Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King

He became known by the beloved term, "Mahatma," which means "great soul."

Ahimsa, or nonviolence to all living things, is a nonher great principle of Hinduism. Ahimsa means noninjury to everything that lives. A vegetarian, Gandhi would non eat animals or hurt them. He hated violence in all forms, and refused even to kill deathlike animals, such as poisonous snakes.

Gandhi studied many religions in his search for the ultimate meaning of life. The Sermon on the Mount, from the Christian Bible, was especially influential to him in the development of his philosophical frame on nonviolence. A passage that profoundly affected Gandhi was one in which Jesus Christ instructed his followers in a mode of passive resistance, "But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, deliberate to him the some other also" (Matthew 5:39). The teachings of Christianity helped Gandhi understand the target of India's irritation was not the British themselves but their imperialistic policies. As Gandhi oftentimes told his followers, "We need not consider the Englishmen as our enemies . . . I trust to convert them and the only when way is the way of love" (Green 139).

Nonreligious authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy likewise influenced Gandhi's philosophy on nonviolence. Gandhi read Thoreau's Civil Disobedience while in prison. Thoreau himself had been wrapped for refusing to pay a poll tax to a presidential term whose policies he considered unjust. Tolstoy wr

Baldwin, Lewis. There is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther great power, Jr. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991.

angiotensin-converting enzyme of the differences in the philosophy of Gandhi and that of King was Gandhi's insistence on exclusive growth and development. Gandhi believed that nonviolence was only possible if the masses were physically, spiritually, and mentally disciplined to accept it. This involved radical changes in lifestyle: diet, family relations, money management, etc. Gandhi often said that anyone could achieve what he had through effort, hope, and faith. He claimed that success and failure were irrelevant, because the means could not be separated from the ends.

Gandhi's satyagraha lifted people to a high plane of existence. Many who got to know Gandhi were never quite the comparable again: his example moved some to live differently, others go through a change in certain attitudes. One of Gandhi's biographers writes, "I count the days with Gandhi the most fruitful of my life. No other experience was as inspiring and as meaningful and as lasting" (Shirer 244).

King realized, as did Gandhi, that it would be impossible to taunt masses of people based on a philosophy of violence. Violence and terrorism tend to be short-lived. Besides, these avenues would have only led to disaster for the members of the movement. African Americans lacked the financial resources to overthrow their oppressors. And King astutely surmised that if African Americans worked as closely within the system as possible they would succeed in embarrassing Confederate whites, once the spotlight of the worldwide media was activated: "The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are still means to awaken a sense of moral overawe in the opponent" (Washington 8).

King, Jr., Martin Luther. The Trumpet of Conscience. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1967.

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