Buddhism in India

Introduction 19

new, moral and rationalistic religion, or ‘Dhamma’, was required.

In The Buddha and His Dhammahe wrote,

Society has to choose one of three alternatives. Society may choose

not to have any Dhamma as an instrument of government.... This

means Society chooses the road to anarchy. Secondly, Society may

choose the police, i.e. dictatorship, as an instrument of Government.

Third, Society may choose Dhamma plus the Magistrate whenever

people fail to observe the Dhamma. In anarchy and dictatorship lib-

erty is lost, only in the third liberty survives. Those who want liberty

must therefore have Dhamma (Ambedkar 1992: 317).

At this point Ambedkar appears close to the functionalists who

emphasise the necessity of a value system to provide social integra-

tion. More specifically, it recalls the French sociologist Emile

Durkheim. Of all of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, Durkheim,

in his last great work,The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,

gave the most careful definition of religion taking it as involving

the ‘sacred’ (as Ambedkar had noted, the Dhamma was ‘sacred

morality’) and as serving the function of social integration. In con-

trast to Marx and Weber, he did not believe religion would vanish

with the progression of modernity, but that a new and rational reli-

gion would develop to give a moral basis to the values of rational-

ity and individualism. The ‘religion of science’ hailed at the time

of the French revolution was, he argued, a forerunner of this

(Durkheim 1965: 37–63, 474–76).

The Navayana Buddhism of Ambedkar is, in fact, a startling

example of Durkheim’s projected religion of rationality.

Prospectus

The following chapters of ‘Buddhism in India’ will take up these

themes, focusing on the question of what is the ‘core’ element in the

Buddhist Dhamma, on what Buddhism has meant for the develop-

ment of Indian civilisation, and on the role of Buddhism in a modern,

industrial age.

Chapter 1 will examine the background to the rise of Buddhism

in the middle of the second millennium BCE, in a period when

being deprived of access to resources was part of the ongoing
civilisational conflict.
All of this had its basis in earlier thinkers of the anti-caste move-
ments. Phule had stressed, though in different language, the centrality
of Brahmanic ideology in enslaving the masses; he had seen the
Buddha as perhaps the most important early fighter against this
enslavement. The Tamil Dalit-Buddhist leader Iyothee Thass not
only founded his own Buddhist movement; he also identified Dalits
with Buddhists by arguing that the Tamil Paraiyas were not only
Buddhists, but descendents of the Buddha’s own clan, the Sakyas.
By the 1920s this identification with early Buddhists was an under-
lying theme among many Dalit movements, especially in south
India, and was seen in the context of theories about Aryan conquest
of an equalitarian, non-Aryan indigenous society. In this interpreta-
tion, acceptance of Buddhism by Dalits (and in some versions, by
non-Brahmans as well) would not really be ‘conversion’ to a new
religion, but liberation and a return to their original identity.

Religion and Modernity

Ambedkar’s ‘challenge to Marxism’—taking the Dhamma as an
alternative to radical socialism—was more than just that; it was
also a challenge to almost all the conventional sociological under-
standing of his time. Modernity, it was thought, was secular in the
sense of being non-religious; the age of industrialism brought with
it science and skepticism about all religions. It was generally
believed in the 1950s and 1960s that traditional forms of religion
would slowly die away. Marx considered religion a part of the
superstructure that would vanish almost automatically when social
equality was genuinely established; Weber wrote of the all-pervading
‘disenchantment with the world’ as characteristic of bureaucratic
rationality. Most sociologists of the time believed that the proces-
ses of ‘secularism’ would deprive religion of its importance in
social life.
Ambedkar thought differently—that religion, backing up a moral
code, was a necessity for society. Just as Brahmanic Hinduism had
been the root cause of the subjection of the untouchables, indeed of
India’s backwardness, so it could not simply be rectified by a socio-
economic development that would render religion unnecessary. A

18 Buddhism in India