Editing Rahul Sankrityayan (section)

== Ideas ==

Sankrityayan's engagement with Buddhism was never confined to doctrinal exposition; from his earliest scholarly writing onward, he treated the Buddha's teaching as a historically situated response to social conditions and read Buddhist philosophy through a dialectical-materialist lens without ever fully resolving the tension between the two frameworks. His position is best described as a Marxist-leaning interpretation of Buddhist doctrine and history, combined with an institutional engagement with Buddhism early in his career and a lasting personal reverence for the Buddha, rather than as a settled Buddhist identity: Chudal herself concludes that his aim in Tibet was "not mainly to propagate and practise Buddhism as the religion leading to nirvana", even though he stated that he sought books in order to "propagate Buddhism in India".<ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," p. 81 (the conclusion) and p. 68 (his stated aim, citing ''Meri Jeevan Yatra'' vol. 2, p. 32).</ref>

Long before he joined the Communist Party, Sankrityayan had already identified the Buddhist monastic sangha as a historical precedent for communal economics. In ''Samyavad hi Kyon?'' (1935), he argued that the Buddha, seeing the material needs of his monks and nuns, did not merely mandate equal distribution but sharply reduced the sphere of individual property while greatly expanding the property held in common by the community, comparing this arrangement to the Mazdakite movement in fifth-century Iran and to the legendary wealth redistributions of the Tibetan king Mune Tsenpo.<ref name="SHK2">Sankrityayan, ''Why Communism?'' (1935), p. 38.</ref> He returned to this argument more systematically decades later in "Buddhist Dialectics" (1970), describing the Buddha's monastic communism in detail: aside from eight permitted personal items, all property was held by the samgha in common, a system that persisted for several centuries before eroding as monks began accumulating private wealth, as attested by donative inscriptions at Sanchi and Bharhut.<ref name="BD">Sankrityayan, Rahul (1970). "Buddhist Dialectics". In: Sankrityayan, Rahul, Debiprosad Chattopadhyaya, Y. Balaramamoorty, Ram Bilas Sharma, & Mulk Raj Anand, ''Buddhism: The Marxist Approach'': 1–8. People's Publishing House, p. 2.</ref> The same view appears in ''Bauddh Darshan'', where he writes that the Buddha, aware of the evils of individual property, wished within his own monastic sangha to abolish it and establish complete communism in enjoyment.<ref>Sankrityayan, Rahul (1948). बौद्ध दर्शन [''Bauddh Darshan'']. Kitab Mahal, p. 30.</ref> He likewise stressed the Buddha's preference for the republican ''gana'' polities of his day over monarchy, and his theory that kingship itself originated historically from the growth of private property and consequent class division, rather than from divine sanction.<ref name="BD" />

Sankrityayan applied the same class-functional analysis to the religious traditions around the Buddha, and then to Buddhism itself. In ''Bauddh Darshan'' he described Vedic religion as having upheld the existing order and helped the state, established "by crushing the people with bloody hands", to protect the propertied class and to keep slaves and laborers in check.<ref>Sankrityayan (1948), ''Bauddh Darshan'', p. 56.</ref> He credited the Buddha's original philosophy of dependent origination with a profoundly revolutionary character, but argued that the doctrines of karma and rebirth-linking were strengthened within the community because they reassured propertied and ruling classes, and that, "seen from a class perspective", Buddhism acted as an intermediary of the ruling class, presenting itself as on the side of justice without removing that class's basic interests.<ref>Sankrityayan (1948), ''Bauddh Darshan'', pp. 57, 59.  The point concerns what happened to the insight once it had to survive among kings, monasteries, and patrons, not the falsity of dependent origination, which he read as an early theory of conditioned, processual causality compatible with materialism.</ref> He also criticized the Buddha for locating both suffering and its remedy in the individual rather than in society, while adding that the conceptual and institutional tools for a social remedy did not yet exist in the Buddha's time.<ref>Sankrityayan (1948), ''Bauddh Darshan'', p. 30.</ref> Yet his own argument reproduces an individual-centered logic: he held that belief in a life-stream extending beyond a single body is necessary for social progress, since only it can produce enough people willing to sacrifice themselves for a high ideal, so that individual self-sacrifice and self-restraint remain "indispensably necessary to make the world better".<ref>Sankrityayan (1948), ''Bauddh Darshan'', p. 17.</ref>

Sankrityayan's most sustained philosophical claim was that Buddhist metaphysics anticipates, in embryonic form, the categories of dialectical materialism. He read the doctrine of impermanence (anicca) as a philosophy of universal process rather than static being, the law of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) as an early theory of causality that rejects any single, sufficient cause in favor of the "collectivity of causes" (hetu-samagrivada), and the Buddhist "criterion of reality" as capacity for objective, practical action (artha-kriya-samartham) as a proto-materialist, almost verificationist standard of truth close to modern scientific method.<ref name="BD" /><ref>Sankrityayan (1948), ''Bauddh Darshan'', p. 148, on particulars and universals in Dignaga and Dharmakirti: a jar or a cloth is ultimately real because it is capable of purposive action, whereas "jar-ness" is only conventionally real.</ref> At the same time, he insisted that Buddhism, particularly in its idealist Yogacāra form, remained closer to Hegelian idealism than to materialism proper, since it held consciousness (vijnana) rather than matter to be primary; he suggested that "inverting" this formula, treating mind as an evolutionary product of matter rather than matter as a transformation of mind, would spare Buddhist idealism "the trouble of standing on its head," an explicit echo of Marx's own image for his inversion of Hegel.<ref name="BD" /> He also cautioned that it would be erroneous to say Buddhism helped Marx or came near his fundamentals, though students of Buddhist philosophy would find Marxist philosophy easier to grasp.<ref name="BD" /> This ambivalence, Buddhism as dialectical without being straightforwardly materialist, was itself later contested from within the same Marxist milieu: in the same 1970 volume, Ram Bilas Sharma argued that Sankrityayan's own scholarship, particularly his ''Bauddh Darshan'', showed Buddhist philosophy to be fundamentally idealist and metaphysical, and that Buddhism's social radicalism had always been constrained by its dependence on the patronage of merchants and princes, whose underlying economic order it left unchallenged.<ref>Sharma, Ram Bilas (1970). "Some Aspects of the Teaching of Buddha". In: ''Buddhism: The Marxist Approach'': 54–65. People's Publishing House, esp. pp. 64–65. Sharma's citations of ''Bauddh Darshan'' (pp. 16–17, 30–31, 33) are consistent with the scan.</ref> Ramkrishna Bhattacharya likewise later challenged Sankrityayan's characterization of Buddhism as historically status-quoist, counterposing it with Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's and D.D. Kosambi's arguments that early Buddhism represented a form of "primitive communism" with genuine transformative potential.<ref name="Bhatta1994">Bhattacharya, Ramkrishna (1994). "From Buddha to Marx". In: Chattopadhyaya, Alaka (Ed.), ''Essays in Indology: Birth Centenary Tribute to Mahapandita Rahula Sankrityayana''. Manisha Granthalaya; discussed in Joshi (2009), "Journeys of the Self," p. 138. Note that D.D. Kosambi's own 1965 text rejects the idealized version of primitive communism, so the grouping is Bhattacharya's, not Kosambi's.</ref> He also read Vinaya detail against social background: the rule against ordaining debtors, he argued, closed an escape route from debt-slavery, a reading that Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya cites in ''Lokayata'' from ''Darshan-Digdarshan'' (Hindi), p. 541.<ref>Chattopadhyaya, Debiprasad (1959). ''Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism''. People's Publishing House (1992 edition), pp. 465–466 nn. 25, 28.</ref>

Across both his Buddhological and his explicitly Marxist writing, Sankrityayan prized the Buddha's rejection of the authority of scripture, caste, and priestly ritual, his refusal to speculate on unanswerable metaphysical questions (the Buddha's celebrated silence on the ten unanswered, or ''avyakata'', questions concerning the eternity and spatial extent of the world, the identity of the life force with the body, and the post-mortem status of an enlightened being), and his insistence that individuals test truth-claims by reason and experience rather than by appeal to tradition.<ref name="Bhartiya2025">Bhartiya, Poonam (2025). "Rahul Sankrityayan and His Contribution to Indian Buddhism: With Special Reference to the Teaching and Philosophy". ''South India Journal of Social Sciences'' 23(4): 99–102, drawing on Sankrityayan's ''Darshan-Digdarshan'' (1944).</ref> He read the Buddha's four "unstated" positions, no creator god, no eternal soul, no scriptural authority as final proof, and no confinement of the mental life-stream to a single body, as together constituting a coherent, this-worldly philosophy of liberation distinct from both orthodox theism and vulgar materialism.<ref>Bhartiya (2025), "Rahul Sankrityayan and His Contribution to Indian Buddhism," pp. 101–102.</ref> This rationalism extended into a broader, sharper critique of organized religion as such: in ''Samyavad hi Kyon?'' he devoted an entire chapter to arguing that priesthoods across religions manipulate belief in God and the afterlife to secure the loyalty and the surplus labor of the poor, and in ''Tumhari Kshaya'' (1939) he wrote that "the sickness of religions is natural; there is no cure for it short of their death."<ref>Sankrityayan, quoted and translated in Joshi (2009), "Journeys of the Self," p. 138.</ref>

Yet this hostility to religion as an institution coexisted, without full resolution, with a lasting personal reverence for the Buddha himself, whom he described in 1956 as the one fully perfected human being that humanity's entire history had produced, while explicitly declining to call himself a follower of the Buddhist religion, since for him "culture" (sanskriti) and "religion" (dharma) were not the same thing.<ref>Sankrityayan, quoted and translated in Joshi (2009), "Journeys of the Self," pp. 136–138.</ref> In ''Ghumakkar Shastra'' (1948), he singled out Buddhism as "the gem amongst" world religions precisely because its rejection of caste-based purity taboos made it uniquely compatible with his own ideal of unrestricted human wandering and fellowship, a reading of Buddhism as embodied cosmopolitanism that a recent study analyzes as a satirical, quasi-scriptural critique of religion more broadly.<ref name="Upadhyay2025">Upadhyay, Nishant (2025). "The Wanderer as Becoming: A Satirical Critique of Indian Philosophy and Religions and a Wanderer's Religion". ''Religions'' 16(9): 1147.</ref> His disciple Jagdish Kashyap recalled that Sankrityayan dismissed meditation as something best left to old age, preferring missionary and political work in the present.<ref>Kashyap (1961), p. 8.</ref>

Sankrityayan's Buddhism-Marxism synthesis has been read alongside, and against, [[BR Ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]]'s contemporaneous turn to Buddhism as a vehicle of Dalit emancipation. Where Ambedkar stripped Buddhism of most of its metaphysics to foreground it as a social doctrine of equality, Sankrityayan retained a far more textual and historical engagement with Buddhist metaphysics even as he tried to fuse it with Marxist materialism, and he wrote for a broad Hindi readership across caste and class lines rather than constructing a specifically Dalit religious identity.<ref name="Joshi2019">Joshi, Maya (2019). "Rahul Sankrityayan and Ambedkar as Contrapuntal Contemporaries: Unpacking Their 'Metaphysics and Politics'". In: Lal, Vinay (Ed.), ''India and Civilizational Futures: Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics II'': 182–214. Oxford University Press.</ref> He nonetheless shared with Ambedkar an emphasis on the Buddha as social reformer, praising the Buddha's grant of formal equality to the lowest castes within the monastic order and his practice, memorialized in Sankrityayan's own retelling of the Buddha's rebuke to a wealthy foster-mother who wished to give him a robe rather than the sangha as a whole, of directing his followers toward "the good of the many" rather than individual salvation alone.<ref>Sankrityayan, "Buddha aur Gandhi," quoted and translated in Joshi (2009), "Journeys of the Self," pp. 139–140.</ref> His interpretation of ''anatta'' (non-self) likewise doubled as social critique: he read the doctrine's dismantling of a permanent, unchanging self as a philosophical rejection of the caste- and class-based hierarchies that, in his view, depended on essentialist claims about fixed human natures and inherited status.<ref>Bhartiya (2025), "Rahul Sankrityayan and His Contribution to Indian Buddhism," p. 100.</ref>