Editing P Lakshmi Narasu (section)

== Ideas ==
Narasu presented Buddhism as a religion of reason and experience that does not rest on authority. He described ''The Essence of Buddhism'' as the humble offering of a disciple, laying no claim to originality, and accepted nothing as the Master's teaching that is not in strict accord with reason.<ref>Narasu (1907), ''Essence of Buddhism'', Preface, p. vii.</ref> Ober connects this rationalism with the Kalama Sutta, which Narasu took to set aside "all recourse to authority or revelation", and reports that in a presidential message he declared that even the words of a Buddha must be rejected if they do not accord with reason.<ref>Narasu, P. Lakshmi (1916). ''What is Buddhism?'' (Samyak Prakashan, 2009), p. 21, as quoted in Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 142; the presidential message is described on the same page.</ref> His reading was also materialist. He denied the soul and held, on the basis of the doctrines of non-self and impermanence, that the karma of a sentient being passes to others in this life only; he called karma a fatalism that blinds believers to the injustice of social conditions and has consecrated the division of society into castes, and he added that those forms of Buddhism that accommodated themselves to transmigration eventually succumbed to the caste regime.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 142; Narasu, P. Lakshmi (1922). ''A Study of Caste''. K.V. Raghavulu, pp. 134–135, 135–143. Page numbers for ''A Study of Caste'' refer to the 1922 text; the reprints of 1988 and 2003 were not compared.</ref> He did not reject religion as such: the Foreword of ''A Study of Caste'' aims at religion "whose life-blood is caste", and a chapter of the same book argues that the denial of soul and God does not imply the denial of all religion, defining religion as a plan of action for realizing the human hope of a life free from suffering.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', Foreword and pp. 153–155.</ref> His criticism extended to the sangha, in which Ober says he saw the same obscurantism and dogma that he despised in other religions, and which he thought had to change and become more socially engaged.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 142, 148.</ref>

Caste was Narasu's central target, and he treated it as inseparable from Hinduism. He presented the Buddha as a Kshatriya who rejected caste and the sacrificial system, and he argued, with a long passage attributed to the Buddha and with a summary of Asvaghosha's ''Vajrasuchi'', that Brahmin and Chandala do not differ by birth.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', pp. 27–30, 44–45; Narasu (1907), ''Essence of Buddhism'', pp. 70–71, 79–82. Narasu does not separate the words of the Buddha from those of the ''Vajrasuchi''.</ref> Among the Buddha's lay followers, he wrote, caste distinctions had no religious significance, and perhaps social conditions prevented the Buddha from preaching a general crusade against caste.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', p. 31.</ref> He held that Brahminical civilization had barely penetrated South India by about 700 CE, so that the South Indian Brahmin was a newcomer and hence more exclusive.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', p. 72.</ref> He was also critical of non-Brahmin Hindus: the non-Brahmin, he wrote, had not budged an inch to throw off caste, and even the despised classes were prepared to enter the caste system if its doors were opened to them.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', p. 107.</ref> Caste, in his account, had made India a pleasant place for the Brahmin at the cost of suffering and destitution for the depressed classes.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', p. 125.</ref>

Narasu's economic critique is the strand in his work that is closest to the left, and it is ethical and cooperative, not Marxist. In the chapter on the morality of Buddhism he wrote that the spirit of Buddhism is "essentially socialistic", meaning that it teaches concerted action (''samanartha'') for social ends, and that it is opposed to an industrialism driven by the struggle for wealth.<ref>Narasu (1907), ''Essence of Buddhism'', p. 45.</ref> He then argued that the accumulation of capital in a few hands has no ethical justification, that capital is not the product of individual saving but surplus seized from producers, and that this differs little from theft; he drew on Herbert Spencer's ''Social Statics'' for the origin of landed property in violence and fraud, called modern imperialism a manifestation of a robbing propensity, and still held that even extreme need cannot justify seizing the goods of others.<ref>Narasu (1907), ''Essence of Buddhism'', p. 46. The surplus-from-producers formulation is not attributed to any author in the passage.</ref> In ''A Study of Caste'' he wanted labor to have a share in the management of industry, with joint responsibility of laborer and capitalist, and he noted that seven tenths of the world's wealth and the control of the means of production were in the hands of a few; among the measures that create real opportunity he listed the abolition of special privilege and a wider and more equal distribution of wealth.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', pp. 121, 125–127. The Foreword states that the book gives no references, and some of its passages are borrowed from other authors without attribution.</ref> These passages contain no class-struggle language and no program. Ober groups Narasu with Thass and Singaravelu as anti-caste writers who portrayed early Buddhism as a religion of the oppressed, and adds that these portrayals made no explicit reference to Marxist doctrine.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 230.</ref>

Narasu's politics combined hostility to Hindu nationalism, a limited criticism of colonial rule, and a faith in education. He attacked the nationalists who boasted that India's social system had been perfected in antiquity, and he held that foreign conquest had been possible only because of the country's spiritual and social slavery.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', pp. 111, 113.</ref> He also criticized the colonial government for ruling India for its own prestige and for spending more on the police, the magistracy, the secret service, and the military than on education.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', pp. 107–108.</ref> The remedy that he proposed was mass education and not electoral reform, though he also wrote that revolutions had historically given the masses their chances of cultural progress and praised Japan's abolition of caste.<ref>Narasu (1922), ''Study of Caste'', pp. 109, 111, 157–158.</ref> The record of the Buddhist Association under his presidency was loyalist and constitutional, and its resolutions did not go beyond demands for caste-based social justice, women's property rights, and rural housing and land.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', App. 5–9, pp. 209–229. The request for land at Vallathur in North Arcot dates from the conference of 1945, which G. Appaduraiyar chaired, after Narasu's death.</ref> His treatment of women was reformist in the same way: he wrote that the Buddha placed man and woman on an equal footing in theory but that in practice woman "stands much lower", he blamed this on later brahmanical influence, and he cited Burma as showing what equality could achieve.<ref>Narasu (1907), ''Essence of Buddhism'', pp. 89–96 (the quoted words at p. 92, which Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 149, cites to a different edition with the same page number); Narasu (1916), ''What is Buddhism?'', p. 82, as quoted in Ober (2023), p. 150.</ref>

The sources diverge on Narasu's place between Thass and Ambedkar. Ober, drawing on Aloysius, stresses that Narasu's family had risen in colonial society, that he knew English and French well, and that his scientific training gave him access to the circle of men of consequence in Madras; Ober adds that some of the Society's members found his Buddhism too "strange" and "scientific", while Kesava Kumar, following Aloysius, attributes that judgment to Thass, who is said to have rejected a Buddhism that did not make anti-casteism central.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 140–142; Gokhale (Ed.) (2021), ''Classical Buddhism'', ch. 12 (P. Kesava Kumar), p. 241, citing Aloysius, G. (2004). ''Dalit-Subaltern Emergence in Religio-Cultural Subjectivity: Iyothee Thassar & Emancipatory Buddhism''. Critical Quest, p. xvi. That page does not exist in the 48-page edition of Aloysius (2004) examined for this entry, and the judgment was not found in Thass's own texts. Ober (p. 142) attributes the judgment to the Society's members, without naming Thass.</ref> Ambedkar's preface of 1948 says that he never met Narasu and took his biographical details from Dr. Pattabhi Sitaramayya; it describes him as an iconoclast and social reformer who fought caste in the 1890s and calls ''The Essence of Buddhism'' "the best book on Buddhism that has appeared so far".<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', App. 10, pp. 230–232. Aloysius (p. 187) says that Ambedkar read the book in the early 1940s; Ayyathurai (2011, p. 214 n. 307) dates the preface to 1943, and Ober (2023, p. 314 n. 77), Geetha (2021, pp. 269–270), and Ambedkar's own preface give 1948. Ober (p. 327 n. 43) reports, from a collection edited by Singh, that during a visit to the Lucknow vihara in the 1940s Ambedkar could not obtain a copy of the book, which was out of print, and that Bhikkhu Bodhananda supplied one; the identity of this Bodhananda with other persons of the name is unsettled.</ref> Geetha lists Narasu with Dharmanand Kosambi and Haraprasad Shastri among the writers who appealed to Ambedkar because they treated the Buddha's presence in Indian history as consequential and his teaching as radical, and she writes that Ambedkar learned of the South Indian movement chiefly through Narasu's writings and the contacts of the Scheduled Castes Federation at Madras, but she also doubts that he knew Narasu's work on caste.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', pp. 157, 269–270, 273.</ref> Ayyathurai finds no direct archival evidence for a link between Thass and Ambedkar and treats Narasu as the main indirect bridge.<ref>Ayyathurai (2011), ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness'', pp. 136, 214 n. 307.</ref> Contemporary reception was mixed. Devapriya Valisinha, writing in 1946, called Narasu's interpretations of karma and rebirth "alarmingly materialistic", and Ober cites a critical review of ''The Essence of Buddhism'' by Louis de la Vallée Poussin (1913).<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 142 (Valisinha's introduction to Narasu (1916), ''What is Buddhism?'', p. 14) and p. 314 n. 79 (La Vallée Poussin's review, ''Anthropos'' 8.2–3: 579–580).</ref>