{"id":297482,"date":"2025-06-30T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T11:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=297482"},"modified":"2025-06-26T06:38:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T05:38:42","slug":"gandhis-philosophy-of-nonviolence-essential-selections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/06\/gandhis-philosophy-of-nonviolence-essential-selections\/","title":{"rendered":"Gandhi’s Philosophy of Nonviolence: Essential Selections"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gandhi’s Salt or Dandi March heading to the sea, 1930<\/p><\/div>\n

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A concise open-access teaching resource featuring essential selections from Gandhi on the philosophy of nonviolence. The book includes: a preface, brief explanatory notes, supplementary boxes containing related philosophical material, images and videos, an appendix on post-Gandhian nonviolence, questions for reflection\/discussion, and suggestions for further study.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

2021 – <\/em>Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi <\/span>(1869<\/span>\u2013<\/span>1948)<\/span>\u2014<\/span>often addressed by the respectful <\/span>\u201c<\/span>Gandhiji<\/span>,\u201d the <\/span> reverential <\/span>\u201c<\/span>Mahatma<\/span>\u201d <\/span>(Sanskrit for <\/span>\u201c<\/span>Great Soul<\/span>\u201d), <\/span>or the affectionate <\/span>\u201c<\/span>Bapu<\/span>\u201d (<\/span>Gujarati for <\/span> \u201c<\/span>father<\/span>\u201d<\/span>)<\/span>\u2014<\/span>is widely regarded as the father of nonviolence. <\/span> 1 <\/span> His birthday, October 2, is <\/span> commemorated as the <\/span>International Day of Nonviolence<\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, Gandhi was not the first to advocate <\/span> nonviolence as a form of resistance to injustice. He drew on an expansive range of earlier sources, most <\/span> notably the Jain religion, his own Hinduism, Christianity, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (469\/470<\/span>\u2013 <\/span> 399 BCE), the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, the US transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson <\/span> (1803<\/span>\u2013<\/span>1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817<\/span>\u2013<\/span>1862), the Russian novelist and essayist Leo Tolstoy (1828<\/span>\u2013 <\/span> 1910), and the English writer, philosopher, and art critic John Ruskin (1819<\/span>\u2013<\/span>1900). <\/span><\/p>\n

Gandhi<\/span>\u2019s significance lies in synthesizing and building on these sources, <\/span>developing new methods of <\/span> nonviolent resistance, advocating for and publicizing these ideas and methods in writings and speeches, <\/span> and putting them into practice on a massive, coordinated scale in South Africa and India, thereby providing <\/span> a template on which many future nonviolent activists would model their own campaigns. <\/span><\/p>\n

Most prominent <\/span> among those he influenced was <\/span>Martin Luther King, Jr. <\/span>(1929<\/span>\u2013<\/span>1968), a Baptist minister, activist, and <\/span> spokesperson for the US civil rights movement. King studied philosophy, sociology, and theology as <\/span> an undergraduate and in seminary, which prepared the way for his enthusiastic embrace of Gandhi\u2019s ideas <\/span> upon encountering them during doctoral studies. King then absorbed <\/span>Gandhi\u2019s writings<\/span>, traveled to India to <\/span> pay homage, and imported the Gandhian philosophy into the US context, where he adapted it to his <\/span> Christianity, systematized and refined it, presented it to the public in an eloquent, powerful new voice, and <\/span> wielded it in his fight for justice and against what he termed <\/span>\u201c<\/span>the Triple E<\/span>vils\u201d <\/span>of poverty, racism, and <\/span> militarism. <\/span><\/p>\n

Although Gandhi and King are no longer with us, the Gandhi-King paradigm lives on today in <\/span> nonviolent resistance movements all over the world. <\/span><\/p>\n

Download PDF file:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gandhi’s Philosophy of Nonviolence<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original – academia.edu<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

FEATURED RESEARCH PAPER<\/em> STAYS POSTED FOR 2 WEEKS BEFORE BEING ARCHIVED<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A concise open-access teaching resource featuring essential selections from Gandhi on the philosophy of nonviolence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":99435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[524,444,1243,723],"class_list":["post-297482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paper-of-the-week","tag-gandhi","tag-nonviolence","tag-nonviolent-action","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297482"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297488,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297482\/revisions\/297488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}