Mahatma Gandhi said at a certain stage of his life: “Those who think me to be a politician and those who think that my business is politics have really not understood me at all. They have totally missed the real being in me. I am a seeker or nothing at all. The truth about my life is my seeking, my quest for God. Politics is only an incidental part of my life”.

Gandhi was ever seeking after the great Reality and this seeking started right in his little boyhood. He was a deeply devoted son of very religious and pious parents and he got the habit of repeating Ram Nam even when he was a little boy going to secondary school, and his seeking developed and took the form of service of the living God in the poor millions of India and, as India was at that time going through a political phase, his service took the form of political agitation for the welfare of his people. To Mahatma Gandhi it was all a part and parcel of his worship of God in and through man, in and through the suffering people of India, in and through his poor brethren, and thus it was a Sadhana to him.

Gandhi’s life was based absolutely upon the ideal of truth, purity and compassion and his was the path of service. In his life we see the ideals of self-discipline, of ceaseless inward striving, of moderation, and a sublime simplicity, the parallel of which the world has seldom seen except perhaps in the life of Christ. Many have called him the modern Christ. Many have called him the modern St. Francis, the modern Buddha. He has been a source of great inspiration to the whole of the modern world and the world will hear much more about him in the decades to come in this century.

The source of Mahatma Gandhi’s great spiritual force was not the great following he had, for he lived a life dedicated to poverty and he had nothing which he called his own. The source of his spiritual force was his constant unbroken contact with God. How did he maintain such contact? Through daily prayer and the Divine Name. Not a single day passed without his setting aside all activity, without his turning away from all secular activity at the hour of twilight. When the sun had set, Gandhi was found always in the middle of his little prayer group, perhaps under a spreading Banyan tree, in some peaceful spot, in the corner of some compound or on a little wooden platform or stage, totally oblivious of the rest of the world and totally merged in a wonderful peace and sweetness of inward communion with God.

His prayer meetings were extraordinary. The vision of universalism in his approach to God was something of an object lesson to every one. His prayer contained portions of the Koran recited in Arabic, portions of the Zendavesta of the Parsis recited in their own Persian tongue, portions of Japanese prayer recited in the Japanese language, the Sanskrit hymns of the Vedas, portions from the Testament and the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, practically every religion came to be represented in Mahatma Gandhi’s daily evening prayer.

There was a period of silence and all sank into meditation. There was a group chant of the Divine Name, and then, coming out of his silence, meditation and communion, Mahatma Gandhi gave a short message of five or ten minutes to the people, and always it was filled with spirituality, vibrant with a living quality which came out of this ever-fresh contact that he maintained with the Supreme Being through such daily prayer.

Gandhi was essentially a man of prayer. He had his roots in faith and in daily prayer. He said, “Prayer is the real bread of my life. But for prayer, I would not find it possible even to live”. The secret of all his great achievements, of the strenuous life which he led, was the Divine Name. The Divine Name was Gandhi’s constant strength and support. He never parted from the Divine Name—the Name of Ram. To him, born as a Hindu, it was Ram, but essentially it was the Divine Name which was always on his lips and which was ever an under-current of his life, which few suspected and fewer knew; and only a few among those who knew understood its true significance.

All the activity of Mahatma Gandhi was activity centred in God by absolute detachment to the world and deep inward attachment to the Lord through love, worshipfulness, prayer and the spiritual link—the constantly repeated Divine Name. God was the ultimate value for Mahatma Gandhi in all his life. Not even political attainment, but God and God alone was the ultimate value in his life. He was the centre, He was the goal, He was the object of his quest, He was the object of all his life thus nobly lived. All this divine life of Mahatma Gandhi’s was but a constant seeking, through activity, through service of his people, through service of the Divine Spirit that he knew and felt to indwell all people.