Page 60 - Acharya Vinoba Bhave in 21st Century ISBN

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religion. Yet, he made use of every opportunity to understand and appreciate positive elements in
world religions including Christianity. In Moved By Love, he says:

While I was a student in the High School, the NewTestamentof the Bible came
into my hands and I read it through. Later, in connection with the study of

religions, I read all the translations of the New Testament that I could get. In
1955, when I was in tour in West Bengal, some Christian men and women came

to me and gave me a copy of the Bible, and I resumed my study of it that very
day. I kept it up, and later when I reached Kerala, the Bishops of the various

Churches came to visit me. They were pleased to see my Bible, with my markings
and notes in it. They prayed according to their own custom, and blessed the

Bhoodan work, with which they showed much sympathy. … 12

On Religions/Organized Religions
Like Gandhi, Vinoba was a deeply religious person. However, he had a critique his own about

religions when they failed to generate and hold high a spiritual outlook. He was ascetic to the core as
far as his personal life was concerned. From the philosophical point of view, he was influenced by

Advaitavaad, too. However, he did not seem to make the traditional “denial of the ascetic,” i.e., about
the “unreality of the material world,” this world of plurality. Though a spiritually oriented person, yet he

does not negate the matter. He speaks of the complementarity of the two. “It is wrong to separate
spiritual progress and material advance. The two must coalesce. If the two are conceived separately,

both will remain incomplete. It cannot be said, that the materially backward countries are spiritually
advanced, while it is equally fallacious to think that materially developed countries like America are

spiritually poor. … Where the emphasis is one-sidedly on spiritual progress, there too life will be
lopsided. Thus progress can only be all-sided.” 13

Like Vivekananda and Gandhi, he believed that the Universal Religion consisted in every
concretely existing particular religion. So he accepted everything good in them. “The more we concentrate

on the fundamental oneness of humanity, the more do the different religions appear as enriching and
strengthening one another. I regard the different religions as merely different forms of worship. Each

form has its distinctive merit. When the different ways meet together, all these merits gather together
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and make a rich and full pattern.” He accepted all religions as different roads leading to and terminating
in God. He understood that the ethical principles in all the religions are same too. 15
He also critiqued the organized religions as they lead to the destruction of the original vision

and charism of its very foundation. Organized religion, according to him, is contradictory a term in
itself. Organized religions have done enough and more harm to the society. He spoke of the Western

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