Buddhism in India

Conclusion 281

we have also seen a primary reason for this triumph of Brahmanism

in its ability to forge an alliance with political rulers.^5 Brahmans

provided a base of crucial administrative skill, and at the same time

gave an ideology that both legitimised rulers as kshatriyas (and

often linked them with gods as semi-divine) and freed them from

responsibility for providing welfare; their main duty was to enforce

varnashrama dharma, while all types of otherwise immoral conduct

was legitimised as necessary for rulership, as part of what the

Buddhists criticised as ‘Kshatriya dharma’.

In the New Millennium

Today, of course, it is a different era. Aside from its role on a world

scale, probably today Buddhism can have more to offer India as a

nation than ever before. Not least, of course, as Dalits and Bahujans

emerge as newly conscious force in India, Buddhism can not only

provide inspiration for their struggle (which other philosophies and

religions can also do)—it can help all of them regain a sense of their

own history. It is perhaps appropriate to close this essay with what

is the earliest mention of a Dalit in any Indian literature:

Birth does not make an outcaste, birth does not a Brahman make;

action makes a person low, action makes him great.

To prove my case I give just one example here –

the Sopaka Matanga, Candala’s son, of fame.

This Matanga attained renown so high and rare

that masses of Brahmans and Khattiyas to serve him were drawn near.

He ascended, so they say, in a chariot divine,

defeating lust and hatred, from passion freed, so high

nor did his birth or caste bar him from paradise!

But born brahmans are there, kin to the mantra-knowers

whose evil deeds expose them again and again,

scorned by the faithful and virtuous, facing a future doom

their brahman birth does not prevent scorn now or later doom (Sutta

Nipata, #136–41).

‘Buddhism’ nor ‘Brahmanism’ can be taken as eternal, unchanging
entities: the transformation of both needs to be analysed not only
in terms of their conflict with each other, but also in relation to
changes in the productive base and the political sphere. Both went
through changes over time that were not simply a result of the
unfolding of internal possibilities, and not simply either a matter of
conflict with one another. Without a link to economic and political
changes, historical analysis appears caught at the level of textbook
simplicities. This means above all taking account of the mode of
production, of the relation of ideologies and philosophies to changing
forces and relations of production.
It also has to be noted that at the cultural-ideological level itself,
‘Buddhism’ and ‘Brahmanism’ were not the only factors in Indian
society. There have been other important cultural-philosophical-
religious trends, including other parts of the samana tradition, such
as Islam which was influential for over a millennium, Christianity
influential in the last two centuries, as well as the secular modern
philosophies of Marxism and liberalism. These have been crucial
in and of themselves, and in their linkages with Brahmanism
and Buddhism.
In other words, we would suggest that Ambedkar’s formulation
of the Buddhism–Brahmanism conflict should be taken much in the
spirit of Weber’s effort to add cultural–ideological factors to expla-
nation in terms of economic factors.
With this in mind, the formulation does provide a crucial insight
into the processes of Indian social–historical development. For over
a millennium, Buddhism and Brahmanism, as the major contend-
ing philosophical-religious ideologies in India, fostered very differ-
ent types of individual behaviour and social order. The period of
the dominance of Buddhism was one of trade and cities, where a
vibrant commercial society and the enthusiastic involvement in
global trading networks linked India to distant Rome and China. It
is also not accidental that this early period was one of scientific
investigation and historical questioning, debate, openness to ideas.
The final triumph of Brahmanism in the last half of the first millen-
nium resulted in a good deal of stagnation at the ‘developmental’
level and in a fiercely hierarchical caste society that fixed the
masses into unprecedented forms of exploitation.
While the slowdown of trade, resulting from the decline of Rome
and dynastic crises in China, played a role in these developments,

280 Buddhism in India

(^5) This is also argued by Weber who states in The Religion of Indiawho sees as
‘decisive...the fact that Hinduism could provide an incomparable religious support for
the legitimation interests of the ruling strata as determined by the social conditions
of India’ (1958: 18).