By Owen M. LynchThis was a book review of Reconstructing the World: B. R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India that appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 2 (May 2005): 497-499. I’m posting it since it’s relevant to my blog series “The Oppression of Shudras/Dalits in India: A Marxist and Hindu Liberationist Perspective.” This should explain better to those readers out there who are curious but who don’t know who Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is.
The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.
Reconstructing the World: B. R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India. Edited by Surendra Jondhale and Johannes Beltz. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.viii, 316 pp. Rs 995 (cloth).
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit (ex-Untouchable) and major architect of India's constitution, was arguably India's greatest modern intellectual. His social and political writings and ideas have become more influential today than when they were first written. Just before his 1956 death, Ambedkar completed his own interpretation of Buddhism, The Buddha and His Dhamma (Bombay: Siddharth Publication, 4th ed. 1991), "the" sacred book for many of his followers today. Reconstructing the World: B. R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India's fifteen authors-too many for separate mention in eight hundred words-make a major contribution insofar as they synthesize, contextualize, and explain Ambedkar's interpretation of Buddhism and thereby demolish some of the many misunderstandings and misrepresentations of his thought.
A reader might read Yashwant Sumant's article first because it best summarizes Ambedkar's thoughts on religion and Buddhism. Sumant demonstrates how Ambedkar, a rationalist, concluded that so-called popular religions surrender reason to transcendental gods and dogmas. They thereby separate themselves from morality, as does Hinduism's rejection of liberty, equality, and freedom, and its unjust treatment of Dalits through its practice of graded inequality. Contrariwise, Ambedkar's rationalist Buddhism is a this-worldly social praxis, a morality rejecting all social barriers. For these reasons, as Johannes Beltz's article shows, many Dalits today reject Hinduism and convert to Buddhism.
Ambedkar's Buddhism is often pejoratively called "neo-Buddhism." That implies that Dalit Buddhists are still Hindus, a judgment that they reject in their own sense of identity (Beltz, p. 261). "Neo-Buddhism" also implies departure from traditional Buddhism because it rejects the four noble truths as pessimistic and denying hope to humans rather than providing motivation to change their everyday life's conditions through Buddhist social praxis. Pradeep Gokhale's article, however, responds that even if Ambedkar's Buddhism is a reconstruction of traditional Buddhism, "it may or may not be so for original Buddhism" (p. 124). Moreover, Christopher Queen's article convincingly argues that activist Buddhists in Southeast Asia and elsewhere have used mass media, public relations, and legislation to pursue this-worldly change, yet they are not labeled with the prefix "neo." Rather, Queen demonstrates that Ambedkar's transformations retain "the central elements of the Buddhist vision" (p. 146). More telling are Adèle Fiske and Christoph Emmerich, who, following Richard Gombrich, argue that "orthodoxy is by far the lesser issue in the history of ruptures within the Buddhist tradition compared to the role of orthopraxy. ... If Ambedkar departed from any Buddhist tradition, it was on the grounds of a challenge to orthopraxy through his own ideas of political and social practice" (p. 112).
Gary Tartakov's article notes that Ambedkar called his Buddhism Navayana (p. 152). Navayana is not "neo"; it is a fourth vehicle (yana) among Buddhism's traditional three. Ambedkar's Buddhism, as many of the book's authors argue, is based on a deep study of Buddhist texts and scholarly writings about them, just as The Buddha and His Dhamma is organized around a profound understanding of events in the Buddha's life, as Eleanor Zelliot's article notes. Many of the book's authors argue that Ambedkar did not intend Navayâna for Dalits only. He meant it as a universal message for all humanity. Its goal is individual and collective emancipation from nonrational thought, economic exploitation, and unjust social difference.
A keyword in Ambedkar's Buddhist discourse is "justice," meaning liberty, equality, and fraternity. Some, therefore, say that Navayâna is mostly repackaged Western liberal thought. Yet, Ambedkar said that he had learned everything about those words' meaning from the Buddha. Eugenia Yurolova's article, like Olivier Herrenschmidt's, adverts to Ambedkar's statement that equality has no value without liberty and fraternity, that the three must coexist and do so only by following the Budhha's way. Ambedkar, Yurolova says, felt that democracy was the best form of government but not in its Western form, in which liberty had swallowed equality, producing class difference and a market ideologically supported by social Darwinism (pp. 86-92). In this reviewer's opinion, Ambedkar's views here resonate loudly in contemporary India's struggle between meritocracy (liberty) and reservations (equality and freedom).
Reconstructing the World's second major contribution is its introducing readers to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Buddhist movements among Dalits other than Ambedkar's Buddhism. G. Aloysius's article succinctly illuminates Pandit Iyothee Thass's 1898 establishment in Tamilnadu of Sakya, later the South Indian Buddhist movement. While similar to Ambedkar's Buddhism in ideas and goals, it tantalizingly differed in one respect. Sakya had an earthbound transcendent God: "[A]Il those men and women who followed the path of righteousness and wisdom and lived a life of total selflessness, and thus through their own character, conduct and life-contribution had become indispensable to and immortal in the lives of successive generations" (p. 212).
Maren Bellwinkel's revealing article narrates historical Buddhist influences in Uttar Pradesh. In Kanpur, Archarya Ishvardatt Medharthi (1900-1971) tried to reconcile Buddhism with the sant tradition, while in Lucknow, Bodhanand Mahastavir (1874-1952) established a Buddhist temple and advocated for Dalits. His followers founded the press influential among Dalits, Bahujan Kalyan Prakashan, and actively participated in Ambedkar's Republican Party of India. Also around 1937, two Sri Lankan-trained but Western-born monks made a missionary visit to Kanpur. Finally, in 1981 Kanpur's newly formed Dalit Panthers organized its first mass conversion to Ambedkar's Buddhism.
Reconstructing the World offers stimulating and provocative analyses of Ambedkar's religious legacy: Buddhism's contemporary revival in India and its universal relevance for humanity.
Copyright Association for Asian Studies, Inc. May 2005
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