I can no more describe my feeling for Hinduism than for my own wife. She moves me as no other woman in the world can. Not that she has no faults; I dare say, she has many more than I see myself. But the feeling of an indissoluble bond is there. Even so I feel about Hinduism with all its faults and limitations. Nothing elates me so much as the music of the Gitâ or the Ramayana by Tulasidas, the only two books in Hinduism I may be said to know. I know that vice is going on to-day in all the great Hindu shrines but I love them in spite of their failings. I am a reformer through and through. But my zeal never takes me to the rejection of any of the essential things of Hinduism.[29]
What are the essential things in which Gandhi believes? In an article written October 6,1921, Gandhi defines his conception of Hinduism:
1. He believes, he says, in the "Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and all that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures." He believes, therefore, in Avataras and rebirth.
2. He believes in the Varnashrama Dharma[30] or the "Discipline of the Castes," in a sense which he considers "strictly Vedic," but which may not correspond to the present "popular and crude sense."
3. He believes in the "protection of the cow in a much larger sense than the popular."
4. He does not "disbelieve in idol worship."
Every Occidental who reads Gandhi's "Credo" and stops at these lines is apt to feel that they reveal a mentality so different from ours and so far removed in time and space as to make comparison with our ideals impossible, owing to the lack of a common measure. But if he will read on, he will find, a few lines below, the following words, which express a doctrine more familiar to us:
I believe implicitly in the Hindu aphorism that no one truly knows the Shastras who has not attained perfection in Innocence [Ahimsa], Truth [Satya], and Self-Control [Brahma-Charya] and who has not renounced all acquisition or possession of wealth.
Here the words of the Hindu join those of the Gospel. And Gandhi was aware of their similarity. To an English clergyman who asked him in 1920 which books had influenced him most, Gandhi replied, "The New Testament."[31]
The last words of Gandhi's "Ethical Religion" are a quotation from the New Testament,[32] and he claims that the revelation of passive resistance came to him after reading the Sermon on the Mount in 1893.[33] When the clergyman asked him, in surprise, if he had not found the same message in Hindu scriptures, Gandhi replied that while he has found inspiration and guidance in the Bhagavad Gitâ, which he reveres and admires, the secret of passive resistance was made clear to him through the New Testament. A great joy welled up in him, he says, when the revelation came to him, and again when the Gitâ confirmed this revelation.[34] Gandhi also says that Tolstoi's ideal, that the kingdom of God is within us, helped him mold his own faith into a real doctrine.[35]