Indian Spiritual Leader to Expand Movement

Indian spiritual leader Pandurang Shastri Athavale arrived in a wheelchair pushed by his daughter, Jayashree, to accept the world’s largest annual monetary prize.

The 76-year-old Athavale, who has shunned publicity and prizes for sparking a self-help movement among millions of poor villagers, this week became the latest winner of the $1.2-million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. The announcement at a news conference here made him the third Hindu to win the award in its 25 years.

Athavale is renowned throughout much of India but virtually unknown in the West. He is an educated Brahman who teaches that rich and poor alike are endowed with an equal dose of inner divinity that, once recognized, can enable them to overcome self-hatred, prejudice and poverty.

He has mobilized thousands of volunteers to go to the villages around Bombay, living among fishers and farmers as pious teachers accepting nothing, but instilling self-respect and self-help. These villagers have initiated cooperative farms, orchards and fishing boats, with the harvests contributed to the neediest among them.

Athavale’s movement, known as Swadhyaya, or “self-study,” has no paid staff, budget or headquarters, but is said to have reached 20 million people in 100,000 villages. He said he would use the prize money to expand his movement.

Financial investor John M. Templeton said he founded the prize in 1972 to recognize “new spiritual information,” just as Nobel Prizes have rewarded the discovery of scientific information. Previous winners include the Rev. Billy Graham, Mother Teresa and Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

After he was named the winner, Athavale said: “I have not advocated a new ideology or a new religion, but merely tried and picked from human culture certain universally shared principles.”

When he was given the Mahatma Gandhi Prize in 1988, Athavale doubled the amount of the award and returned it to its donors for them to use as they saw fit. He has returned donations from wealthy benefactors, encouraging them to contribute time instead in the villages. He has refused academic positions in the United States, Europe and Japan.

The nine Templeton judges include former President George Bush, Buddhist leader the Rev. Nichiko Niwano, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, spiritual leader of about 300 million Orthodox Christians.

Athavale came to their attention after Betty Miller Unterberger, a history professor at Texas A&M; University, traveled to India in 1986 and saw 500,000 members of Athavale’s movement at a rally. Many clambered up on stage and testified that their lives were changed by Athavale.

“I came home convinced that I was witnessing certainly another Gandhi,” Unterberger said.