Gandhi’s Concept of Truth

Abstract

We learn from his Introduction to The Story of My Experiments with Truth that Gandhi’s search for Truth was a search for personal liberation. He had not really intended to write an autobiography, he tells us, only to tell the story of his numerous experiments with Truth, but ‘as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography’.1 That this Truth was and had been his main concern in life he reaffirms later in the Introduction, despite the fact that his account will ‘include experiments with non-violence, celibacy and other principles of conduct believed to be distinct from Truth. But for me, Truth is the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles … I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found him, but I am seeking after him.’2 It is also evident from this that Truth had for him the kind of ultimacy that can only be ascribed to the ultimate reality, what he also describes in the capitalized ‘Absolute Truth’. Yet two paragraphs earlier he had depicted his life’s struggle in a quite different language, with different implications: ‘What I want to achieve — what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years (he was writing in 1925) — is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha.’3 Evidently, his discovery of Truth would involve in some way a liberation from the self, moksha, which was in turn, paradoxically, a realization of the self. On another occasion he put it more succinctly: ‘Truth is the same thine as moksha.’4