What is Nature – Mahatma Gandhi

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

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What is Nature – Mahatma Gandhi 

 

No word seems to be more abused today than the word ‘natural’. For instance, a correspondent writes, “As eating and drinking are natural to man, even so is anger.” Another seems to argue: “The sexual function is as natural as the other functions of the body. Were it not so, God would not have endowed it to man. If it was not our duty to curse the wicked and to bless the good, why should we have been endowed with the faculty of cursing and blessing? May it not be our duty to develop all our faculties to perfection? And thus himsa would appear to be as much one’s dharma as ahimsa. In short virtue and vice are figments of our imagination. Your ahimsa is a sign of weakness, inasmuch as it expresses only one side of our nature. Rather than regard it as the highest religion, why should we not regard it as the highest irreligion? Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah was originally Ahimsa Paramo Adharmahthe negative prefix a (not) having somehow dropped out, or been rubbed out by some enemy of mankind. For on many occasions, ahimsa can be demonstrated to be the highest irreligion.”

This is not one man’s argument; I have boiled down and put together the arguments of many. The theory about the negative a in ahimsa being dropped was propounded by an old barrister friend, and he did so in all seriousness. Indeed if we were to put man in the same category as the brute, many things could be proved to come under the description ‘natural’. But if they belong to two different species, not everything that is natural to the brute is natural to man. “Progress is man’s distinction, men alone, not beasts.” Man has discrimination and reason. Man does not live by bread alone, as the brute does. He uses his reason to worship God and to know Him, and regards the attainment of that knowledge as the summum bonum of life. The desire to worship God is inconceivable in the brute, while man can voluntarily worship even Satan. It must therefore be, and is, man’s nature to know and find God. When he worships Satan, he acts contrary to his nature. Of course, I will not carry conviction to one who makes no distinction between man and the brute. To him virtue and vice are convertible terms. While to the man whose end and aim is realization of God, even the functions of eating and drinking can be natural only within certain limits. For having knowledge of God as his end, he will not eat or drink for the sake of enjoyment but solely for sustaining the body. Restraint and renunciation will therefore always be his watchwords even in respect of these functions. And if it is man’s nature to know and find God, sexual indulgence should be contrary to his nature, and complete renunciation of it will accord best with his mission.

For realization of God is impossible with-out complete renunciation of the sexual desire. It is not man’s duty to develop all his faculties to perfection; his duty is to develop all his Godward faculties to perfection and to suppress completely those of a contrary tendency. Anyone blessed with choice or free will to accept and reject cannot but distinguish between good and evil, virtue and vice. For these mean in other words nothing but things to be accepted and things to be rejected. Thus robbing someone of his property is a thing to be rejected, hence bad or sinful. We have within us both good and bad desires. It is our duty to cultivate the former and to suppress or eradicate the latter, and if we fail therein we should remain brutes though born men. Birth as a human being is therefore declared by all religions as a rare privilege—a state of probation. And Hinduism says that if we are weighed and found wanting we should have to be reborn as beasts. The world is full of himsa and nature does appear to be ‘red in tooth and claw’. But if we bear in mind that man is higher than the brute, then is man superior to that Nature. If man has a divine mission to fulfil, a mission that becomes him, it is that of ahimsa. Standing as he does in the midst of himsa, he can retire into the innermost depths of his heart and declare to the world around him that his mission in this world of himsa is ahimsa, and only to the extent that he practises it does he adorn his kind. Man’s nature then is not himsa, but ahimsa, for he can speak from experience, his innermost conviction, that he is not the body but atman, and that he may use the body only with a view to expressing the atman, only with a view to self-realization. And from that experience he evolves the ethics of subduing desire, anger, ignorance, malice and other passions, puts forth his best effort to achieve the end and finally attains complete success only when his efforts reach that consummation can be said to have fulfilled himself, to have acted according to his nature. Conquest of one’s passions therefore is not superhuman, but human, and observance of ahimsa is heroism of the highest type, with no room therein for cowardice or weakness.

 

Reference:

Young India, 24-6-1926