Excerpts from Gandhi’s autobiography were published in 1948 by UNESCO under the title, All Men Are Brothers. These selections are from chapter II, “Religion and Truth.”
1. “By religion, I do not mean formal religion, or customary religion, but that religion which underlies all religions, which brings us face to face with our Maker.”
Question: Have you ever had a religious experience? Can you identify with MG’s sense of being beyond formal or customary religion at such a moment?
2. “It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and which ever purifies. It is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself, known its Maker and appreciated the true correspondence between the Maker and itself.”
Question: Do you think that religion in this sense is advancing or declining among the people you know?
3. “The purer I try to become the nearer to God I feel myself to be.”
Comment?
4. “God to be God must rule the heart and transform it. He must express Himself in every smallest act of His votary. This can only be done through a definite realization more real than the five senses can ever produce. . . . It is proved not by extraneous evidence but in the transformed conduct and character of those who have felt the real presence of God within.”
Question: Of the people you’ve met, who most expresses religion in this sense?
5.“To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself.” “Identification with everything that lives is impossible without self-purification; without self-purification the observance of the law of ahimsa [non-violence] must remain an empty dream; God can never be realized by one who is not pure of heart.” “I am endeavouring to see God through service of humanity . . . .”
Question: Do you agree?
6. “Divine knowledge is not borrowed from books. It has to be realized in oneself. Books are at best an aid, often even a hindrance.” “It is better to allow our lives to speak for us than our words. God did not bear the Cross only 1,900 years ago, but He bears it today, and He dies and is resurrected from day to day. It would be poor comfort to the world if it had to depend upon a historical God who died 2,000 years ago. Do not then preach the God of history, but show Him as He lives today through you.” “I do not believe in people telling others of their faith, especially with a view to conversion. Faith does not admit of telling. It has to be lived and then it becomes self-propagating.”
What are ways to grow in that genuine living religion?
1. Real religion “transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and gives them reality.” “Religions are different roads converging to the same point.” “If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others too.”
Do you think that all religions lead to the same goal of faith-realization?
2. “So long as there are different religions, every one of them may need some distinctive symbol. But when the symbol is made into a fetish and an instrument of proving the superiority of one’s religion over others’, it is fit only to be discarded.”
What happens in crossing the threshold that makes religious loyalty dangerous?
3. “After long study and experience, I have come to the conclusion that (1) all religions are true; (2) all religions have some error in them; (3) all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism, inasmuch as all human beings should be as dear to one as one’s own close relatives.” “I believe that all the great religions of the world are true more or less. I say “more or less” because I believe that everything that the human hand touches, by reason of the very fact that human beings are imperfect, becomes imperfect. Perfection is the exclusive attribute of God and it is indescribable, untranslatable. I do believe that it is possible for every human being to become perfect even as God is perfect.”
Do you agree that there is both truth and imperfection in every religion?
4. “My belief in the Hindu scriptures does not require me to accept every word and every verse as divinely inspired. . . . I decline to be bound by any interpretation, however learned it may be, if it is repugnant to reason or moral sense.”
Do you agree?
5. “I do not believe in the exclusive divinity of the Vedas. I believe the Bible, the Koran and the Zend Avesta, to be as much divinely inspired as the Vedas.” “I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world. I believe that they are all God-given, and I believe that they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that, if only we could all of us read the scriptures of the different faiths from the standpoint of the followers of those faiths, we should find that they were at the bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.”
Can each religion profitably study and assimilate the best of the truths contained in every other faith?
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