Editing Maha Bodhi Society

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The Maha Bodhi Society was founded in 1891 by the [[Sri Lanka]]n Buddhist layman Anagarika Dharmapala (Don David Hewavitarana) to restore the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya to Buddhist control and to revive Buddhism in [[India]]. For several decades it was a leading Buddhist institution in India, with its headquarters in Calcutta (now Kolkata), a major center at Sarnath, and branches in cities such as Madras (now Chennai). It is relevant to the Radical Buddhism Project not as a radical body, which it was not, but as the institutional setting for many of the figures treated in the India entries. It sheltered the young [[Dharmanand Kosambi]], employed [[Rahul Sankrityaya]]n as a missionary, and counted Singaravelu and [[P Lakshmi Narasu |P. Lakshmi Narasu]] among the officers and speakers of its Madras branch. It clashed with [[Iyothee Thass]]'s casteless Sakya Buddhists and, in a lawsuit, with Narasu. Its relations with Hindu nationalism and with the state were close, and its response to [[BR Ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]]'s conversion was divided. This page treats the Society only as these connections require and is not a full institutional history.

== Foundation and Bodh Gaya ==
The Mahabodhi temple, where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, had been out of Buddhist hands for centuries. According to the sources used here, a Saiva mahant took up residence at Bodh Gaya in 1590, and the site was thereafter administered by his lineage as a Hindu place of worship.<ref name="ober23">Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, chs. 3–4. Chudal dates the abandonment of the temple by Buddhists to "sometime in the 14th century" (Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2015). "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal". ''European Bulletin of Himalayan Research'' 46: 62–87).</ref> After a pilgrimage there, Dharmapala founded the Society in 1891, with Sumangala (Sumangalacharya) as its president; its stated aims were to restore the temple to Buddhist control, to revive Buddhism in India, to print Buddhist literature, and to train missionaries.<ref>Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन ''Nivedan'' [Statement] (Marathi). Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali, p. 103 (read from the page image; the founding year and the president). The list of aims is from Chudal (2015) and Ober (2023). Kosambi writes "Dharmapal", the son of a rich Sinhalese trader, and does not equate him with any other Dharmapala.</ref> Geary and Mukherjee describe a dispute over the temple with the Giri mahants in which the colonial state was hesitant and cautious.<ref>Geary, David, & Sraman Mukherjee (2017). "Buddhism in Contemporary India". In: Jerryson, Michael (Ed.), ''The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism''. Oxford University Press, ch. 2: 36–57, pp. 43–44. Doyle (2003), "Liberate the Mahabodhi Temple!", is the lead for later Dalit activism at Bodh Gaya and was not examined.</ref> Kosambi, who reached Bodh Gaya in February 1902, found the temple compound in the mahant's monastery with Hindu image worship going on, heard from students that a Buddhist monk named Dharmapala was in litigation with the mahant, and was told by a monk there to learn Pali in Ceylon and to apply to the Maha Bodhi Society in Calcutta.<ref>Kosambi (1924), ''Nivedan'', pp. 83–88. Whether the monk of the lawsuit is Anagarika Dharmapala is not stated on the pages.</ref>

The Society was not the first Buddhist voluntary association in colonial India. Ober identifies the Chittagong Buddhist Association (1887) as the first such body, four years earlier, and Kripasaran's Bengal Buddhist Association (Calcutta, 1892) followed the Society by a year.<ref name="ober23" /> Ober also shows that the Panchama free schools of Henry Steel Olcott's Theosophical Society in Madras seeded the Sakya Buddhist Society (pp. 135–143; see [[Tamil Buddhist Movement]]).

== The Madras Branch ==
The Madras branch is the point at which the Society touched the anti-caste Buddhism of South India. G. Aloysius reports that the effort to open a Madras branch in 1898 began at the initiative of M. Singaravelu, although the branch itself opened in 1900, and he lists Singaravelu among its early lecturers.<ref>Aloysius, G. (1998). ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism''. New Age International, p. 58 and n. 27 (citing the Society's journal, vol. 8, no. 6, p. 51, and vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 39–40). The same page records that in 1903 the Sakya Buddhist Young Men's Association was formed under the joint patronage of Dharmapala and Thass.</ref> In 1903 Kosambi found a "Madras Maha Bodhi Sabha" whose president was a Professor Lakshminarasu Naidu (probably Narasu) and whose secretary was Singaravelu, which held its meetings at Singaravelu's house and at Royapettah, gave poor relief and school supplies, and did not get on with Thass's followers.<ref>Kosambi (1924), ''Nivedan'', pp. 110, 114–117; Murugesan, K., & C.S. Subramanyam (1975). ''Singaravelu: First Communist in South India''. People's Publishing House, pp. 8, 146. The identification of Lakshminarasu Naidu with Narasu is an inference from the pages. Singaravelu later signed a manifesto in 1923 as, among other offices, president of the Madras Maha Bodhi Society (Murugesan & Subramanyam, p. 187).</ref> The Society's Madras members and Thass were separate groups: in a reply to a reader in the ''Tamilan'' of 17 May 1911, Thass explained why he neither attended nor preached at the Maha Bodhi Sangam in Pudupettai. He objected that its members said Buddhism had no caste, yet said they would teach the "lower classes" and so raised themselves, and that they denied rebirth and held that death is the end. Aloysius adds that Thass distrusted the Society's "scientific Buddhism" as western atheist rationalism, and that his followers accused the Society of upper-caste condescension.<ref>Aloysius, G. (Ed.) (1999). அயோத்திதாசர் சிந்தனைகள் ''Iyothee Thassar Cinthanaikal'' [Thoughts of Iyothee Thass], vol. 2, item 73, pp. 168–169 (''Tamilan'' 4:49, 17 May 1911). The issue number marks the end of the instalment. The no-rebirth doctrine is attributed to the Madras members and not to Dharmapala, and the article names nobody. Aloysius (1998), pp. 145, 160.</ref>

== Narasu and the Society ==
{{Main|P Lakshmi Narasu}}
Dharmapala wrote the introduction to Narasu's ''Essence of Buddhism'' (1907), and the Society's Calcutta branch published his ''What Is Buddhism?'' (1916). The relationship worsened as Narasu's materialist reading of karma and rebirth and his criticism of the sangha became known. The Society had helped to fund the vihara at Perambur that belonged to the Sakya Buddhist Society, and its journal printed a report of a South Indian Buddhist conference at Bangalore that omitted key sentences of Narasu's presidential message. In his last years the Society sued him in a civil court for illegally occupying the vihara; Ober reports that the case was settled only sixty years later by the Madras High Court.<ref>Narasu, P. Lakshmi (1916). ''What is Buddhism?'' Calcutta: Mahabodhi Society of India (reprinted Samyak Prakashan, 2009); Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 142–143 and nn. 80, 83 (p. 314). Ober's text places the censored message at the second conference, but his note compares two printings of the transcript of the third conference of 1928; the Society's journal gave the case numbers and its side of the dispute in 1932–34. See the entry on Narasu for the details and for the difference between Ober's and Aloysius's dates for the vihara.</ref>

== Kosambi and Sankrityayan ==
The Society's Calcutta circle was Kosambi's first institutional contact with Buddhism. He turned to it for help, was sheltered by it in Calcutta, and was given letters of introduction to Madras.<ref>Kosambi (1924), ''Nivedan'', pp. 84–85, 95–97, 103.</ref> His stay at the Madras branch is described above, and his own career is treated in the entry on [[Dharmanand Kosambi]].

[[Rahul Sankrityayan]]'s work for the Society is better documented. In 1922, newly active in Congress politics at Chhapra, he drafted a resolution that the temple at Bodh Gaya be restored to Buddhist control; it was forwarded to the Gaya session of the Congress, where Dharmapala sent two monks, Bhikshu Sri Nivasa and a Bhikshu Dharmapala, with Burmese monks to press the case, and Sankrityayan translated the foreign delegates' speeches into Hindi at a meeting held in the Arya Samaj's tent.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 4; Chudal (2015), "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal", p. 62 and n. 3. The monk "Bhikshu Dharmapala" of this episode should not be identified with Anagarika Dharmapala or with the monk of the Bodh Gaya lawsuit in Kosambi's memoir without evidence.</ref> In 1926 he sat, with K.P. Jayaswal and Rajendra Prasad, on the committee that negotiated over the temple, whose report appeared in the Society's journal.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 4, n. 25 (the ''Maha Bodhi Journal'' 34/1, 1926: 2–50). According to Ober, a document of the committee records him as "Sadhu Ramodar Das".</ref> He went to Sri Lanka in 1927 on Bhikshu Sri Nivasa's recommendation, and he served as the Society's missionary (''dhammaduta'') for the London Buddhist Mission in 1932–33.<ref>Chudal (2015), pp. 64–66 and n. 6. See the entry on [[Rahul Sankrityayan]].</ref> The Society's Sarnath branch also published a Hindi journal, ''Dharmadoot'', from 1935, which carried work by Bodhananda, Har Dayal, Sankrityayan, Jagdish Kashyap, and [[Narendra Deva]], among others; Ober counts the Society, Kashi Vidyapith, and the Vidyalankara Pirivena as the shared institutions through which the scholarly, leftist, and Dalit currents of Indian Buddhism were interconnected.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 195, 210.</ref>

== The Hindu Mahasabha and the Question of Hindu Nationalism ==
The Society was entangled with Hindu nationalism from the 1920s. Ober documents the Hindu Mahasabha's attempts to treat Buddhism as a part of "Hindu" India: Dharmapala's own shifting statements on Hindu-Buddhist unity (pp. 151–152), V.D. Savarkar's declaration in ''Hindutva'' (1923) that the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha were all "ours" (p. 159), and the industrialist J.K. Birla's long and well-documented financing of Buddhist temples (pp. 165–167), a policy that aimed to fold Buddhism into a wider "Arya Dharma".<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 4, pp. 151–167. The sources used here do not state that Birla's funds went to the Maha Bodhi Society itself; Ober notes that Birla also supported several leftist and anti-caste Buddhists of the 1930s, including Sankrityayan, Kashyap, and Kosambi, while they criticized the Mahasabha he supported, and leaves the tension unresolved.</ref> The sharpest link was a personal one: Syama Prasad Mookerjee was the Society's president from 1942 to 1953, and during those years he founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the ancestor of the Bharatiya Janata Party.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 4.</ref> Sankrityayan attacked the Birla-funded dharmashala at Kushinagar (1939) as an attempt to turn the anti-caste, atheist, self-supporting Buddhists into Hindus by throwing money at the site.<ref>Sankrityayan, Rahul ([1944–63] 2014), vol. 2, p. 192, as cited by Ober (2023), ch. 4.</ref>

== Ambedkar's Conversion and the Nehru Era ==
Ober shows that Ambedkar's conversion was prepared by decades of engagement with this milieu: Ambedkar met Bodhananda in 1920 and had direct links with the Society and with his Pali tutor Ishwardatt Medharthi.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 5.</ref> When he converted at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, he is reported to have told the press that he wanted the whole of India to become Buddhist and that it should not be only a "Harijan religion"; the Society's journal printed the remark.<ref>''Maha Bodhi Journal'' 64/11 (1956), p. 504, as cited by Ober (2023); the journal was not seen.</ref> The response to the conversion was divided: the Society's journal printed one dismissive review, although Sankrityayan wrote an approving pamphlet in 1957, and the Society petitioned Nehru over the loss of reservation benefits for converts and distributed 50,000 copies of Bodhananda's ritual manual to the new Buddhists. The Birla-funded donor network, by contrast, effectively cut off funding to the Ambedkarite movement.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', chs. 5 and 7. The 50,000 copies and the petition are reported by Ober; the dismissive review is not identified here.</ref>

== Nepal ==
The Society was also a base of the Theravada revival in [[Nepal]]. The first Nepalese Theravada monks were ordained in India by monks of the Society, and the Buddhist Society of Nepal (1951) adopted objectives drawn from the Maha Bodhi programme.<ref>Letizia, Chiara (2014). "Buddhist Activism, New Sanghas, and the Politics of Belonging among Some Tharu and Magar Communities of Southern Nepal". In: Toffin, Gérard, & Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka (Eds.), ''Facing Globalization in the Himalayas''. Sage, ch. 12, pp. 289–294, citing Kloppenborg, Ria (1977). "Theravada Buddhism in Nepal". ''Kailash'' 5.4: 301–321, p. 307.</ref> When the Rana government expelled the Theravada monks in July 1944, the Society offered them hospitality at Sarnath, and its Sarnath secretary, the Sri Lankan monk Bhikshu Sri Nivasa (1894–1968), sheltered five of them at his rest house at Nautanva on the Indian side of the border.<ref>Kloppenborg (1977), "Theravada Buddhism in Nepal", p. 306; Chudal (2015), p. 65 n. 8. See the entry on Nepal.</ref>

== Literature in English ==
* Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press. {{annotation|The standard study of the Society's role in the Buddhist revival, its entanglements with the Theosophical Society, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Nehru government, and its quarrel with Narasu.}}
* Geary, David, & Sraman Mukherjee (2017). "Buddhism in Contemporary India". In: Jerryson, Michael (Ed.), ''The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism'': 36–57. Oxford University Press. {{annotation|A survey of the Society's founding, the Bodh Gaya dispute, and the post-1956 movement, with a bibliography of recent work.}}
* Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2015). "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal". ''European Bulletin of Himalayan Research'' 46: 62–87. {{annotation|Sankrityayan's work for the Society and the Society's role in the Nepalese revival.}}
* Aloysius, G. (1998). ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism''. New Age International. {{annotation|The relation of the Society's Madras branch to the Sakya Buddhist Society. Its interpretations are the author's own arguments.}}
* Murugesan, K., & C.S. Subramanyam (1975). ''Singaravelu: First Communist in South India''. People's Publishing House. {{annotation|Meetings of the Madras branch at Singaravelu's house, and his 1923 manifesto, signed as its president.}}

== Literature in Other Languages ==
* Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन ''Nivedan'' [Statement]. Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali. {{annotation|The memoir of a Marathi monk, with eyewitness accounts of Bodh Gaya in 1902 (pp. 83–88), the Society's Calcutta circle (pp. 95–97, 103), and the Madras Sabha in 1903 (pp. 110–117). Marathi.}}
* Aloysius, G. (Ed.) (1999). அயோத்திதாசர் சிந்தனைகள் ''Iyothee Thassar Cinthanaikal'' [Thoughts of Iyothee Thass], vols. 1–2. FRRC, St Xavier's College. {{annotation|Thass's reply of 17 May 1911 on the Society's Madras members (vol. 2, pp. 168–169). Tamil.}}

== How to Cite This Article ==
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Brons, Lajos ({{REVISIONYEAR}}). "Maha Bodhi Society". ''The Radical Buddhism Project''. Version of {{#time: j F Y | {{REVISIONYEAR}}-{{REVISIONMONTH}}-{{REVISIONDAY}} }}. <nowiki>http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Maha_Bodhi_Society</nowiki>.

== Notes ==
<references />

[[category:India]]
[[Category:Topical Pages]]
[[Category:Organizations]]
[[Category:Dharmanand Kosambi]]
[[Category:Rahul Sankrityaya]]
[[Category:P Lakshmi Narasu ]] 
[[Category:BR Ambedkar]]