Gandhi held that satyagraha, holding firmly to truth, and ahimsa, refusing to injure, were obligations rather than tactics, binding whether or not they produced a result, and the ashram he ran was built to make that claim practical. Its residents took a set of vows that went well beyond nonviolence: truth, chastity, non-possession, not stealing, control of the palate, fearlessness, physical labour for a living, the use of locally made goods, equal respect for all religions, and the removal of untouchability. Daily prayer drew readings from more than one scripture. The point of the arrangement was that a political method has to be lived somewhere before it can be asked of anyone else.
His reading of texts was his own and he said so. He treated the Bhagavad Gita as an allegory of the struggle inside a person rather than as a licence for war, which is not how the tradition had generally read it, and he acknowledged the objection. The Jain environment of his Gujarati childhood shaped the seriousness with which he took injury to any living thing. The Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy and Ruskin all left marks. He described the whole of his own life as a series of experiments with truth, a phrase that concedes the possibility of getting it wrong.