Buber and Gandhi never met, nor did their correspondence bring about any meeting of minds, and yet one can't help having the impression that there was a deep underlying basis of agreement between them on many issues and that this would have come to light if circumstances had been different. Apart from his influence on German Protestant theologians, which was considerable in the 1930s, Buber had more of a name in the English-speaking world than in Palestine and this was largely because of J.H. Oldham and his associates and the appearance in 1937 of the English translation of his Ich und Du. Buber was inspired by the Hasid notion of the zaddik or righteous man as Gandhi was by Vaishnava bhaktas like Narsingh Mehta. Both men regarded mysticism as a luxury of the spirit although in his early years Buber had been attracted to it. Gandhi could have echoed Buber's early statement "True religiousness is an activity", a recurring theme in his Vom Geist Des Judentums published in 1916. He could have also echoed Buber's reminder that what matters was not religious experience but religious life.¹ The Kabbalistic tendency to aspire to higher realms had no appeal for him. He writes: "What concern of ours if they exist, are the upper worlds?"² A similar sentiment turned Gandhi away from Mme Blavatsky's attempts to ascend the ladder of consciousness.