Buddhism in India

Navayana Buddhism and the Modern Age 261

The Mass Revival of Buddhism in India

There are two important eyewitness descriptions of the Buddhist

conversion which took place on a large field in Nagpur that was

henceforth to be known as the diksha bhoomi, the field of vow-

taking. One is by Sangharakshata, the English Buddhist monk,

founder of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, who was to

play an important role in spreading and confirming Buddhism in

the period immediately following conversion. The other is by

Vasant Moon, a Dalit government officer from Nagpur, later to

become the editor of Ambedkar’s English writings for the

Government of Maharashtra, and who at that time was an activist

of the Samta Sainik Dal.

Let us begin with Sangharakshata’s account. In his earlier meetings

with Ambedkar he had become aware of the man’s ill-health, and

dislike for the Mahabodhi society, which at that time was domi-

nated by Brahmans. For the dikshaceremony itself, as he described

it, people

even the poorest, came clad in the spotless white shirts and saris that

had been prescribed for the occasion by their beloved leader. Some

families had had to sell trinkets in order to buy their new clothes and

meet the expenses of the journey, but they had made the sacrifice

gladly and set out for Nagpur with songs on their lips and the hope

of a new life in their heart....Some stayed with relations in the Mahar

ghettoes...Many simply camped on any patch of waste ground they

could find...By the end of the week 400,000 men, women and

children had poured into Nagpur, with the result that the population

had nearly doubled and the white-clad Untouchables had virtually

taken over the city. The Caste Hindus...gazed with astonishment at

the spectacle of tens of thousands of clean, decently dressed, well

behaved and well-organised people in whom they had difficulty in

recognizing their former slaves and serfs.... (Sangharakshata 1986:

129–30).

When Ambedkar proclaimed his ‘refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma

and the Sangha’ and took the vows from U. Chandramani, a

Burmese who was the oldest Bhikku in India, some of those who

were afraid because of his reluctance about taking refuge in the

Sangha gave a sigh of relief. Then, he turned around and himself

administered the vows to the masses there—and added an additional

22 vows:

God or divine forces as central. This was also the sense used by
many early sociologists, including Marx. In this sense, Buddhism was
not a religion; it did not encourage faith; nor awe and trembling
before the ‘holy’. But in sociology, Emile Durkheim, whose
research focused on religion and society, had given a broader
definition focusing on the element of the ‘sacred’ in religion and its
role in providing a binding force for social relationships. In this
sense, Buddhism was a religion. It was not simply a morality, but a
‘sacred morality’, and Ambedkar’s expounding of this in The
Buddha and His Dhamma almost echoed Durkheim: ‘In every
human society, primitive or advanced, there are some things or
beliefs which it regards as sacred and the rest as profane.... The
sacred is something holy. To transgress it is a sacrilege.’ This was
necessary, Ambedkar goes on to argue, like Durkheim, because
without sacredness no common rules of morality will exist. He
then concludes that in a society not bound by a common morality
protecting individual rights, exploitation will remain:

This means there can be liberty for some but not for all. This means

that there can be equality for a few but none for the majority. What

is the remedy? The only remedy lies in making fraternity universally

effective. What is fraternity? It is nothing but another name for

brotherhood of men which is another name for morality. This is why

the Buddha preached that Dhamma is morality and as Dhamma is

sacred so is morality (Ambedkar 1992: 325).

The ‘new world’, as he noted, needed religion-as-morality just as
the tumultuous society of the first millennium BCE had needed it.
It was a world in turmoil, one with tremendous potential for
economic development, but with increasingly visible poverty and
backwardness the world was being rejected by people who could
see the wealth and prosperity of others; a world in which massive
psychological and spiritual questions were being posed because of
the processes of change, by social movements, by wars, by experi-
ence of fascism, the Holocaust and unprecedented brutalities.
There were promises of economic development but these were to
become so enveloped in commercialism and technological ‘fixes’
that the need for a moral grounding was clear.
In the midst of all these considerations, and in the context of
advancing age and ill health, Ambedkar’s journey towards
Buddhism was completed in October 1956.

260 Buddhism in India