Satish Kumar's Serene Spirituality

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Some of these same people teach at Schumacher College, which Satish founded in 1991 with the Dartington Trust, an educational foundation. Named after E.F. Schumacher, the visionary economist whose groundbreaking best-seller Small Is Beautiful was based in part on articles first published in Resurgence, the college offers adult students one- to five-week courses on spiritual and ecological subjects. Housed in a 14th-century hall on the Dartington Estate in southwestern England, the academy allows students from around the world to immerse themselves in the process of learning as they discuss new ideas in classes, over dinner, while washing dishes, and out in the orchard by moonlight.

Satish's remarkable success in enlisting people's goodwill and financial help arises from highly developed skills honed throughout a life of intellectual rebellion, spiritual reflection, and political action. At age 9, against his family's wishes, he joined an order of Jain monks (a religion with spiritual tenets akin to Hinduism and Buddhism) and spent years wandering across India, relying on the kindness of villagers for meals and a bed.

At 18, after reading a book by Gandhi (forbidden reading among the monks), he joined a campaign led by Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi's successor as leader of India's village movement. Satish helped organize strikes among farmworkers of the untouchable caste and later served as an editor at a Gandhian movement newspaper until he was sacked for criticizing some prominent Gandhians' plans to build a fancy modern office complex—a stark rejection of Gandhi's own program of simple living.

Later, as he recounts in Path Without Destination, Satish was sitting with a friend at a café, looking over the newspaper, when he noted that British philosopher Bertrand Russell had been jailed at a ban-the-bomb protest in London. It was 1962, and people at breakfast tables around the planet were feeling uneasy as they learned of the latest round of nuclear saber-rattling between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But rather than descend into despair or cynicism, Satish and his friend Prabhakar Menon decided to take action. Inspired by the 90-year-old Russell's deep convictions, the two vowed that morning to take a message of peace to leaders of the world's (then) four nuclear nations. A few months later, with no money in their pockets, they set out on their pilgrimage, walking most of the way from Delhi to Moscow to Paris to London to Washington. Among the many people who befriended them and offered food and shelter along the 8,000-mile journey were Martin Luther King Jr. and the Shah of Iran, as well as hundreds of peasants and factory workers.

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