Nonviolence Daily
Nonviolence Daily is a thought-for-the-day from Gandhi with a short and inspiring commentary from Professor Michael Nagler from the Metta Center for Nonviolence.
Nonviolence Daily
Day 349
Ahimsa is the highest duty. Even if we cannot practice it in full, we must try to understand its spirit and refrain as far as humanly possible from violence.
-Gandhi, Mahatma, Volume 7
https://www.mettacenter.org/nonviolencedaily
Music by https://skyhidigital.bandcamp.com/album/the-third-harmony
Ahimsa paramo dharma. That was a basic formula in the Sanskrit scriptures, in particular the Mahabharata, that nonviolence is the underlying law of reality.
What that means, and here's where Gandhi becomes very helpful for us ordinary erring mortals – what that means is that the ideal is to be treated as a distant goal toward which we try to proceed as much as possible. But never feel that, “Oh, I didn't make it.”
The point is to make our greatest possible progress, not to achieve a complete ahimsa, which doesn't seem to be quite possible for an embodied being in this world.