THE RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF AHIMSA: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY

DISTILLATION

John Howard Yoder, chapter ten in Chapters in the History of Religiously Rooted NonViolence:
A Series of Working Papers of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

I have ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice, the law of suffering. The
Rishis who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence were greater geniuses
than Newton, greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms they
realized their uselessness and taught a weary world that salvation lay not through violence but
through nonviolence... The religion of non-violence is not meant merely for the Rishis and saints.
It is meant for the common people as well. Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is
the law of the brute. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law - to the strength of
the spirit... I want India to practice non-violence being conscious of her strength and power...(1)

What follows is a thinly documented commentary on the above statement by Gandhi, affirming
the rootedness of nonviolence in willing suffering, and the place of suffering in ancient Hindu
religion. The Rishis to whom Gandhi in this passage alluded were the legendary figures behind
the Rig Veda.(2)
At the same time that Gandhi could, with the competence of an insider(3) and the validation of a
wide public echo, affirm that his vision of ahimsa was true to the ancient Asian religious
heritage, what he did with that legacy went beyond what others had seen of its potential. His
achievement thereby become worthy of study not only for the sake of its immediate content but
also as a highly visible test case in how a deep religious resource can at the same time be
retrieved and modernized.(4)

Krishnalal Shridarani in War Without Violence (Harcourt Brace 1939) offered a simple
exposition of what he called the spiritual and cosmological roots of the notion of "the power of
suffering," which in the 1930's was beginning to attract attention in the West, due mostly to the
visibility of Gandhi. The several Western scholars with expert knowledge of the religions of
India whom I have been able to consult(5) have indicated that Shridharani's description, although
simplified and westernized, does no violence to the facts.(6)

The author was at that time under thirty, after having spent a few years in the Gandhian
movement, some time in the "schools" led both by Gandhi and by Tagore, and a few years at

Columbia University. I have not researched what happened to him later.(7)

The picture KS gives is developmental, with each stage of his story clearly building on those
which went before.(8) His schematic outline (167-180) is as follows(9):

I. In the Vedas, ritual sacrifice (Yajna) is "a natural law more powerful than the Gods." KS calls
it "barbaric formalism" and a "crude Indo-Aryan notion," yet in his usage this description is
historical and anthropological, not pejorative or mocking. The act of giving to the gods assures
getting. The shape of the cosmos is such that sacrifice cannot but produce a reward. "...even the
most whimsical of the gods cannot resist the power of suffering."(10)

II. The Upanishads refine sacrifice to make it a disciplining and refining of the self. The ego is
both the subject and the object of sacrifice.

III. Jainism makes ahimsa (non-harming) the core of religion. Shridharani does not make clear
to me how this goes beyond level II, whether in the intensity of its definition, or in the breadth of
its popularisation.(11) He says there are "thousands of legends" in which
Vardhamana/Jeena/Victor conquers "by the sheer force of his non-violence." The western reader
wonders how "sheer force" works in this context. It would seem that a morally right position
exerts some kind of psychic force, because it resonates to the structure of the cosmos (phase I
above) and gives play to the nature of its vital forces.

IV. Buddha goes beyond the above, in giving to ahimsa a "more positive form" by means of a
"housecleaning," providing a path to eliminate the cause of suffering. There are still more
"legends of Buddha's triumph over evil through sheer nonviolence" which "instilled once more in
the Indian mind a fresh conviction in the efficacy of voluntary suffering." Buddha negotiated
between two princes who were ready to go to war over irrigation rights in a time of drought.(12)
In a previous incarnation Buddha had been a king; then he had ruled without punishment,
without weapon, and without force.(13)
V. Asoka, the ruler(14) moved the whole package beyond the realm of saints and seers, and from
being a way to "turn one's eyes toward the heavens." Previously the rewards obtained from
suffering (beginning with stage I above) had been proofs of the reliability of Providence, but they
had not made the course of history important in its own right. With Asoka, ahimsa is "deftly
filtered of its more spiritual qualities" in order to be made "a cultural dynamic which governed
the day-to-day activities of the Indian people." It became "the doctrine of the state" and "even
regulated the political activities of the government." Thereby Asoka "thwacked the breath of life
into the doctrine of ahimsa." After the Kalinga war (ca. 260) Asoka became a Buddhist and
replaced war by diplomacy as a way to expand his empire.(15)

VI. After the collapse of the Indian empire and the Muslim takeover,(16) some elements of the
world view and the spirituality of ahimsa were retrieved in poetry and spirituality, to constitute a
means of spiritual resistance for people without political power. Shridharani names, without any
reference to content which the outsider can understand without more resources:
- the Puranas;
- Narasimi, bhakti,
- Kabir and Nanak in the north;
- Namdev, Tukaram, and Muktabai in the south;
- Jaydev, Chandidas, and Chaitanyafe in Bengal.(17)

Again at this phase KS alludes to "hundreds of legends, along with innumerable mystic songs,"
which "have created in India a general belief in the efficacy of nonviolence."

The way in which each of the above phases subsumes and goes beyond the earlier one, yet
without losing its aboriginal hindu particularity, provides a helpful way first to tell a story, and
then to be able to compare and contrast the heritage which Gandhi called upon with hebraic,
Christian, and later western angles on suffering.

Shridharani was of course not an academic expert in the literature and culture he is describing
here; yet he was its authentic product. He documents well what a bright young man growing up
in India could absorb before he was 22. He had been for a while in Gandhi's "University" at
Ahmedabad, and more briefly in Tagore's school near Calcutta, so that some of the above outline
can very well have been distilled for him by one of his famous teachers.

Obviously in this clear and simple synthesis there are elements of romanticism about the unity of
the story KS tells, and there are elements of adjustment to the western mind he is addressing.
That is what a translator and popularizer is supposed to do. There are elements of hyperbole at
work when he alludes to "thousands of legends" or songs, where a few dozen would suffice to
prove a point, and he retells none of them.(18)
The overview by Thtinen(19) reaches back before the materials in the above standard account to
identify a yet earlier phase, which the historian can distinguish from the later ones on the basis of
ethno-cultural or anthropological and geographical considerations. That oldest level (A) was preAryan and pre-Vedic. Ahimsa on that level was an ascetic vision, carried by "heterodox" schools
and by yogins who did not support sacrificial rituals nor the brahmanic social order(20). Then the
younger level(21) (B; equivalent to Shridharani's (I) above) is what Thtinen describes as
orthodox, Vedic, rejecting killing on moral grounds, including a sacrificial dimension. Buddha as

reformer (Shridharani's level IV above) then can be seen to have reached back behind or before
the Vedic level to retrieve the older vision. This would then give us nine levels instead of
Shridharani's eight, but still within the same basic vision of a succession of strata, each
incorporating [sublating?] the previous ones.

Minimal bibliography

Christopher Key Chapple, Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions State
University of New York Press Alabany 1993; especially strong on the Jain strand of the above
story, and on its vegetarian focus.

Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi's Religious Thought Notre Dame Press 1983

Donald S. Lopez Jr. (ed), Religions of India in Practice. Princeton University Press 1995

John McKenzie, Hindu Ethics Oxford/London 1922, New Delhi Oriental Reprint 1971

Krishnalal Shridharani The Mahatma and the World New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946
__________ My India, My America New York. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941

Unto Thtinen, Ahims; Non-Violence in Indian Tradition London, Rider and Company 1976

Koshelya Walli, The Conception of Ahimsa in Indian Thought (According to Sanskrit Sources)
Varanasi (India), Bharata Manisha press, 1974

1. M. Gandhi, Indian Opinion April 6, 1921, cited in Romain Rolland Mahatma Gandhi, New
York/London Century 1924 p. 68. Also in Young India August 11, 1920, reprinted in Albert
Marrin War and Christian Conscience p. 219.
2. Scholars of Hindu religion whom I have asked are not clear what accounts Gandhi is referring
to. That makes it all the more striking that Gandhi was able to make his argument in such a
taken-for-granted and confident way.

3. Gandhi continued to be utterly at home in his native culture. He wrote in his native Gujarati
and translated Western texts into Gujarati, although it was not the language of the home in which
he grew up.
4. "To see at the heart of the Gita the message of ahimsa startled Gandhi's contemporaries much
in the same sort of way that some people in the west have been startled by talk of 'the myth of the
incarnation.'" Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi's Religious Thought p.40. Chatterjee's point is not at
all to challenge Gandhi's claim that ahimsa was rooted in ancient Indian religious cultures, but
that Gandhi took a further step beyond the tradition when he used it as a tool to "spiritualize" the
message of the epic about royal wars. The topical index to the Lopez anthology (s. bibliography
below) is another testimony that the use of the notion of ahimsa was not very widespread nor its
meaning very profound.
5. They must remain unnamed since I as amateur must take full blame for this kind of
summarization and interpretation.
6. There are (academically) good reasons why any popularly-accessible summary will be
questionable to Western scholars. Many scholars work with ancient documents, not with illiterate
religious cultures. Any Western effort to understand ancient Asian religious cultures must be
reticent to claim adequacy. For that very reason I find it preferable to honor the "translation"
effort of an authentically bicultural immigrant. Shridharani continued to function both as an
interpreter of India in the West (Cf. his The Mahatma and the World (1946) and My India, My
America (1941) and as an author publishing back home. Though living in America he continued
to write and publish poetry, plays and fiction in Gujarati. He was famous before he left India for
a children's story he had written about a banyan tree.
7. Shridharani came to Columbia University in 1934 at the age of 22 with a scholarship from the
government of India. He is briefly referred to in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in
the King Years 1954-63 New York, Simon and Schuster, 1968, p. 171 as having had a role in the
late 1930's or early 1940's, especially in the education of Bayard Rustin, who later became one of
the mentors and aides of Martin Luther King, Jr.
8. Other interpreters of Indian religion for western readers use this same layered pyramidal form
of exposition. It fits with the pluralistic, non-linear, non-historical, or cyclical qualities of the
Asian religious experience which they often contrast with the historical mode they ascribe to the
monotheisms which formed the cultures of the West.
9. Quotations not otherwise identified are all from the cited passage by Shridharani. See below
the one point at which Thtinen expands Shridharani's scheme.
10. Shridharani does not provide any light on the meaning of Gandhi's reference to the Rishis,
with which we began, who are also supposed to have been historically on the level of the Vedas.
11. Prof. Christopher Chapple interprets this background further in his Nonviolence to Animals,
Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions, Albany, SUNY, 1993. As is also indicated in the Lopez
material (note 4 above), Jainism's focus on life's vitalities (from the beehive to the elephant) as

ontological infrastructure, and on vegetarianism as ethic does not point toward Gandhi's political
perspectives.
12. Jtaka V pp 412ff cit. in Thtinen 95.
13. Anguttara-Nikya III p 222 in Thtinen loc cit
14. b. ca.304, ruled ca. 269, d. 232BC
15. Thtinen p. 95.
16. There were repeated waves of Muslim incursion; Arabs came in the eighth century, Turks in
the eleventh, Mongols in the fourteenth.
17. The use of such an accumulation of proper names and technical terms makes the survey
appear impressive but is no help to the inexpert Western leader.
18. Some of the texts to which experts have directed me do not seriously count as "legends."
Many are such brief snippets as "Buddha was sitting under a tree when a man came to him. He
said:'.....'" Clothing a proverb in a narrative setting adds nothing to its meaning. At the other end
of the spectrum there are long complex legends where the western reader is at a loss to know
what they "teach."
19. op. cit. appendix pp 131ff
20. Again here we look in vain for reference to the Rishis with whom we began.
21. "Younger" means no earlier than the tenth century BC.