E-Book - Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi’s Pancha Mahavrat… 91this respect and carves out a distinct niche for his thought onthe issues involved. He neither accepts the dominant Adi-Sankaracharya vedantic view which recommends totaldisentanglement from the vagaries of the phenomenal world forthe seekers of salvation. Nor did he accept the other view thatobserving four staged ashram and varnashrama dharma couldlead one to the other shore of salvation. Thus, his real strengthlies in the fact that he steers clear from traditional controversyabout pravriti and nivriti. He came to believe that neither therenunciation of the phenomenal world nor in the blind pursuitof varnashrama dharma could take the man to the other shore.He argues that varnashrama dharma must be transcended bysadharna dharma. But he even moves a step further. For himthe real challenge before man is to find the transcendentalcentre in his own being which is a search for God Himself. Notonly that, even the phenomenal world is nothing but themanifestation of God. As Gandhi wrote that, ‘from theimperishable unmanifest down to the perishable atomeverything in the universe is an expression of the Supreme.And which is why everything in the world deserves our utmostreverence’. As he put it:‘We may not know God, but we know his creation.Service of His creation is the service of God’. Such a firm faithin the unity of all being has several implications for Gandhi. Inthe first place, it demolishes the citadel of humanism created bythe European renaissance that the man is supreme and everyother animate and inanimate being in the cosmos is meant forhis comfort and consumption. Gandhi argued that such a livingfaith in the unity goes beyond the universal brotherhood of menas it excluded all types of exploitation including those of theother species.The second implication is that every one must be treatedon equal footing and every kind of inequality is ruled out insuch a perspective. 28 The third implication is that whether the