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Gandhi's Teachers : Rajchandra Ravjibhai Mehta
progress did not matter much and what really mattered was how the nations treated people, served them, and whether or not national policies were geared toward their welfare and happiness. Ruskin also mentions that true wealth of a nation were not goods and services, but people. Gandhi learned from the book that welfare of the nations and of the people were conjoined and that the role and function of each person in the society was important and had the same merit. In Gandhi's own words: 1) the good of the individual was contained in the good of all people in the society, 2), a lawyer's work had the same value as the barber's, in as much as all had the same right of earning their livelihood from their work, and 3) a life of labor, i.e. the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, was the life worth living. Gandhi knew the first of these conclusions, the second he had dimly realized, but the third had not occurred to him until he read the book.""
Even though no one could meet Gandhi's expectations of a guru in the religious realm, Rajchandra is the one who came very close to it. Gandhi admired Rajchandra and publicly acknowledged his immense debt to self. In a presidential address celebrating the birth anniversary of Rajchandra in Premabhai Hall in Ahmedabad, India in 1915, Gandhi offered the following remarks about this saint-philosopher from Gujarat:20
"On my life there is such a constant influence of Rajchandra that I can not describe. I have very deep feelings for him. For years, I have been in search of highly religious people. So far, I have not found another person who could equal him. He possessed knowledge, renunciation, and devotion and was free from pretense, factionalism, passion, and jealousy. He had a divine power through which he could make full use of available contexts and opportunities. Compared to the writings of western thinkers, his writings were more penetrating, expressive, and illuminating. Among the thinkers of Europe. I place Leo Tolstoy as number one and John Ruskin as number two. However, the religious experiences of Rajchandra
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