GANDHI, THE BUDDHA, AND ATMAN:

Nicholas F. Gier, Gandhi Marg 21:4 (January-March, 2000), pp. 447-459.

Linked with permission

    Over the years Ramashray Roy has established himself as one of India's leading political theorists. He has developed a very keen understanding of European philosophy and also has a good grasp of contemporary critics of liberal political theory. Roy has ably defended traditional approaches to ideas of self and society and has offered much insight about Gandhi's philosophy in general. I am sure that many others will join me in confessing that I have learned much from him.

    It was with some dismay, then, that I recently read the chapter "Atman versus the Self" in Roy's book Understanding Gandhi. Here he takes me to task for my attempt to give a Buddhist interpretation of Gandhi's view of self and society and how the virtue of nonviolence should be conceived. Unfortunately Roy misunderstands what I mean by a relational self; he sides with the wrong Buddhist philosopher; he misrepresents my virtue of nonviolence; and he fails to address some of the major arguments of my article.

I

    I believe I am correct in claiming that Gandhi does not have a consistent view of the self. It ranges from a strict individualism, perhaps inspired by Socrates and Thoreau, to a Vedantist pantheism in which individual autonomy is not very well supported. I believe that it best to situate Gandhi somewhere in between and I now call this position "organic holism." Roy correctly maintains that Gandhi preserves the "primacy of the individual." (Gandhi's statement that "corporate growth is therefore entirely dependent upon individual growth" is one of the best texts for this point.) This means that Roy simply cannot succeed in his attempt to interpret Gandhi as an Advaitin, the Vedantist school the deemphasises the individual the most.

    Inexplicably Roy writes critically at some length about a view of the self that I do not support and one that is not relational at all; indeed, it is quite the opposite. What Roy describes in the second section of his chapter is the disastrous results of the modern Cartesian-Kantian self, which he describes as "a god-like Ego" and "a self-confident, pig-headed Ego that would be prepared to destroy humanity. . . ." This is what I call the Titanistic self, one that takes on divine attributes and prerogatives, and I have written at length about the liabilities of spiritual Titanism.

    It is completely baffling to me how anyone could have interpreted my article in this way. This is definitely not the Buddha's concept of self nor the other major thinkers that I referenced: Confucius, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, George Herbert Mead, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (I should have added Gabriel Marcel and Alfred North Whitehead.) I also observed that Jacques Maritain's view of the self, which Roy nicely explicates in Self and Society, is much more compatible with these thinkers than the Advaita Vedanta he supports.

    In an earlier book Gandhi: Soundings in Political Philosophy Roy correctly describes Gandhi's philosophy as an "organismic vision" that involves "the necessity of harmonizing oneself with an ever-enlarging network of relationships . . . . Thus this extended self becomes the ground for sociality. Society then turns out to be a network of extended selves rather than a mechanical aggregate of enclosed selves or an all-consuming totality of a fictional abstraction."This is an eloquent and precise account of what I mean by the "relational self," and it most closely resembles the Confucian self. Roy and I have much more in common than he thinks.

    Growing numbers of 20th Century Euro-American philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have finally rediscovered what many ancient thinkers (and even common sense) already knew: namely, individual identities are just as much constituted by others as there are by themselves. This means that persons are not social atoms, analogous to the physical atom, moving accidentally through social space. The organic view that Gandhi and the thinkers above propose likens society to a living whole rather than to the simple sum of existing parts. This view is essential for understanding Gandhi's revision of the caste system and also his concept of villages as the real organs of a truly living society. Roy's writings reiterate these same points with a grace and erudition that others would wish to emulate.

II

    Commentators on Indian philosophy are not always clear in distinguishing between the organic holism of the Upanishads and the absolute monism of Shankara. There is a significant contrast between seeing the cosmos as a dream-like appearance (Shankara) and the cosmos as the very body of the Godhead (Ramanuja). Lance Nelson contends that Advaita Vedanta achieves its nonduality "exclusively not inclusively" such that disunity rather than unity with the world is the result. Citing Shankara's writings directly, Nelson shows that the Advaitin imputes no value whatsoever to the natural world and by implication to the social world as well. This is the only logical conclusion of a view that holds that our perception of the rich web of existence is the result of avidya. Organic holism recognizes the reality of individuals and their complex relations while the Advaitin rejects it as at most only derivative.

    Roy's chapter contains a long, technical discussion of Advaita Vedanta, but he fails to connect it in any meaningful way to Gandhi, who rarely if ever employed some these terms. Gandhi used the term advaita very loosely to mean the unity of humanity and reality and used the term dvaita to affirm the real plurality of individuals. It is puzzling that Roy does not respond to those scholars, such as Glyn Richards, who have correctly placed Gandhi among the neo-Vedantists not the Advaitins. Margaret Chatterjee puts Gandhi's differences with Advaita Vedanta in bold relief: "Gandhi had no truck with the maya doctrine. . . we are not called to a higher state of consciousness where the mesh of maya will disappear." The translator of Gandhi's commentary on the Gita, whose strong personal theism has never been conducive to an Advaitin reading, renders maya as divine power not as illusion, and other translators of Hindu scriptures such as R. C. Zaehner also agree that the word illusion is misleading.

    Roy's proposed solution to the fragmentation of modern selfhood is a return to atman as the proper ground for human agency. As our divine center, atman is the principle that enables us to discipline the passions and center our lives on the things that really matter. The fact that Roy does some very instructive comparative analysis with Plato should remind any student of philosophy that there are standard, and many say persuasive, arguments against this concept of self. For instance, if atman is the same in literally every thing, how can it be the basis for individual agency?

    In response Roy claims that universal atman is particularised as individual atmans, just as the neo-Platonic world soul is instantiated as many psyches. How is this possible and how does one make this intelligible? How do these spiritual selves interact with the nonspiritual? How can a pure soul carry karmic debt from one life to another? How, if Shankara is correct, can the world exist for the ignorant ones, but at the very same time not exist for saints who experience the total unity of Atman-Brahman? (According to John White, this violates the law of contradiction and makes Shankara's alleged absolute monism a transcendental dualism roughly equivalent to Christianity.) Following Shankara's logic further, is the liberated one a spiritual Titan, that is, actually greater than Ishvara the Creator? Ishvara is inextricably linked to the phenomenal world as long as ignorance exists, so many saints will be enjoying total bliss long before God himself.

    To my knowledge no one has ever given satisfactory answers to these questions. Saying that there is no world, no karma, no individual agency, etc. does not count, at least for me, as an acceptable answer. Personal agency is, after all, what we are trying to explain. In a very insightful analysis, D. K. Bedekar suggests that Gandhi attempted to escape the "the unbreakable spell" of Vedanta and he points out subtle nuances in the Gujarati text of the Autobiography that show that Gandhi was very much committed to salvaging individual agency, engagement, and uniquely personal truths. He argues that Gandhi deliberately avoids the word atman, and instead uses antaratman for his authoritative inner self. He also claims that Gandhi concluded that Vedantist metaphysics itself could not be the theoretical foundation for his experiments in truth. Later on I will propose that Gandhi's empirical search for truth is very similar to the Buddha's search for Dharma.

    Roy proposes that it is a mistake to conceive of atman as a substance, and that is presumably why he prefers to refer to it as a principle and sometimes as a potential. In both Asian and European philosophy, substances are defined as those things that are self-existent, self-contained, independent, eternal, and immutable. Aristotle's prime matter, Plato's forms, the Christian God, the Jain jiva, Vedanta's Atman-Brahman, Mahayana's Dharmakaya, and Sankhya's purusha and prakriti are all substances according to this standard definition. I believe that Roy is wrong in claiming that atman is simply a principle or only a potential. Aristotle's prime matter is actualized by form, but Atman-Brahman is always complete, actual, and perfect reality. To claim that it is less than that this simply does not do justice to either the Upanishads or general Vedantist tradition.

III

    During his long night of enlightenment Gautama Buddha, using the same yogic techniques that he learned from his Jain and Hindu teachers, discovered something quite remarkable and, at least I think, quite true: there is no evidence for the existence of spiritual substances, whether they be atmans or purusha souls. The Buddha's vision encompassed all six realms of existence and all that he was able to determine was that the law of karma did indeed work and that all things are transitory. There is no unchanging reality behind or below the phenomenal world. The foundations of liberalism's social atomism have been an illusion. One of the most dramatic confirmations of the Buddha's "process" philosophy is found in contemporary physics, including the cosmic interdependence of paired subatomic particles. Many things are unclear in today's physics, but one conclusion is indubitable: the basic units of reality cannot be considered substances in the traditional sense. Organic holism therefore rightfully becomes the unifying theoretical model for physical, personal, and social reality.

    The Buddha concluded that the substance metaphysics common to all Indian philosophical schools constituted the greatest obstacle to the religious life. The problem of selfishness is due to, or at least aggravated by, the false belief that there is a permanent self underlying the phenomenal self. Gautama concluded that the Jain jiva, the Sankhya purusha, and the Upanishadic atman each constitutes a point of attachment that is just as addictive in asceticism as it is in eroticism. In other words, one can become just as attached to the idea of a substantial self (either in meditation or speculative thought) as one can become enslaved by the objects of sense. Ultimately the meaning of Nirvana lies in the freedom from reifying either external objects or internal subjects.

    The Buddha anticipated Hume's view that the self is the ensemble of feelings, perceptions, dispositions, and awareness that is the center for agency and moral responsibility. The Buddha's view, however, is superior to Hume's, primarily because Gautama supported real causal efficacy among internally related phenomena. While Hume deconstructed any theory of causality, the Buddha reconstructed causal relations with his theory of interdependent coorigination. For the Buddha the self is real in the sense that is constituted by relations with its body, its mental life, other selves, and all other entities. This is why the Buddhist self should be viewed in positive relational-process terms rather than the negative implications of the no-self doctrine that have led to unfounded charges of nihilism.

IV

    What Roy finds especially salutary about the Hindu-Platonic-Gandhian view is the idea that the passions have to be controlled by a pure spirit. This is exactly where I find the traditional view both unintelligible and unacceptable. It is unintelligible because of the problems of interaction (how do spiritual substances interact with material substances) described above. Even if this view is accepted on faith, it is unacceptable because it sets up an unnecessary and destructive tension among parts of the soul. This conflict becomes Manichean in some Jain philosophers, and unfortunately it appears too many places in Gandhi's writings. Contemporary Jain philosopher J. L. Jain states: "God versus Satan becomes Pure Soul versus Matter. God is Pure Soul. Satan is Pure Matter, the tempter, seducer, deluder and Jailor of the Soul."

    Unfortunately, the Buddha's disciples made Buddhism much more ascetic than he ever intended. (Emblematic of this point was the Buddha's declaration that he always had a full bowl of food in response to some disciples who decided to take only a half bowl.) The result was that the human body and nature took on negative value. These Buddhists neglected one of the key truths of the skandha doctrine: the self is holistically constituted by both physical and mental elements. (In contrast Vedantists, Jains, and the Cartesians hold that the body has nothing to do with personal identity.) The great achievement of Zen Buddhism was to reaffirm the value of the passions, the body, and nature. The Buddha joins most the 20^th Century thinkers mentioned above in a "somatic" view of the self, in which, as Marcel phrases it, we are our bodies rather than the view that we own and control our bodies. Merleau-Ponty is the philosopher who knows the scientific literature well enough to demonstrate the truth of the coextension of personal and bodily identity.

V

    Roy's discussion of Buddhism is disappointing, primarily because he relies on two secondary sources and does not cite any of the Buddhist texts. (Actually this is his approach to Vedanta and Jainism as well.) Unfortunately, Roy sides with D. T. Suzuki when he should have trusted his own compatriot T. R. V. Murti. In the Pali scriptures the Buddha uses jiva (not atman) to refer to the self of the five skandhas. The Buddha is always consistent in holding that the self he is rejecting is the noumenal atman not the phenomenal jiva. Therefore, Roy has been misled by Suzuki in thinking that the Buddha rejected only the egoistic self and not the substantial self. It is significant that the Pali scripture does not mention either the Dharmakaya or the doctrine of Suchness that Suzuki discusses. These would have been strange ideas to Gautama Buddha.

    Sadly, many Mahayana philosophers, from Ashvaghosa to Suzuki, have succumbed to the temptation of self-existence and its false security. Tibetan Buddhists could not believe that Nagarjuna, following the Buddha faithfully, actually meant that literally all things were empty (shunya) of substance. The following quatrain sums up their puzzlement:

If emptiness were the method,
then Buddhahood could not be. Since other
Than this cause there would be no other fruit,
The method is not emptiness.

Suzuki joins the Tibetans in exempting the Dharmakaya, the deified cosmic body of the Buddha, from the shunyata doctrine. (The Buddha would have been scandalized by the thought of his body being exaggerated in this way!) As a result they turned the Buddha's process philosophy back into a metaphysics of substance, completely undermining the Buddha's brilliant philosophical revolution.

    I am afraid that Roy is also wrong when he claims that the virtue of karuna is not based on the interrelatedness of all life and all things. This was the fundamental moral discovery of the Buddha's Enlightenment. One of the basic problems with substance metaphysics is that substances are completely independent from one another. Substances exist in themselves; they do not existence for and because of others. To use the technical terms that Roy misunderstood in my article, substances are externally related to one another while the world that the Buddha experienced was based primarily on internal relations. (A is externally related to B if both terms can stand on their own, independent from one another. A and B are internally related with each if they are dependent each other.) Compassion and sympathy can have no meaning if Sankhya purusha, Jain jiva, or Vedantist atman are, as these schools hold, independent substances.

    Instead of responding specifically to my discussion of Jainism, Roy briefly cites a secondary source about the Jain's organic holism. In my own work on Jainism I have praised the Jains for this view and I also commend them for their steadfast theoretical and practical commitment to ahimsa. At the same time intellectually integrity compels on me to assess all aspects of the Jain worldview. The world-denying goals of the Jain saint unfortunately undermine most of the positive aspects of the philosophy. The Tirthankaras are totally independent from the world and the epistemology of many-sidedness (anekantavada), which had a profound effect on Gandhi and which we should all embrace, ironically does not apply to the liberated ones. The Jains gave us the famous story of the five blind men knowing only parts of the elephant, but the Jain saint is fully sighted and omniscient. The liberated one is a Gnostic Titan, claiming an absolute knowledge of all things and all possible modes of their existence.

    N. D. Bhargava, a contemporary Jain philosopher, reaffirms the theory of absolute independence and its relation to ahimsa. In their practice of ahimsa Jain saints cannot depend upon the existence of others or the action of others, because nonviolent action is "independent of society." Bhargava states that "the world of relationship is a world of attachment and aversion. But nonviolence is possible and possible only without interrelationship, because interrelationship is dependent on others and cannot be natural." The ultimate implication of Bhargava's position is a reductio ad absurdum: liberated Jaina saints are the only ones who can practice nonviolence, but their isolated lokas are the only places in the universe where such practice is not necessary--indeed, it has no meaning at all there. I trust that many will agree with me that Gandhi would have sided with the Buddha on these basic ontological and moral issues. Remember it is Roy himself who said that Gandhi's "organismic vision" involves "the necessity of harmonizing oneself with an ever-enlarging network of relationships . . . ."

VI

    Not only do I wish to give a Buddhist interpretation to Gandhi's ethics of nonviolence, I also propose that it is best formulated in terms of virtue ethics. In order to safeguard the freedom of the will it is necessary to reject the Jain and Vedantist view that pure souls are nonviolent by nature. Although Gandhi sometimes writes in these terms ("ahimsa is the very nature of the atman"), he also says that ahimsa is a virtue that must be attained, and he claims that it is a means to a higher end, alternatively truth, love, compassion, or God.

    As I have argued in another article, ahimsa should be seen as an "enabling" (not "exacting" as Roy misquotes) virtue for the "substantive" virtues of love and compassion. The enabling virtues include optimism, rationality, self-control, patience, sympathy, foresight, resoluteness, endurance, fortitude, and industry. The substantive virtues are wisdom, courage, justice, truthfulness, temperance, benevolence, and compassion. The substantive virtues have moral content (hence substantive), i.e., the right desire to tell the truth or help the needy, whereas the enabling virtues simply require an effort to resist one temptation or another. The substantive virtues require proper motivation toward the good, while the enabling virtues require sufficient will power to counter vice. (Incidentally, I do not ever claim, as Roy states, that Gandhi's nonviolence is either a "logical category" or that it is "world-denying.") The virtue of nonviolence is learned disposition, aided by the enabling virtues of self-control and patience, not to injure in word, deed, or thought.

    In Self and Society Roy uses the tiger cub story from the Panchatantra to demonstrate the process of discovering our spiritual natures. In my article I suggest that the tiger cub's immutable nature as a predator has unfortunate implications for an ethics of nonviolence. Furthermore, the tiger cub cannot change his violent nature, but Gandhi believes that in the course of human evolution human beings developed a spiritual capacity to transform their original animal natures. In my article I pointed how incongruous it was for Roy to use the tiger story to support the idea of immutable natures and then immediately cite Gandhi on our ability to change our natures and choose nonviolence. In respoinse Roy chides me for being unable to distinguish between analogy and metaphor. The relation of the cub's unchanging nature to his violent actions is obviously not analogous to our changing nature's capacity to turn away from violence. If the story is a metaphor for realizing our own unchanging natures, then it fails to convey the Gandhi's point about our ability to change. If the story is simply a metaphor for self-realization, then the point is very weak indeed.

    In other work I have suggested that virtue ethics is best formulated in terms of process philosophy. In yet another rejection of the Roy's tiger cub argument, Gandhi told a companion that he disagreed with him about the British being unable to change. In this conversation Gandhi explicitly connects "the capacity of nonviolence" with a rejection of "the theory of the permanent inelasticity of human nature." While this is only one passage, this is still a significant ontological point. This the closest Gandhi ever comes to embracing the Buddha's process view of the self and reality. All Indian philosophies except Buddhism have inelastic views of the self, so it is the process self that must be joined with Gandhi's ethics of nonviolence. Is it too bold to insist that Gandhi must give up the immutable atman of his Hindu tradition? Do we dare break the "spell" that Vedanta had over him? I hope that logic not sentiment prevails in our attempts to formulate a consistent and acceptable Gandhian philosophy of peace.

VII

    Roy does mention process philosophy in his chapter but he misrepresents Henri Bergson's version of it. "Bergson's metaphysical notion of becoming, the continuous process of change, of flux, descends on the social real and keeps it in a perpetual state of agitation." Ever since Aristotle's misreading of Heraclitus, commentators have fallen into the temptation of dismissing process philosophy with apocalyptic warnings such as these. These critics do not seem to realize that Heraclitus' flux has Logos as its ordering agent; Whitehead's becoming has the primordial nature of God; and the Buddhists have the Dharma. (Incidentally, Roy's view of Buddhist dharma as a necessary substance is not the Buddha's view or even most Buddhist schools.) Just as subatomic processes have their laws so, the Buddha claims, do human lives also. Basic logical and metaphysical principles still underlie and guide the transitory events of history and nature.

    Roy objects to my calling Gandhi a pantheist, although it is quite standard in the literature to do so. Roy's objection, however, does have some merit and that is one reason I am experimenting with the term organic holism in this essay. Roy argues that Gandhi is not a pantheist "because while he sees everything in this world pervaded by the Absolute, the significance of the Absolute is not thereby exhausted." Roy believes that Gandhi is correct to assume that God is transcendent as well as immanent. Roy does not give an extended argument for this, and I am not sure whether the textual evidence would consistently support his thesis. In many passages it appears that all the guiding principles are immanent not transcendent. The major exception might be his habit of calling on, ever since the family's maid taught him the practice, the name of Rama in time of need. Even here Gandhi usually explains that he is actually addressing an internal higher Self rather than a transcendent deity.

    The philosophers of the relational self that I mentioned earlier split on this basic issue of transcendent being or principle. Confucius, Marcel, Whitehead, and Buber support the concept, while the Buddha, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Mead, and Merleau-Ponty reject it. Stressing the fully empirical thrust of his experiments with truth, I propose that Gandhi join the latter group. Although Gandhi expressed faith in eternal Truth, he always reminded himself and his followers that finite beings could only know finite truths. Bedekar is the one Gandhi scholar who sees the implications of this most clearly: "He unmistakably refers to the finite truth which can be grasped by a finite mind, and boldly asserts that we, as finite human beings, must chart our voyage with this compass, as our only guide. Here Gandhi appears a humble seeker of human truth, as distinguished from eternal Truth sought by ancient seeks of Moksha, Nirvana or the eternal Bliss of Brahma-jnana." He continues: "It appears to me that Gandhi bypasses metaphysical clarity, and he wants to confront issues directly. He wants to experiment with Truth and Ahimsa; in others words, he has no use for definitions and concepts, but wants to live out, or try out, certain tentatively held beliefs or instinctively felt urges."

    The Buddha's famous statement "a person who sees causation, sees the Dharma"implies that people know how to act, not because of abstract rules or absolutes, but because of their past and circumstances. Those who are mindful of who they are and how they relate to themselves and others will know what to do. The "mirror of Dharma" is not a common one that we all look into together, as some Mahayana schools believe, but it is actually a myriad of mirrors reflecting individual histories. Maintaining the essential link between fact and value, just as Greek virtue ethics did, the Buddha holds that the truth about our causal relations dictates the good that we ought to do. As David J. Kalupahana states: "Thus, for the Buddha, truth values are not distinguishable from moral values or ethical values; both are values that participate in nature." I believe that we can find this same ethical naturalism in Gandhi's experiments in truth, which, because their purpose was always directed to how we should live, were basically empirical experiments in Dharma.

    The Buddha's Middle Way is therefore a distinctively personal mean between extremes, much like Aristotle's mean. Aristotle defined a moral virtue as "a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by [practical reason]. . . ." For example, Aristotle thought it was always wrong to eat too much, but each person will find his/her own relative mean between eating too much and eating too little. A virtue ethics of moderation is still normative, because the principal determinants in finding a workable mean for eating are objective not subjective. If people ignore these objective factors--e.g., body size, metabolism, and other physiological factors--then their bodies, sooner or later, will tell them that they are out of their respective means.

    If this analysis is correct, then the traditional translation of the moral imperatives of the Buddha's eight-fold path may be misleading. Translating the Sanskrit stem samyag- that appears in each of the words as the "right" thing to do makes them sound like eight commands of duty ethics. Instead of eight universal rules for living, they should be seen as virtues, i.e., dispositions to act in certain ways under certain conditions and personal circumstances. (Samyagajiva, right livelihood, is particularly unintelligible by the absolutist reading.) The translation of samyag- more appropriate to Buddhist pragmatism would be "suitable" or "fitting," but "right" could remain as long as we understand it to be "right for you." It is only fitting, for example, that a warrior eat more and more often than a monk, or it is only appropriate that the warrior express courage in a different way than a nonwarrior does. Both are equally virtuous, because they have personally chosen the virtues as means, means relative to them.

    Gandhi's controversial experiments with brahmacharya is an instructive example of how Gandhi put aside traditional rules and found his own way, dictated solely by his own experience, his own dispositions, and his very unique way of purifying himself of sexual desire. He made it perfectly clear to his followers that no one should imitate the quasi-Tantric methods he used. This was his own personal mean between the excess of sexual indulgence and the deficient of complete withdrawal from women. (He thought yogis who did so were cowards.) Sleeping with his grandniece was right for him, and Manu Gandhi claimed that it was as innocent as sleeping with her mother, whom Gandhi had replaced. Gandhi found his own truth in direct experience; there is no evidence that he appealed to any transcendent principle or rule. In fact, he affirmed quite the opposite: "There are some things which are known only to oneself (atman) and one's Maker (atman). These are clearly incommunicable. The experiments I am about to relate are not such." Notice how Gandhi subtly leaves Vedantist metaphysics and turns to the scientific method where the results are there for anyone to verify. Gandhi's sleeping area was open for all, and those who did found Manu and him sleeping peacefully and innocently.

VIII

    Let me sum up my response to Roy by observing that he chooses a premodern interpretation of Gandhi's philosophy while I prefer a constructive postmodern view. In my article "Gandhi: Premodern, Modern, or Postmodern?" I explore this issue in much detail. The postmodern philosophy that most are familiar with is French deconstruction, in which both premodern and modern worldviews are essentially negated. Some commentators have proposed that the Buddha, Nagarjuna, and Shankara each anticipate deconstructive postmodernism. In my own work I have taken issue with these claims. I believe that all Vedantist philosophy is essentially premodern in its outlook, primarily because of its affirmation of a primordial totality, its deemphasis on the individual, and its rejection of history and temporality. With their emphasis on individual autonomy and dualism, Jainism and Sankhya-Yoga contain elements of modernism.

    The Buddha and Confucius, however, both anticipate constructive postmodernism. They join the 20^th Century thinkers mentioned in this essay in a creative attempt to salvage the positive value of both premodernism and modernism. For example, instead of rejecting the concept of the individual self entirely, as both Advaitins and deconstructionists do in their own ways, the concept of the relational self can affirm individual rights but at the same time preserve the values of community. Instead of the monism of premodernism or the fragmented pluralism of deconstruction, the constructive postmodernist embraces the organic holism that both Roy and I wish to attribute to Gandhi. Finally, I propose that the ethics most compatible with constructive postmodernism is virtue ethics and Gandhi's virtue of nonviolence should be an integral part an ethics for the 21^st Century.

1. Ramashray Roy, Understanding Gandhi (New Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1996).

2. Nicholas F. Gier, "Gandhi, Ahimsa, and the Self," Gandhi Marg 15:1 (April-June, 1993), pp. 24-38.

3. Roy, Gandhi: Soundings in Political Philosophy (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1984), p. 14.

4. Gandhi, The Hindu (September 12, 1927) in Collected Works (New Delhi: Government of India Publications, 1959), vol. 34, p. 505. The preceding sentence "there is no distinction whatever between individual growth and corporate growth" might imply absolute monism, but the sentence cited makes it clear what Gandhi's meaning is.

5. Roy, Understanding Gandhi, p. 89.

6. See N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).

7. "[Maritain] considers freedom as self-activity, autonomy and transcendence of objective determination in which the conception of community happens to be an integral part of the human psyche and therefore individuality and sociality become mutually supportive" (Ramashray Roy, Self and Society: A Study in Gandhian Thought [New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1985], p. 95).

8. Ibid. Repeated on p. 43.

9. Lance E. Nelson, "Reverence for Nature or the Irrelevance of Nature? Advaita Vedanta and Ecological Concern," Journal of Dharma 16:3 (July-Sept., 1991), p. 299.

10. Glyn Richard's "Gandhi's Concept of Truth and the Advaita Tradition," Religious Studies22:1 (March, 19860, pp. 1-14

11. Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi's Religious Thought (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), pp. 134, 104.

12. Discourses on the Gita, trans. V. G. Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1960), pp. 22, 34. See R. C. Zaehner's Hindu Scriptures (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1956).

13. See John D. White, "God and the World from the Viewpoint of Advaita Vedanta: A Critical Assessment," International Philosophical Quarterly 30:2(June, 1981), pp. 185-193.

14. See Lance E. Nelson, "Living Liberation in Shankara and Advaita Vedanta" in Living Liberation in Hindu Thought, pp. 17-62.

15. D. K. Bedekar, Towards Understanding Gandhi, ed. R. Gawande (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1975), p. 115.

16. J. L. Jaini, Commentary on Kundakundacharya's Samayasara in The Sacred Books of the Jainas, ed. J. L. Jaini (New York, NY: AMS Press, 1974), vol. 8, p. 43.

17. The Majjhima-Nikaya II, 6; The Middle Length Sayings, vol. 2, p. 207.

18. Cited in Tsong-Karpa, Tantra in Tibet (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), p. 117.

19. See N. F. Gier, "Jaina Superhumanism and Gnostic Titanism," Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 17:2 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 139-158.

20. N. D. Bhargava, "Some Chief Characteristics of the Jain Concept of Nonviolence" in The Contribution of Jainism to Indian Culture, p. 124.

21. Gandhi, letter to Bhai Prithvi Singh, October 2, 1941 in Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 3 vols., 1986), vol. 2, p. 251.

22. "Nevertheless, Ahimsa is the means, Truth is the end" (From Yeravda Mandir, trans. V. G. Desai [Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1945], p. 8). In his autobiography, Gandhi says that the "only means for the realization of Truth is Ahimsa. . . ." (The Story of My Experiments with Truth [Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 2nd ed., 1959], p. 370. For ahimsa as a virtue see Harijan 6 (October 8, 1939), p. 282.

23. N. F. Gier, "The Virtue of Non-Violence: A Buddhist Perspective," Seikyo Times (February, 1994), pp. 28-36.

24. Roy, Understanding Gandhi, p. 102.

25. Roy, Self and Society, p. 66-67.

26. Roy, Understanding Gandhi, p. 106, note 67.

27. Harijan 9 (June 7, 1942), p. 177.

28. Roy, Understanding Gandhi, p. 90.

29. Ibid., p. 108, note 87.

30. Ibid., p. 97.

31. See Gandhi, Harijan 7 (August 19, 1939), p. 237; excerpted in Truth is God, p. 43. I have supplied a capital "S" on each of the original "selves."

32. Bedekar, op. cit., pp. 117, 119.

33. Majjhima-nikaya I.190-1, quoted in David J. Kalupahana, Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis, p. 64.

34. Kalupahana, Buddhist Philosophy . . . , p. 63.

35. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1106b36 (W. D. Ross, trans.).

36. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, p. xiv. "My brahmacharya was not derived from books. I evolved my own rules for my

37. N. F. Gier, "Gandhi: Premodern, Modern, or Postmodern?" Gandhi Marg 17:3 (Oct.-Dec., 1996), pp. 261-281. See also chapter two of Spiritual Titanism, which is published in the SUNY Series on Constructive Postmodern Thought. See titles in the rest of this series for more information about this philosophical perspective.

38. See N. F. Gier, "Ahimsa, the Self, and Postmodernism," International Philosophical Quarterly35:1 (March, 1995), pp. 71-86.