Satyagraha

This is one of many, many pieces of writing that I cobbled together just minutes before class during those moments when I simply couldn't find any other material adequate to the task of helping my students explore an important concept.  Although rushed, when I revisited it I thought it was worth sharing. 

I either handed out this reading before or after the paper about George Washington Carver's correspondence with Gandhi.  In each of my classes the discussions about it were so lively that I scrapped everything else and spent the entire day on it, discussing questions about the relationship between truth and love, self-knowledge and the ability to tell the truth, and what it means "to be disciplined about telling the truth."  If these sound like questions for only the most intellectual students, nothing could be further from the truth: students are aching to discuss ethics, spirituality, and philosophy.    

Gandhi’s fight for civil rights in India was founded on powerful understandings of spirituality.  Most of the African Americans who traveled to India to learn from Gandhi were also deeply spiritual. 

(Long pause here while students share, debate, and refine their notions of spirituality with much prodding in certain directions from me, i.e., asking them if it needed to be distinguished from religion, for examples of spirituality that may not be religious, for examples of how religion might support spirituality or not, etc.) 

For example, Howard Thurman was the head of the religious studies program at Howard University, and was one of the greatest spiritual leaders of his generation.    He travelled to India in 1935 – 20 years before Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on the bus.  After returning to the US, he spread Gandhi’s message, raised funds for other African American leaders to visit India, and invited Indians involved in the nonviolence movement to speak at Howard University.

One of the most important questions we can ask about the civil rights movement was what role spirituality played.  Why did African American leaders choose to study Gandhi? 

Satyagraha

African Americans in the generation before Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were studying Gandhi’s philosophy known as Satyagraha.  The word is made of two parts: satya means truth, and graha means to be disciplined.  When the two words are combined, it means to be disciplined in telling the truth.  Gandhi emphasized two kinds of truth: 1) we should be disciplined in telling the truth about oppression; and 2) we should be disciplined in telling the truth about spirituality, the ways that oppression injures the spirit both of the oppressor and the oppressed, and the way that spirituality can overcome oppression. 

On the surface, telling the truth may seem simple.  But if we go deeper, we see that to be disciplined in telling the truth requires deeply understanding the truth.  It requires study and reflection.  If the truths that must be spoken are the truths about racism or other forms of oppression, before one can speak the truth, one must have deeply studied and understood how different kinds of oppression work.  If the truth is about spiritual matters such as how to love others or be courageous and non-violent, those must have been deeply studied as well.  Because people deepen their understandings of these subjects over the course of their entire life, there may be no such thing as completely and perfectly telling the truth. 

Next, it might seem that anybody who knows the truth can simply speak it.  However, this is not true.  Consider this: if you tell the truth to somebody, but they do not understand, then in some way you have failed to tell the truth because you failed to communicate.  On the surface, you told the truth, but in a deeper way, perhaps you did not.  To tell the truth in a deeper way means to understand how to help other people understand.    

Next, to be disciplined, or to hold firm in telling the truth means not only to study the truth and speak it in a way that everybody can understand and be motivated by, it also means speaking the truth even in the face of danger.  This means to tell the truth about oppression, in a way that is loud and clear and that everyone can understand, even at great risk.  

Why is this spiritual?

Gandhi sometimes described satyagraha as “soul force.”  Part of what he meant was the special force that people can gain – the revolutionary force – when they cultivate their soul.  He also described satyagraha as a combination of truth and love: we are disciplined in speaking the truth about oppression and spirituality out of love, because the goal is to overcome oppression and create the best lives, communities, and countries possible.