Mahavira and his Teaching

Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti

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DR. HEIMO RAU
excessively enjoyed meal from another who has to hunger then. Gandhi was very surprised that Ruskin praised the manual labour and showed that the life of a worker of the soil or a craftsman was worth living. Thus Gandhi arrived at an appreciation of daily manual labour which he made for himself and his followers a duty.
Let us return to the station at Johannesburg. Gandhi, who had not heard anything of Ruskin before, began to read and read throughout the night and asserted later: The book was a turning point in my life. However, he found fault in the fact that Ruskin was satisfied with “revolutionising his spirit” and that he did not find the power to change his life. Gandhi did not suffer from this fault. In order to bring his life in harmony with the ideals of the book, he went and bought Phoenix Farm, and moved in with his family and colleagues. How can one describe the lightning-like effect of Ruskin's book on Gandhi? It awoke in him slumbering thoughts deeply founded in his mind by education and tradition sharpened them and proved the direct impulse for action. Gandhi mentions the following method of dealing with books: I had the habit of forgetting what displeased me and of putting into action what pleased me.
Thoreau
Gandhi was imprisoned in Volkerust in South Africa for civil disobedience from 10th October to 13th December 1908. Here he had the time and leisure to read and among other books he read the essay “Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau, a fellow-countryman and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The American poet was born in 1817 and died at the age of 45 of tuberculosis. He was opposed to Negro slavery and hated the servile dependence of the individuals on the church, state, property, tradition and customs. With his own hands he built himself a small house on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts, in Walden Pond, did all the work himself and nourished himself from that what nature offered. For two years he felt free in the solitude there. When he returned to Concord,