© 1985 Probal Dasgupta
© 1985 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
I am thou: meditations on the truth of India. By Ramchandra Gandhi. Pune: Indian Philosophical Quarterly Publications (Department of Philosophy, University of Poona). 1984. xii s 311 pages. $15.
Let me begin by quoting from page 51: “Man does not live by bread alone, Christ reminds us, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, i.e. by the totality of God’s revelation to mankind, i.e. at least by the truth in all the religions of the world.” This book is an attempt by Ramchandra Gandhi, an Oxford-trained philosopher who is also a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, to provide a partial exposition of the truth of the Indian spiritual tradition in a form that invites the attention of all thinking people. One of his main points is that the one God, whose self-multiplication — before eternity — is unthinkable in human thought and yet real, is accessible to us through a necessary plurality of revelations. We have to assimilate and reconcile the truths we learn from different traditions.
Readers of The URANTIA Book will perhaps be especially interested in points at which the formulations in this book converge with ideas familiar to them. Let us look at some such points.
Gandhi develops (99-101) a view of evil as self-contradiction. His idea rests on his technical philosophical work, but can be understood without grasping the technicalities. When we do wrong, we imply in the very act that it is okay to do it, and yet we know that it is not okay to do it; such self-contradiction involves losing touch with the center, the self, and ultimately is literally self-destructive.
Gandhi questions (41-2) the idea of the resurrection of what we think of as the body. In terms reminiscent of the concept of morontia, he says that “the materiality of the human body on earth in normal circumstances is a very inadequate materiality, it is not that alchemical omnipresent materiality of which we get a glimpse in the accounts of the resurrected body of Christ, or in the vast literature of bhakti [devotion] which celebrates the omnipresence and substantiality of the divine body of Sri Krsna or Sri Rama. True materiality and substantiality, true hardness and indubitability of existence, can only be gained by mukti [release, liberation], by an explosion of love for all things and identity with all things.”
This last turn of phrase points up a significant difference of accent: the Indian view stresses identity, a-dvaita (non-duality, non-separateness). Perhaps the section (101-5) on “What is it like to be God?” is the clearest statement of this tenet. One might think that the notion that individual people are brothers (and sisters) and remain so after death contradicts the Indian idea of advaita. But consider this: the primordial Father-Son relationship emerging from the one God is a pre-eternal mystery. Likewise, the Indian view postulates a mysterious appearance of separateness which the individual seeker must go beyond, through seeking in eternity, to be able to reunite with God, to reattain the identity that had been mysteriously veiled. It is the same mystery, approached differently.
Gandhi attaches importance to the need for religious renewals in history: “Nostalgia deceives and debilitates even while it comforts” (54). In his section on Sikhism, he speaks of “the unfolding of a new scripture form: a non-classical scriptural corpus of writing and orally transmitted memory whose vehicle and medium is not Samskrta [the Sanskrit word for Sartskrit] but modern languages” (54). He sees this unfolding as “the incarnation of the ethereal classical as the flesh and blood colloquial in spiritual history” (56).
Here and elsewhere Gandhi recognizes the crucial role of “the mysterious uplifting assistance which the evolution of man has received, an anti-entropic assistance which has made man not merely a living and conscious being but a self-conscious being launched on the road to self-realization as Atman-Brahman [Person-Spirit]” (67). Again, the theme should sound familiar and congenial to a reader of The URANTIA Book.
Such a reader will also be familiar with the point (123) that the “coerciveness of Christian civilization” is “a departure from the style of sacrifice of Christ,” from the emphatically non-coercive teachings of Jesus. Gandhi goes so far as to say (83): “When exclusivist Christianity scornfully turns its back upon Hinduism and even seeks uprooting conversion of Hindus to its own exclusivism, […] Hindus find themselves forgetting the divine love of Christ which Christianity even in its arrogant forms often communicates, and suspect Christianity of being the hardest cross that Christ bears.” Harsh language, perhaps, but surely mitigated by even harsher criticism of Hinduism elsewhere (“degeneration […] I into caste arrogance and the blot of untouchability”, 26), and put into perspective by repeated (105,173, and passim.) attempts to show that different civilizations and approaches complement each other in specific ways and that therefore we should all strike a balance between pride in our achievements and humility about our inevitable limitations. This is not to say that all strands of life and thought in the world are supposed to remain distinct, unassimilated. Anyone who has thought about the notion of God the Supreme emerging through the multiple experience of aspiring mortals will see the validity of Gandhi’s observation that “The heights of our spiritual history are not all those of synthesis and absorption and assimilation, they are also the achievements of non-violent contacting and coexistence, the mutual illumination of distinctive items and peoples and modes of life and thought which by their unintercoursing juxtaposition dramatise the Vedic vision of oneness in diversity” (59). He concludes that “perhaps Indian uniqueness is not coexistence as such but the coexistence of coexistence and synthesis” (59). “At its self-confident and self-conscious best, Indian civilization is describable as a dynamic far-flung sourcewardness, a powerful and distinctive stance of being and becoming which is, however, capable of tragic caricature, and this has occurred often enough in our turbulent history. But even in our failure we must be mindful of our truth” (60). This truth involves synthesizing and assimilating where appropriate, and keeping apparently incompatible ideas side by side, unreconciled, when it is appropriate to wait and see how their apparently divergent truths are supposed to work out.
—Probal Dasgupta
Pune, India