THOREAU, GANDHI, KING, AND NONVIOLENCE:An Example of East-West Cultural Interflow

Robert L. Greenwood

　　〔提要〕：印度與中國哲學對於新英格蘭先驅論者的思想有極大的影響。亨利·索洛關於《不合作運動》的專著，就是受了印——中哲學的影響而寫成的。
　　這篇論著對當時正在南非為印度人的權益，後來又為爭取印度的獨立而奮戰的甘地，產生了深遠的影響。後來，甘地又對美國黑人民權運動的領袖馬丁·路德·金產生了決定性的影響。
　　Macau has a right to be proud of its history of facilitating East-West cultural interflow. Such interflow has played a very strong role in the development of the contemporary world. Not all cultural interflow, unfortunately, has been for the best; although on this point there could never be universal agreement. One very important example of beneficiai East-West cultural interflow is the influence of Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism on the New England transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau one of the New England transcendentalists, in turn exercised an influence on Mohandas K. Gandhi as he lay incarcerated in a South African jail. Gandhi, in turn, influenced and inspired the American civil right activist, Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of these men was intimately concerned with the problem of human rights and their flagrant disregard by their respective governments. The issue before Thoreau was the horror of human slavery as practiced and defended in the United States of America. He was also concerned with the　ill-treatment of the indigenous people of North America. Gandhi’s concern at the time he encountered Thoreau’s essay, “Civil Disobedience,” was with the treatment of his fellow Indians by the government of South Africa. Finally, King was involved with the struggle on the part of black Americans for recognition of their just civil rights.
　　The influence of Hindu thought on the New England transcendentalists has not always been recognized. It is more common to trace their intellectual origins to German idealism⁽¹⁾ A.K. B. Pillai, in his book, Transcendental Self, has published his comparative studies of the work and thought of the New England transcendentalists and the thought of the great Asian cultures. Pillai describes Thoreau’s enthusiasm for Hindu writings, many of which he encountered in the library of Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most famous and influential of the New England transcendentalists. Thoreau read The Laws of Manu, the Bhagavadgita, the Vedas, Vishnu Purana, Hari Vamsa and the Dhammapada, among others. Pillai calls attention to many paraileis between these Indian texts and the writings of Thoreau, especially Walden. Arthur Christy, in his The Orient in American Transcendentalism,⁽²⁾ claims that of all these works, the Bhagavadgita was the most influential. Among the Chinese it was Confucius and Me ncius who exercised the most influence on Thoreau. In particular, he much admired the recognition by these thinkers of the moral nature of man as opposed to the Calvinistic insistence on the total depravity of man.
　　One of strong characteristics of New England transcendentalism was its revolutionary temper. All of the major figures of the movement were at one time or another involved in subversive activities.
　　Samuel May was mobbed tive times within one month for preaching abolition. Thoreau went to prison rather than pay a tax to the state which countenanced slavery, and followed this protest with 〔his essay〕 “Resistance to Civil Government.” 〔Theodore〕 Parker was indicted for obstructing the Fugitive Slave Law, which be had most certainly done. 〔Bronson〕 Alcott hid a Negro who passed through Concord on the underground railway. Even the aloof Emerson went home with a copy of the fugitive Slave Law in his pocket to sit down before his Journal and write: “I will not obey it, by God.”⁽³⁾
　　Next to Walden, perhaps Thoreau’s most famous writing is “Civil Disobedience.” In this work, Thoreau expresses his contempt for a government which permits and enforces slavery. The essay is more an exercise in ethics than a political document. He asks, “Can there not be a government in which majorities decide right and wrong, but conscience? …… I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”⁽⁴⁾ In the same vein, he writes:
　　A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see afile of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or smafl movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?⁽⁵⁾
　　Thoreau was particularly incensed that even though all men recognize the right of revolution when a government’s tyranny or inefficiency are great and unendurable, many of his fellow Americans claimed that was not the case at the time. He compared the then present situation, in which a sixth of the population of the United States, a nation which proclaimed itself the refuge of liberty, was in slavery, with the situation at the time of the American Revolution of 1775. The government then was thought to be bad because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports. He believed that the Abolitionists in Massachusetts should act immediately to withdraw their support from the government of Massachusetts and not wait until they reached a majority. He proclaimed that it was enough to have God on their side without having to await a majority. Thoreau himself refused to pay pole taxes to the state of Massachusetts because it countenanced slavery and spent a night in jail in consequence. “Under a gover nment which imprisons any unjustly,” Thoreau proclaimed, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” Thoreau believed deeply in the rights of the individual and accepted the motto which proclaimed, “That government is best which governs least:” and he added, “Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--that government is best which governs not at all.” He lauded Confucius for his wisdom in regarding the individual as the basis of the empire. “There will never be a really free and enlightened State,” Thoreau declared, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
　　Such was the message of “Civil Disobedience.” Anda stirring message it was. A message read and appreciated by Mohandas Gancdhi while he too suffered incarceration imposed by the injustice of the state, the state of South Africa. Gancdhi had gone originally in 1892 to South Africa as a lawyer in the service of a firm of Porbandar Moslems. There be found himself in a society with deep divisions along racial, class, and religious lines. After settling the lawsuit for which be came, Gandhi prepared to retum to India. Ata farewell party, Gandhi learned of the proposal of the Natal government to deprive Indians of their right to elect members of the legislature. Gandhi stressed the importance of defeating the move and when his prevailed upon him to stay on and help with the struggle, he agreed to remain another month but ended by staying twenty years fighting for Indian rights, a fight which he won.
　　In 1906, the Transvaal government proposed an ordinance which required all Indians over the age of eight to register with the government, submit to fingerprinting, and carry a certificate at all times. Gandhi called a meeting and got an agreement from all not to register. When the act was passed in 1907, most Indians stood by the agreement and many went to jail for so doing, including Gandhi. Again in 1908 Gandhi was jailed and it was on this occasion, according to one source⁽⁶⁾, that he became acquainted with Thoreau’s essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which he borrowed from the prison library. It is clear that Gancdhi did not detive his idea of resistance to authority from Thoreau’s essay in as much as the movement was well underway in South Africa before Gandhi discovered the essay. The movement was then called “passive resistance.” But Gandhi began to use “civil disobedience” in his explanations of the movement to English readers. Gandhi later claimed (1931) that Thoreau’s essay “conta ined the essence of his political philosophy, not only as India’s struggle related to the British, but as to his own views of the relation of citizens to government.”⁽⁷⁾ On another occasion, (1944) Gandhi wrote in an appeal to the American people that “You have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who fumished me through his essay on the ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience’ scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South Africa.”⁽⁸⁾
　　One should not be surprised that Gandhi, like Thoreau, was much influenced by the Bhagavadgita. After all, Gandhi was a native of India. The interesting fact is, however, that Gandhi had never read the Gira until he was twenty years old anda second year student of law in London, England. He read the English translation of Sir Edwin Arnold which was published under the title of The Song Celestial in 1885. Later, Gandhi read the Gita in Sanskrit and even translated it from the Sanskrit into Gujarti. Gandhi’s interpretation of the Gita was not standard. According to Louis Fischer:
　　On first reading the Gita in 1888-89, Gandhi felt that it was “nota historical work.” Nor, be worte later, is the Mahabharta. The Gita is an allegory, Gandhi said. The battlefield is the human soul wherein Arjuna, representing higher impulses, struggles against evil. “Krishna,” according to Gandhi, “is the Dweller within, ever whispering to apure heart.... Under the guise of physical warfare,” Gandhi asserted, the Gita “described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind.... Physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring.” Gandhi often questioned doctrinal, and temporal, authority.⁽⁹⁾
　　Thoreau too had protested the seeming justification of violence in the Gita. Nonviolence, or ahimsa, was always an important aspect of Gandhi’s thought, due in part, no doubt, to the strong influence of Jainism in his youth with its prohibition against the killing of any living creature. Other influences were at work on young Gandhi besides Jainism, the Gita, and Buddhism. Gandhi also found great value in the New Testament and he said that the Sermon on the Mount went straight to his heart. Other teachings that confirmed Gandhi in his devotion to nonviolence were those of Confucius, Lao-tse, Moses, Socrates, Mohammed, and Tolstoy. Gandhi’s final name for his movement, a name which he hoped would sun up all the postitive aspects of the various influences at work in his thought, was Satyagraha. Gandhi coined the term from the Sanskrit, satya, truth, and agraha, firmness of force. He also called Satyagraha “Soul force.”
　　In 1915, Gandhi returned to his native India after his success in South Africa. He turned his attention to the freeing of India from the yoke of British oppression. He put to good use his experiences in South Africa with Satyagraha and continued to develop his understanding of the movement be had created with a view to making it most effective in the circumstances in which be now found himself. He undertook to teach a whole nation the meaning and implications of Satyagraha. For those Indians who wished to join in Satyagraha, Gandhi set up training camps in which he taught how to abstain from violence in any form and how to control crowds and restore order. Volunteers were required to take a pledge to resist injustice, ahstain from violence to the opponent’s life, person, and property, and be willing to suffer cheerfully the consequences of their actions. Eventually Gandhi succeeded in his aim to free India and the British relinquished power on August 15, 1947. Rather than rejoice, however, Gandhi stated　that thirty-two years of work had come to an inglorious end. He was disappointed with his country because of its partition into Hindu and Moslem parts, something he regarded as a spiritual tragecly.
　　Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired by a sermon given by Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, to read several books on Gandhi. His reading about Gandhi restored his original faith in the power of love, a faith that had been shaken by his study at Corzer Theological Seminary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power. In The Genealogy of Morais, Nietzsche proclaimed that Jews and Christians had developed a slave morality as a result of hatred and resentment against the noble and the powerful. Such an ethic raised love and compassion for the poor, the powerless, the suffering, the sick, and the ugly above the “noble morality” of the ancient world which had valued the ideais of power, selfaffirmation, health, and beauty. In The Will to Power, Neitzsche attacked the Christian duty to love all humanity. As a result, King came to the reluctant conclusion that Jesus’ message to love one’s enemies and to turn the other cheek was useful in conflicts between individuais but not among racial groups and nations. Leaming about Gandhi changed all that for King. He said that Christ had furnished the spirit and the motivation for the Montgomery Boycott, and that Gandhi had supplied the method. In a sermon delivered in 1967 at The Riverside Church in New York City, King stated that “We will return good for evil. We will love our enemies. Christ showed us the way and Gandhi showed us it could work.”⁽¹⁰⁾
　　King was particularly criticai of the polarity of love and power he found in Neitzsche. He traced the polarization to a failure to distinguish among eros, philia, and agape. Whereas eros and philia are conditional, agape affirms the other unconditionally. Whereas eros and philia distinguish between worthy and unworthy persons, between friend and enemy, agape suffers and forgives. Agape is the recognition that God loves one’s enemies. The affinity of this viewpoint with that of Gandhi’s Satyagraha is clear.
　　In his book, Martin Luther King, Jr. : The Making of a Mind, John J. Ansbro compares the methods employed by Gandhi and King and points out that King used most of the methods first explored by Gandhi. Among those methods of Gandhi’s in which King found inspiration were (1) the observing of national days and weeks to protest the government’s failure to make good on promises. Also, using such times to encourage renewal of the Satyagraha pledge. (2) Publishing pamphlets to defy restrictions on press freedom and thus invite government suppression leading to the mobilization of public opinion. (3) Conducting prohibited meetings, demonstrations, and processions both for protest as well as the education of public opinion, (4) Creating massive unrest by staging ceremonial marches in defiance of government orders. For example, the Salt March in the case of Gandhi and the match from Selma to Montgomery in the case of King. (5) Organizing strikes to demand better working conditions or in pursuit of political goals . (6) The use of boycotts of foreign goods, institutions, honors, and official functions to exert economic and political pressure. (7) Peaceful picketing, both to persuade the opponent and to increase the political awareness of the participants. (8) Resignations to protest against an official policy. (9) The use of civil disobedience to protest against immoral laws and to symbolize one’s revolt against the state. Gandhi had used civil disobedience in South Africa in refusing to comply with compulsory registration, in boycotting and picketing permit offices, in refusing to allow fingerprinting or thumb-impressions, hawking without a license, and entering neighboring provinces without registration certificates. Gandhi used civil disobedience in India when he violated laws banning publication of certain literature, by distilling salt from sea water, and by cutting palm trees that furnished the government with revenue. (10) Courting imprisonment by violating laws which were in conflict with one’s conscience and thereby arousing the sympathy and respect of public opinion for the justice of one’s cause through the willingness to suffer. Other methods employed by Gandhi but not by King included (1) encourgement of voluntary c losure of shops; (2) raids on property; (3) renouncing property voluntarily to prevent its seizure by the government; (3) resigning from political groups; (4) fasting; (5) usurping government functions; (6) establishing functions paralleling those of the government; and (7) the nonpayment of taxes. Some of these differences in the methods of the two men can be accounted for because Gandhi was rebelling against a foreign imposition whereas King was aiming at the implementation of equality and justice-for-all that had been denied the black community by the white community. One might say that Gandhi worked outside the system and King worked inside. Both men were successful in achieving their most　important goals. Gandhi succeeded in freeing India of British rule and King succeeded in fomenting a social revolution of immense scope and importance. I remember as a young officer of the United States Air Force in the 1950’s defending the principles of racial desegregation with some of my fellow officers from the South. They informed me in no uncertain terms that never under any circumstances would the South allow desegregation. I have made my home in the deep South for the past twenty-five years, all of them under desegregation as a result of the valor and dedication of Martin Luther King, Jr. I have seen that section of my country come to slowly adjust itself to the realities of desegregation. It is now called the New South and our current president of the United States of America is a product of that New South. I wish that I could report that prejudice against African-Americans was a thing of the past. Alas, that is not the case. It is the case, however, that race relations continue to improve and I hav e witnessed the improvement in the hearts and minds of my students over the years. I have every faith and expectation that the plight of black Americans will continue to improve.
　　This is the story then of one instance of East-West cultural interflow. I think it is a clear indication of the value of such interflow. It certainly illustrates the interconnectedness of all the peoples of the earth. In this instance, ideas which first formulated in India at least two millennia in the past found their way to Concord, Massachusetts, there to help inspire Henry David Thoreau to formulate a doctrine of civil disobedience. Thoreau must be given some credit also for helping to raise the consciousness of his fellow Americans to the horror of slavery in their midst. And be was willing to go to jail in support of his conscience. This fact about Thoreau impressed Gandhi and heightened his appreciation of Thoreau and his thought. Civil disobedience picked up new meaning and moral power in the hands of Mahatma Gandhi, and he ended by helping to free a whole nation. King, too, partly under the influence of Gandhi, helped to free a whole nation; for no nation can call itself free where any of its cit izens are denied equal rights under the law. No people can be free while at the same time oppressing others. Oppression takes energy away from a people which they could put to better use in developing them-selves and their society. Slavery took a terrible toll upon the most basic freedoms of the white population of the United States of America. It led to fruitless and stupid attempts at philosophical defenses. It led to suppression of free speech anda free press. Segregation continued to take a toll, especially on the South. Fear was rampant. Any dissension could easily lead to beatings and even death. We are well rid of these curses. I think that there can be little doubt that the United States of America could never have achieved whatever power and influence it has, had the evils of first slavery and then segregation not been abolished. I think that the lesson is equally clear for all the nations of the earth.

　　(1)For example, the article entitled, “New England Transcendentalism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, states:“Apart from Platonism and Unitarian Christianity, the chief formative intellectual influence on the group was German idealism.” Vol. 5”, p. 479.
　　(2)Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (New　York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1963)
　　(3)Walter G., Muelder, Laurence Sears, and Anne V. Schlabach, eds., The Development of American Philosophy: A Book of Readings, 2nd ed. (New York: Honghton Mifflin Company, 1960), p. 110.
　　(4)Muelder, et al., p. 163.
　　(5)Ibid.
　　(6)Louis Fischer, The Life ofMahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers)
　　(7)George Hendrick, “The Influence of Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ on Gandhi’s Satyagraha,” reprinted in　Thomas, Owen, ed., Walden and Civil Disobedience (Indiana University, 1966)., p. 364.
　　(8)Ibid.
　　(9)Fischer, p. 32.
　　(10)John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr. : The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books,1982), p. 3.