Welcome back, my friend.
I'm so glad you returned.
We've been spending time together in Chicago lately --- in that remarkable hall in September of 1893, watching something unfold that most of the people inside it didn't fully understand yet. Last time I told you about Swami Vivekananda --- the wandering monk who arrived nearly broke and unknown, stood up in front of thousands, and said four words that brought a room to its feet. He proved that America was ready for something it hadn't known it was hungry for.
Today I want to tell you about someone who almost didn't make it to that hall at all.
Not because he lacked the will. Not because he lacked the preparation --- oh, he was prepared, more prepared than almost anyone who stood at that podium. But because the tradition he carried, one of the oldest and most quietly profound spiritual paths humanity has ever walked, had rules. Ancient rules. And those rules said the ocean could not be crossed.
Someone had to find a way around that.
Someone did.
His name was Virchand Gandhi. He was twenty-nine years old. And what he carried to Chicago --- and what he did with it after --- is a story I have been waiting to tell you.
I want you to imagine a room in Gujarat, India. Early morning, months before the Parliament opens its doors.
The room is simple. The light is just arriving. And a young man is already at work --- not at a desk, not with books spread open around him, though there is plenty of that too. He is working on himself. Discipline of body, discipline of mind, discipline of spirit. The kind of preparation that doesn't announce itself, that leaves no visible mark, that only shows in the quality of stillness a person carries when they finally stand up in front of a crowd.
Virchand Gandhi knew exactly what he was preparing for. The Parliament of World Religions was coming. The invitation had arrived. And the problem was immediate and almost insurmountable --- the monks of his Jain tradition, the teachers and holy men who held the deep wells of this ancient wisdom, could not go. Their vows bound them to Indian soil. The ocean crossing was forbidden.
So the tradition would have no voice in Chicago.
Unless.
I love that word. Unless. I have heard it spoken at the hinge of history more times than I can count. It is the word that lives in the space between what seems impossible and what someone decides to do anyway.
Unless a layman stepped forward. Unless someone who was not a monk --- but who knew the teaching deeply enough, reverently enough, completely enough --- was willing to spend months becoming worthy of carrying it. Unless the monks themselves sanctioned that person to speak on their behalf, to stand in that hall as their voice, their presence, their representative to a world that had never heard of them.
Six months. That is what it took. Six months of preparation that I watched with something close to awe --- and I do not use that word lightly. I have seen a great deal.
He wasn't preparing a speech. He was preparing himself. There is a difference. And on the day he finally boarded that ship, the monks had given their blessing, the tradition had given its trust, and a twenty-nine year old lawyer from Gujarat stepped onto the water carrying twenty-five centuries of wisdom on his shoulders.
I watched him go. I wondered if he knew what was waiting for him.
I don't think any of us fully did.
So who was this young man?
Virchand Raghavji Gandhi was born in 1864 in Mahuva, a small coastal town in Gujarat --- the same soil, as it happens, that would produce Mohandas Gandhi two years later. I notice these things. The land itself sometimes seems to be preparing something.
His family were Vaishnavas by background but deeply embedded in the Jain community --- merchants, as so many Jain families were, which meant they understood both the discipline of careful living and the practical necessity of engaging the wider world. Virchand grew up inside that combination. Principled and practical. Idealistic and precise. It is a particular kind of mind that Jain culture has always had a gift for producing.
He was a remarkable student. English, Sanskrit, Gujarati, French --- languages came to him naturally, which matters more than it might seem. A translator doesn't just move words from one vessel to another. A true translator carries meaning across a distance, intact. Virchand understood this instinctively. By the time he was twenty-two he had been appointed honorary secretary of the Jain Association of India --- a young man trusted with representing an ancient tradition to the outside world, already practicing the role that Chicago would demand of him on a much larger stage.
Jainism itself is worth pausing on for a moment, because most of the people in that Chicago hall had never encountered it and neither, honestly, have most people today. It is one of the oldest living spiritual traditions on earth --- some of its roots reaching back perhaps three thousand years, its classical form established by Mahavira in the sixth century BCE, a contemporary of the Buddha. At its heart is a principle so radical, so uncompromising, so quietly demanding that it has shaped everything the tradition touches.
Ahimsa. Non-violence. Reverence for every living thing.
Not as a guideline. Not as an aspiration. As the organizing principle of an entire way of life --- diet, speech, thought, occupation, movement through the world. Jain monks sweep the ground before them as they walk so as not to harm insects beneath their feet. They strain their drinking water. They do not eat after dark. The commitment to harmlessness runs all the way down, through every layer of daily existence, without exception.
This was what Virchand Gandhi had been shaped by. This was what he carried to Chicago. And this was what the Parliament's organizing committee --- well-meaning, curious, thoroughly unprepared --- had nearly allowed to go unrepresented because they simply didn't know it existed.
When the invitation came and the problem of the ocean crossing became clear, Virchand didn't hesitate for long. He went to the monks. He asked for their blessing and their trust. He submitted himself to six months of preparation --- study, dietary discipline, spiritual refinement --- until they were satisfied that he could speak not just about Jainism but from within it.
He arrived in Chicago in September 1893 having never left India before in his life.
He walked into that hall and he was ready.
I want to tell you what it meant to stand in that hall as Virchand Gandhi stood in it.
Not as Vivekananda had stood --- arriving like a sudden storm, electric and overwhelming, the kind of presence that fills a room before it speaks. Virchand was something different. He was precise. Measured. Calm in the way that deep water is calm --- not because nothing is happening beneath the surface, but because what is happening there is too substantial to be disturbed by wind.
And the audience felt it.
Remember what I told you about that hall. These were educated, curious, largely Christian Americans who had come to the Parliament with an assumption quietly built into their attendance --- that this would be an encounter with the exotic, the foreign, the spiritually underdeveloped reaching toward something their own tradition had already achieved. They were generous people, many of them. But generosity is not the same as genuine openness. They expected to be interested. They did not expect to be instructed.
Virchand instructed them.
Not with arrogance --- never that. But with the complete authority of someone speaking from the inside of a living tradition rather than describing it from the outside. When he spoke about ahimsa he was not presenting a philosophy. He was reporting a reality he had organized his entire life around. And that quality --- that peculiar integrity of a person who actually lives what they are saying --- has a sound to it that audiences recognize even when they cannot name what they are hearing.
He spoke several times over the Parliament's seventeen days. He was precise where others were expansive, quiet where others were dramatic, and somehow that restraint drew people in rather than pushing them away. Newspapers noted his presence. Other delegates sought him out. Swami Vivekananda --- who had no shortage of his own admirers to attend to --- publicly praised him, defended him when critics back in India questioned whether a layman had the right to represent the tradition at all.
That criticism stung, I think. I watched it reach him. There were voices at home who felt he had overstepped, that the ocean crossing itself was a transgression regardless of the blessing he had received, that the ancient rules existed precisely because the world outside India was spiritually dangerous territory. He bore that quietly. He had made his choice and he stood in it.
But here is what moved me most, watching those seventeen days unfold.
It wasn't the applause, though there was applause. It wasn't the newspaper coverage, though that came too. It was something smaller and more enduring. It was the conversations afterward --- in corridors, in drawing rooms, over meals --- where Americans who had never once considered the moral weight of a single meal, a single word spoken carelessly, a single creature dismissed as insignificant, found themselves suddenly unable to stop thinking about it.
Ahimsa had landed. Not as an exotic curiosity. As a question that wouldn't leave.
That is the most powerful thing an idea can do. Not convince. Not overwhelm. Simply --- refuse to leave the room after the speaker has gone.
He didn't go home after the Parliament ended.
Like Vivekananda before him, Virchand Gandhi looked at America and saw something worth staying for. An audience that was genuinely hungry --- not just curious, not just politely interested, but actually leaning forward, actually asking questions that kept him up late into the night composing careful answers. He had come to represent his tradition at a seventeen day gathering. He ended up staying for three years.
Five hundred and thirty-five lectures. America and Britain, city by city, hall by hall. I watched him work and I found myself thinking about what extraordinary stamina it requires --- not physical stamina, though that too, but the particular stamina of someone who is perpetually a long way from home, perpetually explaining something that has no existing framework in his audience's mind, perpetually starting from the beginning because there is no shared vocabulary to build from. Every lecture was an act of translation in the deepest sense. Not just words but an entire way of inhabiting the world, carried carefully across a distance and set down as gently as possible in unfamiliar soil.
And here is where I want you to stay with me for a moment. Because this is the part of the story that reaches forward into your own time in ways that still astonish me.
The soil was being prepared.
Not by one hand. Never by one hand. Vivekananda was working one part of the field, introducing Americans to the vast interior landscape of Vedantic philosophy, proving that Eastern wisdom could fill a lecture hall and send people home changed. Virchand was working another part --- quieter, more precise --- planting the specific seed of ahimsa, of non-violence as the most serious and demanding moral commitment a human being could make.
And across the ocean, in Russia, a great novelist and moral philosopher named Leo Tolstoy was preparing soil of his own. From an entirely different direction, through the Sermon on the Mount and his own anguished moral reckoning, Tolstoy was arriving at strikingly similar ground --- that violence, in all its forms, was the central problem of human civilization, and that only a principled, uncompromising commitment to non-violence could begin to answer it.
None of these men were working together. They may not have been aware of each other at all. But that is precisely the point. That is what it looks like when an idea whose time has come begins pushing up through multiple surfaces simultaneously --- when the ground has been prepared enough, by enough hands, that the seed finds purchase wherever it lands.
A young lawyer in South Africa was reading Tolstoy in those years. Writing to him. Wrestling with questions about justice and resistance and the moral weight of violence that his own situation made impossible to ignore. Mohandas Gandhi --- no direct relation to Virchand, though I have always found the shared name quietly poetic --- was being shaped by everything that had been planted. Tolstoy's moral philosophy. The Jain principle of ahimsa that ran like bedrock beneath his own Gujarati heritage. The proof, demonstrated in those American and British lecture halls, that the Western world was capable of receiving these ideas seriously.
Virchand Gandhi died in 1901. He was thirty-six years old. He did not live to see what grew from what he planted. He did not see the Salt March, did not see the Montgomery Bus Boycott, did not see the long twentieth century discover again and again that the most powerful force available to people without power is the disciplined, costly, unwavering refusal to do harm.
I saw all of it. And I thought of him every time.
He came to Chicago to represent a tradition that almost had no voice there. He stayed to prepare ground he would never see harvested. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, everything.
I want to tell you something I have been thinking about all week.
I have been watching this garden for a very long time. Longer than any of the gardeners knew. I was there when the first seeds went into ground so hard and cold that any reasonable observer would have said nothing could possibly grow here. I watched Virchand Gandhi carry his seed across an ocean on a steamship, not knowing if the soil on the other side would receive it. I watched him plant it anyway, lecture hall by lecture hall, city by city, with the patient precision of someone who understood that his job was not to see the harvest but to make it possible.
And I have lived to see what grew.
Not metaphorically. Actually. In the streets, in the history books, in the moral imagination of an entire civilization that was quietly, irrevocably reshaped by the principle one young man from Gujarat carried into a Chicago hall in 1893.
Mohandas Gandhi --- no direct relation, though I have always smiled at the shared name --- grew up breathing the same Jain influenced air that shaped Virchand. Ahimsa was not a foreign concept to him. It was native soil. But it was in South Africa, reading Tolstoy, wrestling with injustice that had a face and an address, that the principle became a strategy. Became a weapon, if you can call the refusal to do harm a weapon --- and I think you can. I think it may be the most powerful one ever conceived.
He took it home to India. And what happened there I watched with something I can only describe as sacred astonishment. Millions of people, against an empire, armed with nothing but discipline and the willingness to absorb violence without returning it. It shouldn't have worked. Every cynical calculation of power said it couldn't work. And yet I watched it work. I watched an empire blink.
The seed crossed another ocean.
A young minister in Atlanta was paying attention. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to India in 1959 --- a pilgrimage, he called it, and he meant it --- to understand what Gandhi had done and how. He came home carrying the same seed in American soil, and what he planted in Montgomery, in Birmingham, in Washington, in the moral conscience of a nation that had been telling itself comfortable lies for three hundred years --- I watched that too.
I watch everything. And I tell you, there are moments that make even someone as old as I am catch her breath.
This week one of those gardeners left us.
Reverend Jesse Jackson walked beside King. Literally walked beside him, in those streets, in those years when the cost of walking was real and the outcome was not guaranteed. He carried the principle forward through decades that tested it repeatedly --- when the world grew tired, when cynicism became fashionable, when the distance between what we believed and what we practiced seemed impossibly wide. He kept pulling weeds. He kept tending the garden. For a very long time.
I do not think of his passing as the end of an era. I have lived through too many eras to reach for that phrase easily. What I think instead is this --- the garden he tended is still here. Still growing. Still producing fruit that feeds people who will never know his name or Virchand's name or trace the long extraordinary chain of hands that prepared this soil.
That is not loss. That is exactly what success looks like from where I stand.
There are still weeds. I will not pretend otherwise --- I have been watching too long to offer you comfortable illusions. The work of a garden is never finished. Justice is not a destination you arrive at and then rest. It is a living thing that requires tending in every generation, by every pair of hands willing to do the work.
But the soil is rich now. Richer than Virchand Gandhi could have imagined standing on that dock in Gujarat, about to board a ship into the unknown. The principle he carried --- that every living thing deserves reverence, that violence is never the most powerful option available to us, that ahimsa is not weakness but the most demanding form of strength --- is embedded now in the moral bedrock of the world he helped build.
He planted. Others watered. The garden grew.
And here you are, standing in it.
So here is the question I want to leave sitting quietly with you.
Not a demanding question. Not one that requires an answer today. Just something to carry.
You are standing in a garden you did not plant. The ground beneath your feet was prepared by hands you will never shake, by people who boarded ships into the unknown, who stood at podiums before skeptical crowds, who walked streets lined with hostility, who pulled weeds in the dark when nobody was watching and no applause was coming. They did not do it for recognition. They did not do it because the outcome was guaranteed. They did it because the garden mattered more than their comfort.
And it brought you here.
So the question is simply this. What are you tending?
Not what are you planning to tend someday, when conditions improve and the timing feels right and the cost feels manageable. Right now. In the actual soil of your actual life --- your neighborhood, your workplace, your family, the small daily decisions about how you move through a world that still contains plenty of weeds alongside all that growth.
Virchand Gandhi was twenty-nine years old. He had no guarantee that anyone in Chicago would listen. He had no way of knowing that a century later the principle he carried would have reshaped the moral imagination of the entire world. He just prepared himself as completely as he could, accepted the trust that was placed in him, and showed up.
That is available to you too. Not the steamship, not the lecture hall --- but the showing up. The willingness to carry something true into whatever room you happen to be standing in today.
The garden needs tending in every generation. This one is yours.
Next time I want to tell you about a man who built a different kind of bridge.
His name was Jenkin Lloyd Jones. He was a Unitarian minister from Wales who somehow ended up on the American frontier, who fought in the Civil War as a teenager and came home unable to believe that God lived inside any single tradition's walls. He was one of the driving forces behind the Parliament of World Religions --- not the organizer, not the headline speaker, but something quieter and perhaps more important than either. He was the one who genuinely meant it. Who believed, not as a polite aspiration but as a bone-deep conviction, that every tradition gathered in that hall carried a piece of something true.
He spent the rest of his life building spaces where those pieces could be held together.
I watched him work. I found him --- as I so often find the most important people in any story --- not at the center of the stage but just to the side of it, doing the thing that made the stage possible.
I think you will love him.
Until then I want you to carry this image with you. A young man in a simple room in Gujarat, in the early morning light, preparing himself for a journey whose full meaning he could not yet see. Six months of becoming worthy of a moment. The monks watching. The tradition trusting. The ocean waiting.
He crossed it. He planted what he carried. And the world you live in today is quietly, unmistakably different because he did.
That is what one person can do. Just one. With one principle, carried carefully, planted faithfully, in soil prepared by others and preparing soil for those not yet born.
Never underestimate what you are carrying.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.