His weekly paper Young India, 23 September 1926
Mutual Toleration
In September 1926 Mahatma Gandhi was living at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. He had taken a year away from travel, and he spent his days spinning cotton and answering letters. Across India, riots between Hindus and Muslims were breaking out, and people kept pressing him to take a side. A correspondent wrote to him with a plan. The correspondent thought workers of different faiths could never agree, so they should all adopt a single religion of truth. Gandhiji answered the letter in his weekly paper, Young India, on 23 September 1926.
Gandhiji told the writer that making everyone agree on one creed was impossible. The correspondent thought forced harmony would bring peace, but it only creates a new argument. He wrote, "The golden rule of conduct is mutual toleration, seeing that we will never all think alike and we shall see Truth in fragment and from different angles of vision." When two people look at a house from opposite corners, each person sees a different wall. Neither person is lying, and neither person sees every side at once. You do not need to give up your opinion to listen to the person sitting across from you.
Therefore
Expect that other people see a part of the facts that you cannot see from your chair. Listen to their corner before you decide you understand the whole building.
Young India, 23 September 1926
The correspondent had argued that India needed one creed for all its workers. That demand only made people angry, because volunteers felt their faith was under attack. Long before this dispute, Raychandbhai Mehta, a Jain jeweller in Bombay, had taught Gandhiji that any view depends on where a person stands. Gandhiji brought that lesson to his paper, Young India. Instead of forcing everyone into one mold, he told workers of different faiths to join hands on practical chores like weaving and sanitation. That work held them together. The idea underneath it was anekantavada (ah-nay-kahn-tuh-VAH-duh), the Jain doctrine of many-sidedness, which says that each person sees only a piece of truth.
A small reminder, on the desk or the table, that the person across from you sees an angle you cannot see alone.
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