Buddhism in India

Introduction 3

lead Dalits into the fold of an already existing organisational and

ideological structure. He distrusted what he knew of the existing

Theravada and Mahayana Sanghas; he distrusted even more the main

representative at that time of Buddhism in India, the Mahabodhi

society. While Buddhism attracted him as a teaching that was equal-

itarian, universalist and rationalist, many of its existing expressions

made him very uncomfortable. As someone very conscious that he

was near death, he knew he would not be around for long to lead

the movement, and wanted to provide his followers with a ‘bible’,

a simple but comprehensive text of Buddhism, based on what he felt

were the most important passages of the Pali canon. Thus, he took

up, as his last work, the apparently audacious task of rewriting

Buddhist scriptures.

The book he laboured to produce was The Buddha and His

Dhamma. In it, he attempted to bring Buddhism to the world of

social action and social change. Buddhism, as we shall see, was not

simply spirituality for Ambedkar, but a rational and psychologically-

oriented ‘Dhamma’ (teaching) designed to help humans live in the

world and transform that world into one free from sorrow, or dukkha.

Most of the passages of the text are taken from various sections of

the Pali canon (without footnotes; Ambedkar was not writing a

scholarly book) and can be traced. But some are new, interpolations

aimed at providing what might be called ‘Buddhist answers to

Marxist questions’.

Ambedkar’s death is celebrated as mahaparinibbana with hundreds

of thousands of Dalits from throughout Maharashtra leaving their

villages and urban slum homes, climbing on trains and travelling

ticketless to Mumbai or Nagpur to mark his memory. He dominates

the revival of Buddhism in the land of its birth. His interpretation

of the Dhamma is thus not to be ignored. It provides an important

entry into the question of what Buddhism is, what its impact on

past Indian society was, and what its role in a future, modernised

Indian society could be.

The Challenge of Navayana Buddhism

The introduction to The Buddha and His Dhammashows just how

radical Ambedkar’s view was. In what we might call ‘the four

denials’, Ambedkar

taken inspiration from Marxism, his answers were such as to
antagonise Marxists and, for that matter, most of the secularists of
his time. He held out the Sangha as the ideal Communist society,
and he believed that through the morality of Dhamma humans
could transform themselves and reconstruct society. This was seen by
Marxists as ‘bourgeois idealism’; even moderate leftists of India at
that time and later have looked on it as a step backward to religious
solutions in what they considered to be an age of secularism, when
economic and political solutions should have been emphasised.
Ambedkar’s interpretation of the Buddhist Dhamma was,
finally, a major challenge to the existing forms of Buddhism itself.
In fact, Ambedkar himself called it Navayana, to mark its distinc-
tion from the three accepted ‘ways’ of Buddhism: the Theravada
(or Hinayana), the Mahayana and the Vajrayana. The term has
become widely accepted, and the distinction, as we shall see, was a
thoroughgoing one.
The choice of Buddhism, and its reinterpretation, did not come
out of a vacuum. It followed over a century-and-a-half of social
radicalism, pioneered by a ‘shudra’, Jotirao Phule, in Maharashtra,
that was marked by strong anti-caste movements both among wide
sections of non-Brahmans in south and west India and among
Dalits throughout India. A major theme of this wave of movements
was to expose the role of Brahmanic Hinduism as the ideological-
religious factor behind the caste system; a large number of leaders
of these movements broke away from ‘Hinduism’ and looked for
religious alternatives, or alternatives in atheism, as in the case of
the south Indian leader Periyar. Phule himself had respect for the
Buddha as a satyapurushor man of truth, his highest compliment,
but he knew little of what the Buddha had taught. It was another
Dalit leader, Pandit Iyothee Thass of Tamil Nadu, who first took
up Buddhism at the beginning of the 20th century and gave it a
mass base in Tamil Nadu, and in parts of Burma and South Africa
settled by Dalit migrant labourers. Ambedkar’s choice of Buddhism
and his posing it as an alternative to Brahmanism had its basis
in Indian history, but his understanding of Buddhism and his
reinterpretation of it owed much to Iyothee Thass and to Laxmi
Narasu, another leader of this Sakya Buddhism of the early 20th
century.
When Ambedkar led thousands of Dalits for a mass vow-taking
of Buddhism in 1956 in Nagpur, he did not simply propose to

2 Buddhism in India