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Of Mantras and Unquestioned Creeds: Reconstructing Gandhi’s Moral Insights

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The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth

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Abstract

Tagore raised objections against Gandhi’s emphasis on taking vows/vratas to obey shastric injunctions and the related practice of tapas/austerity. This chapter examines Gandhi’s central moral ideas—his list of virtues, the primacy he accorded to ahimsa, the centrality of tapasya and the insistence on bodily purity. Though Gandhi considerably reinterpreted terms such as tapas, vrata, yama and niyama his relationship to the traditional texts of Indian philosophy cannot be entirely overlooked. While this chapter reconstructs the independent, and at times original, philosophical arguments that informed Gandhi’s moral vision, it also brings out the influence of the Yoga Sūtra on Gandhi’s moral ideas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is from the electronic edition of Gandhi’s Collected works (Gandhi 1947), accessible online at http://gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html. Note that between the Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi (100 Volumes, 1955) and the electronic edition (eCWMG) are disputed differences of content and different volumes and page numbers.

  2. 2.

    A footnote was added here: ‘Yoga is controlling the activity of the mind’ (Patanjali, Yoga Sūtra); Gandhi, “Discourses on the Gita”, 24-02-1926.

  3. 3.

    As Gandhi wrote the original Sūtra in Hindi the author has quoted the English translation of the Sūtra from Ranganathan’s translation of the Yoga Sūtra. (Ranganathan 2008, p. 186). The rest of the quotation faithfully records Gandhi’s own words.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

    Bindu Puri

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  1. Bindu Puri
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Puri, B. (2015). Of Mantras and Unquestioned Creeds: Reconstructing Gandhi’s Moral Insights. In: The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 9. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2116-6_2

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