Maha Bodhi Society

⚠  Awaiting Peer Review  ⚠ This encyclopedia entry is complete but has not yet undergone review by an area specialist.

The Maha Bodhi Society was founded in 1891 by the Sri Lankan 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 Sankrityayan as a missionary, and counted Singaravelu and 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 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. 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. Geary and Mukherjee describe a dispute over the temple with the Giri mahants in which the colonial state was hesitant and cautious. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Narasu and the Society

➣ Main article: 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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". 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Literature in English

• Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [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. [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. [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. [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. [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. [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. [Thass's reply of 17 May 1911 on the Society's Madras members (vol. 2, pp. 168–169). Tamil.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Maha Bodhi Society". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Maha_Bodhi_Society.