The Gita according to Gandhi 126

The Gita according to Gandhi -Mahadev Desai

INDIVIDUAL ETHICS (Discourses 16 and 17) Naked we came out of our mother's womb and naked we must return to the womb of Mother Earth. But this is a partial truth. As we have seen in last discourse, we do not come quite naked, we come with something the impress of our actions, our character, our karma and we return with something, if we do. The Gita says that this heritage that we bring with us is either godly or ungodly, the godly helping to deliver us from .the bondage of flesh, the ungodly tightening the bondage. Fearelssness is declared to be at the top of the godly heritage of virtues, and with reason. Fear presupposes otherness, and a vision of God cures one of the otherness and hence of fear. It is thus at the root of all virtues. Then follow the cardinal virtues truth and unoffensiveness, purity and self- restraint, and a grip of the end and the means jnana and yoga, and a number of other virtues like charity, compassion, spiritedness, long-suffering, etc. The opposite of these constitute the ungodly heritage hypocrisy, snobbery, cruelty and the like. But the Gita goes on to describe at length the characteristics of ungodly men. Lust and lawlessness may be said to be the law of their life, anything they do is with a view to secure those ends, for they do not accept any reign of law on earth and recognize no lawgiver.