Buddhism in India

Introduction 15

essential core includes support for varnashrama dharma and a

belief that the atman and brahmaare one. Without these two

points, ‘Hinduism’ would be something else.

The issue of ‘Navayana Buddhism’ provokes us to ask certain

questions about Buddhism: what is its essential core, without

which we would no longer be able to call it ‘Buddhism’ or ‘the

Dhamma taught by the Buddha’? Does it include the karma/rebirth

notions, or not? Answers to such questions will allow us to sepa-

rate out ‘Buddhism’ from other ideological and religious trends in

Indian culture and history and will also provide resources to

answer further questions about the civilisational impact of

Buddhism in India and elsewhere.

Buddhism and Brahmanism

in Indian History

The other important point in Ambedkar’s Buddhist renaissance

had to do with his concern for the development of India as a whole.

In arguing that the basic conflict was between ‘Buddhism and

Brahmanism’, he was making an important intervention in debates

on the question of Indian identity. Most Indian intellectuals of his

time and even today have seen this as basically a ‘Hindu’ identity,

in which all the various religions and sects originating in the Indian

subcontinent are viewed as having a basic unity that is charac-

terised by their flexible and comprehensive view of the divine and

of the ultimate identity between the divine and the human soul.

This is then contrasted to the ‘western’ religions which see a sepa-

ration between man and God, and between man and nature, reli-

gions that are based on monotheistic, sectarian and individualistic

world-views. Buddhism, according to this position, is basically

similar to Hinduism in its major themes.

The term ‘Hindu’ was originally a geographical one, deriving from

the river Sindh, used because the first ‘foreigners’, the Iranians, pro-

nounced ‘s’ as ‘h’ (so that asura, a word that came to refer to the

demons in contrast to the gods of the Vedic Aryans, became ahura,

the name used for the supreme god in Zoroastrianism). During the

Mughal period, it was often used to classify together all the diverse

indigenous religious groups. During the time of British rule, the

nationalist elite themselves took up the term to identify their religion

are different from the two major later commentaries on it, and
argues that by adding the cosmological theory of karma/rebirth,
the Theravada Buddhist value theory lost coherence. In the early
text the goal is a positive system of values which is this-worldly,
immanent and life-affirming. In this, little or no connection is
drawn between the ideal goal (nibbana) and metaphysical conse-
quences or benefits of attaining the ideal, such as escape from
repeated birth, old age, and death (Burford 1991: 12). The com-
mentaries retain this life-affirming view but add to it the ‘world-
denying, transcendent system of values’ of escape from birth and
death. This leads to a problem both for scholars and for believer-
practitioners because, as Burford believes, the value system must be
coherent if Buddhism is to be capable of leading believer-practitioners
to the attainment of the goal and is to be accepted as truthful. Her
solution is to reject the transcendental metaphysical claims as being
interpolations and interpretations by the early Sangha, and return-
ing to an original Buddhism as it is recorded in the Atthakavagga
(ibid.: 7).
Like Ambedkar, Carol Burford argues that the ‘true’ classical
Buddhism is life-affirming; that escape from the birth-and-death
round is a peripheral preoccupation. Her position, currently being
debated in Buddhist scholarship, gives scholarly support for under-
standing Buddhism in a new way, much as Ambedkar did.
There is one more reason for considering seriously Ambedkar’s
interpretation of Buddhism. It is an important heuristic device. It
requires something like the ‘thought-experiment’ perhaps compa-
rable to that commonly used by physicists: can we ‘think’ the
Buddhist Dhamma without the cosmological framework of karma/
rebirth, in isolation from the social-cultural conditions of the first
millennium BCE in India? This is precisely what Ambedkar’s
‘Navayana’ Buddhism requires us to do. Doing this assumes that a
religion or ‘teaching’ is not simply a reflection of its period, that it is
not simply infinitely flexible in how it functions in regard to society,
that it has an essential core to it. (Saying this need not lead us to
the kind of metaphysical belief in ‘essences’ which Buddhism
denied; it is only saying that there is something that, without which
we would not call a set of phenomena ‘Buddhism’). For example, I
would argue that classical ‘Hinduism’/Brahmanism has an essential
core which frames all the local traditions and cults it absorbs as
well as the sometimes grandiose morality it teaches, and that this

14 Buddhism in India