E-Book - Mahatma Gandhi

70 Contextualising Gandhian Thought‘…. There are laws for knowing the great living forcewhich we call God but it is self-evident that it requires hardlabour to find out those laws. That law in short is termedbrahmacharya. Brahmacharya is the method of tapping intothe power that is Brahman, the very essence of life, the energythat sustains the world’. 15 To achieve that state of selfpurificationone has to observe all the disciplines andbrahmacharya could not be in isolation from other disciplines.As he put it, what is brahmacharya? It is the way of life whichleads to Brahma (God). 16Elaborating on his new conception of brahmacharya hewrote on 17 March 1947, when he was faced with a crisis onthis very count. He defined brahmacharya as follows:One who never had any lustful intention, who byconstant attendance upon God has become proof againstconscious or unconscious commission, who is capable of lyingnaked with naked women, however beautiful they may be,without in any manner whatsoever sexually excited: such aperson should be incapable of lying, incapable of intending ordoing harm to a single man or woman in whole world, is freefrom anger and malice and detached in the sense of theBhagavad Gita. And only such a person is a realbrahmachari’ 17 . It is evident from the above that the colour andcomplexion with which the concept of brahmacharya whichstarted with Gandhi in 1906, has undergone a sea change in1947, the last phase of his life. It had become a symbol of totaldispassion and self-actualisation. Besides, it had become aspringboard for acting in the phenomenal world with a spirit ofa real Loksangraha.From 1906 onwards, till the end of his life Gandhi madeseveral experiments with his ideal brahmacharya. Towards theend of his life, it reached its zenith when he took it at the levelof yajna. Of course his experiments created some