Shrimad Rajchandra.
A Bombay jeweller with a prodigious memory who was also a mystic and who died at thirty-three. Gandhi met him in 1891, wrote to him from South Africa with a list of questions about religion, and named him alongside Tolstoy and Ruskin as the three moderns who shaped him — which is the route by which Jain ahimsa reached the independence movement and, later, the American South.
Shrimad Rajchandra was a diamond and pearl merchant in Bombay with a documented feat of memory — the shatavadhana, attending to a hundred things simultaneously — who abandoned the exhibition circuit as a distraction, and who died in 1901 at thirty-three. His significance outside Jainism is Gandhi. They met in Bombay in 1891 when Gandhi was twenty-two and newly returned from London; Gandhi, in South Africa and under real pressure from Christian and Muslim friends to convert, wrote to him with twenty-seven questions about the soul, God, moksha, the Gita and the Bible. Rajchandra's answers steadied him in Hinduism and pressed on him ahimsa and anekantavada. Gandhi later named Rajchandra, with Tolstoy and Ruskin, as the three moderns who most influenced him, and wrote that Rajchandra was the one who had the deepest hold. The line of transmission from Jain ahimsa through Gandhi to the American civil rights movement runs through this jeweller, and it is rarely traced in accounts of either end of it.
Three moderns have left a deep impress on my life and captivated me: Raychandbhai by his living contact, Tolstoy by his book The Kingdom of God is Within You, and Ruskin by his Unto This Last.
M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, part IIThe route by which Jain non-violence entered the Indian independence movement.
The same ground, other faiths
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