Introduction to Part II

Abstract

Gandhi taught that Truth is God. This very naturally puzzles the philosophically educated Westerner, who is likely to think of the truth as the sum of all true propositions. This is not, however, at all what Gandhi had in mind. The key word for him was satya, Truth — the term that he invented, satyagraha, meaning the power of Truth. The heart of satya, Truth, is sat, reality, the real, the true, the ultimate. Indeed, Gandhi treated satya and sat as synonymous. [From Yeravda Mandir, Chap. 1]. Thus in his dictum that Truth is God, Gandhi was freeing the idea of God from particular images of the ultimate in the form of Vishnu or Shiva or Allah or the Heavenly Father, etc., and was saying that God is sat, the Real. So far this is a familiar idea within the Hindu tradition: the Gods are all manifestations of the one ultimate reality, called Brahman. But, as Rex Ambler so interestingly shows in his chapter, ‘Gandhi’s Concept of Truth’, Gandhi went beyond this traditional understanding with a startling originality which has had immense consequences. The opposite of sat ‘reality’ is maya ‘illusion’. According to the Hindu (and Buddhist) tradition, the world of our ordinary ego-centred perception, together with its pervasive values and concerns, is distorted, illusory, concealing reality from us.