PAYING homage to the Gautam Buddha for his renunciation of worldly attachments, Mahatma Gandhi wrote in the Indian Opinion on July 7, 1907, how in the sixth century B.C., Lord Buddha, after “suffering many privations, attained self-realization... and spread ideas of spiritual welfare among the people.”
In letters, he praised how the Buddha had left his wife and parents and brought deliverance to them as well; and how they were admired by the world for this act of sacrifice and also how his own freedom from attachment with Kasturba (his wife) permitted him to serve her better. He praised his own state of voluntary poverty, as this was the state of the Buddha and the way to self-realization.
After returning to India in 1915, until his imprisonment in 1922, Mahatma Gandhi had led local satyagrahi in Champaran, Ahmedabad, and Kaira, an all-India movement against the Rowlatt Bills, and the noncooperation movement.
During this period, his first public reference to the Buddha’s teachings was made in his speech at the Missionary Conference in Madras, given on February 14, 1916. He said that Hinduism was a mighty force because of its underlying swadeshi spirit and that it was erroneous to think that it had driven out Buddhism; it had in fact absorbed it. He repeated in a speech given on October 21, 1917 that Buddhism cherished the same ideals as Hinduism.
Writes Gandhiji, “I thought of the story of Buddha but I also saw that the task was beyond my capacity.”
In a speech he gave on July 27, 1916, he said that had the Buddha and Christ not spent years in the wilderness preparing themselves for their mission, they would not be “what they are.”
Again in his famous speech given at the Muir College Economic Society in Allahabad on December 22, 1916, he said that “the Buddha, Jesus, and other great religious leaders... had deliberately embraced poverty,” and we would only go downhill if we make “materialistic craze as our goal.”