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The Practice of Non-violence in Multicultural Perspective
DAVID M. BROOKMAN
Most Americans do not associate the non-violent civil disobedience of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1960s with Mahatma Gandhi. Still less do they know of the linkage between Dr. King and Ahimsa mediated through the Mahatma. Yet the strong Jaina influence which operated in Gandhi's life, especially through his mother, has amply documented. The traditional values of Vaisnavite religion and Jaina culture which surrounded Gandhi included :... "vegetarianism and periodical fasting; cleanliness and purification; the making of confessions and the taking of vows; and above all ahiṁsā, avoiding harm to living beings."' Gandhi apparently recognized ahimsā, the equivalent of the Christian concept of agape or disinterested love. Eventually, King integrated Gandhian satyāgraha into his Christian theology so that it was compatible with agape. His wife, Coretta, noted that her husband practiced Gandhian non-violence for the first time during the Montgomery, Alabamabus campaign. King himself referred of Montgomery as "the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of non-violence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."3
I have mentioned this "Mahatma connection" to illustrate two points. First, it is possible for persons of good will to take up the teachings of another religious tradition and incorporate them into their own spiritual growth process. It must be said that Martin Luther King, Jr. was probably already searching for non-violent methodology when he heard an address by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, who hadvisited Gandhi in India. King's personal quest, in other words, prepared him to integrate in his own person the wisdom of ahiṁsā, mediated through Gandhi, with the wisdom of agape transmitted through the Christian
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