The Influence of Religion on Mahatma Gandhi

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at the life of one of the most influential Hindu figures of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mahatma Gandhi. It examines how Gandhi?s life was guided by a search for truth and how he believed that truth could be known only through tolerance and concern for others. It shows how he dedicated himself to truth, to nonviolence, to poverty, and to honesty, and how he believed in "Ahimsa" or nonviolence, and taught that to be truly nonviolent required great courage.

From the Paper:

"The most influential factor in Gandhi's philosophical development was religion. Gandhi did believe in God, and his religion is Hinduism. "My religion is Hinduism, which for me is the religion of humanity and includes the best of all the religions known to me" (Gandhi, Para1). Gandhi inherited Hinduism from his parents, but he was more influnced by the religion through reading many books. ?It was thanks to his theosophist friends that Gandhi started learning about his own religion, by reading the Bhagavad-Gita Gita, which he was ashamed of never having read, in the original, either in the original Sanskrit or in a Gujarati translation, and which he now tackled eagerly in Sir Edwin Arnold's popular English translation."

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