Gandhi, like the Buddha, found that concern for the well-being of all was an antidote to fear | The Indian Express

Gandhi, like the Buddha, found that concern for the well-being of all was an antidote to fear | The Indian Express

Written by K.P. Shankaran |Updated: December 2, 2019 10:08:48 am

The writer taught philosophy at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.

Gandhi, like the Buddha, found that concern for the well-being of all was an antidote to fear

Our fascination for men like Gandhi, the Buddha or Socrates “rests on the need of all men to find the few who plausibly take it upon themselves to reveal — and give meaning to — what others must deny at all times but cannot really forget for a moment”— death/nothingness.

In the rest of this article, I make an attempt to bring out the significance of Gandhi’s desire to reduce himself to “zero” by using some subcontinental philosophical concepts.

While recently rereading Erik Erikson’s 1969 psychoanalytical political biography of Gandhi, Gandhi’s Truth, I was particularly struck by the following statement: “Freud, in one of his ‘economic’ moods might well have said that, psychologically speaking, such men (people like Gandhi) save others not so much from their sin but from the fantastic effort not to see the most obvious of all facts: That life is bounded by not-life.” Gandhi, according to Erikson, allows us to face the fact that we are “bounded by not-life” and tempts us to draw power from such efforts as exemplified in Gandhi’s life struggle.