Hinduism and Buddhism
Buddhism flourished in India for more than 15 hundred years. It gradually disappeared from the areas that today are defined by the modern nation of India, with its final disappearance probably from around the 12th century CE. During these more than 15 hundred years, Buddhist and Hindu traditions influenced each other in numerous ways, both because of disagreements and exchange of ideas and because of competition for power and ritual clients. However, Buddhism never disappeared from South Asia and continued to prosper in the southern part of South Asia on the island of Sri Lanka and northern part in the mountainous regions of the Himalayas, areas that also have a strong Hindu presence. It is nevertheless common to conceptualize the history of Buddhism in India as a history of flourishing and disappearance and the discovery of India’s Buddhist past by civil servants of the British imperial power in the 18th and 19th centuries (Almond, 1988), half a millennium after Buddhism had disappeared. The discovery of a Buddhist golden age of ancient India had consequences for the modern Hindu understanding of Buddhism, and it led ultimately to a revival and rebirth of Buddhism in India in the 20th century.
A significant alteration in the Hindu understanding of Buddhism in the modern period was the recognition of a Buddhist influence on the formation of Hindu traditions. Since this Buddhist influence was unknown to many Hindus, and Buddhism was considered a tradition opposed to the Veda, this marked an important change. L.M. Joshi has suggested that in Hinduism it was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) who was “the first to recognize and publicly declare the Hindu indebtedness to the Buddha’s ideas” (Joshi, 1983, 19). The influence of Rabindranath Tagore and others who started to use Buddhist stories in their work has also been referred to (Coward, 1995, 283; Fiske, 1976, 134). L.M. Joshi has correctly called attention to the extraordinariness of this shift in the attitude toward the Buddha. Buddha had indeed earlier, in the mid-first millennium CE (from the 7th cent. CE), been incorporated in the Hindu traditions as an avatāra of Viṣṇu. But this did not necessarily mark an acceptance of a Buddhist influence, and it was probably not an attempt to include Buddhists in the Hindu traditions, as is sometimes believed. Instead, the Buddha’s task as an avatāra was, according to some traditions, to deceive, that is, to make evil beings followers of a mistaken teaching to make sure evil beings did not attain heaven. The mantra that pays homage to the Buddha avatāra reads, namo buddhāya daitya dānava mohine, “Homage to the Buddha who deceived daityas and dānavas” (BhāgP. 10.40.22).
In other words, the incorporation of Buddha as an avatāra of Hinduism denounced Buddhism as a demonic tradition. This interpretation of the Buddha avatāra in Hinduism was a theological construct. Worship of the Buddha avatāra has not been widespread in Hindu temples, but the worship can also be understood as an example of the peaceful coexistence of Buddhists and Hindus, which has been the dominant feature of their relation. Nevertheless, this Hindu tradition of seeing the Buddha as an avatāra of Viṣṇu that came to delude evil people probably also had wide acceptance, as shown in some early Western scholarship on religion in India. The Encyclopedia Britannica, as late as 1842, began its entry on Buddhism by defining the Buddha as “one of the two appearances of Vishnu, assumed for the purpose of deluding the enemies of the gods, and effecting their destruction by leading them to profess heretical opinions, and thus to reject the Hindu religion” (Almond, 1988, 16).
The recognition of a Buddhist influence that was initiated by Vivekananda led to the inclusion of Buddhism in Hinduism. This meant a reversal of earlier ideas of the Buddha avatāra. The Buddha was now seen as a person who successfully purified Hinduism from erroneous practices. “The Buddha was accepted as an avatara who reclaimed Hindus from sanguinary rites and erroneous practices and purified their religion of the numerous abuses which had crept into it,” wrote the Hindu statesman and philosopher S. Radhakrishnan (1888-1975; Holt, 2004, 21). The Buddha thus helped Hindus by initiating necessary changes in their religion; particularly important was the Buddha’s teaching of ahiṃsā, an important symbol for the identity of modern Hinduism. The purpose of the Hindu Buddha was no longer to deceive evil beings who followed a mistaken teaching but to correct the teaching of good people, as a reformer of Hinduism. It was now held that Buddha was born, grew up, and died a Hindu, and that Buddhism was an offshoot of Hinduism. J.C. Holt has correctly underscored the radical newness of this Hindu admiration for the Buddha:
"In light of the Buddha’s critique of Brahmanism and the consequent hostility that it provoked, it is remarkable that the image of the Buddha was eventually rehabilitated and incorporated into many Hindu normative constructions, that the Buddha was eventually embraced by some modern Hindus as one of the greatest teachers of humankind, and that some other Hindus would go so far as to say that the Buddha was, in fact, even born a Hindu" (Holt, 2004, 10).
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Buddhism became recognized as an important part of the heritage and history of India. The recovery of Buddhist monuments had revealed an Indian golden age of the past. The publication and translation of volumes of the Pali Canon had identified a great literary heritage in an ancient Indian language other than Sanskrit. That Buddhism had spread to large parts of Asia and had also become highly regarded in the West was understood as an admiration of Indian values. The creation of modern Buddhism, “which tend[s] to see Buddhism as above all a system of rational and ethical philosophy divorced from the daily practices of the vast majority of Buddhists” (Lopez, 2002, 19), had also made Buddhism attractive to Indian intellectuals (who mostly, however, did not convert; Fiske, 1976, 134-137). For several reasons, therefore, the Buddhist heritage became an important part of Indian nationalism and the construction of the identity of India. This new knowledge was important for the reevaluation of Buddha and Buddhist teachings in modern Hinduism.
Several Hindu intellectuals understood Buddhism as a branch of Hinduism, especially as a school of philosophy that was basically in agreement with Advaita Vedānta. This philosophical system of Śaṅkara had been influenced by Buddhist ideas. Śaṅkara was called a crypto-Buddhist (prachannabauddha) by other teachers of Vedānta because of the similarity they saw between Buddhist philosophy and Śaṅkara’s Vedānta. Many modern Hindu intellectuals reversed also this Buddhist influence on Hinduism and saw instead Buddha as a teacher of Hinduism. “Buddhism is one of our sects,” wrote Vivekananda, and he maintained that “Buddha was one of the saṃnyāsins of the Vedānta.” The Buddha was able to bring out “the truths from the hidden Vedas” (Vivekananda, 1962-1965, vol. I, 22), which meant that the teaching of the Buddha was in reality a vedic philosophy: “The ideas which now are called Buddhism were not his. They were much more ancient” (Vivekananda, 1962-1965, vol. IV, 135; vol. V, 309). According to Vivekananda, therefore, all the essential doctrines of Buddhism were borrowed from the Veda, that is, the Upaniṣads, which according to Vivekananda were pre-Buddhist (Joshi, 1983, 31). Other Hindu intellectuals promoted a similar view of Buddhism as a school of Hinduism and Vedānta. S. Radhakrishnan understood the Buddha as one who accepted the teaching of the Upaniṣads. According to S. Radhakrishnan, the Buddha believed in brahman , only he gave brahman a different name, dharma (truth, the nature of things). S. Radhakrishnan understood the famous last words of the Buddha to mean that one should take refuge in the ātman /brahman (Murti, 1992, 567-605). The great scholar on Dharmaśāstra P.V. Kane in the same way stated that the Buddha continued the tradition of the ancient vedic and Brahmanical seers and was only a reformer of Hinduism (Kane, 1962, 1004-1005). A representative example of this trend in the interpretation of Buddhism in 20th-century Hindu philosophy reads:
"Buddhism and Vedānta should not be viewed as two opposed systems but only as different stages in the development of the same central thought which starts with the Upaniṣads, finds its indirect support in Buddha, its elaboration in Mahāyāna Buddhism, its open revival in Gauḍapāda, which reaches its zenith in Shaṅkara and culminates in post-Shaṅkarites. So far the similarities between Buddhism and Vedānta are concerned, they are so many and so strong that by no stretch of imagination can they be denied or explained otherwise. So far as the differences are concerned, they are few and mostly they are not vital. Most of them rest on a grave misunderstanding of Buddhism" (Sharma, 1960, 318).
The general view is that the Buddha did not teach anything new, but simply restated the teaching of the Upaniṣads and is therefore grounded in Vedānta. A fundamental doctrine of Buddhism, such as the theory of no-self (Skt. anātman; Pal. anatta), is denied as part of Buddhism, because Buddhism “does not deny the existence of the true Ātman, the Pure Self, which is Pure Consciousness and which is the only reality” (Sharma, 1960, 325). Likewise, according to this type of Hinduization of the teaching of Buddhism, the concept of śūnya means not only māyā (illusion) and refers to the dharmas (constituents of human experience) as empty, but also brahman since appearances imply that there is a reality of which they are appearances. Here Hindu views, which are quite contrary to the teaching of Buddhism, are projected on Buddhism, and the justification for it is that Buddhism at the outset had been defined as a school of Vedānta, thus there could be no difference between Buddhism and Vedānta. Other common Hindu interpretations of Buddhism are the identification of the Buddhist nirvāṇa with the brahman of the Upaniṣads and the claim that the doctrine of no-self (anātman) is a denial only of the lower self.
These interpretations reduce Buddhism to a form of Hindu philosophy and imply a denial of a separate identity of Buddhists and Buddhism. The inclusiveness of Hinduism exemplified above was expressed also in the Constitution of India, which uses the term "Hindus" to include Buddhists, stating that “the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly” The Hindu nationalists have included Buddhism in their concept of hindutva, and the concept “Indic religion” does sometimes have similar implications, seeming to imply (mistakenly) that Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism are split offs from Hinduism However, Hindu teachers such as Vivekananda also accepted that Buddhism was a protest against the religion of the Veda because of its sacrificial violence. But, it was argued, the Buddha was mistaken in breaking up the tradition. It was because he did not understand the harmony of religions, and he therefore “introduced sectarianism” (Joshi, 1983). Other times Vivekananda traced the origin of Buddhism to the struggles between Kṣatriyas and Brāhmaṇas (Brahmans) and stated that Buddhism opened the religion of the Upaniṣads to all castes (Joshi, 1983, 31). Another element in the Hindu view of Buddhism is the explanation of the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism as the same as between Judaism and Christianity, only with the difference that Judaism rejected Christ, but Hindus started to worship the Buddha (Joshi, 1983, 32). This view was probably influenced by similar speculations of Western orientalists who compared the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism to that of Catholicism and Protestantism.
Admiration of the Buddha characterized the view of many Hindu intellectuals during the 20th century, both secular intellectuals and religious gurus who sometimes drew on both Hindu and Buddhist traditions of yoga and meditation. However, the admiration of the Buddha was not shared by all. The Hindu nationalist V. Savarkar, one of the founding figures of the political ideology of Hindu nationalism, while seeing Buddhism as a sect of Hinduism, nevertheless saw the dominance of Buddhism and its emphasis on meditation and ahiṃsā in ancient India as the cause of foreign invasions. V.P. Kane saw tantric Buddhism as the cause of decay of India (Kane, 1962, 1029-1030) and supported his view by quoting Vivekananda, who wrote: "The most hideous ceremonies, the most horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever wrote or the human brain ever conceived, the most bestial forms that ever passed under the name of religion, have all been the creation of degraded Buddhism." Nevertheless, for Vivekananda, this condemnation of tantric Buddhism did not cancel out his admiration for the Buddha and his teaching; on the contrary, Vivekananda wrote, “Hinduism has become so great only by absorbing the ideas of the Buddha” (Vivekananda, vol. IV, 507).
Mahatma Gandhi similarly argued that the Buddha had recovered the truth of the Veda and considered Buddhism part of Hinduism:
"Gautama was saturated with the best that was in Hinduism and gave life to some of the teachings that were buried in the Veda and which were overgrown with weeds. His great Hindu spirit cut its way through the forest of words, which had overlaid the golden truth that was the Vedas" (extract from a speech by Gandhi held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1928)
The most successful movement of conversions to Buddhism in modern India was led by B.R. Ambedkar, who converted in 1956 in a ceremony in the city of Nagpur together with several hundred thousand members of the Mahar caste, the caste to which Ambedkar belonged. Most of contemporary India’s around ten million Buddhists belong to the Buddhist movement founded by Ambedkar. Quite opposite to the modern Hindu tendencies of identifying Hinduism and Buddhism with the universal teaching of Vedānta as the truth of all religions, Ambedkar stated that “[t]here cannot be a thesis more false than the thesis that all religions are true” (Ambedkar, 1995, 36). Ambedkar believed that the Dalits could not attain justice in Hinduism and advised them to convert to another religion. Ambedkar argued that the Dalits were descendants of the early Buddhists and that their ancestors had been ostracized from the community by the Hindus who had migrated into India and demanded that they convert to their religion. Those who refused had been given the status of untouchable. The Dalits were the original inhabitants, according to Ambedkar, and when they now converted to Buddhism, they returned to their original religion.
The rebirth of Buddhism in India did not, however, start with Ambedkar’s conversion in 1956, but in 1891 (considered “the most memorable year in the history of Indian Buddhism” [Ahir, 1989, 4] since Ambedkar also was born in that year) with the founding by the Sri Lankan Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala (Don David Hewavitarne; “the first to hoist the flag of Buddhism in modern India,” Ahir, 1989, 5) of the Mahabodhi Society, the goal of which was the revival of Buddhism in India and gaining control of the ancient Buddhist pilgrimage places. (The other memorable year is 1956, which marked both the 2,500th buddha jayantī celebration and the conversion of Ambedkar and his followers to Buddhism.) Dharmapala had been involved with the Theosophical Society but broke off his connection with them, because he thought they had too favorable a view of Hinduism, which contrasted with Dharmapala’s anti-Hindu sentiments. In 1891 he had visited the restored Mahābodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya and discovered that the temple was run by Śaiva priests, which had been the case since the 15th century. Bodh Gaya was, and still is, a Hindu-Buddhist shared sacred space. He thereafter founded the Mahabodhi Society in Sri Lanka (the headquarters was moved to Calcutta in 1892).
Ambedkar was also not the first Dalit to redefine Buddhism as a Dalit religion of liberation. In Tamil Nadu, as early as 1898, Pandit Iyothee Thass (1845-1914) together with other Dalits and with the help of Colonel Olcott of the Theosophical Society organized the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras (Aloysius, 1998; Webster, 2002). The movements of Thass remained small. The doctrines of being Tamil, being the original inhabitants of India, being Buddhists, and the rejection of Hindu rituals and replacing them with Buddhist rituals were central to the Buddhist identity formation of the movement, as well as “a persistent polemic against Hinduism” (Webster, 2002, 31). This movement lost momentum after 1935, because after that year, one had to declare oneself a Hindu to benefit from the reservation system instituted by the British rulers of India. (For other early converts, see Ahir, 1989; Ramteke, 1983.)
Ambedkar’s interpretations of Buddhism were shaped by the revival of Buddhism, which had already occurred in India, and by the Western orientalists’ creation of a homogeneous early Buddhism. Many of his interpretations are typical of modern Buddhism. Ambedkar was in contact with the Mahabodhi Society in India (Beltz, 2005) and was probably influenced by Dharmapala’s modernist interpretations of Buddhism. In Ambedkar’s interpretation, Buddha’s teaching was defined as a rational and logical teaching comparable to modern political philosophies. What was not rational and logical could not be the teaching of the Buddha (Omvedt, 2003, 7). Typical of modern Buddhism was the claim that it represented a recovery of a postulated “real” Buddhism, but Ambedkar understood well the difference between historical Buddhism, the contemporary forms of Buddhism, and the Buddhism to which he himself converted. His term for the Buddhism that he founded, therefore, was Navayāna (“New Vehicle”), which he nevertheless claimed to be a return to the real teaching of “early Buddhism.” For Ambedkar Buddhism was oriented around building a just and happy society, and he excluded those parts of Buddhism that did not support his own egalitarian social democratic philosophy. Suffering was caused by poverty and caste, not ignorance, and the message of the Buddha was how to abolish poverty, caste, and the injustice done to the marginalized. The supernatural attributes of the Buddha, meditation, and ideas of karma and rebirth were not part of Ambedkar’s Buddhism. The ritualism of Buddhism was not real Buddhism, according to Ambedkar. He also reversed the relationship between monks and laypeople; the role of the monks was not to dominate but to serve society (Ambedkar, 1992). Monks can be the hope of Buddhism only if they are social servants (Omvedt, 2003). He did not accept the common interpretation of karma and rebirth, since it seemed to be based on an idea of the self. The idea of karma was contradicted by the doctrine of anatta (Pal. non-self), and the idea of karma seems also to legitimate untouchability. The notion of rebirth did not mean reincarnation but transformation. Ambedkar also denied that the four noble truths were part of Buddhism. The reason for the Buddha‘s renunciation was not the sight of a sick, an old, and a dead man, but a clash between the Śākyas and the Koliyas. Far from arguing that suffering was an inherent part of the worldly existence, the point of the Buddha was that it is possible to create a world free from suffering. The message was that humans are able to create a society based on righteousness by their own effort. For Ambedkar Buddhism was not a renunciant tradition aiming at individual salvation. “Dhamma is not concerned with life after death, nor with rituals and ceremonies; but its centre is man and relation of man to man,” wrote Ambedkar (1992, 83). The salvific goal of Buddhism, nirvāṇa, was reinterpreted to mean a just society.
"[U]ntouchability was born out of the struggle between Buddhism and Brahmanism. According to him [Ambedkar] the Untouchables were originally Buddhists and their untouchability was a punishment for sticking to Buddhism. He called them the 'Broken Men' who were forced to live outside the village from the very beginning. He further believed that the root of their untouchability was beef-eating and that Untouchability became intimately connected with the ban on cow-slaughter which was made a capital offence by the Gupta Kings of the 4th century and thus he could say with some confidence that Untouchability was born sometimes about 400 A.D." (Narain, 1994b, 85).
Ambedkar’s primary aim of conversion to Buddhism was to gain a new religious and social identity for the Dalits. For Hindus, Ambedkar thought, when interacting with untouchables who were also Hindus, the identity of being untouchables was most important, while when interacting with Christian untouchables, the identity of them being Christians became foremost. Religion overwrote caste in a sense. Changing religion, therefore, argued Ambedkar, offered a way out of untouchability.
An aspect of Buddhism that made it attractive for Ambedkar was that Buddhism was opposed to the Veda (the revealed texts of the Brahmanical tradition), the status of the Brahmans, and their sacrificial religion, and he thus undermined the legitimacy of Brahmanical ritual power and the caste system. Ambedkar saw traditional Indian religious culture as constituted by two coexisting religious traditions, the Brahmanical Hindu and the Buddhist, and Ambedkar understood these two traditions to be in a relationship of permanent moral conflict. Ambedkar argued for two main differences between Buddhism and Hinduism in the essay “Buddha and the Future of His Religion,” published in the Maha Bodhi Journal (1950). Hinduism was a religion that is not founded on morality, argued Ambedkar, “whatever morality Hinduism has, it is not an integral part of it,” while the “the Religion of the Buddha is morality…Buddhist Religion is nothing if not morality” (Ambedkar, 1992, 31). Secondly, Ambedkar argued that “the social gospel of Hinduism is inequality,” while Buddha “was the greatest opponent of Chaturvarna [the caste system]” and “did everything to uproot it” (Ambedkar, 1992, 33). Consequently, when Ambedkar converted at the rally in Nagpur October 14, 1956, after he had taken “refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha” from a Burmese monk, U. Chandramani, and when he turned to the masses gathered there and administered the vows to them, he added 22 vows in addition. These 22 vows can be divided into two groups, those that break with a Hindu identity and those that affirm Buddhism. Those openly directed at Hinduism state:
Researchers have noted that in many homes of the Indian Buddhists images of Hindu gods and goddesses are placed next to those of Ambedkar and the Buddha, and that especially the worship of goddesses is widespread, and that this points to a coexistence of Hinduism and Buddhism. For many Buddhists in India, Hindu and Buddhist rituals are not mutually exclusive, but there is nevertheless also a public pressure to denounce Hindu worship (Beltz, 2005; Shastree, 1996). The temples of this new Buddhist tradition contain images of the Buddha and Ambedkar, but it is the pictures and statues of Ambedkar that are the main symbols of the Buddhist identity, and pictures of him “are omnipresent and are the normative decorative item for every Buddhist ritual and ceremony” (Beltz, 2005, 162). New rituals have been created such as a new ritual calendar, and old Hindu rituals have been transformed into Buddhist rituals by adding recitation of Buddhist Pali texts. In addition to the buddha jayantī (Buddha’s birth; Apr 14), Ambedkar’s conversion (Oct 14, but often celebrated on the vijayadaśamī, the full moon day of the month āśvina) and death (Dec 6) are important festivals. The saṃskāras include recitation of the Buddhist Pali formulas of the tisaraṇa (Pal. three refugees) and the pañcaśīla (five precepts) that mark these rituals as Buddhist. However, some Ambedkar Buddhists do not favor ritual practice, because they consider it superstition and against Ambedkar’s vision, and this points to a tension in the Buddhism tradition founded by Ambedkar between religion and political ideology.
Nevertheless, there have been several emancipation movements among the Dalits such as the Satnami movement among Camars in Chhattisgarh that was founded in the 1820s by Ghāsidās, the Ad Dharm movement in Punjab started in the 1920s by Mangoo Ram, and the Ravidāsīs in Uttar Pradesh. These movements have done much to spread the idea of equality in India. The Buddhist Ambedkar tradition is among the larger ones, but less than 5% of Dalits are Buddhists. However, around 75% of Mahars are Buddhists, the majority of the Jatav Camars in Uttar Pradesh, and small groups of Dalits in Gujarat, Punjab, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh have also become Buddhists (Lobo, 1996). Buddhism in India has become identified to some degree with Dalit culture and the ideology of justice for the marginalized, and in contemporary India Buddhism and the Dalit movement are two sides of the same coin (Beltz, 2005, 243).
The dynamics of the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism are shaped by localities and histories. Relations between the religions may differ, and the terms "Hindu" and "Buddhist" may be less relevant in some localities (for Nepal, see Gellner, 1992), and in other localities such as Sri Lanka with parallel ethnic identities (most Hindus are Tamils and most Buddhists are Sinhalese), long periods of ethnic violence have impacted the relations (see Seneviratne, 1999; Holt, 2004). But in the modern period, it is only in India that mass conversions from Hinduism to Buddhism have taken place.
The discovery of Buddhism as a religion of a golden age of India’s past and the subsequent inclusion of Buddhism in Hinduism as a form of Advaita Vedānta, on the one hand, and the establishment of Buddhism as a non-Hindu identity of some of those who have been the greatest victims of the Indian caste system and who for that reason wanted to separate themselves from Hinduism, on the other, are the two most significant developments in the relations of Buddhism and Hinduism in India in the modern period. Other elements of growth of Buddhism in modern India have been the immigration of Buddhist refugees from Tibet from the 1950s onward and the establishment of Dharamsala as the center of Tibetan Buddhism, the activities and establishment of a number of centers of Satya Narayan Goenka’s vipassanā meditation movement from 1969 onward, increased pilgrimage to the Buddhist sacred sites, and building of a number of new Buddhist grand monuments (Jacobsen, 2010), as well as an increased interest of Indian academic institutions in the religion.
Hindu Inclusion of Buddhism
The disappearance of Buddhism from India caused its disappearance partly also from memory. Even the Buddhist sacred sites were in a ruinous condition, many had been forgotten, and some such as the famous Buddhist pilgrimage place of Bodh Gaya had become Hindu sacred sites (Barua, 1934; Kinnard, 1998). In the past, a number of features of the Hindu traditions may have come into being because of influences from Buddhism and the Śramaṇa traditions (Bronkhorst, 2006; Jacobsen, 2013; Jacobsen and Smart, 2006; Jaini, 1970; Joshi, 1983), but this influence of Buddhism on the formation of Hindu traditions has often not been known or accepted by Hindus. Buddhist influences on the Hindu traditions had probably come about because Brahmans impressed with Shramanical ideas changed the vedic tradition from within (Olivelle, 1992, 36), as responses to criticism and because of changes in the Hindu traditions driven by competition with Buddhists for ritual clients and donations (dāna). Central religious ideas of the Śramaṇa traditions, such as punarjanma (rebirth), saṃsāra , karman , mokṣa (liberation), and ahiṃṣā , may have entered the vedic tradition in this way. As systems of related ideas, these concepts became part of the vedic textual traditions for the first time in the last part of the Veda, the Upaniṣads. Changes may also have come about because the power and popularity of the Śramaṇa traditions posed challenges to the vedic traditions. Several of the kings of ancient India were Buddhists, most important among them Aśoka (r. 272-232 BCE, Mauryan Empire), Kaniṣka (r. 78-101 CE, Kushana Empire), and Harṣa (r. 606-647, Harṣa’s empire). Buddhism attracted support from a number of traditional patrons of the Brahmans, and this might have produced hostility (Jaini, 1970, 42).A significant alteration in the Hindu understanding of Buddhism in the modern period was the recognition of a Buddhist influence on the formation of Hindu traditions. Since this Buddhist influence was unknown to many Hindus, and Buddhism was considered a tradition opposed to the Veda, this marked an important change. L.M. Joshi has suggested that in Hinduism it was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) who was “the first to recognize and publicly declare the Hindu indebtedness to the Buddha’s ideas” (Joshi, 1983, 19). The influence of Rabindranath Tagore and others who started to use Buddhist stories in their work has also been referred to (Coward, 1995, 283; Fiske, 1976, 134). L.M. Joshi has correctly called attention to the extraordinariness of this shift in the attitude toward the Buddha. Buddha had indeed earlier, in the mid-first millennium CE (from the 7th cent. CE), been incorporated in the Hindu traditions as an avatāra of Viṣṇu. But this did not necessarily mark an acceptance of a Buddhist influence, and it was probably not an attempt to include Buddhists in the Hindu traditions, as is sometimes believed. Instead, the Buddha’s task as an avatāra was, according to some traditions, to deceive, that is, to make evil beings followers of a mistaken teaching to make sure evil beings did not attain heaven. The mantra that pays homage to the Buddha avatāra reads, namo buddhāya daitya dānava mohine, “Homage to the Buddha who deceived daityas and dānavas” (BhāgP. 10.40.22).
In other words, the incorporation of Buddha as an avatāra of Hinduism denounced Buddhism as a demonic tradition. This interpretation of the Buddha avatāra in Hinduism was a theological construct. Worship of the Buddha avatāra has not been widespread in Hindu temples, but the worship can also be understood as an example of the peaceful coexistence of Buddhists and Hindus, which has been the dominant feature of their relation. Nevertheless, this Hindu tradition of seeing the Buddha as an avatāra of Viṣṇu that came to delude evil people probably also had wide acceptance, as shown in some early Western scholarship on religion in India. The Encyclopedia Britannica, as late as 1842, began its entry on Buddhism by defining the Buddha as “one of the two appearances of Vishnu, assumed for the purpose of deluding the enemies of the gods, and effecting their destruction by leading them to profess heretical opinions, and thus to reject the Hindu religion” (Almond, 1988, 16).
The recognition of a Buddhist influence that was initiated by Vivekananda led to the inclusion of Buddhism in Hinduism. This meant a reversal of earlier ideas of the Buddha avatāra. The Buddha was now seen as a person who successfully purified Hinduism from erroneous practices. “The Buddha was accepted as an avatara who reclaimed Hindus from sanguinary rites and erroneous practices and purified their religion of the numerous abuses which had crept into it,” wrote the Hindu statesman and philosopher S. Radhakrishnan (1888-1975; Holt, 2004, 21). The Buddha thus helped Hindus by initiating necessary changes in their religion; particularly important was the Buddha’s teaching of ahiṃsā, an important symbol for the identity of modern Hinduism. The purpose of the Hindu Buddha was no longer to deceive evil beings who followed a mistaken teaching but to correct the teaching of good people, as a reformer of Hinduism. It was now held that Buddha was born, grew up, and died a Hindu, and that Buddhism was an offshoot of Hinduism. J.C. Holt has correctly underscored the radical newness of this Hindu admiration for the Buddha:
"In light of the Buddha’s critique of Brahmanism and the consequent hostility that it provoked, it is remarkable that the image of the Buddha was eventually rehabilitated and incorporated into many Hindu normative constructions, that the Buddha was eventually embraced by some modern Hindus as one of the greatest teachers of humankind, and that some other Hindus would go so far as to say that the Buddha was, in fact, even born a Hindu" (Holt, 2004, 10).
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Buddhism became recognized as an important part of the heritage and history of India. The recovery of Buddhist monuments had revealed an Indian golden age of the past. The publication and translation of volumes of the Pali Canon had identified a great literary heritage in an ancient Indian language other than Sanskrit. That Buddhism had spread to large parts of Asia and had also become highly regarded in the West was understood as an admiration of Indian values. The creation of modern Buddhism, “which tend[s] to see Buddhism as above all a system of rational and ethical philosophy divorced from the daily practices of the vast majority of Buddhists” (Lopez, 2002, 19), had also made Buddhism attractive to Indian intellectuals (who mostly, however, did not convert; Fiske, 1976, 134-137). For several reasons, therefore, the Buddhist heritage became an important part of Indian nationalism and the construction of the identity of India. This new knowledge was important for the reevaluation of Buddha and Buddhist teachings in modern Hinduism.
Several Hindu intellectuals understood Buddhism as a branch of Hinduism, especially as a school of philosophy that was basically in agreement with Advaita Vedānta. This philosophical system of Śaṅkara had been influenced by Buddhist ideas. Śaṅkara was called a crypto-Buddhist (prachannabauddha) by other teachers of Vedānta because of the similarity they saw between Buddhist philosophy and Śaṅkara’s Vedānta. Many modern Hindu intellectuals reversed also this Buddhist influence on Hinduism and saw instead Buddha as a teacher of Hinduism. “Buddhism is one of our sects,” wrote Vivekananda, and he maintained that “Buddha was one of the saṃnyāsins of the Vedānta.” The Buddha was able to bring out “the truths from the hidden Vedas” (Vivekananda, 1962-1965, vol. I, 22), which meant that the teaching of the Buddha was in reality a vedic philosophy: “The ideas which now are called Buddhism were not his. They were much more ancient” (Vivekananda, 1962-1965, vol. IV, 135; vol. V, 309). According to Vivekananda, therefore, all the essential doctrines of Buddhism were borrowed from the Veda, that is, the Upaniṣads, which according to Vivekananda were pre-Buddhist (Joshi, 1983, 31). Other Hindu intellectuals promoted a similar view of Buddhism as a school of Hinduism and Vedānta. S. Radhakrishnan understood the Buddha as one who accepted the teaching of the Upaniṣads. According to S. Radhakrishnan, the Buddha believed in brahman , only he gave brahman a different name, dharma (truth, the nature of things). S. Radhakrishnan understood the famous last words of the Buddha to mean that one should take refuge in the ātman /brahman (Murti, 1992, 567-605). The great scholar on Dharmaśāstra P.V. Kane in the same way stated that the Buddha continued the tradition of the ancient vedic and Brahmanical seers and was only a reformer of Hinduism (Kane, 1962, 1004-1005). A representative example of this trend in the interpretation of Buddhism in 20th-century Hindu philosophy reads:
"Buddhism and Vedānta should not be viewed as two opposed systems but only as different stages in the development of the same central thought which starts with the Upaniṣads, finds its indirect support in Buddha, its elaboration in Mahāyāna Buddhism, its open revival in Gauḍapāda, which reaches its zenith in Shaṅkara and culminates in post-Shaṅkarites. So far the similarities between Buddhism and Vedānta are concerned, they are so many and so strong that by no stretch of imagination can they be denied or explained otherwise. So far as the differences are concerned, they are few and mostly they are not vital. Most of them rest on a grave misunderstanding of Buddhism" (Sharma, 1960, 318).
The general view is that the Buddha did not teach anything new, but simply restated the teaching of the Upaniṣads and is therefore grounded in Vedānta. A fundamental doctrine of Buddhism, such as the theory of no-self (Skt. anātman; Pal. anatta), is denied as part of Buddhism, because Buddhism “does not deny the existence of the true Ātman, the Pure Self, which is Pure Consciousness and which is the only reality” (Sharma, 1960, 325). Likewise, according to this type of Hinduization of the teaching of Buddhism, the concept of śūnya means not only māyā (illusion) and refers to the dharmas (constituents of human experience) as empty, but also brahman since appearances imply that there is a reality of which they are appearances. Here Hindu views, which are quite contrary to the teaching of Buddhism, are projected on Buddhism, and the justification for it is that Buddhism at the outset had been defined as a school of Vedānta, thus there could be no difference between Buddhism and Vedānta. Other common Hindu interpretations of Buddhism are the identification of the Buddhist nirvāṇa with the brahman of the Upaniṣads and the claim that the doctrine of no-self (anātman) is a denial only of the lower self.
These interpretations reduce Buddhism to a form of Hindu philosophy and imply a denial of a separate identity of Buddhists and Buddhism. The inclusiveness of Hinduism exemplified above was expressed also in the Constitution of India, which uses the term "Hindus" to include Buddhists, stating that “the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly” The Hindu nationalists have included Buddhism in their concept of hindutva, and the concept “Indic religion” does sometimes have similar implications, seeming to imply (mistakenly) that Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism are split offs from Hinduism However, Hindu teachers such as Vivekananda also accepted that Buddhism was a protest against the religion of the Veda because of its sacrificial violence. But, it was argued, the Buddha was mistaken in breaking up the tradition. It was because he did not understand the harmony of religions, and he therefore “introduced sectarianism” (Joshi, 1983). Other times Vivekananda traced the origin of Buddhism to the struggles between Kṣatriyas and Brāhmaṇas (Brahmans) and stated that Buddhism opened the religion of the Upaniṣads to all castes (Joshi, 1983, 31). Another element in the Hindu view of Buddhism is the explanation of the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism as the same as between Judaism and Christianity, only with the difference that Judaism rejected Christ, but Hindus started to worship the Buddha (Joshi, 1983, 32). This view was probably influenced by similar speculations of Western orientalists who compared the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism to that of Catholicism and Protestantism.
Admiration of the Buddha characterized the view of many Hindu intellectuals during the 20th century, both secular intellectuals and religious gurus who sometimes drew on both Hindu and Buddhist traditions of yoga and meditation. However, the admiration of the Buddha was not shared by all. The Hindu nationalist V. Savarkar, one of the founding figures of the political ideology of Hindu nationalism, while seeing Buddhism as a sect of Hinduism, nevertheless saw the dominance of Buddhism and its emphasis on meditation and ahiṃsā in ancient India as the cause of foreign invasions. V.P. Kane saw tantric Buddhism as the cause of decay of India (Kane, 1962, 1029-1030) and supported his view by quoting Vivekananda, who wrote: "The most hideous ceremonies, the most horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever wrote or the human brain ever conceived, the most bestial forms that ever passed under the name of religion, have all been the creation of degraded Buddhism." Nevertheless, for Vivekananda, this condemnation of tantric Buddhism did not cancel out his admiration for the Buddha and his teaching; on the contrary, Vivekananda wrote, “Hinduism has become so great only by absorbing the ideas of the Buddha” (Vivekananda, vol. IV, 507).
Mahatma Gandhi similarly argued that the Buddha had recovered the truth of the Veda and considered Buddhism part of Hinduism:
"Gautama was saturated with the best that was in Hinduism and gave life to some of the teachings that were buried in the Veda and which were overgrown with weeds. His great Hindu spirit cut its way through the forest of words, which had overlaid the golden truth that was the Vedas" (extract from a speech by Gandhi held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1928)
The Buddhist Symbols of the Nation of India
The lion capital of the Aśoka pillar from Sarnath is the national emblem of India, and the Aśoka wheel (cakra) from the base of the same Aśoka pillar from Sarnath is placed in the center of the Indian flag. That the two main symbols of the nation of India have strong Buddhist associations has to do with not only the Hindu celebration of a golden age of India as an ancient Buddhist civilization, but also the rebirth of Buddhism in modern India. The first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a distaste for religion in public life, but he greatly admired Buddhism, because he saw in it a scientific and ethical attitude. There were no large Buddhist communities in India at the time of independence in 1947, so the lion capital and the Aśoka wheel were not thought to symbolize a living community but a period of history. The main reason for the use of these symbols with strong Buddhist associations for the national emblem and the national flag is that it was suggested by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), the most important Buddhist leader of modern India, but who had at that time not formally converted, even though he had proclaimed already in 1935 that while he was born a Hindu, he did not intend to die one. Ambedkar was one of the six members of the flag committee constituted in June 1947. Ambedkar proudly recalled that he got the lion capital and the Aśoka wheel adopted without anyone in the Constituent Assembly opposing it (Beltz, 2005). The fact that the Sarnath lion capital became the national emblem and the Aśoka wheel a national symbol on the flag because of Ambedkar is not often recognized. Ambedkar lobbied for the adoption of a number of other Buddhist features to become part of the Indian state between 1947 and 1950, not only the wheel of dharma (the teaching of the Buddha) on the flag and the Aśoka lion as the emblem of the nation, but also the inscription of a Buddhist aphorism on the pediment of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the residence of the president of the republic (Jaffrelot, 2005), and for the buddha jayantī (the birthday celebration of the Buddha) to feature in India’s official calendar. Inclusion of these Buddhist features was conceived as a celebration of India’s glorious past as a great Buddhist civilization, as was the great 2,500-year commemoration of buddha jayantī in New Delhi in 1956.Rebirth of Buddhism in India
The Hindu views of Buddhism described above were mainly those of Brahmans. The conversions to Buddhism, which mark the rebirth of Buddhism as a living religion in India, were, however, mostly among low castes . The rebirth of Buddhism in India was due not to Hindus considering the Buddha to be a Hindu, but to untouchables (Dalits) who had never been accepted as fully Hindu and who, by the act of conversion, wanted to separate themselves from Hinduism and escape the doctrines of caste and untouchability. They emphasized the disagreements and conflicts between Buddhism and Hinduism and considered the Buddha a main opponent of Hindus. By converting to a different religion, they wanted to be identified by religion and not by caste.The most successful movement of conversions to Buddhism in modern India was led by B.R. Ambedkar, who converted in 1956 in a ceremony in the city of Nagpur together with several hundred thousand members of the Mahar caste, the caste to which Ambedkar belonged. Most of contemporary India’s around ten million Buddhists belong to the Buddhist movement founded by Ambedkar. Quite opposite to the modern Hindu tendencies of identifying Hinduism and Buddhism with the universal teaching of Vedānta as the truth of all religions, Ambedkar stated that “[t]here cannot be a thesis more false than the thesis that all religions are true” (Ambedkar, 1995, 36). Ambedkar believed that the Dalits could not attain justice in Hinduism and advised them to convert to another religion. Ambedkar argued that the Dalits were descendants of the early Buddhists and that their ancestors had been ostracized from the community by the Hindus who had migrated into India and demanded that they convert to their religion. Those who refused had been given the status of untouchable. The Dalits were the original inhabitants, according to Ambedkar, and when they now converted to Buddhism, they returned to their original religion.
The rebirth of Buddhism in India did not, however, start with Ambedkar’s conversion in 1956, but in 1891 (considered “the most memorable year in the history of Indian Buddhism” [Ahir, 1989, 4] since Ambedkar also was born in that year) with the founding by the Sri Lankan Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala (Don David Hewavitarne; “the first to hoist the flag of Buddhism in modern India,” Ahir, 1989, 5) of the Mahabodhi Society, the goal of which was the revival of Buddhism in India and gaining control of the ancient Buddhist pilgrimage places. (The other memorable year is 1956, which marked both the 2,500th buddha jayantī celebration and the conversion of Ambedkar and his followers to Buddhism.) Dharmapala had been involved with the Theosophical Society but broke off his connection with them, because he thought they had too favorable a view of Hinduism, which contrasted with Dharmapala’s anti-Hindu sentiments. In 1891 he had visited the restored Mahābodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya and discovered that the temple was run by Śaiva priests, which had been the case since the 15th century. Bodh Gaya was, and still is, a Hindu-Buddhist shared sacred space. He thereafter founded the Mahabodhi Society in Sri Lanka (the headquarters was moved to Calcutta in 1892).
Ambedkar was also not the first Dalit to redefine Buddhism as a Dalit religion of liberation. In Tamil Nadu, as early as 1898, Pandit Iyothee Thass (1845-1914) together with other Dalits and with the help of Colonel Olcott of the Theosophical Society organized the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras (Aloysius, 1998; Webster, 2002). The movements of Thass remained small. The doctrines of being Tamil, being the original inhabitants of India, being Buddhists, and the rejection of Hindu rituals and replacing them with Buddhist rituals were central to the Buddhist identity formation of the movement, as well as “a persistent polemic against Hinduism” (Webster, 2002, 31). This movement lost momentum after 1935, because after that year, one had to declare oneself a Hindu to benefit from the reservation system instituted by the British rulers of India. (For other early converts, see Ahir, 1989; Ramteke, 1983.)
Ambedkar’s Buddhism
Ambedkar was a leading politician before and after India’s Independence, and he was the leading spokesperson for the untouchable/ex-untouchable castes and “by far the greatest figure ever born to the untouchable communities” (Deliége, 1999, 175). As the father of the Indian Constitution, he had great impact on the shaping of the Indian state. For untouchables, Ambedkar argued, to become liberated from the repression of caste, most important was the necessity to break away from Hinduism. Already in speeches in 1936, he encouraged all untouchables to leave Hinduism and convert to another religion as that was their only chance of being treated as equal by Hindus (Ambedkar, 2004). He advised them to adopt any religion that would give them equality of status and treatment. In another speech, in which conversion to Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism were discussed as possibilities, he ended his speech by telling the story of Buddha’s parinirvāṇa and quoted his last words in his own retelling: “Believe in yourself, don’t be dependent on others. Be truthful. Always take refugee in the truth and do not surrender to anybody” (Ambedkar, 2004, 32). He then concluded, “I also take refuge in the Buddha” (Ambedkar, 2004, 32). As early as 1943, Ambedkar visited Buddhist shrines and discussed plans for the revival of Buddhism in India (Ahir, 1994, 7). When he established his first educational institution in Bombay, he named it Siddharth College (Ahir, 1994, 7). In 1948 Ambedkar had P. Lakshmi Narasu’s book The Essence of Buddhism, a book that influenced his interpretation of Buddhism as the religion of reason (Beltz, 2005), translated to Marathi so that persons who thought about converting to Buddhism could read it. In the preface, he noted that he was writing a book on Buddhism (the book that was published in 1957 under the title The Buddha and His Dharma). In 1950 Ambedkar, in an article “Buddha and the Future of His Religion,” concluded that “Buddhism is the only religion which the world can have” (Ahir, 1982, 25). Ambedkar taught that the three jewels that he himself believed in – liberty, equality, and fraternity – were derived from Buddhism and the teachings of the Buddha.Ambedkar’s interpretations of Buddhism were shaped by the revival of Buddhism, which had already occurred in India, and by the Western orientalists’ creation of a homogeneous early Buddhism. Many of his interpretations are typical of modern Buddhism. Ambedkar was in contact with the Mahabodhi Society in India (Beltz, 2005) and was probably influenced by Dharmapala’s modernist interpretations of Buddhism. In Ambedkar’s interpretation, Buddha’s teaching was defined as a rational and logical teaching comparable to modern political philosophies. What was not rational and logical could not be the teaching of the Buddha (Omvedt, 2003, 7). Typical of modern Buddhism was the claim that it represented a recovery of a postulated “real” Buddhism, but Ambedkar understood well the difference between historical Buddhism, the contemporary forms of Buddhism, and the Buddhism to which he himself converted. His term for the Buddhism that he founded, therefore, was Navayāna (“New Vehicle”), which he nevertheless claimed to be a return to the real teaching of “early Buddhism.” For Ambedkar Buddhism was oriented around building a just and happy society, and he excluded those parts of Buddhism that did not support his own egalitarian social democratic philosophy. Suffering was caused by poverty and caste, not ignorance, and the message of the Buddha was how to abolish poverty, caste, and the injustice done to the marginalized. The supernatural attributes of the Buddha, meditation, and ideas of karma and rebirth were not part of Ambedkar’s Buddhism. The ritualism of Buddhism was not real Buddhism, according to Ambedkar. He also reversed the relationship between monks and laypeople; the role of the monks was not to dominate but to serve society (Ambedkar, 1992). Monks can be the hope of Buddhism only if they are social servants (Omvedt, 2003). He did not accept the common interpretation of karma and rebirth, since it seemed to be based on an idea of the self. The idea of karma was contradicted by the doctrine of anatta (Pal. non-self), and the idea of karma seems also to legitimate untouchability. The notion of rebirth did not mean reincarnation but transformation. Ambedkar also denied that the four noble truths were part of Buddhism. The reason for the Buddha‘s renunciation was not the sight of a sick, an old, and a dead man, but a clash between the Śākyas and the Koliyas. Far from arguing that suffering was an inherent part of the worldly existence, the point of the Buddha was that it is possible to create a world free from suffering. The message was that humans are able to create a society based on righteousness by their own effort. For Ambedkar Buddhism was not a renunciant tradition aiming at individual salvation. “Dhamma is not concerned with life after death, nor with rituals and ceremonies; but its centre is man and relation of man to man,” wrote Ambedkar (1992, 83). The salvific goal of Buddhism, nirvāṇa, was reinterpreted to mean a just society.
Buddhism and Dalits
Ambedkar believed that “Hinduism and the practice of untouchability were inseparable” and that “the only solution was to abandon Hinduism” (Beltz, 2005, 36). As part of providing a new social and religious identity for the Dalits, Ambedkar connected the untouchables to early Buddhism. It was Brahmanism that transformed these Buddhists to untouchables, argued Ambedkar. Untouchability was a punishment for not becoming Hindu. In his book The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? Ambedkar explained that when the Hindus came to power, those Buddhists who were not willing to become Hindus were segregated and had to live in separate quarters outside the villages, and they became the untouchables. This is a modern myth that Ambedkar fashioned, and the historical evidence to defend this thesis is lacking. The caste system, he argued, solidified after the defeat of Buddhism by Hinduism, and the Buddhists were redefined as untouchables. Here Ambedkar based himself also on the earlier thinkers of the anticaste movement such as Jotirao Phule and Iyothee Thass, and already by “the 1920s this identification with early Buddhists was an underlying theme among many Dalit movements” (Omvedt, 2003, 18). Ambedkar's view is summed up by A.K. Narain:"[U]ntouchability was born out of the struggle between Buddhism and Brahmanism. According to him [Ambedkar] the Untouchables were originally Buddhists and their untouchability was a punishment for sticking to Buddhism. He called them the 'Broken Men' who were forced to live outside the village from the very beginning. He further believed that the root of their untouchability was beef-eating and that Untouchability became intimately connected with the ban on cow-slaughter which was made a capital offence by the Gupta Kings of the 4th century and thus he could say with some confidence that Untouchability was born sometimes about 400 A.D." (Narain, 1994b, 85).
Ambedkar’s primary aim of conversion to Buddhism was to gain a new religious and social identity for the Dalits. For Hindus, Ambedkar thought, when interacting with untouchables who were also Hindus, the identity of being untouchables was most important, while when interacting with Christian untouchables, the identity of them being Christians became foremost. Religion overwrote caste in a sense. Changing religion, therefore, argued Ambedkar, offered a way out of untouchability.
Buddhism as a Critique of Hinduism
Ambedkar’s view of religion developed “through his argument with Hinduism and not through direct, self-conscious Buddhist influence” (Webster, 2002, 51). He knew Hinduism from experience, but Buddhism he encountered mainly through books. Ambedkar’s experience with growing up as an untouchable in a Hindu-dominated society and his political opposition to M.K. Gandhi are at the foundation of his conversion to Buddhism. He experienced serious discrimination especially in his childhood and youth. That Gandhi in his conflict with Ambedkar about a separate electorate for untouchables defended the Hindu system of caste hierarchy caused Ambedkar to declare that although he was born a Hindu, he would “not die a Hindu.” Gandhi thought caste was too central to Hinduism as a religion to be given up. Ambedkar was active in the movement for gaining access for untouchables to the Hindu temples closed to them, but many Hindus opposed the idea. This reality of exclusion is behind his later conversion to Buddhism. Why should he want to be integrated into a religious community that fought against integrating them? Ambedkar clashed with Gandhi on the issue of untouchables, and he doubted the will of Gandhi to put an end to untouchability, even if Gandhi claimed to speak for them. Ambedkar wanted to use the possible independence of India as a way to end untouchability. At the Round Table Conference in London in 1930, Ambedkar demanded a separate electorate to the untouchables and representation, similar to the demands made by Muslims for the Muslim communities. When Gandhi met Ambedkar in 1931, Gandhi claimed himself to represent untouchables in India. Gandhi recognized only Muslims and Sikhs as minorities. For Gandhi, to accept the untouchables as a separate community meant that Hindus would be divided, and he thought the British would exploit it in their “split and rule” policy. In 1932 Gandhi did a “fast until death” to stop the untouchable from gaining separate electorate. Ambedkar had to accept Gandhi’s claim from fear of retaliation against Dalits. R. Deliége has suggested that Ambedkar’s subsequent conversion to Buddhism was a reaction in particular to Gandhi’s Hinduism (Deliége, 1999). His debate with Gandhi on caste had proven to him that Hinduism could not be separated from caste (for the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate, see Omvedt, 2003, 248-253; Omdvedt, 2004, 56-72; Jaffrelot, 2005, 52-73).An aspect of Buddhism that made it attractive for Ambedkar was that Buddhism was opposed to the Veda (the revealed texts of the Brahmanical tradition), the status of the Brahmans, and their sacrificial religion, and he thus undermined the legitimacy of Brahmanical ritual power and the caste system. Ambedkar saw traditional Indian religious culture as constituted by two coexisting religious traditions, the Brahmanical Hindu and the Buddhist, and Ambedkar understood these two traditions to be in a relationship of permanent moral conflict. Ambedkar argued for two main differences between Buddhism and Hinduism in the essay “Buddha and the Future of His Religion,” published in the Maha Bodhi Journal (1950). Hinduism was a religion that is not founded on morality, argued Ambedkar, “whatever morality Hinduism has, it is not an integral part of it,” while the “the Religion of the Buddha is morality…Buddhist Religion is nothing if not morality” (Ambedkar, 1992, 31). Secondly, Ambedkar argued that “the social gospel of Hinduism is inequality,” while Buddha “was the greatest opponent of Chaturvarna [the caste system]” and “did everything to uproot it” (Ambedkar, 1992, 33). Consequently, when Ambedkar converted at the rally in Nagpur October 14, 1956, after he had taken “refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha” from a Burmese monk, U. Chandramani, and when he turned to the masses gathered there and administered the vows to them, he added 22 vows in addition. These 22 vows can be divided into two groups, those that break with a Hindu identity and those that affirm Buddhism. Those openly directed at Hinduism state:
- 1.
- I will not regard Brahmā, Viṣṇu, or Mahādev (Śiva) as gods, and I will not worship them.
- 2.
- I will not regard Rām or Kṛṣṇa as gods, and I will not worship them.
- 3.
- I will not honor Gaurī (Pārvatī), Gaṇapati, or any other god of Hinduism, and I will not worship them.
- 4.
- I do not believe that god has taken avatār.
- 5.
- I agree that the propaganda that the Buddha was the avatār of Viṣṇu is false and mischievous.
- 6.
- I will not do the ceremony śrāddhapakṣa (for the departed) or piṇḍadān (gifts in honor of deceased).
- 7.
- (= 8) I will have no rituals done by Brahmans.
- 8.
- (= 19) I renounce the Hindu religion, which has obstructed the evolution of my former humanity and considered humans unequal and inferior. (See Omvedt, 2003, 262, for the full list of the 22 vows.)
Researchers have noted that in many homes of the Indian Buddhists images of Hindu gods and goddesses are placed next to those of Ambedkar and the Buddha, and that especially the worship of goddesses is widespread, and that this points to a coexistence of Hinduism and Buddhism. For many Buddhists in India, Hindu and Buddhist rituals are not mutually exclusive, but there is nevertheless also a public pressure to denounce Hindu worship (Beltz, 2005; Shastree, 1996). The temples of this new Buddhist tradition contain images of the Buddha and Ambedkar, but it is the pictures and statues of Ambedkar that are the main symbols of the Buddhist identity, and pictures of him “are omnipresent and are the normative decorative item for every Buddhist ritual and ceremony” (Beltz, 2005, 162). New rituals have been created such as a new ritual calendar, and old Hindu rituals have been transformed into Buddhist rituals by adding recitation of Buddhist Pali texts. In addition to the buddha jayantī (Buddha’s birth; Apr 14), Ambedkar’s conversion (Oct 14, but often celebrated on the vijayadaśamī, the full moon day of the month āśvina) and death (Dec 6) are important festivals. The saṃskāras include recitation of the Buddhist Pali formulas of the tisaraṇa (Pal. three refugees) and the pañcaśīla (five precepts) that mark these rituals as Buddhist. However, some Ambedkar Buddhists do not favor ritual practice, because they consider it superstition and against Ambedkar’s vision, and this points to a tension in the Buddhism tradition founded by Ambedkar between religion and political ideology.
Conclusion
Most Dalits in India have been attached to Hindu traditions and have remained so. They were denied the use of temples but were not excluded from all aspects of religious life. Ambedkar thought Buddhism could give the Dalits a religion that was without caste, a religious tradition for intellectual development, religious rituals without Brahmanical supremacy, a religion without the concepts of impurity and untouchability, and that Buddhism would create a distinct identity that Dalits who converted to Islam and Christianity did not get. Ambedkar has been criticized for ignorance about the Hindu subaltern traditions with which he could have networked and built alliances (Rodrigues, 1994, 44). It is further argued that Ambedkar’s “understanding of Hinduism was too stamped with orientalism rather than based on any original perception of lived experience” and that the “critique of a stereotyped Hinduism confined him to the Dalit constituency without making Hinduism critical” (Rodrigues, 1994, 44). But contrary to this, J.C.B. Webster has made the case that Ambedkar was "a Dalit activist intellectual whose task was not to appreciate Hinduism…in its fullness and complexity but to deliver his people from oppression. Hinduism, as he experienced and understood it, stood in the way" (Webster, 2002, 53).Nevertheless, there have been several emancipation movements among the Dalits such as the Satnami movement among Camars in Chhattisgarh that was founded in the 1820s by Ghāsidās, the Ad Dharm movement in Punjab started in the 1920s by Mangoo Ram, and the Ravidāsīs in Uttar Pradesh. These movements have done much to spread the idea of equality in India. The Buddhist Ambedkar tradition is among the larger ones, but less than 5% of Dalits are Buddhists. However, around 75% of Mahars are Buddhists, the majority of the Jatav Camars in Uttar Pradesh, and small groups of Dalits in Gujarat, Punjab, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh have also become Buddhists (Lobo, 1996). Buddhism in India has become identified to some degree with Dalit culture and the ideology of justice for the marginalized, and in contemporary India Buddhism and the Dalit movement are two sides of the same coin (Beltz, 2005, 243).
The dynamics of the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism are shaped by localities and histories. Relations between the religions may differ, and the terms "Hindu" and "Buddhist" may be less relevant in some localities (for Nepal, see Gellner, 1992), and in other localities such as Sri Lanka with parallel ethnic identities (most Hindus are Tamils and most Buddhists are Sinhalese), long periods of ethnic violence have impacted the relations (see Seneviratne, 1999; Holt, 2004). But in the modern period, it is only in India that mass conversions from Hinduism to Buddhism have taken place.
The discovery of Buddhism as a religion of a golden age of India’s past and the subsequent inclusion of Buddhism in Hinduism as a form of Advaita Vedānta, on the one hand, and the establishment of Buddhism as a non-Hindu identity of some of those who have been the greatest victims of the Indian caste system and who for that reason wanted to separate themselves from Hinduism, on the other, are the two most significant developments in the relations of Buddhism and Hinduism in India in the modern period. Other elements of growth of Buddhism in modern India have been the immigration of Buddhist refugees from Tibet from the 1950s onward and the establishment of Dharamsala as the center of Tibetan Buddhism, the activities and establishment of a number of centers of Satya Narayan Goenka’s vipassanā meditation movement from 1969 onward, increased pilgrimage to the Buddhist sacred sites, and building of a number of new Buddhist grand monuments (Jacobsen, 2010), as well as an increased interest of Indian academic institutions in the religion.
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