Gandhi and the Sermon on the Mount

Mahatma Gandhi regarded the Sermon on the Mount and its assertion of the law of love as eternal wisdom. We know the Sermon on the Mount as a collection of sayings and moral teachings of Jesus, found in the Gospel of Matthew, in the New Testament of the Bible. It takes place relatively early in the Ministry of Jesus after he had been baptized by John the Baptist, and after he had finished a period of fasting and meditation in the desert. Jesus had been "all about Galilee" preaching and "great crowds followed him.” Seeing the multitudes, Jesus goes up unto the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him and he began to teach them.

Charles Freer Andrews a close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, wrote the following: “Very early in my life, while engaged in the study of the Sermon on the Mount, the discovery came to me which every learner makes sooner or later, that Christ’s words in these chapters are not a series of beautiful proverbs, loosely strung together, but an amazingly perfect description of character at its highest point. Christ sets before us, in each moral issue that he raises, the standard. He speaks to us, not from theory but from practice. His example is all the while before us; and when He tells us that nothing less than perfection is to be our goal, we remember with awe that He has not only set that standard, but also attained it… ‘Be ye perfect,’ he bids us with good cheer, ‘even as your father which is in heaven is perfect.’ And ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Christ was born in a village and spent His youth and early manhood as an artisan. He lived His own life in close touch with the fields and the hills. He was constantly engaged in friendly intercourse with the country folk, who loved homely stories and rhyming proverbs. To these rather than the learned He spoke first His universal message, and in this plain and direct way.”

What are the Beatitudes but the teaching and realization of humility, compassion and love:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Journalist and author, Vincent Sheean wrote the following description of Gandhi, saying that Gandhiji “was so penetrated with the truth and beauty he felt in the verses of the Sermon that through years of effort he actually became something like a summation of the Beatitudes, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemaker. His reverence for Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount illumined his long struggle and gave him strength for it.”

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus not only brings forth the beatitudes but He also presents us with the Lord’s prayer.  Prayer had a very important place in Gandhi’s ashrams. In fact, each day commenced with congregational worship from 4:15 a.m. to 4:45 a.m. and the day closed with evening prayer from 7 to 7:30 p.m. He experimented with the timing of the morning prayer but finally settled upon the earlier time (with a wake up call at 4 a.m. to give everyone in the ashram time to wash and arrive for prayer which was held under the canopy of the sky. He said in all countries of the world, devotees of God and tillers of soil rise early!

Gandhiji felt that without prayer there is no inward peace. He said that “If insistence on truth constitutes the root of the ashram, then prayer is the principal feeder of that root.” This brings us back to his appreciation for the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer when Gandhiji said: “There is really only one prayer that we may offer. ‘Thy will be done.’ After all, what do we pray for? Is it not simply that God should be ever victorious in our own hearts?”

We often hear the beautiful words in Arabic… In-Shallah. God-willing. Think of the significance of these words. In our daily life, how often do we think, speak and work with the thought of God and higher Truths?  It is a source of resignation to the will of God, “In-Shallah”… But it is also our challenge to learn what is the will of God in light of the Eternal Truth of all. Thinking of the will of God… is not merely leaving things to chance. There is an important element of responsibility placed on us to realize, to understand and to know the very Truth of our life. After all, it is Truth that shall set us free. Even Jesus was careful to discriminate between the real and the unreal, Truth and the untruth, to sort out what was God’s will and what was not. This requires us to lift our consciousness to a higher state, to realize the perfection of soul.

Gandhi said, “The Sermon on the Mount went straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita. The verses, 'But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man take away thy coat let him have thy cloak too,' delighted me beyond measure and put me in the mind of Shamal Bhatt's 'For a bowl of water, give a goodly meal’.” Shamal Bhatt was a medieval Gujarati narrative poet and Gandhi related his poem to the message in the Sermon on the Mount. Bhatt's expression is one of returning tenfold goodness to whatever is done to us.

Gandhiji said: "A Gujarati didactic stanza...gripped my mind and heart. Its precept: return good for evil—became my guiding principle. It became such a passion with me that I began numerous experiments in it.” And Gandhiji quoted the wonderful lines of this stanza in his autobiography:

For a bowl of water give a goodly meal;
For a kindly greeting bow thou down with zeal;
For a simple penny pay thou back with gold;
If thy life be rescued, life do not withhold.
Thus the words and actions of the wise regard;
Every little service tenfold thy reward.
But the truly noble know all men as one,
And return with gladness good for evil done.

Closely resembling the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, this poem resurfaced in the mind of Gandhiji from his youth and he renewed his dedication to its message by carrying it out in the activities of his life. He said: “My young mind tried to unify the teaching of the Gita, The Light of Asia and the Sermon on the Mount. That renunciation was the highest form of religion appealed to me greatly. This reading whetted my appetite for studying the lives of other religious teachers.”