Mahatma Tolstoy

Mass peaceful, nonviolent, but resolute resistance (without fear or personal concern) is the successful and righteous means for vanquishing tyranny and oppression. Gandhi succeeded with it, and later Martin Luther King did as well. But both of them adopted the notion from Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy wholeheartedly adopted Shopenhauer’s writings on renunciation of material acquisitiveness and of the egoic sense of self. After a profound spiritual awakening, he embraced the literal words of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. He interpreted Jesus’ exhortation to “…turn the other cheek…” literally as a commandment to face-down evil & conflict with nonresistance & nonviolence; a realization which he outlined in his work “The Kingdom of God is Within You”.

In 1908 Taraknath Das wrote Tolstoy seeking his thoughts on how India might gain independence from colonial rule. Tolstoy responded in a letter overviewing his philosophy on nonviolence which was published in the Free Hindustan newspaper. The letter referred to the teachings of both Jesus and Krishna, as well as the work of Swami Vivekananda. After Gandhi read both the letter and “The Kingdom of God is Within You”, as well as corresponded with Tolstoy, he became convinced that nonviolent resistance was the way out of colonial rule, as he wrote in “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”. Later in his biography, the Mahatma called Tolstoy “the greatest apostle of nonviolence that the present age has produced”. Tolstoy gave up hunting & fishing and adopted vegetarianism to bring his personal lifestyle in-line with his nonviolent beliefs. He generally regarded governments as violent, unstable forces held together for a time by intimidation from state authority, corruption of state officials, and by the indoctrination of people from their early youth.