We walked from Delhi, from the grave of Mahatma Gandhi, and took about a month to walk from Delhi to the border of Pakistan.
Satish Kumar
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Five minutes ago, our friends were saying, "You will go hungry and starve because you are going without money," and my friend was in tears because I would not accept the parcels of food, and five minutes later I am in tears to see this example of welcome.
I and a friend of mine called Mannon talked together, and we both decided to walk this journey.
I came through the passport control, through the customs control, came out into Pakistan, and to my total amazement and surprise and disbelief, there was a young man standing with two garlands of marigold flowers waiting.
I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother.
I have put my body where my mouth is and expressed my protest by walking. So, that was my idea that I would walk.
I was a restless child. I did not go to school. My mother used to go to the monks of the Jain religion, and I would go with her.
I was born in a very small village in Rajastan, which is in the northwestern part of India, on the border with Pakistan.
I was pursuing the inner path at the expense of the rest of my being and the rest of the world.
If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.
If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.
It became extremely important that we go and see the four heads of the governments, and the message was delivered, with the tea packets, to all these heads.
Kennedy had been assassinated a month or so before. So we walked to the grave of John Kennedy and ended our walking symbolically at the Arlington National Cemetery.
Monks will have three begging bowls for their food: one for water, one for liquid food, one for dry food.
My mother, for example, made a list of 50 items which she could eat in her life, and she would not eat anything outside that list.
One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings.
So, at the age of nine, I became a monk, and from then on I was there practicing that kind of nonviolence.
That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.
That was my real education in the world - I learned politics, the social and cultural life of India, Hindu tradition and religion, and Buddhism.
The Jains are particularly keen on nonviolence at all levels, nonviolence meaning not only not to harm any other individual person or society, which is of course included, but not to harm any animal, even a fly or an ant, not to harm any plants or trees or water.
They have only handwritten manuscripts, because you can write very small and then you can carry the most basic manuscripts with you.
This gives us more time to attend the inner need.
We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.
We walked from Delhi, from the grave of Mahatma Gandhi, and took about a month to walk from Delhi to the border of Pakistan.
While I was walking with Vinoba, I had an inspiration to walk for peace outside of India, because at that time - '61, '62 - there were a lot of campaigns in England, the U.S. and Europe against nuclear weapons.
With slight risk of exaggeration you could say that he walked almost every mile of the Indian land.
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