Mahatma Gandhi and Buddha's Path to Enlightenment

by Raghavan N. Iyer, The Theosophy Trust (Compilation)

Gandhi, like Gautama, did not try to escape the evident truth of human suffering through seeking mindless oblivion or neurotic distractions, nor did he choose to come to terms with it through compensatory spiritual ambition or conventional religious piety. Rejecting the route of cloistered monasticism, he pondered deeply and agonizingly upon the human condition, and sought to find the redemptive function and therapeutic meaning of human misery. Translating his painful insights into daily acts of tapas – self-chosen spiritual exercises and the repeated re-enactments of lifelong meditation in the midst of fervent social activity – he came to see the need for a continual rediscovery of the purpose of living by all those who reject the hypnosis of bourgeois society, with its sanctimonious hypocrisy and notorious ‘double standards’ for individual and public life. Spiritual striving towards enlightenment can help to raise a ladder of contemplation along which the seeker may ascend and descend, participating in the worlds of eternity and time, perfecting one’s sense of timing in the sphere of action. In most people, alas, the seed is not allowed to sprout or grow owing to chaotic and contradictory aims and desires, tinged by vain longings and delusive expectations, fantasies and fears, blocking any vibrant encounter with the realities of this world as well as any possibility of envisioning Jacob’s ladder, “pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross”. Gandhi’s own spiritual conviction grew, with the ripening of age, that social reformers and non-violent revolutionaries must repeatedly cleanse their sight and remove all self-serving illusions by placing themselves squarely within the concrete context of mass suffering.

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2014

About the author

Raghavan Narasimhan Iyer was born in Madras, India on March 10, 1930, the son of Narasimhan Iyer and Lakshmi Iyer. He was educated at the Universities of Bombay and Oxford. At Bombay he received first class honors in Economics and won a variety of commendations and prizes, including the Chancellor's Medal. At the age of 18 he became the youngest lecturer in the University of Bombay, at Elphinstone College. After being awarded his master's degree in Advanced Economics in Bombay, he was sent as the sole Rhodes Scholar for India for 1950 to Magdalen College, Oxford. He secured First Class Honors in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and later received the D. Phil. Degree in moral and political philosophy. While a student at Oxford, he was elected President of the Oxford Union, the Voltaire Society, the Oxford Majlis, the Oxford University Peace Association, the Oxford Social Studies Association and several other societies.

On returning to India, he served as Director of the Indian Institute of World Culture and as Associate Editor of the Aryan Path. He then served as Chief Research Officer for the Head of the Planning Commission of the Indian Government, and helped to elaborate the theory of democratic planning.

In 1956 he returned to Oxford, where he taught Moral and Political Philosophy for eight years. He was Fellow and Lecturer in Politics at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Oslo, Ghana and Chicago. He also lectured at the College of Europe in Belgium, the Erasmus Seminar in Holland, and at Harvard, Bowdoin, Berkeley, U.C.L.A., Rand Corporation and the California Institute of Technology. He was actively associated with the world federalist movement in Europe, participated in many television and radio programmes of the B.B.C. and lectured at various international conferences in Sweden, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia and Japan.

He settled permanently in Santa Barbara in 1965, where he was a Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara until his retirement in 1986. He became a Consultant to the Fund for the Republic, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Academy of World Studies and the Management Development Institute of the State of California. From 1971 to 1982 he was a member of the Club of Rome, and from 1978 to 1988 he was a member of the Reform Club in London. In the Spring of 1985 he was Alton Brooks Visiting Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He was also a member of the American Society for Legal and Political Philosophy, the International Society for Gandhian Studies and the International Society for Neo-Platonic Studies.

In 1988 he visited the Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia, met Dr. Broadus Butler and Bishop Featherstone, and intoned the Gayatri mantram for the sake of all souls. In New Orleans he paid tribute to the memory of Louis Armstrong, the herald of 'the American Century'. In Savannah, Georgia he entered into a deep midnight meditation at the Pulaski monument by the sea, invoking myriad stars in accordance with ancient custom, on behalf of the disinherited billions upon this earth.

After five and one-half decades of service to the Theosophical Movement and to the emerging City of Man, Sri Raghavan Iyer passed away on June 20, 1995 in Santa Barbara, California. His profound insights into the spiritual promise and therapeutic trials of contemporary man, his radical proposals for creative modes of individual and collective growth, and his deep devotion to a new and more vibrant world culture will continue to resonate to myriad, receptive souls for generations and centuries to come.