ABSTRACT
A leading practitioner of civil disobedience and acclaimed as the father of India as a nation. Gandhi (1869-1948) was born in an upper-caste Hindu family and grew up in the religiously plural environment of western India. At nineteen he went to England to train as a lawyer. There he read two religious texts that had a deep and abiding influence upon him, the great Hindu poem the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible. He also read an account of the life and teachings of the Buddha. The Jain ideas of nonviolence (ahimsa) and nonpossessiveness (aparigraha), the Buddhist ethic of renunciation, the Hindu attitude of detachment (anasakti), and the Christian values of selfless love and passive (nonaggressive) resistance to evil embodied in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount became the moral foundation of Gandhi's life and work.
