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Reaching so ideally high, adhering so adamantly to noble principles and what he called "purity of means," Mahatma Gandhi failed to achieve all he hoped for India. But the passion of his life was the legacy he left to his country and to the world, inspiring millions with the grandeur of his dream and some few disciples with an ardent love of suffering on their own painfully narrow road to martyrdom. In Gandhi's passion lies the key to his inner temple of pain. He suffered joyfully, guarding his dream to someday restore the epic "Golden Age" of goodness and truth to Mother India. And through the multifaceted prism of his passion, Gandhi's tragic weakness is revealed as the other side of his singular strength, helping to account for his final failure to win that for which he worked hardest and suffered most.

"Suffering" and "the suffering of pain" are the primary definitions of passion. The first example of the word passion in the Oxford English Dictionary is "the sufferings of Jesus Christ on the Cross." The story of Mahatma Gandhi's life may be read as a pageant of his conscious courting of suffering. Gandhi's life of passion also ended in martyrdom.

Gandhi's passion has Indian historical roots that predate Jesus by more than two thousand years. Hinduism's Great God Shiva, yogic Lord of Beasts and of the Dance, was first depicted on an Indus Valley seal dating back to the third millennium B.C. Among the skills honed by yogis, including breath and mind control, none is more potent or important than tapas, a Sanskrit word meaning "suffering." When first used in the Rig-Vedata pas meant "heat," the self-incubating creative power that gave birth to ancient India's first monistic neuter god, Tad Ekam ("That One"). In subsequent sacred texts, tapas refers to yogic powers of contemplation and meditation whose laser-like beams were, it appears, hot enough to awaken even a neuter divinity to life.

Soon after launching his monumental Satyagraha ("Hold fast to the Truth") movement in South Africa, Gandhi resolved, as he wrote in 1906, that "sacrifice" was the "law of life." He gave up his pleasures as a British barrister, his Saville Row suits, and sexual relations with his wife, vowing to focus all the heat of his passion toward helping India's emigrée and indentured community, living in Natal and the Transvaal, win freedom from racial prejudice and discrimination. Gandhi's elder brother felt betrayed and abandoned by the young man he had so generously supported for three years while he studied law in London. Gandhi's wife and eldest son found it impossible to understand his courting hatred and violent contempt in his selfless service to the Indian community. They could not fathom his eagerness to give up his fortune and every comfort of home and hearth to break "evil" laws and then warmly welcome long prison terms. Gandhi's passion turned each prison cell he occupied into a self-proclaimed "temple" or "palace," even as he taught his self-sacrificing yogic spirit to relish the "delicious taste" of fasting, taking pleasure in every pain he suffered for the "common good."

Gandhi early won the admiration and active support of the greatest liberal leaders of India's National Congress, a body that also included a radical revolutionary wing whose members were repelled by his scrupulous insistence on nonviolence. Other more conservative Anglophile Indians, of course, found Gandhi's rejection of Western garb and his prison record abhorrent. But after twenty years of successfully leading the Indian struggle in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India during World War I to widespread acclaim for the passionate courage he displayed during a series of Satyagraha campaigns against injustice in Gujarat and Bihar. Soon after the war ended, he was ready to assume supreme command of the Congress, rewriting its constitution and transforming its mostly moderate political reform lobby into a mighty mass movement demanding freedom for India from British imperial exploitation and domination.

But after acquiring more political power than any other Indian of the previous century of British rule had enjoyed, he rejected all the power perquisites coveted by others the world over. He refused to travel any way but by foot or in third-class railway carriages and retreated to the Spartan simplicity of remote village ashrams he founded whenever he was not jailed in a British prison. Gandhi's seemingly eccentric or at any rate curiously contradictory behavior, his rejection of all "normal" pleasures, acquisitive and sensual, and his oft-repeated retreat from the brink of victory can best be understood in light of his passionate resolve to suffer and experience in daily life all the pain and deepest sorrow sustained by India's poorest peasants and outcastes. He shivered naked in winter as they did and bore the scalding heat of central India's summers without complaint. When the Congress offered him complete control over its national machinery and the crown of its presidency, he invariably declined, grooming younger men to wear what he called the "crown of thorns." He abandoned the organization he had revitalized when it became too high and mighty, too rich and greedy, for his passionate nature . . .

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