'Prepare for war with peace in thy soul. Be in peace in pleasure or pain, in gain and in loss, in victory or in the loss of a battle. In this peace there is no sin.'

If Gandhi's religious beliefs were not founded on the traditional texts, there was one work that profoundly influenced his practice, the 'Bhagvad-Gita'. Here again, however, his interpretation was highly original. The Gita is a central text in the Vedantic culture of modern India. It seems clear that it is a conservative defense of dharma: the warrior, Arjuna, on being confronted by the moral dilemma of whether to fight his relatives seeks the advice of the god Krishna; he is told that his higher loyalty is to his caste dharma or duty as a Kshatriya or warrior and that he must fight. Admittedly he is admonished that he must do so with no pursuit of personal gain, in a spirit of non-attachment. Krishna instructs Arjuna : 'Prepare for war with peace in thy soul. Be in peace in pleasure or pain, in gain and in loss, in victory or in the loss of a battle. In this peace there is no sin'. Possibly such language permitted Gandhi his own idiosyncratic interpretation. Krishna, he believed, was in fact advocating non-violent action.

The poem should be seen, according to Gandhi, as a commentry not on a real battle but on an internal one within the soul. Krishna sees Arjuna as 'merely the means of my work' and this may be the clue to Gandhi's extracting from the text his belief in the dynamics of means shaping ends. If the prevailing orthodoxy in modern Hinduism is Vedantic, based on the Vedas and essentially other worldly in outlook, the thrust of Gandhi's philosophy was quite otherwise. He belonged to a relatively neglected part of the Hindu tradition, to the Karma-Yogi, a tradition of action, of an essentially 'this worldly' approach. Admittedly he drew on a similar tradition of ascetic practices or tapas (tapascharya were the meditations and austerities of the saints); devotion to satya and ahinsa are paramount examples, brahmacharya another. Gandhi had a Hindu view of time, seeing the world as caught up in a vast cyclical process, with the present age, the Black or Kali Yuga age, some five thousand years old. He thus did not share the ninteenth-century Western faith in a linear view of progress. His vision was arcadian, a looking back to an age of truth, to Satya Yuga, when the Kingdom of God, or 'Ram Rajya', had been realized on earth. Yet he shared the views of an earlier utopian socialist, Charles Fourier, that immediate steps could be taken to realize utopia.

Gandhi's was to be a lifetime of testing out means, of experiments. One such experiment had been his Vegetarianism in London, the beginning of a lifelong experiment with diet. The most formative years of Gandhian experimentation in means, or different sorts of action, were to be in South Africa, 'that God-foresaken continent where I found my God'.