The author is a former Jain monk and an international peace activist with sixty years of experience. We’ve been reviewing his work for decades. He lives in England.
Satish Kumar wants you to realize that the three words of his book’s title are intimately connected in our lives. Kumar writes in the preface: “If my outer body is soil, then my inner being is the soul. As I cultivate the soil to grow food for the body, I take care of the soul and cultivate love, compassion, beauty, and unity to realize harmony within and without.”
He also explains, “The trinity of Soil, Soul, Society is a way of saying in three words that we are all related, interconnected, and interdependent. This is a trinity of wholeness and unity of life in its myriad forms.”
This eloquent book of ecological wisdom is published in the United States by Thich Nhat Hanh’s publisher, because Kumar and Thay were friends going back to the 1960s. In fact, Kumar has been doing this work so long that he was even connected to the philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell in that decade. Speaking of his old friend who recently died, Kumar says, “I felt that Thay was the Gandhi of our time.”
The great early twentieth-century Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore also features large in this book’s teachings, as does the twentieth-century British economist and mystic, E.F. Schumacher, whom Kumar calls the founder of “Buddhist economics” and whom we remember every year on September 4.
Everything begins with soil: “Everything comes from the soil and returns to the soil…. Through the soil we are all related and interconnected…. All living beings depend on the soil, and soil treats all living being equally.”
The soil is our teacher, Kumar says, and so is our soul. They are intimately connected, and yet we can deepen the connections too.
And “beauty is the food for soul,” so we ought to foster societies that are full of beauty in many ways. This book is a manifesto for wholeness that is both given and built with discipline.
