Mahatma Gandhi once told Vinoba Bhave, "I am not fit to measure your worth." Dedicated to Saryodaya, or "welfare for all," Vinoba furthered Gandhi's vision by seeking contributions of land for the poor, in a program that depended on people's generosity of heart. At his work's peak, donations of 2.5 million acres far exceeded government land reforms in scope. Yet our gratitude rests not on the results of his lifelong service - which were, in the end, fraught with problems - but rather on his trust in an underlying spiritual revolution capable of establishing a "Kingdom of Kindness." — Patricia Carlson

Vinoba Bhave was widely regarded as the spiritual heir of Mahatma Gandhi in India. He was born on September 11, 1895, to a devout Brahmin family near Bombay. As a youth he felt torn between the desire to spend his life as a spiritual seeker in the Himalayas or to join in a violent revolution against the oppressive British colonial rule of his country. The dilemma was resolved in 1916 when Vinoba first encountered Gandhi. He realized that in this poor, half-naked prophet, armed only with the power of truth and a simple spinning wheel, he had found a model of holiness in the pursuit of social transformation.

Among Gandhi's disciples, it was Vinoba who best appreciated the spiritual dimension of Gandhi's vision. He understood that Gandhi aimed at something greater than independence from Britain - nothing less than the kingdom of God. While resistance had its place in the struggle, Gandhi believed that colonialism must also be uprooted from within. It was necessary to overcome the cultural and spiritual habits of dependence, fear, and division that were the footholds of foreign oppression. That was the logic behind the spinning wheel. Not only did the production of homespun cloth withdraw the market for imported British fabric, but it affirmed social equality, simplicity, native culture, and the dignity of common labor.

In 1940 it was Vinoba whom Gandhi selected to initiate a great campaign of civil disobedience in his struggle against the British. Vinoba was arrested and spent five years in prison. Soon after the war came independence, followed shortly by Gandhi's assassination. Though grief-stricken, many of Gandhi's comrades felt by this point that the victory of independence had been achieved. But Vinoba vowed to carry on the struggle for Gandhi's wider goal - Sarvodaya - a nonviolent society dedicated to "the welfare of all." As he traveled the country Vinoba perceived that for the majority of India's poor the achievement of formal independence had not altered their oppression. This was especially so for the vast number of the rural poor who had no access to land. In 1951 while visiting a village in Telegana, Vinoba was presented with an appeal for help by a group of landless peasants. Vinoba was suddenly inspired to address the village and ask whether there was not someone present who could help. At once a prosperous farmer stepped forward and offered to donate a hundred acres of his own land.

In this gesture of individual generosity, Vinoba conceived of what became known as the Bhoodan (land-gift) movement. Vinoba went on to travel by foot from village to village asking for contributions of land for the poor. His efforts met with extraordinary success. Within seven weeks he had collected over twelve hundred acres. Co-workers, extending his travels, collected another hundred thousand acres. By 1954 the sum had grown to 2.5 million acres, far exceeding any land reform achieved by the government. Vinoba did not believe that the donation of a few acres of land would solve all of India's problems. It was the underlying spiritual revolution, reflected in the gift, that would make all the difference. "We do not aim at doing mere acts of kindness," he wrote, "but at creating a Kingdom of Kindness."

By the time Vinoba had inaugurated a new phase of his movement, the Gramdan (village-gift) movement. Having started by gathering land, he began to seek out whole villages willing to commit themselves to the ideals of Sarvodaya. Gramdan villages took a pledge to hold all land in trust for the benefit of the community. Again, the movement met with astonishing success. By 1970 160,000 villages - almost a third of all the villages in India - had responded to his appeal. It seemed that the Gandhian revolution might actually be achieved.

By the mid-1970s, however, the movement had begun to founder against the limits of its utopian promise. Much of the donated land was unusable. In other cases landowners reneged on their promises. The structures of poverty and oppression were deeper than could be reached entirely through Vinoba's appeal to love for neighbor. But Vinoba resolutely refused to combine his moral appeal with a campaign of active resistance. In this, it was commonly observed, Vinoba differed from the Mahatma.

In later years Vinoba devoted himself more exclusively to prayer, disillusioned by the divisiveness and rancor that had entered into the Gandhian movement itself. He died in 1982 at the age of eighty-seven.

Measured against the goal of ending poverty his movement must ultimately be judged as a heroic but failed experiment. Vinoba, however, was not so much a social activist as a man of prayer and a poet of deeds. Through the power of his personal faith he unlocked the consciences of countless persons, and so provided a glimpse of what it would look like if a society were organized around the systematic appeal to human goodness and solidarity rather than the narrow instincts for self-preservation and greed.