Mahatma Gandhi and Buddha's Path to Enlightenment by Raghavan Iyer just published by TT.ORG
By Editor on Tuesday, December 23Mahatma Gandhi and Buddha's Path to Enlightenment by Raghavan Iyer has just been published by TT.ORG in book and Kindle formats (available from Amazon.com) and in other eBook formats on this site (see Theosophy Trust Books page).
This volume brings together the HERMES articles on Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy with Prof. Iyer's articles on Buddha's Path to Enlightenment by showing the connection through the First Noble Truth, that all embodied life is suffused with suffering.
Gandhi, like Gautama, did not try to escape the evident truth of human suffering through seeking mindless oblivion or neurotic distractions, nor did he choose to come to terms with it through compensatory spiritual ambition or conventional religious piety. Rejecting the route of cloistered monasticism, he pondered deeply and agonizingly upon the human condition, and sought to find the redemptive function and therapeutic meaning of human misery. Translating his painful insights into daily acts of tapas - “self-chosen spiritual exercises and the repeated re-enactments of lifelong meditation in the midst of fervent social activity“ - he came to see the need for a continual rediscovery of the purpose of living by all those who reject the hypnosis of bourgeois society, with its sanctimonious hypocrisy and notorious 'double standards' for individual and public life.