Miscellaneous Topics

[Bharatvarsh2]

11.8. Jeevan Kulkarni on Buddhism and caste





Dr. Ambedkar’s chief argument for Buddhism was that this was the only religion that did not in any way encourage or justify social injustice. He, along with the majority of modern writers on Buddhism, especially liked Gautama’s supposed protest against the caste system. The question is whether the social-reformist qualities which Ambedkar ascribed to the Buddha were not in the eye of the beholder.





One Hindutva polemicist who accepted Dr. Ambedkar’s challenge was the HMS amateur-historian (and veteran of India’s desperate defence of its northeastern frontier against the Chinese invaders in 1962) Jeevan Kulkarni. He argues that the Buddha did pursue a political agenda, but not an egalitarian one, that “he tried only to establish supremacy of Kshatriyas over the Brahmins” while “the fate of the two other classes remained the same”.59 The pro-Kshatriya bias in early Buddhist literature has been noted by others as well, e.g. linguist Madhav Deshpande: “On the higher philosophical plane, Buddha totally rejected hereditary caste rank. But on the lower social plane, Buddha asserted a social hierarchy different from that of Brahmanical belief. He clearly asserts that Kshatriyas are superior to Brahmanas.”60





Kulkarni argues further, along with many Western students of Buddhist history, that Gautama’s objectives were not of this world, and that “Buddha was not a social reformer (…) The theory much trumpeted about the role of Buddha as a social reformer was discarded by a galaxy of scholars prior to Dr. Ambedkar’s version (and also of infamous writings of Laxmi Narsu) of Buddhism. Most of them have decidedly proved that Buddha had never discarded caste system”.61





Kulkarni calls Western authorities to the witness stand. Sir W.W. Hunter has written: “It would be a mistake to suppose that Buddhism and Jainism were directed from the outset consciously in opposition to the caste system. Caste, in fact, at the time of the rise of Buddhism was only beginning to develop; and in later days, when Buddhism commenced its missionary careers, it took caste with it into regions where upto that time the institution had not penetrated.”62





Hermann Oldenberg is quoted as explaining how Buddha had other concerns than social reform: “Caste has no value for him, for everything earthly has ceased to affect his interests, but it never occurs to him to exercise his influence for the abolition or for the mitigation of the severity of its rules for those who have lagged behind in the worldly surroundings.”63 R. Spencer Hardy wrote: “The existence of the four great tribes is recognized continually in the Jatakas, and inferiority of caste is recognized as giving rise to the same usages and as being attended with degradation.”64 Prof. T.W. Rhys-Davids has given details about caste practices in over 100 Buddhist communities.65





The list of Western supporters of Kulkarni’s critique could easily be extended, e.g. Alex Wayman writes: “It is generally stated in Western writings on Buddhism that Buddhism is directly opposed to the caste system. While it is true that such distinctions in status perpetuated by social norms were not the basis for admission into monasterial monk training, and also true that Buddhist literature contains some sharp attacks on what are referred to as ‘Brahmin pretensions’, lay Buddhists had to respect social norms and even Buddhist literature generated by the monks differs in response to the caste system, usually remaining silent about it.”66





This is confirmed by the Dutch Buddhologist Prof. Zürcher: “In modem popularizing writings, one often reads that ‘egalitarian’ Buddhism was essentially a ‘protest movement’ against the Brahminical caste system. It is true that the Buddhist view of caste is different from and more rational than the religious justification which one finds in Brahminism. But neither the Buddha himself, nor any pre-modern Buddhist teacher after him has combated the caste system. The explanation of the egalitarian attitude which we find in the sangha, is simple. Caste is a social distinction, which belongs in the world of the laity, where it is completely proper and self-evident. As soon as someone becomes a monk, he in principle steps completely out of the world. He renounces his family and family ritual, and therefore also the caste to which his family belongs. Like all other Indian ascetics inside and outside Buddhism, he is a complete ‘outsider’: for him, social distinctions-those of caste included-have not become objectionable, but meaningless.”67





Kulkarni’s argument against claims of Buddhist egalitarianism even finds support among Indian Marxists, at least among those of an earlier generation who had not yet taken to using Buddhism as a stick with which to beat Hinduism. The rhetoric about “egalitarian Buddhism vs. oppressive Hinduism” is now so influential in India’s collective consciousness that I consider it worthwhile to hear their testimonies too. The eminent historian D.D. Kosambi pointed out that in the recruitment of monks, the candidate’s social position was not entirely disregarded: “…runaway slaves, savage tribesmen, escaped criminals, the chronically ill and the indebted as well as aboriginal Nagas were denied admission into the order.”68





To ensure peace for itself and avoid trouble with society (creditors, aggrieved slave-owners etc.), it was a logical decision for the Buddhist Sangha to keep out all those who could attract angry attention. The encounter with worldly suffering (typified by an old man, a sick man and a corpse) had convinced Gautama to turn away from the world and to focus on spiritual exercises. The monks did not want to be disturbed with social problems, and the atmosphere they created for themselves in their monasteries was meant to focus their attention on their spiritual practice, not on the social needs of the laymen:





“No rotting half-eaten corpse, no leprous beggar with festering sores mars the smooth harmony of sumptuous frescoes and reliefs to remind the monk of the Founder’s doctrine. Nor does the art portray the normal hardships of the poorest villager, whose surplus the monk could eat, but whose misery was easily discounted on the callous theory that the suffering must have been deserved because of misdeeds in some previous birth.”69





Not unlike clerics in other religions (including Brahmins), Buddhist monks tended to develop a certain smugness regarding the privileges which came with their spiritual prestige. This is but a general human failing and cannot be held against Buddhism as such, but it is nonetheless notable that if Buddhism wasn’t any worse than others in this respect, it wasn’t any better either.





Where slavery existed, Buddhism did not abolish it. The Buddha never ordered the masters to set the slaves free, nor the slaves to revolt against their masters. Buddhist monasteries continued the labour arrangements existing in society at large. In his study on slavery in ancient India, the Marxist historian Dev Raj Chanana noticed the stark contrast between the actual history of Buddhist social practice and the more “progressive” picture given by modern writers, who fail to register the existence of serfdom in connection with the Buddhist monasteries:





“On reading the modern works concerning the Buddhist order in India one gains the impression that no slave labour was employed in the monasteries. One would be inclined to believe that all the work, even in the big monasteries like [those] of Kosambi or Rajagriha, was carried out by the monks themselves. However, a study of Pali literature shows clearly that the situation was otherwise.”70





From the beginning, Buddhism shared the disdain for manual labour expressed by certain Brahminical and ancient Greek sources, which held that philosophical pursuits required a freedom from labour tasks. According to Chanana, this attitude to labour had not always existed in India to the same extent: “This attitude to manual work as an imposition is in contrast with the view expressed in an earlier epoch, in the Rigveda, where there is no expression of any dislike of manual work. This is, in part at least, due to the absence of the division of labour as seen in the well-known verse describing various jobs, intellectual and manual, undertaken by members of one and the same family.”71 In the case of Buddhism, however, “we must not forget that the Buddha, anxious to free his monks of material preoccupations, had forbidden almost all manual labour to them.”72





To the slaves, Buddhism gave the same justification of their condition as is always scornfully attributed to Hinduism. Chanana summarizes: “On the other hand he advised the slaves to bear patiently with their lot and explained the same as follows. If a person is born a slave, it is the consequence of some bad acts of an earlier life and the best way for him is to submit willingly to his lot. He should submit to all sorts of treatment at the hands of his master and should never allow any feeling of revenge to grow within himself, even if the other should try to kill him. In such cases, a change of destiny is promised to the slave in the next birth. (…) In case, however, such a person is lucky enough to obtain manumission from his master, he may obtain ordination and thus try to secure salvation from the cycle of transmigration, i.e. release from the slavery of life and death.”73





So, the same allegation of using the karma doctrine as an opium for the people to keep them happy in their submission has been levelled against the Buddha as well as against Puranic Hinduism: “That he derived his conclusion from the widely accepted belief in the theory of karma, of the retribution of acts, need not be stressed again and again. To him and his followers birth in a particular group was the consequence of certain good or evil acts. Since the retribution was believed to be inexorable, unvarying, like the working of a machine, he could not but advocate complete submission to one’s destiny (…) we may agree that the Buddha (from what we learn about him in the Tipitaka) sincerely believed in [karma]. But even from this angle it is clear that disobedience on the part of a slave or servant was considered as an evil act. The same view was held of bad treatment on the part of a master.”74





The Hindutva horizon being typically limited to India, Jeevan Kulkarni overlooks what could have been one of his strongest arguments: the fact that Buddhism’s non-interest in social reform is amply demonstrated by its career outside India. Everywhere it integrated itself into the existing social and political set-up, from bureaucratic centralism in China to feudal militarism in Japan. There is no known case of any of these branches of Buddhism calling for social reform, let alone for a social revolution as far-reaching as the abolition of caste would have meant in India. After centuries of profound impact of Buddhism, Tibetan society was in such a state that the Chinese Communists could claim in 1950 (with exaggeration, but not without a kernel of truth) that 95% of the Tibetans were living in slavery. Buddhism does not seem to have made Tibet’s traditional feudalism any more egalitarian than it had been in the pre-Buddhist past.





Outside India, a number of sources confirm that Buddhist monasteries employed slaves: “There are numerous references to prove the existence of slaves in the Buddhist monasteries in China. (…) These slaves were normally in charge of the maintenance of the monasteries but could also be sent to aid the peasants at the time of ploughing, harvesting, etc. Public slaves and criminals used to be formed into groups and known as the ‘families of the Buddha’ .”75 Perhaps “slave” is too strong a term here, as many slaveholding societies had intermediate forms of semi-free serfdom; but “egalitarianism” is certainly a different thing. Apart from slave-owning, the monasteries also upheld milder forms of social inequality. In China, they were feudal landlords, and under the Tang dynasty (618-907) the Sangha was even the biggest land-owner in the empire, until it was expropriated (in what has been mis-termed the “Buddhist persecution”) because its tax-exempt status disrupted the economy. It also goes without saying that the traditional inequality between men and women was fully accepted: nuns were always lower in rank than monks.76 We may therefore agree that by and large, Buddhism cannot be considered a pioneer of modern egalitarianism.





Coming to the specific form of inequality which is the caste system, in a survey of the Buddhist canon, we do find a number of references to this subject. These instances show that Buddhism was not meant as a social revolution, even when it was critical of caste inequality. Thus, in a list of parables from the Pali Canon, we find the well-known simile: “Whether kindled by a priest, a warrior, a trader or a serf, from whatsoever type of fuel, a fire will emit light and heat; even so, all men, regardless of caste, are equally capable of the highest spiritual attainment.”77 This merely says that the spiritual dimension is common to all, not that the differentiation of men into castes or even the secular inequality between these castes should be abolished.





Another instance is the famous story from the Divyavadana (2nd century AD?), of the noble monk Ananda and the low-caste girl Prakriti. The girl tries to seduce the monk, but through the Buddha’s miraculous intervention, her efforts are counterproductive, and it is she who follows the monk into the Sangha: she becomes a nun. But the public objects to the ordination of an outcaste, and so the Buddha explains that caste divisions have no bearing on spiritual life.78 But he does not say that henceforth, his audience should intermarry with the lowest castes. He does just the opposite: he contrasts worldly and spiritual spheres, and justifies the neglect of caste discrimination in this case with reference to the girl’s spiritual vocation, thereby acquiescing in the persistence of caste in lay society. On the other hand, even if only for theorical purposes, the text’s demolition of caste inequality is thorough, e.g. it is said that in a previous life, the two had already been lovers, though then their castes had been the opposite.79





Another promising example is where the Buddha grills a Brahmin with Socrates-type questions to extract from him the insight that to be a Brahmin, or conversely to be unworthy of the practices of Arya Dharma, birth is not the criterion.80 The modern editor explains that the Buddha “vindicates his own universalist outlook and severely criticizes the whole theoretical basis of the brahminical caste structure”.81 Here, then, we reach the limit of Savarkar’s and Kulkarni’s revision of the claim of Buddhist egalitarianism: eventhough Buddhism did not reform society in an anti-caste sense, some Buddhist texts did develop a theoretical criticism of caste. Yes, there was an anti-caste element in Buddhism, often voiced by Brahmin-born monks.82





Brahmin writers have not only codified and justified the existing caste system, and possibly hardened it; in the final editing of many influential classics of Puranic Hinduism, they have also unnecessarily extended caste distinction beyond the social sphere, incorporating spiritual liberation in the calculus of karma and caste duties. The crassest example of this tendency is the Shambuka story in what experts consider the youngest layer of Valmiki’s Ramayana, where Rama “has to” kill the low-caste ascetic Shambuka because the latter’s spiritual vocation is contrary to his caste duties and therefore harmful to society as a whole.83





In anti-Hindu polemic, this episode is always held up as proving the true and irreducible inhumanity of Hinduism. However, J.L. Brockington contrasts this episode of the Ramayana (7:67) with the contrary evaluation of a similar act in an older layer of the Ramayana, viz. Dasharatha’s paying dearly for his killing Shravana, an ascetic of mixed Vaishya-Shudra descent (2:57): “There has been an enormous shift in attitudes between the period of the former, among the earlier additions, and the latter, among the latest parts included in the text”, viz. an appalling hardening of caste discrimination.84 The harsh caste discrimination of recent centuries is a vaguely datable innovation in Hindu social history, not an age-old conditions.85





A case could be made that this appropriation of spirituality by the Brahmin caste is what the Buddha criticizes in the Prakriti story and elsewhere. What he objects to is not the existing social system on the basis of caste, but precisely the improper extension of caste division to the spiritual sphere, beyond the worldly sphere where social distinctions belong. We may add that Sri Lankan Buddhists, who have a long history of fighting predominantly Hindu Tamils, and hence a strong sense of separateness from Hinduism, observe their own caste distinctions.86





Buddhism’s lack of interest in social reform was implicitly admitted by Dr. Ambedkar himself, when as Law Minister he defended the inclusion of Buddhists in the category of citizens to whom the Hindu Code Bill would apply. He declared: “When the Buddha differed from the Vedic Brahmins, he did so only in matters of creed, but left the Hindu legal framework intact. He did not propound a separate law for his followers. The same was the case with Mahavir and the ten Sikh Gurus.”87 That should clinch the issue.



11.9. Conclusion





Neo-Buddhim is based on a mistake. Dr. Ambedkar opted for Buddhism on the somewhat contrived assumption that the Buddhist Sangha Councils provided a native model for modern parliamentary democracy, and mostly on the wrong assumption that Buddhim was an anti-caste reform movement. In Hindutva literature, in a few marginal corners, the latter assumption has been criticized, sometimes with reference to corroborative Western research. However, emanating from upper-caste Hindutva authors and written in a heated polemical style, this is unlikely to reach let alone convince the neo-Buddhost audience.





The neo-Buddhists are not Hindus, because they say so. Indeed, whereas all the other groups considered developed their identities naturally, in a pursuit of Liberation or simply in response to natural and cultural circumstances, only to discover later that this identity might be described as non-Hindu, the neo-Buddhists were first of all motivated by the desire to break with Hinduism. The most politicized among them, all while flaunting the label “Buddhist”, actually refuse to practise Buddhism: because it distracts from the political struggle, and perhaps also because the Buddhist discipline is too obviously similar to the lifestyle of the hated Brahmins in its religious aspect. It doesn’t come naturally to political militants to sit down and shut all activist concerns from their minds, whether to recite Vedic verses or to focus on the dependent origination of their mental motions.





Yet, in broad sections of the converted Dalit masses, the practice of Buddhism is catching on. From a Hindu or a generally spiritual viewpoint, this is one of the most hopeful and positive developments of the post-independence period: many thousands of people who had truly been a Depressed Class, confined to lowly occupations, suffering humiliation and low self-esteem, often steeped in superstition and given to alcoholism, entered the path of the Buddha. Rather than talk about the spiritual path and the glories of India’s sages, as anglicized upper-caste Hindus do, they talk politics but do regularly sit down to apply the methods taught by the Awakened One





Most thinking Hindus, from Veer Savarkar to Ram Swarup, have welcomed the conversion of Dr. Ambedkar and his followers to Buddhism. Rather than joining hands with the Christians or Muslims, Dr. Ambedkar stayed within the national mainstream by taking refuge in the Buddha, thus averting what to Hindus looked like a looming disaster. That he abjured the Hindu Gods and the label “Hindu” seemed to matter less, especially when research shows that many neo-Buddhists still participate in Hindu forms of worship.





That the neo-Buddhists will move closer to the Hindu mainstream, and possibly even take a leadership role in future waves of religious revival, is rendered more likely by the evolution in society. Thanks to education, reservations, and the ever-widening impact of modernization on all Indians regardless of caste, the actual living conditions and cultural horizons of Dalits and upper castes become ever more similar. It is logical, then, that caste animosities will gradually give way to the increasing realization of common Indian and common human concerns, in mundane as well as in spiritual matters.





So, from the Hindu viewpoint, the practical conclusion ought to be: let the neo-Buddhists be non-Hindus. Their chosen religion will shield them from maximum exposure to anti-Hindu influences, and will encourage in them doctrines and practices with which most Hindus are familiar. The religious development and deepening of neo-Buddhism and the process of social reform and psychological modernization in Hindu society ensures that the two will meet again in the not too distant future.



http://voiceofdharma.org/books/wiah/ch11.htm