Conclusion 277contrast to reliance on authority, was the main force behind this
tradition of skepticism.Reconstructing the World: SukhavatiNow
In reformulating traditional Buddhist thinking, Ambedkar had
initially objected to the predominance of dukkhaand then given it an
extremely social interpretation, identifying it with social-economic
exploitation. With this, the goal of action becomes not only the
liberation of the individual seeker, but the transformation of the
world. This is expressed most radically in Ambedkar’s account of
the way his first audience of five samanas greet the Buddha’s first
teaching: ‘never in the history of the world has salvation been
conceived as the blessing of happiness to be attained by man in this
life and on this earth by righteousness born out of his own efforts!’
(Ambedkar 1992: 130–31).
The concept of the Dhamma as the basis for ‘reconstruction of
the world’ moves the focus away from the individual to the social.
Buddhism on the whole has been an individualistic religion.
Though it has clearly propagated an ethics for the social world of
householders and producers—which we saw in Chapter 3—its
more classic forms have not sought to order society in the way that
traditions such as Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, Brahmanism and
so forth have done. This can be looked at, from one point of view,
as an advantage—because the ‘ordering of society’ by such reli-
gions has often involved maintenance of social hierarchies and,
even if they have been relatively equalitarian in ‘class’ terms, almost
always gave rise to gender discrimination.
At the same time, it can be called a limitation. In part, the rise of
Mahayana Buddhism can be seen as a reaction to the individualistic
focus of Theravada, which saw the role of the householder almost
entirely in terms of providing support for the religious aspirations
of the bhikkus. Mahayana proponents, in justifying the doctrine of
Bodhisattvas, argued that ‘Hinayana’ was too narrow and selfish in
taking the Buddha as only a teacher, in seeing the achievement of
liberation as only possible for a relatively few enlightened beings.
Instead of posing each individual as going through tiring and
almost endless rounds of rebirth, labouring for his/her own enlight-
enment, it proposed to shorten this path through the figure of theAll ideologies have decayed.
No one views comprehensively.
What is trivial, what is great
cannot be understood.
Philosophies fill the market,
gods have become a cacophony,
to the enticements of desire
people fall prey...
There is a cacophony of opinions,
no one heeds another.
Each thinks the opinion
he has caught is great.
Pride in untruth
leads them to destruction.
So the wise people say,
seek the truth (Phule 1991: 440).Scientific method, we might argue, is based on an epistemology of
critical realism: verifiable knowledge of the world is possible but
it is always relative since further developments in science—in
understanding, in the ability to experiment and measure—can cast
into doubt previous theories and paradigms. Hence they always
remain theories, always paradigms, never absolute certainties.
When a theory or viewpoint is seized or clung to, when it is held to
be an absolute truth, when it is taken to be more than the tentative
approach to reality that it is, then it no longer remains a scientific
hypothesis or theory but has become an ideology. It obstructs
further learning.
This expression of this ‘middle way’ between skepticism and
absolutism had crucial relevance to developments in Indian scien-
tific thinking. In a lecture on science and history in India, India’s
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has stressed the connection between
scientific development, an open mind and skepticism, and ‘hetero-
doxy’. Thus he argues that the origin of the mathematical and
scientific developments (for instance, in astronomy) that are linked to
the Gupta period in India lie primarily in ‘the tradition of scepti-
cism that can be found in pre-Gupta India—going back to at least
the sixth century BC—particularly in matters of religion and epis-
temic orthodoxy’ (‘History and the Enterprise of Knowledge’, The
Hindu, January 4, 2001). Buddhism, with its opposition to clinging
to ditthi and insistence on achieving knowledge by oneself in
276 Buddhism in India