A Man on Foot

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The Way of Love. Nowadays Vinoba Bhave reads only three books: Euclid's Elements, Aesop's Fables and the Bhagavad Gita. For him, as for Gandhi, the Bhagavad Gita is the supreme book of human guidance. This great Sanskrit poem, imbedded in a larger work called the Mahabharata, is later than the Vedas and the Upanishads, and fills a role in the Hindu holy books something like that of the New Testament in the Bible. During one of his jail terms, Vinoba lectured every Sunday on the Gita. He translated it into Marathi* verse, and this work sold about a quarter of a million copies.

The Gita prescribes three paths for the soul's union with God: karma-yoga, the way of action, Jnana-yoga, the way of knowledge, and bhakti-yoga, the way of love. The poem is set in the frame of bloody battle, a great battle on the plain of Kurukshetra. The hero, Arjuna, is downcast because he must fight against men who, he suspects, are his brothers, even though they are foes, and the god Krishna givers Arjuna advice. Krishna persuades Arjuna that it is permissible to fight, indeed, that he must fight, so long as the struggle serves no selfish ends. Although most Indian scholars believe that the poem refers to a real battle, Gandhi was so deeply committed to nonviolence that he convinced himself that the battle of Kurukshetra was an allegory, that it portrayed the conflict of good & evil in the human heart.

Bhave practices karma-yoga, the way to God through action in the world: "You must perform every action sacramentally, and be free from all attachment to results." It is not to be undertaken with out first mastering the other yogas, learning control of the body, the breathing and the mind; learning concentration through love and devotion by prayer; gaining knowledge by meditation.

Vinoba Bhave has read and admired the scriptures of other religions, and he knows that the way of love was discovered long ago in many places outside the mountain-walled subcontinent of India. Yet in this racked century, the way of love seems, as Bhoomidan-yagna shows, always new.

"My object," says Vinoba Bhave, "is to transform the whole of society. Fire merely burns; it does not worry whether anyone puts a pot on it, fills it with water and puts rice in it to make a meal. Fire burns and does its duty. It is for others to do theirs.

"The people are going to solve their problems, not I. I am simply creating an atmosphere. The beginning is always small, but when the atmosphere spreads, somebody will ask—and somebody will give."