Dalit Buddhism

From The Radical Buddhism Project

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠

This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

Dalit Buddhism is the Buddhism of India's former "untouchable" (Dalit) communities, above all the Mahars of Maharashtra who followed B.R. Ambedkar into Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956. The movement has a prehistory of more than half a century: from the 1890s, Tamil, North Indian, and Marathi Buddhist networks had already linked Buddhist identity to the rejection of caste, and Ambedkar's turn drew on some of them. Its later history includes a militant, left-leaning phase in the 1970s, attempts to join Ambedkar with Marx, and the Dalit branch of the Triratna Buddhist Community.

Terms

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The literature uses several names for the same body of people and ideas, and they are not interchangeable. "Dalit Buddhism" is the term used in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, and is the most general term.[1] Most other terms are associated with Ambedkar and the Ambedkarite movement and do not include earlier forms of Dalit Buddhism.

"Neo-Buddhism" is the term in the title of the volume edited by Pradeep P. Gokhale, Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste, and Gopal Guru writes "New-Buddhism" in his chapter title.[2] "Navayana" ("new vehicle") is used by Gail Omvedt in her foreword to that volume, where she says that Navayana rejects four elements of classical Buddhism (the claim that all existence is suffering, karma and rebirth, the standard story of the Buddha's renunciation, and the sangha of renouncers) and "follows Iyothee Thass" in reinterpreting karma.[3] "Ambedkarite Buddhism" is the term that foregrounds the movement's founder, and it is also what Hunt, citing an earlier study, reports of the Jatavs of Agra: they were "more Ambedkarites than Buddhists."[4] The terms are also contested by the people they describe. In a study of the Tamil Buddhists of Hubli in Karnataka, Gajendran Ayyathurai reports that his informants reject the labels Scheduled Caste, Neo-Buddhist, Dalit, and Dalit-Bahujan as re-imposing caste, and that they report only "Buddhist" to the census.[5]

Before Ambedkar, c. 1890–1950

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Douglas Ober argues, against the common view that Ambedkar built his Buddhism from scratch, that Ambedkar had been in contact with existing Buddhist networks for decades before 1956.[6] The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism's chapter on India likewise lists a set of pioneers whose example Dalit Buddhist organizations invoke: Mahavir (1833–1919), Iyothee Thass (1845–1914), Kripasaran Mahastavir (1865–1926), Dharmanand Kosambi (1876–1947), Bodhananda Mahastavir (1874–1952), Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963), Anand Kausalyayan (1905–1988), and Jagdish Kashyap (1908–1976).[7] Four strands in the period are summarized here. A common theme shared by many of these strands is the thesis that the Dalits are the descendants of the original inhabitants of India, marginalized by the Aryan/Vedic/Brahmanic immigrants. (Whether this idea was developed independently several times or that there was mutual influence in this regard is unclear.)

The Tamil Buddhist Movement

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➣ Main article: Tamil Buddhist Movement

The earliest of the strands was among Tamil-speaking communities classed as "untouchable". In 1898 the Siddha physician and journalist Iyothee Thass (1845–1914), born a Parayar, founded the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras and from 1907 edited the weekly Oru Paisa Tamilan. From 1917 the movement was organized through the South Indian Buddhist Association, whose first four general conferences were chaired by P. Lakshmi Narasu (1861–1934). Dickens Leonard describes Thass as the first to develop an anti-caste narrative by espousing Buddhism.[8] G. Aloysius argues that the Tamil Buddhist Movement influenced both the Dravidian movement and Ambedkar, but this is his thesis, resting largely on inference and oral testimony, and Ayyathurai finds no direct archival evidence of Thass's influence on Ambedkar.[9] Narasu's The Essence of Buddhism was reprinted by Ambedkar in 1948 with a preface calling it the best book on Buddhism to that date; Ambedkar says there that he had never met Narasu.[10] Omvedt's claim that Navayana "follows Iyothee Thass" is hers, and Thass's own surviving texts, as the page on him shows, contain none of the socialist vocabulary that some later readings attribute to the tradition.

The Adi-Hindu Strand in North India

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➣ Main article: Adi-Hindu Movement

In the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) the Adi-Hindu movement of the late 1910s to the early 1930s held that the untouchable castes were the original inhabitants of India, conquered and degraded by Aryan invaders. Its religion, according to Nandini Gooptu, was bhakti and not Buddhism, and Sarah Beth Hunt places the entry of Buddhism into Adi-Hindu thought mainly after 1956.[11] A smaller Buddhist wing existed in the same milieu: the monk Bodhananda (1874–1952), who in Ober's account founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Samiti in Lucknow in 1916 and wrote Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya (1930), which argues that the Dalits and Shudras were the original Buddhist inhabitants of India, and the writer Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu, who is credited with co-authoring Buddhist books with him.[12] Ober reports that Bodhananda met Ambedkar in 1920 at the Kolhapur Non-Brahmin Conference. The report that Ambedkar had hoped Bodhananda would officiate at the conversion of 1956 rests on one second-hand statement, and Bodhananda died in 1952.[13] Hunt's chronology, in which Buddhism arrives late, and the evidence of Bodhananda's and Jigyasu's earlier books are not reconciled in the sources, and the page on the movement keeps the two apart.

Dharmanand Kosambi and the Bahujan Vihara

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➣ Main article: Dharmanand Kosambi

In 1936, according to Ober, Ambedkar approached the Bombay Buddha Society, whose honorary president was the Marathi Pali scholar Dharmanand Kosambi (1876–1947), and said that Bombay needed a vihara. Kosambi raised funds from Gandhi and the industrialist J.K. Birla and on 26 January 1937 inaugurated the Bahujan Vihara in Parel, the mill-workers' district of Bombay.[14] The name "Bahujan" (not "Buddha") reflected its focus on mill workers and its aim of ending caste discrimination among them. Ambedkar apparently never took part in its events; Ober suggests that this was because of its Birla financing and Kosambi's Brahmin and Gandhian affiliations.[15] Gandhi, replying to a Congress leader who objected to serving on a Buddhist vihara committee, said that the vihara was no different from a temple of Rama or Krishna and was part of the Hindu revival.[16] Kosambi withdrew at the end of 1939 after Birla objected to opinions in Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa. He also has a second claim on the history of Dalit Buddhism: his life of the Buddha and his play on the Buddha's renunciation are among the sources of the account in Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma, although the extent of the debt, and whether Ambedkar failed to credit it, are contested (see the page on B.R. Ambedkar). The Harvard doctorate sometimes attributed to Kosambi is also contested.

The Maha Bodhi Society

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➣ Main article: Maha Bodhi Society

The Maha Bodhi Society, founded in 1891, was the main institutional network of Buddhist revival in India in this period and the setting of many of the contacts described above, including the Madras branch of 1900 and its quarrels with Narasu. After 1956 it petitioned Nehru over the loss of reservation benefits for converts and, according to Ober, distributed 50,000 copies of Bodhananda's ritual manual to new converts.[17]

Ambedkar and the Conversion of 1956

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➣ Main article: BR Ambedkar

At Yeola in October 1935 Ambedkar declared that although he had been born a Hindu he would not die one, and over the next two decades he studied alternative religions before choosing Buddhism.[18] On 14 October 1956, at Nagpur, he and his wife Savita took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from the monk U Chandramani and then administered twenty-two vows to the crowd, renouncing Hindu deities and rites; he died on 6 December of that year.[19] Pradeep Gokhale notes that Ambedkar was a lay follower (upasaka) who administered the refuges and precepts himself to thousands, a departure from the practice that only monks do so.[20]

The number converted at Nagpur is reported differently in the sources, and the differences are recorded here and not resolved. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism says that "an additional 400,000" converted at Nagpur in its chapter on India (p. 47) and gives 600,000 in another chapter (p. 388); Hunt says "lakhs" (hundreds of thousands); Sarah LeVine and David Gellner write "half a million"; Meera Kosambi, reporting a figure of Sukhathankar, gives "two lakh" (200,000); and Aloysius writes "more than 300,000."[21] A related difficulty concerns the Handbook's wording: "additional" implies a prior Buddhist population, which the Handbook describes as limited, before the movement, to the Northeast and what is now Bangladesh, the Himalayan border populations, and Nepali ethnic groups.[22] The twenty-two vows are counted by LeVine and Gellner as including seven that are explicitly anti-Hindu or anti-Brahmin.[23] Sponberg, as reported in the Handbook, says that Ambedkar left no comprehensive model for applying the Dhamma.[24]

After 1956

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The sources consulted for this page document the period after 1956 unevenly. The following summaries cover only the strands that have been researched; the post-1960 history of Ambedkarite organizations, parties, and writers is a gap waiting to be addressed.

The Dalit Panthers

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➣ Main article: Dalit Panthers

The Dalit Panthers were founded in Bombay in 1972 by the poet Namdeo Dhasal (1949–2014) and Raja Dhale (1940–2019). Their manifesto defines "dalit" broadly, to include Neo-Buddhists as one constituency among several, and presents a programme of land redistribution, anti-capitalism, and opposition to institutional religion; the programme is not framed in Buddhist terms.[25] Buddhist identity is therefore present in the movement but is not its organizing principle. Hovell reports that Dhasal was among the ex-Untouchables who converted to Buddhism following Ambedkar; the evidence concerning him is of a personal Buddhist identity and not of Buddhist political thought.[26] Hunt reports that the Hindi Dalit autobiographical field took inspiration from the Marathi literature associated with the Panthers.[27]

Marx and Ambedkar

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Gopal Guru credits the Panthers' manifesto as the first document to bring Ambedkar and Marx together.[28] (This is his characterization and has not been checked independently.) The relation between Ambedkar's Buddhism and Marxism is debated in the secondary literature. A separate tradition of Marxist interpretation of Buddhism grew up, largely apart from the Ambedkarite movement; the exception is the Marathi historian and organizer Sharad Patil (1925–2014), who moved from the Communist Party to a "Marxism-Phule-Ambedkarism" and later to what he called "Sautrantika Marxism".

The Triratna Buddhist Community

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The Triratna Bauddha Mahasangha (TBM, formerly known as TBMSG), the Indian branch of the Triratna Buddhist Community, grew out of connections between Ambedkar, Anand Kausalyayan, and the English-born teacher Sangharakshita (Dennis Lingwood, born 1925), whose Friends of the Western Buddhist Order was founded in London in 1967. Sangharakshita was active in aiding Ambedkar's work of converting and supporting Dalits, and the movement had centres in India and Nepal by the 1970s.[29] The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism records two mass ceremonies in the post-1990 period: Delhi on 4 November 2004 (about 20,000) and the Mahalaxmi Race Course in Mumbai on 28 May 2007 (roughly 50,000, and 100,000 according to others), many of whose participants followed the writer Laxman Mane, who had converted in October 2006.[30]

Size and Shape of the Community

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According to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, the 2001 census counted about 7.95 million Buddhists in India, of whom at least 5.83 million were former Untouchables from Maharashtra.[31] The 2011 census figure, of about 8.4 million with some three-quarters of them Marathi Buddhists, is given on the page on India. The Handbook adds that the movement is largely made up of Mahars and Jatavs, and, citing Beltz (2004), that anti-caste rhetoric within it has coexisted with a hardening of caste consciousness.[32] The Handbook also reports deep differences between Dalit and Tibetan Buddhism, which it presents as a barrier to a pan-Asian Buddhist unity.[33] By the Handbook's account, the state's use of Buddhism after 1947 was symbolic and cultural: the Sarnath lion capital became the state emblem in 1950, and the Buddha Jayanti of 1956 was declared "cultural (not religious)".[34]

Anand Kausalyayan (1905–1988), the Buddhist monk and writer, makes three claims about the legal and demographic position of Buddhists in a question-and-answer book of 1980. He says that the Buddhist population "should definitely exceed ten million" while the last census counted "thirty seven lakhs", an undercount that he blames on non-Buddhist enumerators; he does not name the census year. He also says that in "this so called secular state" a person who wishes to stand for a reserved seat "has to declare and prove that he is not a Buddhist."[35] Hunt reports, from Bhagwan Das, a related claim that denying reservations to Buddhist converts was a strategy to impede the spread of Buddhism.[36] These are claims by participants and are reported as such. Kausalyayan's own list of the monks who re-established a foothold for Buddhism in India names Bodhananda, Mahavir, the Burmese monks Chandramani and Kittimaji, and Anagarika Dharmapala, and ends with Ambedkar's conversion.[37]

The Scholarly Debate

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The essays in the volume edited by Gokhale are the main source for the academic debate. Omvedt's foreword treats Navayana as a departure from classical Buddhism in four respects (see above) and argues that caste was not a social reality during the millennia of Buddhist hegemony and became firmly established only after Buddhism's defeat, which she places around the sixth century; that claim is her assertion and is contestable.[38] Gokhale compares Ambedkar with other engaged Buddhists, among them Dharmapala, Buddhadasa, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Sivaraksa, and finds that his distinction is that the others were Buddhists first and became engaged, while Ambedkar was socially engaged and modern first; caste, he adds, was central for none of the others except Sangharakshita and his followers.[39] Whether Dalit Buddhism is a break from Buddhist tradition or a continuation of it is thus a question on which the volume's authors are divided.

The debate about Ambedkar and Marx, in brief, runs as follows. Guru argues that Ambedkar's Buddhism can be neither reduced to Marxism nor opposed to it, and that post-Ambedkar readings turned it spiritual or psychological.[28] Umesh Bagade argues that Ambedkar combated "rigid Marxist economism" and treated a socio-religious revolution as a prerequisite of the socialist one, and Gokhale reads "Buddha or Karl Marx" as reducing what survives of Marx's creed to four points that are already found in Buddhism, from which Buddhism differs on means.[40] The primary text and its disputed title are discussed on the page on Ambedkar.

Literature in English

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  • Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. London: Routledge. [A volume of thirteen chapters from a seminar held at Sarnath in 2013, with a foreword by Gail Omvedt. It is the main source for the scholarly debate on whether Ambedkar's Buddhism departs from the classical tradition and on its relation to Marxism.]
  • Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [A narrative history of the Buddhist revival that argues that Ambedkar's Buddhism drew on Buddhist networks that already existed. Chapters 4 to 7 supply most of this page's pre-1956 material.]
  • Geary, [Given name], & [Given name] Mukherjee (2017). "Buddhism in Contemporary India". In: Jerryson, Michael (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism: 36–57. Oxford University Press. [A survey chapter that gives the main figures on the size of the community, a list of the movement's pioneers, and an account of the Triratna branch. It is this page's source for the post-1956 organizations.]
  • Hunt, Sarah Beth (2014). Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation. New Delhi: Routledge. [A study of Hindi Dalit pamphlet literature that treats Buddhism as a late addition to the Adi-Hindu field and records the pamphlets on Buddhism that followed the conversion of 1956.]
  • Aloysius, G. (1998). Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism. New Age International. [The monograph on the Tamil Buddhist movement. Its thesis that the movement influenced Ambedkar is the author's own and is contested.]

Literature in Other Languages

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  • Bodhananda, Bhadant ([1930] 2009). [Devanagari] Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya [The Original Inhabitants of India and the Aryans]. Samyak Prakashan. [A Hindi work that is the central historical text of the Adi-Hindu movement and its Buddhist wing. It was not consulted for this entry and is listed on the authority of Ober and Hunt.]

How to Cite This Article

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Brons, Lajos (2026). "Dalit Buddhism". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Dalit_Buddhism.

Notes

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  1. ↑ Geary, [Given name], & [Given name] Mukherjee (2017). "Buddhism in Contemporary India". In: Jerryson, Michael (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism: 36–57. Oxford University Press, pp. 52–53.
  2. ↑ Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. London: Routledge.
  3. ↑ Omvedt, Gail (2021). Foreword. In: Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.), Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste: xv–xviii. London: Routledge, p. xvii.
  4. ↑ Hunt, Sarah Beth (2014). Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation. New Delhi: Routledge, p. 47 (citing Lynch 1969).
  5. ↑ Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2020).
  6. ↑ Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press, ch. 5 (the common view is cited there to Vajpeyi 2012).
  7. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", p. 50 (the list is given there as quoted; the Handbook notes that several of them spent formative years in Burma and Sri Lanka).
  8. ↑ Leonard, Dickens (2021). "Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–1914)". South Asia Research 41.3: 349–368, p. 351.
  9. ↑ Aloysius, G. (1998). Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism. New Age International, pp. 187–189, 191–193; Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2011). Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India. PhD dissertation, Columbia University, p. 136 n. 211.
  10. ↑ Aloysius (1998), Religion as Emancipatory Identity, App. 10, pp. 230–232.
  11. ↑ Gooptu, Nandini (2001). The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India. Cambridge University Press, p. 152; Hunt (2014), Hindi Dalit Literature, pp. 34, 45–47.
  12. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 205–214. The identity of the Bodhananda of Ober and the Handbook with the "Swami Bodhanand" of Hunt and Gooptu is an inference, discussed on the page on the movement.
  13. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 214.
  14. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 215–216 and n. 47 (p. 327); Kosambi, Meera (Ed.) (2010). Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings. Permanent Black, Introduction. M. Kosambi's edition places the completion of the vihara in 1936 and Ober's account dates it to 1937.
  15. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 216 (the reasons are described there as unclear).
  16. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 182–183 (citing Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 69: 318–319).
  17. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, ch. 7. See also the page on B.R. Ambedkar, where the same passage is cited.
  18. ↑ Gokhale, Balkrishna Govind (1999). "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization: Anagarika Dhammapala and B.R. Ambedkar". Journal of Asian and African Studies 34.1: 33–46, p. 42.
  19. ↑ Rodrigues, Valerian (2024). Ambedkar's Political Philosophy: A Grammar of Public Life from the Social Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, ch. 1; Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 185–186. Ambedkar's own account of the conversion and his arguments for Buddhism are on his page and are not repeated here.
  20. ↑ Gokhale (Ed.) (2021), Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste, p. 265 (ch. 13, by Gokhale).
  21. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", p. 47; the Handbook, p. 388 (ch. 20); Hunt (2014), Hindi Dalit Literature, p. 46; LeVine, Sarah, & David N. Gellner (2005). Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal. Harvard University Press, p. 9; Kosambi (Ed.) (2010), Essential Writings; Aloysius (1998), Religion as Emancipatory Identity, pp. 103, 186–187.
  22. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", pp. 36, 47.
  23. ↑ LeVine and Gellner (2005), Rebuilding Buddhism, p. 10.
  24. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", p. 48 (reporting Sponberg 1996).
  25. ↑ Dalit Panthers (1973). Dalit Panthers Manifesto. Bombay. 8 pp., p. 6 (the definition of "dalit") and pp. 7–8 (the programme). The imprint year is unresolved: the title page reads 1973, Gopal Guru cites the document as 1974, and the text counts Congress rule "from 1947 to 1974".
  26. ↑ Hovell, Laurie (1991). "Namdeo Dhasal: Poet and Panther". Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23(2): 77–83.
  27. ↑ Hunt (2014), Hindi Dalit Literature, pp. 3, 139, 181, 184.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Guru, Gopal (2021). "New-Buddhism, Marxism and the Caste Question in India". In: Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.), Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste: 111–126. London: Routledge, p. 114.
  29. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", pp. 49–50; the Handbook also treats the movement at pp. 339 and 407–408.
  30. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", pp. 49–50.
  31. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", p. 36.
  32. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", p. 49 (reporting Beltz 2004).
  33. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", pp. 52–53 (after Singh 2010).
  34. ↑ Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", pp. 46–47.
  35. ↑ Kausalyayan, Anand (1992). An Intelligent Man's Guide to Buddhism. [Publisher], Q. 257–260, pp. 174–175.
  36. ↑ Hunt (2014), Hindi Dalit Literature, p. 46.
  37. ↑ Kausalyayan (1992), Intelligent Man's Guide, Q. 256, p. 174.
  38. ↑ Omvedt (2021), Foreword, pp. xvii–xviii.
  39. ↑ Gokhale (Ed.) (2021), Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste, ch. 13, pp. 258–270.
  40. ↑ Bagade, Umesh (2021). “The Buddhist past as a cultural conflict: Ambedkar’s exhumation of Indian history”. In: Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.), Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste: ch. 9, pp. 162–165. London: Routledge; Gokhale (Ed.) (2021), ch. 13, p. 266.
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