Mahatma Gandhi’s family practiced a kind of Vaishnavism, one of the major traditions within Hinduism, that was inflected through the morally rigorous tenets of Jainism—an Indian faith for which concepts such as asceticism and nonviolence are important. Many of the beliefs that characterized Gandhi’s spiritual outlook later in life may have originated in his upbringing. However, his understanding of faith was constantly evolving as he encountered new belief systems. Leo Tolstoy’s analysis of Christian theology, for example, came to bear heavily on Gandhi’s conception of spirituality, as did texts such as the Bible and the Qurʾān, and he first read the Bhagavad Gita—a Hindu epic—in its English translation while living in Britain.