence.

There are many gems in this book, that is, words uttered by Gandhi and loved by Merton. Here are three:

• “When the practice of ahimsa becomes universal, God will reign on earth as He does in heaven.”
•  “Man as animal is violent but as spirit is nonviolent. The moment he awakes to the spirit within he cannot remain violent.”
• “Nonviolence is the only thing that atom bombs cannot destroy … Unless now the world adopts nonviolence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.”

It is true that Gandhi was influenced not only by the Bhagavad Gita but also by other religious scriptures including the Gospels and the Quran. Reading through Merton’s essays, it appears that only in Gandhi’s political life did Merton find a model for a
Christian nonviolent struggle for world peace for the contemporary generation. This is not surprising. “The law of love” is the essence of all major religions, although, in the political history of the “Christian” West one finds less and less Jesus and more and more violence and greed. Perhaps that is why, in the second of the articles mentioned above Merton writes: “What has Gandhi to do with Christianity? Everyone knows that the Orient has venerated Christ and distrusted Christians ever since the first colonizers and missionaries came from the West.”

In 1968, Merton went to Asia, his first trip to the Orient. He was to give a lecture at a monastic conference in Bangkok in December, but stopped in India first, during October and November, before proceeding to Thailand. He died in a Bangkok hotel by electric shock as he stepped out of his bath and touched an un-grounded electric fan. The date was 10 December 1968, twenty-seven years after Merton had entered Gethsemane, and twenty years after Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist fanatic opposed to Gandhi’s efforts to heal the Hindu-Muslim divide. Today, there is an International Gandhi Peace Prize, which has been awarded annually by the Government of India since 1995, and there is also a Thomas Merton Award, presented by the Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, since 1972. Gandhi and Merton were brothers in soul, two great twentieth-century men of peace; their legacies and messages inspiring our century too.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rasoul Sorkhabi graduated from universities in India and Japan, doing his Ph.D. thesis on the geology of the Himalayas. He is currently a Research Professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where he lives with his wife Setsuko. They have published articles on Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Rumi, and the Dalai Lama.  With thanks to gandhifoundation.org and their editor George Paxton for permission.