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JAINISM AND WESTERN INFLUENCES ON GANDHIJI
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over a gap of two and a half millenia the tradition which has found the deepest expression in Jainism and proved to be still valid. The experiences of his childhood enabled him to appreciate the revolutionary social ideas in the west. He amalgamated them to his own traditions. And he succeeded to put them into practice because his own people had not forgotten the foundations laid by Lord Mahāvīra and Buddha.
Asia and Europe, East and West are contrasting halves of the world. They are, however, not contrasts which exclude each other. They are rather poles of an entire organism, which supplement each other. Rudyard Kipling's hasty assertion: East is East and West is West and ne'er the twain shall meet, overlooks world events and the needs of the hour. Therefore it would be expedient to take advice from Goethe, who proclaimed: Orient and Occident can no longer be separated. Prophetic words which none can contradict in our ever-contracting world. Both sides of the poles which have long been separated seek a supplement in the other. It is a chance for mankind to awaken to a new childhood through such an encounter. We have to mutually learn from one another without giving up our personal principles, just like Gandhi, who in full possession of his Indian heritage studied the western philosophers and roused his own thoughts through them. From the millenia old Indian tradition of Jainism he created his power of asceticism, non-violence and self-less deeds and connected them with the intelligence of western social crtics. It appears to us as if the Mahatma in his Weltanschauung offered a dialogue between East and West. And thus we may call him who considered himself to be a Karma Yogin, in the western equivalent of the term which he had applied to himself, a practical idealist.
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