Nishikant Waghmare has sent us this article with a request to publish it. --Editor
One way of looking at the
coming of Buddhism to the West, and the beginnings of the true interpenetration
of these profound worldviews, is to see it as a fourth yana [vehicle]. If we
look at "Buddhism" as a tradition and we use that term in the singular
we’re really covering a multitude of practices and beliefs. To focus on the
kinds of beliefs and practices that people like ourselves are attempting in the
name of Buddhism raises fundamental questions about whether we’re doing
something brand new, or whether in fact the seeds of what we’re doing were
planted by Shakyamuni Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago.
To my way of thinking, Dr.
B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) is the most articulate and perhaps radical spokesman
for a new turning of the wheel. Ambedkar, I think, really went to the heart of
this problem, and left us all with a provocative vision of Buddhism for the
modern world.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
He was born among the so-called
"untouchables" in India, but through his remarkable genius he became
one of the most prominent personalities of his time. After India achieved
independence in 1947, Ambedkar became the first law minister in independent
India (what we might call the Attorney General). As such, he was the principal
architect of India’s Constitution. It’s the world’s longest democratic
constitution, and includes many articles against the practice of
un-touch-ability. It also provides for what we call affirmative action; people
from all backgrounds should have access to education, scholarships and
government jobs, but the preferences would be given to the lowest people in
society. Ambedkar was responsible for all that.
In the last five years of
his life he made good on a promise he made in 1935, "I was born a Hindu,
but I’m determined not to die a Hindu. I’m going to figure out which of the
religions offers me and my community the most dignity and humanity." Many
who knew him and study him think Ambedkar had Buddhism in mind all along,
because he was deeply moved by a book on the life of the Buddha given him upon
graduation from high school. But if he had declared himself a Buddhist in the
1930s he would have lost a lot of his clout as a negotiator with the British and
with other Hindus like Gandhi in the drama of emerging independence. So he held
off until 1951 when he retired from the government, and spent the last five
years of his life preparing for a huge conversion ceremony on October 14th,
1956, which is the traditional date of Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism.
The year 1956 saw the
worldwide celebration of the twenty-five hundredth year of the birth of Buddha
Shakyamuni. So the date and the place—Nagpur in central India, a city which
was associated with the preservation of Buddhist teachings by the Nagas, the
serpent people— was highly symbolic of the rebirth of Buddhism in a land which
had seen no Buddhism for virtually a thousand years. Nearly a half-million
untouchables took refuge at Ambedkar’s conversion ceremony; and then six weeks
later, he died of a long-standing illness.
In the years since his
great conversion, Ambedkar had become a symbol of hope for low-caste people
throughout India but his Buddhist movement since then has had to struggle along
with support from outsiders like Sangharakshita and his British Buddhist
followers, though it also attracted some talented leaders within India and the
untouchable community. Where it’s going, and whether it’s growing and
flourishing, is anybody’s guess. But we have Ambedkar’s own thoughts and
writings to consider for our purposes today.
Choice and Adaptation
I’d like to mention two
proposals that he made in his effort to adapt Buddhism to modern
circumstances—not just for the untouchables, but really for the modern world.
The first is that one must choose what religion one will follow, and the second
is that one must adapt it to fit one’s needs.
One premise of
Ambedkar’s religious sensibility was that as modern (or even postmodern)
people we are forced to choose our belief system. It’s not only possible for
people to become heretics, but we have what Peter Berger called the
"heretical imperative." (The word heresy, by the way, comes from the
Greek root, which means simply "to choose"; it means to choose a
belief and a lifestyle.) We really are forced by the world today to choose who
we will be and what we will believe, because the grip of tradition on our minds
has now been loosened by modern education, by science, by travel and by global
communication. We are now faced with so many options for belief and practice
that we have to sit down quietly with ourselves and say, "What do I
believe? What shall I do with my life? Who will be my friends and allies? Where
should I put my extracurricular energies?" These are things that all people
in the world are now facing. (There are certainly repressive countries where
those options are limited, but I think most in the world today recognize the
goal of being able to make yourself, remake yourself, and point yourself in some
direction.)
Following his dramatic
announcement in 1935C.E. that he would adopt a new religion, Ambedkar considered
Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism as possible options for him
in India. They were all active religions, except for Buddhism, which, although
originating in India had vanished by the twelfth century. Ambedkar asked,
"Which of these traditions offers my community the most dignity, the most
inspiration, the most empowerment to move ahead and to realize a good life or a
good future or a good symbolic universe, a universe that makes me feel that life
is worth living and there’s a future for the world?"
Buddhism seemed to offer
the most for Ambedkar and his followers because it was an indigenous religion;
it wasn’t, like Christianity or Islam--something imported. It also offered
something unique, a kind of reticence to lock onto fixed beliefs or practices.
There was this notion within Buddhism that you must experiment within the
laboratory of your own life to see what works and what makes sense.
This helped with
Ambedkar’s second principle: the notion that once I’ve chosen a major
tradition or body of thought, I must adjust it so that it works in the
circumstances that I face or that my community faces. Ambedkar echoed the
discourse in the Kalama Sutta in which the Buddha said, "Don’t blindly
trust teachings and writings, but test them in your own life." This idea of
testing for yourself and questioning authority has become a hallmark of Western
or modern Buddhism.
The heart of Buddhism was
an attitude, or, perhaps, Buddhism was an attitude of heart. The Buddha, of
course, was a human being representing a potential that all human beings have.
So all of that went into Ambedkar’s search for a tradition that could be
adaptable to a culture in which pluralism was present, but in which a
significant proportion of people felt dis-empowered and dehumanized. Buddhism,
for Ambedkar, emerged as a model for becoming a full human being. Yet it was a
model still in need of some changes.
The Limitations of Buddhism
In his final work, The
Buddha and His Dhamma, Ambedkar pointed to four problems he saw with the
Buddhist tradition as received from the past, four issues that conflict with our
modern sensibility. We should not forget that Ambedkar was trained in the West;
he was a follower of John Dewey, the eminent American pragmatist
philosopher.
1) The first thing that
Ambedkar questioned was the legend of the Buddha’s isolation, as a prince,
from normal human experiences. How could a twenty-nine year-old man suddenly
discover illness, suffering, and death, and then abandon his family in a fit of
existential angst? Wasn’t that a little late for someone to discover these
things? So there’s something about the Buddha’s story that’s a little odd
to our way of thinking, because we know that young people today confront these
realities of life during their adolescent years and we encourage them to wrestle
with these things and resolve them in certain ways.
2) The second issue has to
do with the causes of suffering. The second noble truth says that suffering is a
result of craving and ignorance; therefore if someone is suffering we have to
say, "Change your attitude. Practice meditation. Practice morality and your
life will improve." But might there be circumstances in which there are
innocent victims? There are children or whole communities who are marginalized
and oppressed by social, political and economic forces that are essentially
beyond their control, unless they somehow collectively organize a resistance to
oppression. Can Buddhism encompass the notion of social change, which has both
victims and oppressors?
3) The third problem was
the question of karma and rebirth. Do we really believe in rebirth? Do we really
believe that karma is a kind of ongoing accumulation of energy that will dictate
not only the quality of our life but cause us to be reborn again and again? Must
we conclude, for example, that a handicapped person is serving a sentence for
past indiscretions or crimes? Ambedkar had difficulty with the place of
traditional teachings of rebirth in our modern world view, not only in terms of
what we now know about psychology and physics, but in light of the social issues
surrounding the life of untouchables in India.
4) The final contradiction
or problem Dr. Ambedkar saw in Buddhism was the role of the monk or the ordained
person. What is the true role of the ideal practitioner of Buddhism? Should it
be one who is renouncing and retreating from the life of family
responsibilities, work, and society, living essentially apart, except for the
ritualized contacts of the begging rounds or teaching? Or should those ideal
practitioners of the Buddha’s teaching be seen not as sitting but as walking;
that is, walking out into the community and trying to help people improve their
material circumstances as well as their spiritual condition? Shouldn’t the
monks be trained as social workers? This was one of Ambedkar’s core questions.
And his model was the Jesuits, the Benedictines and Protestant missionaries who
founded clinics and literacy programs and helped people to dig wells, build
roads, and otherwise improve their situation through engaged activity.
Modifications
In looking at these issues
and other basic notions of Buddhism, Ambedkar modified the tradition quite
freely. One of the most important changes he made was a rather radical
re-interpretation of what was meant by nirvana. According to Ambedkar, nirvana
is not a metaphysical or psychological state or attainment, but a society
founded in peace and justice. He brought a transcendent view of nirvana down to
earth.
This is an important
feature of engaged Buddhism as manifested in many parts of Asia today. A common
feature of this movement is to disregard notions of another world, whether
it’s a psychological world or a metaphysical world, and to translate that into
a society based on equality and the free exchange of ideas and goods. This is a
kind of socialism, and Ambedkar himself, though not a socialist per se, was
significantly influenced by socialist thinkers.
With this different
understanding, the discussion of nirvana becomes analogous to the discussion in
Christianity about the kingdom of God or heaven. Is it an afterlife, or is it an
ideal community on this planet? Ambedkar and his followers would vote for the
latter concept. We need to create communities that unlock human potential and
dignity—that’s nirvana.
If you look at the
Satipatthána Sutta or the Visuddhimagga you find texts setting forth a complex
set of meditation skills and ethical practices, which the tradition offers us as
the path to awakening. That is largely de-emphasized in Ambedkar’s writings
and in his thought. For him the pursuit of education at all levels was a form of
meditation and mental cultivation. This in turn supplemented the institutions of
a free society--representative government, due process, and an impartial
judiciary when an untouchable can go to a court and have a judge actually award
the verdict to him or her. This is nirvana. All this has nothing to do with the
traditional wealth of meditation practices available.
It is important to keep in
mind that Ambedkar’s primary teachers were books. In this sense he shares
something with Western "Buddhists" who have been brought to Buddhism
by reading Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, or Trungpa Rinpoche, rather
than being trained in Buddhism by a personal teacher who is devoting his or her
life to practice and teaching meditation. There are many people in America who
call themselves Buddhists because they’ve read books about it—the
"bookstore Buddhist" or the "nightstand Buddhist," as Tom
Tweed calls them. Ambedkar had thirty thousand books, including a huge
collection on Buddhism; these have marks all over the margins and underlines and
crossings out, agreeing and disagreeing with elements of the tradition and
deciding how Buddhism would work for him. These books were his teachers.
As a personality, Ambedkar
was certainly volcanic; he didn’t have the calm demeanor of Thich Nhat Hanh.
It wasn’t breath and smile for Dr. Ambedkar. Ambedkar was deeply scarred by
being an untouchable in his society all his life, and he brings the passion of
that experience to his understanding of Buddhism. Educate, Agitate, and
Organize—this was Ambedkar’s slogan during his years as a civil rights
leaders in India. Today it is still used by his followers as Buddhists, which
really irritates other Buddhists who say that agitation has no role to play in
Buddhism. Well, does it? Should Buddhists be, in a certain sense, agitators for
a better society, for reconciliation, or are these irreconcilable
concepts?
Ambedkar’s Challenge
Given the way Buddhism is
evolving in the West, with its strong emphasis upon meditation and psychology,
Ambedkar’s perspective is very provocative. Many of us are drawn to Buddhism
because it offers peace—inner peace and world peace. We would like to be more
un-perturb-able, loving, compassionate and joyful, rather than the crusading
radicals some of us were in the sixties. If Buddhism has to do with stilling the
fires of passion, then mettá bhávaná [the cultivation of loving kindness] is
probably the best and highest practice for engaged Buddhism in the traditional
mold—achieving peace and then projecting that peace to others. If this
attainment of peace has some ripples in the world, great; but the world is
really not the primary concern of a traditional Buddhist. It is rather training
the monkey mind to settle down.
But it may be worth
looking closely at Ambedkar’s idea that Buddhism is something we receive and
then have to work with. Buddhist teachings invite us to take responsibility for
ourselves, and this is being interpreted in engaged Buddhist circles as taking
responsibility for the entire Sangha, the larger community, and ultimately, our
eco-system on this planet Earth. Ambedkar’s approach tells us that if we spend
too much time in personal meditation practice, and in retreat from the world of
social relationship, we will be irresponsible to our community. So we need to
get off the cushion, get out of the house, get out there and start to educate,
agitate and organize. This is a collectivist notion of Sangha as people working
together for a society of justice, wherein our Buddhist practice becomes the
engaged activity of social change.
