Original subtitles

Why did Baba Sahib Ambedkar choose Buddhism?

In choosing Buddhism, why did he not join the already existing Buddhist

orders?

Mahayana, Vajrayana or Theravada?

Ambedkar was seeking social and political change.

Hello, I am Sudipto Mandal and welcome to Seeking Sangha.

A special series on What's Your Ism focused on Ambedkar's Buddhism.

We speak to five of the world's top experts to understand a revolutionary

ideology that is 2,500 years old.

Seeking Sangha is actually the name of a documentary film made by my dear friend

Sri Rao TK and my own brother, Sumanto Mandal.

It's a story about an extraordinary group of anti-caste missionaries who

went on a 5000 km yatra across South India to preach Ambedkarite Buddhism.

The questions that my guests and I grapple with in this series are provoked

by the film.

Ambedkar did not get enlightened under a Bodhi tree.

So, where did he get his ideas for anti-caste Buddhism?

Can his Buddhism compete with Brahmanism and Marxism?

The guests with whom I try to answer all these questions are Douglas Ober, author

of Dust on the Throne, The Search for Buddhism in Modern India.

Ambedkarite intellectual, Buddhist scholar and JNU professor, Vyas Aloni.

Feminist intellectual and author of Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, Uma

Chakravarti.

Gajendran Ayyathurai, author of Tamil Buddhism and Brahminism in modern India.

And in the concluding episode, I sit with the person without whose help this

entire series wouldn't have been possible.

The curator of Seeking Sangha, the historian, Dr. Chandrabhan Yadav.

Seeking Sangha, the interview series, is an effort to build context for Seeking

Sangha, the film. The News Minute, News Laundry and Confluence Media have helped

in the making of the film Seeking Sangha and we will be holding a series of

special private screenings for our members and contributors at select

venues across the country.

To make enquiries about the film or to collaborate in hosting screenings, you

can email seekingsangha at thenewsminute.com.

You can help with a contribution by scanning this QR code.

Right, welcome to episode 2 of Seeking Sangha, this special set of

conversations on what's your ism. And for this second episode, I have India's,

one of India's most renowned feminist anti-caste scholars, Uma Chakravarti,

Dr. Uma Chakravarti, the author of Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, a

clutter-breaking book in the 80s.

Somebody who also wrote Gendering Cast and coined that one term that we like to

use quite often nowadays, brahminical patriarchy.

Dr. Chakraborty, thank you so much for coming on What's Your Rhythm.

Thank you for asking me.

Now, this special segment has about five conversations.

Just before this, we had Douglas Ober who wrote the book Dust on the Throne.

The entire effort is to build context for a film that we have made, a film

that you just watched, build context and also bring attention to this film.

That's the attempt of this special series. So before anything, I want to

know from you, what do you think of the film?

What are your takeaways?

You know, one of the best things about the film is

the energy that it has somehow managed to generate.

I mean, there is the issue of the traveling Ashoka and

the project of installing it and so on. But through that connection,

which... People might, in some ways, know in a tenuous kind of way the

relationship between Ashoka and Buddhism.

And historical research has tended to suggest that the Dhamma is something

that he derived, is inspired from Buddhism. But he's careful not to,

Ashoka's careful not to actually call it the Buddha, the message of the Buddha in

some sense of the term. So obviously Ashoka was, to my mind, perhaps being

strategic in the way in which he incorporated the essentials

of the Dhamma into his governance, but

did not actually name it as derived directly from Buddhism.

So there's a sort of attempt at staying above.

beliefs of various kinds. And this is the king's message.

So in that sense, I think what's interesting is that this firmly actually

locates Ashoka in the Buddha Dhamma rather than in simply some kind of a

secular ethic that he derived.

So that's one of the characteristics of the... And to that extent, then what...

the recovery of that relationship between Ashoka and

the Dhamma is given a further charge and it's actually given an

additional charge because the entire film creates that

energy, that high levels of energy with everyone participating in it. So in a

sense,

It's Ashoka, but it's also Ambedkar and it's also the Buddha and very much, of

course, the Buddha and the Dhamma. So that trio comes in very

interestingly and very significantly. So I think in all those ways, the film has

done something to take the...

maybe not ordinary, but that journey through

various parts of peninsular India mostly to a level in

which you are telling a story of that.

I don't know how many people knew that such a thing had happened, but not only

tells that story.

But it recovers that relationship and that history and the links between

Ashoka Dhamma and Abudha Dhamma and Ambedkar. So in that sense,

I think it's very interesting. Right. No, but the film is also, I don't know

how, whether you agree with this or not, but it's a difficult watch. I mean, by

any measure, because it's got seven languages, for starters.

The fact that there are several things over there which come almost, they're a

provocation, but in that provocation is also a cipher because some of those

provocations are not taken to their logical conclusion. For instance, you

know, you will have a character saying the Buddha's message or Samrat Ashoka's

message is essentially a social message. It is a message of anti-caste or

somebody else comes in to say that, you know, how should a king be?

What should a Chakravarti be like?

And each of these things, to my mind, and I suppose that is the conversation

that we're going to have, is an opportunity to get into these at a

conceptual level. And that's where I think this effort to build context for

the film.

Because somebody like you who's educated in the Ambedkarite movement, the anti

-caste struggle, Buddha's role and place in it, might find a lot of things over

there. which you recognize.

But for the lay audience, I suppose, a lot of these things are lost. And

therefore, I really hope that those of you who come to watch the screenings, it

is going to come to your city. We're going to travel across the South. We're

going to come up North as well.

So before you watch the film, please do listen to these conversations because

we're going to try and go into some of these silos, some of these little

conversation blocks, which help us understand this larger structure.

called Buddhism and not just Navayana Buddhism, but Buddhism in its essence or

Buddhism, as you mentioned, in the early period using the Pali canon.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Okay. No, no. In that sense, I think the film is going back to

an originary moment.

before it actually is associated with any sense of a

message. I mean, the Buddha has given his message, and the bhikkhus have been

traveling around with that message, which is, of course, part of the legacy

of the early Buddhist texts itself.

But then because of the association with Ashoka and the fact that it gets picked

up and then it circulates widely as Buddhism and then travels

to all these countries where, you know, goes to Sri Lanka and so on, which is a

very powerful account of that.

That also, resonances of that. So it is interesting. I was struck by the fact

that it is focused essentially on peninsular India. It doesn't go into

North India at all. And so it's the usual beat. And the multiple languages

is interesting because having lived in Karnataka and being somewhat, I mean,

originally Tamil speaking, those languages are familiar. So I didn't

really, it didn't, the number of languages involved. And because one has

worked on Maharashtra and taught there from time to time, the Marathi is also

sort of somewhat familiar. So that was nice. That was quite nice.

Right, right. But it also is for, let's say, you know, somebody who's

working in Dalit politics. It's also a reminder of what actually separates us.

That also comes through quite clearly in what some people are saying, that we are

separated by language and we're trying to find a unitary ideology.

But OK, now.

What we'll do is, like somebody again in the film said, it's a very vast topic.

And that's why your book is instructive. Because in this vastness, you manage to

put together in your book what is absolutely essential to know as far as

this question of Buddhism being a liberation theology.

So I want to start, let's say, let's start from the beginning, which is the

Genesis theory of...

of Buddhism. I suppose that's a good starting point. All religious

cosmologies have this concept of in the beginning. Yes. In the beginning,

consider that on one side we are looking at Brahmanism and then we are looking at

any number of prophetic faiths which are liberational in their ideology. You have

the Abrahamic system where you have the figure of Isa, Jesus of Nazareth. You

have Muhammad and each of them have many, you know, material analysis that

they've gone into. But in the Genesis story, there is some problem. Like in

the church, sorry, in the Christian, this thing, you know, where you talk

about Genesis.

So in the Buddhist Genesis story, what is to your mind the one thing that

really sets it apart from other liberation theologies out there? See, in

one sense, it's actually, it's mind-blowing because

It isn't linked to a body of,

you know, sort of a basic canonical set of

principles that it's trying to propound. It is actually a Genesis theory in the

sense that an extraordinary, so almost, you know, you can draw upon things like

theories of the universe and physics and so on because It is actually talking

about evolution over a very long period of time.

Initially, even the world has not come into being.

So there is the... Actually, a science person will be able to relate to this

Aganya Sutta very well because it is very rational, it's logical,

and it is powerful in looking at what the history of...

the coming into being of the world, the universe and the world, and human beings

in it, and then how things begin to develop. So in that sense, I think it's

absolutely mind-blowing. I remember that I was completely blown over by this

piece, by this sutta, because it seemed so extraordinarily... This is the

agama sutta.

Agana sutta. Agana sutta.

This is what comes... Comes first.

So what came first is the sutta.

And even the manner in which it develops, the sort of how things move

from the subtle to the gross, how the subtleness of what exists in the early

stages becomes grosser and grosser.

Even things like, you know, there's no vegetation, there's no nothing, there's

something, there's a kind of ball, and on that comes a skin, a

sort of skin comes along on it. And over a period of time, through the

evolutionary process, there is a grossification that is happening.

And finally, there is a materiality that you can actually understand and

follow in some ways.

And even things like human beings are evolved through the same process. So

as the universe and the world is evolved, even human beings are evolved

over a period of time.

long period in which the world is evolving and even human beings come into

it. And initially they are actually, they are not divided into men and women.

I mean, you can imagine the power of that. That is, there is a universal

person and that universal person becomes man and woman.

reproduction happens and so on. So it's fantastic in terms of its capacity

to tell you how the world and the things on

it which are material and then human beings on it that come. Even things like

initially there's no rice and they're ethereal beings so they don't have to be

fed.

But then... you know, they are getting grosser and grosser and then food is

required. And then food itself is just gathered. It's a gathering stage. I

mean, look at the power of that. You gather it and come back. And then one

fellow, one lazy fellow has, you know, collected.

collected, its suggestion is rice, collected for both the morning and the

evening. So when the people come around and say, come on, come on, it's our time

to go collect the gathering, collect the rice for the evening. He says, I've

already collected for morning and evening and the morning round.

So, you know, accumulation begins with that. And degeneration begins. Begins

with that. Ma'am, if you'll allow me to come in over here. Yeah, please.

So now, again, in the Christian canon, what do you have?

That the woman is born out of the thigh bone of the man.

That is the origin theory of how the woman came about. And here you're

talking about a unitary power which splits into two, male and female.

Another thing that struck me, and this is something I derived from your own

book, is how they talk about this pristine past

in which

Now again to quote you, in the original state of nature, beings lived in a

godlike perfection.

That is the theory, that beings lived in a godlike perfection. And the

degeneration happened because of greed and passion.

Now the fall of man, here is where it really gets exciting, again quoting from

your book. The fall of man happens with family, private property, the political

state. The emergence of the political state. Absolutely.

And social stratification. And, you know, we have goosebumps already. Right?

Because why? Because we are all, in a broad sense, left thinking, Marxist. And

here you have a communist manifesto, literally. Yes, yes. Which problematizes

private property. Yeah.

Traces the origin of private property to this concept of family. Yeah.

And says, in order to protect private property and family, you have the

emergence of this king.

Yes. And that the Buddhist.

literature talks about consistently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Saying this king was

created by the degeneration.

And the king finally has to maintain what is called as order. Yeah. And

therefore you have to socially stratify. Yeah, yeah. And that is the sum total of

all our problems today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. It is. Absolutely.

And then broadly it accrues to working people.

to king.

But that's the only stratification actually. Men and women have already

come into existence.

But then there is a stratification between the leader of the people and...

the people, it's still not yet, and then it gets more complicated because then

those who do one kind of job are categorized as this. So in that sense,

it gives you a rational explanation for the, it's not that it's created out

of the mouth of Brahma, but it is actually, and therefore it is

sanctified. It evolves from a situation in which the

consensus of the people to some extent is actually present in that division.

We spoke about this king.

Again, in the film, there's a character who speaks about two types of kings.

One she refers to as this king who falls for his advisors and puts his wife to

the test of fire.

And then she proposes another king.

And this is a good entry point for me to talk about that whole section you

dedicate to...

what is called the normative king or how a king ought to be and the empirical

king, which is how the king is in the time of the Buddha, which is five, six

hundred years before Christ.

The Pali Canon has a description of what these kings are doing, what they are up

to, how they rule.

And in that, it is laced with some subtle sense of judgment, but it is more

journalistic. The empirical king in the Pali canon emerges as a character who is

described through his actions. He used his power arbitrarily, for instance.

Then you have this concept of the normative king as how the king should

be. The Kakkavati or the Chakravati. Chakravati.

Chakravati. Let's get into this. What are these two kings, ma'am?

Well, you know, actually, one of the most interesting things about the Pali

texts, and this is to some extent reflected even in the parallel,

you know, the sects that are known at that time, Ajivikas and so on, is the

fact that they have to not only develop a theory of the world

and what exists, they also have to deal with the theory of power.

how it can be used.

So, at the end of the day, one of the critical things is to describe the king.

There are no norms, clearly, in the time of the Buddha.

There are the Ganasanghas and the Ganasanghas are ruled by this internal

mechanism of sort of consensus.

Actually, Ma'am, sorry to interrupt you. I suppose it will be easier for us to

get into this empirical versus ideal king.

If we talk about the political, organization or the political realities

of that time. Can we start with that? What is this Ganasangha?

What are these kingdoms? What is the time we are looking at? Yeah.

What is happening in... Broadly between the 6th and the 4th century BC.

And during this period, the earliest period, that is around the 6th century

BC, you have a number of Ganasanghas.

What are... Republics? They've been... Republics, they've been also described

as tribal oligarchies.

There was...

I think the political scientists and the theoreticians had difficulty trying to

understand what this was.

But some of these kingdoms, some of these Ganasanghas,

were spread at the

edge of Uttar Pradesh.

and Bihar, northeast, generally that area, in the Gangetic Valley, but

closer to, in the northern part of it rather than the southern part of it. By

the time that the Buddha is, the Buddhist texts are being described,

Magadha is already a unit which is seeking to become powerful.

And so there is a certain trajectory that goes through.

Similarly, Koshara is also described like that.

Now these Ganasanghas, which actually I like to call them Ganasanghas because

that is the most accurate term. We have no equivalent where we can say what they

are. So they are not monarchies. They are not.

So they're not monarchies. They're not kingdoms.

They are.

When you call it, they are oligarchies in one sense of the term because there

is stratification in these areas. But they are essentially between two

categories of people, a particular clan that is ruling over there and the labor

that is performed by the Dasakarmakaras who are clearly also in place as those

who are actually doing the production. So the interesting thing about the

Ganasangas is that they seem to be ruled, they seem to be administered,

ruled, controlled by people who see themselves all as equally

entitled to power.

And there is some circulating system by which you can nominate someone to be the

king for either that, an X number of years or whatever it is. It's a system

that has not been fully, I mean, you have to get the edges of that described

in the text.

But it's very difficult because it died out.

thereafter. And so we have no models that we can go off. And so you're left

with, you know, the 6th century BC Greek republics and so on. And our problem

with our historians is that they can't understand their own history.

They have to go here and there in order to be able to actually explain what is

happening in these places.

What is interesting is that they say, I am also a king, I am also a king, I am

also a king. We are all kings.

And so then they have some circulating system and they have some voting system

also by which they decide. This is important because ultimately when the

Buddhists set up their Sangha, they use the same model in order to, where there

is no consensus, they try and use the historic experience of these Ganasanghas

to determine controversial issues.

So then they vote.

If you can't build a consensus, then you vote. So it's interesting that there are

political arrangements, but clearly then there is no despotic power at that

stage. And no concentration of power, central concentration. Now the classic

striking thing is the intensive agrarian belts, which is Kosala and Magadha,

are developing these.

what would be equivalent to absolutely despotic kingship.

It is referred to even in the Buddhist texts as a situation where Isaryamadda,

drunk with power, drunk with the idea of lordship.

And so there's no dhamma, there's no ethical values in place.

The king can do exactly as he pleases. And so he can bind you in chains, he can

do whatever it is.

So that is the situation that the Buddha is confronted with. So when he has to

think of... See, the whole world is not going to become bhikkhus and go off.

So there's a...

Sangha that he will create, that he will also try and use creativity in trying to

work the consensus principle out over there.

But there is also the rest of the world. There is the whole problem of how

if you do not have a consensus, what do you do? And then he suggests that you do

the vote and you actually take account from whatever.

Now, so power.

Concentrated power anywhere is going to lead to arbitrary rule.

So this despotic rule of the Jata Shatrus and

so on has to be replaced with something which has ethics at its

basis. So therefore he comes up with this Dhameko Dhamma Raja. The king who

is ruled by the Dhamma.

And therefore, even conquest. So the model of what Ashoka does afterwards by

accepting the Dhamma and not conquering any further, although he's gotten to a

fairly large empire anyway.

But the fact is that the deep south is left out of it. And he stops at that

point. So it's interesting that the cap on...

kingdom and universal monarchy is being also

suggested through the methods that he saw. So that's one of the powerful

suttas which describe the king as

imagined under this kind of Buddhist humanism of some kind.

Also using power is interesting.

Right. No, and also when you look at the renunciate king,

that is an exciting idea, isn't it? So on one side, in this imagination of what

the, you know, the ideal king should be, the Chakravarti, what should he be like?

The Dhammiko Dhammaraja.

So they're getting into this question of this person needs to have all the power.

at their disposal and yet not use it.

You know, and I hate to, I mean, we talked about this earlier and you were a

little uncomfortable with the term. It's like a nuclear deterrent.

You have the nuclear arms, you have the fourfold army, you have the fourfold

army and you need to have that to be a Chakravarti or a, you know, or a

Dhammiko Dhamma Raja.

But it is your soft power, not your hard power, which in the end of the day

defines your... But he's actually using the alternative that he's constructing.

is to the existing power, especially in Magadha.

It is Bimbisara, but much more so Ajatashatru. So Ajatashatru is actually

known. And one of the interesting descriptions that you get in the

Buddhist texts, it's talk.

It's always standard practice that when the king comes to see even the Buddha,

he comes with his fourfold army to back him. It's like the king cannot be

associated.

disassociated from the coercive apparatus that he has, which is very

interesting.

All the pump and both go together because what is power, which is, you

know, just sort of persuasive power.

There is the possibility of the... strike that can be.

I mean, the fourfold army to that extent is, it's also coming into being because

originally the armies may have been these little oligarchies who are all

going off to fight. The entire clan is going off to fight. Here you are

creating a standing army and that's also something that is mentioned in the

Buddhist text very clearly that they're creating a fourfold standing army and

people are coming to join it from different locations in that.

whether it's Magadha or whatever.

So that's that process of evolution.

There's intensive agrarian production that is growing.

There's military power that is being, let's say, crafted and thought

about. And there is administration that is being expanded.

And the king is meant to do all of this. Now, the point is, if he's a Dhameko

Dhamaraja,

It's a soft power.

And that soft power has to be used for good things, including welfare.

Like, for instance, you know, if there are thieves and whatever it is, or

people who don't have resources, and they are plundering the countryside or

whatever it is, the king is exhorted to create, give them

grants of land so that they can... actually have a productive process.

This, I think, is very important. And we're talking about it today. Yes,

exactly. We're talking about reformative justice.

We're talking about punishment being a form of reform, of jail time being some

kind of Varsha Vyas.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, where you reflect on your... I would even push it

further. In my leap, at the point where India became independent,

we should have actually, my theory is that we should have actually...

collectivize the land and redistributed it across the population so that

everyone had productive resources.

And if everyone had productive resources, then you would not have

needed reservations to, which becomes then this endemic thing of, you know,

you don't deserve it and you're getting, everyone is entitled to reproduce

themselves.

And everyone is therefore entitled to the state's resources in reproducing

themselves. So I see that as the real possibility through these.

Reforms, right?

Redistribution and reform. And that is, again, another thing which comes

through, shines through in this compilation that you put together 40

years ago.

You know, and we're talking about Nizam, which is two and a half thousand years

ago. And here we are talking about how to fight crime.

How do you fight crime? How do you fight the thief and the charlatan and the

looter and all of that is by taking away their reason to loot and to thieve and

to... And how do you do that? By providing gainful employment, by making

sure that the conditions... And this is something that actually even in our

public discourse, you know, in the 80s and all that, in the movies that we saw,

the criminal was a product of the system.

Today, in cinema, the villain is a cardboard cutout who is bad for being

bad, who is bad for bad sake.

Not somebody who stole two rotis because of hunger.

You know, that is quite a path-breaking way of looking at it.

I think the imagination was extremely powerful at that point of time. The

manner in which the Buddhist, the Buddha is trying to resolve the contradictions

of his own time without actually saying going back.

This I think is also an important thing about the Buddha.

He knows that there is no going back in history.

This is very important in my opinion.

You cannot actually return to some pristine past because history has moved.

The dialectics has created a new situation.

Then you have to moderate that and mediate that rather than say, I'll

unwind and go back to the days of the Ganasanga. So the Ganasanga can only

function as a model for his own Sangha. It is not functioning as a model for the

whole of the territory and the whole of society. That I think is important in us

trying to understand it.

He's acutely conscious of history and it's moved forward. You can't go back.

And you can't go back to a time which you've moved away from.

And that's again a very Marxist instinct. It is. Because now you use the

term yourself, you use dialectics. I'll add another word, dialectical

materialism is what?

Changing your dialectics according to the material conditions. In the simplest

of terms, the material conditions are changing and Marxism has to respond to

those changing.

And here you have somebody who's saying the same. I mean, he's saying there's an

impermanence in all of this.

And in all of this also is a very radical kind of commitment to modernity,

right?

To say that to break from the past is also to construct, to give the present

an opportunity to construct something for tomorrow.

Yeah. And actually the Sangha is meant to be that kind of a possibility.

That is, if you have a model,

That works.

Then it actually is something which is, you know, you break away from the

Buddhism.

The Buddha required you to actually to find the path to break, leave home,

leave the world of production and leave the world of reproduction and

production. And then go out in search of, you know, the path

as it were.

It is something that is not in the early Buddhist thinking.

You cannot be a householder and actually reach Nibban. Yeah. Okay.

Because you won't get into a state of desirelessness.

So it's very clear. So some people can leave the home and go off and do what

they are, join the Sangha. Now that Sangha then has to be modeled as a

fraternal organization.

which actually does not have the characteristics in that other world,

which is accumulative, which is selfish and greedy and whatever it is, and which

also accumulates power.

So in that sense of the term, what the Buddha is trying to create is an

organization which allows you to live minimally of the people.

And this is part of the culture.

You will feed someone and it has to be one meal a day only.

You can't, you bring back and then it's actually...

Powerful in the sense that they describe it as all the food is sometimes brought

to you. You don't go to a house because that lady gives you good food. You have

to go according to a... You have to go to every house. You have to go to every

house and according to a logic.

And then it got even more complex because in places like Sanchi, you'll

find a huge stone bowl where all the food is brought and tossed into it and

then it's...

mixed up and then you make shares in the because then get each a share. So in

even the manner in which you create the Sangha and reproduce it in terms of

the goals of the Sangha are distinctive but and that is also and that must have

humane relations not

you know, selfish relationships, but it has to have human relationships because

the Buddha, there is a description of a man who's not well, of a bhikkhu who's

not well and he's lying in his own, his bowels are

not in control and he's lying in that condition and the Buddha comes and says

to the other bhikkhus that you have to, you know, that is it.

We have all given up the world. We have no Nazis. We have no relatives.

We have to do for each other.

And so it's that fraternal relationship that is the basis of that thing. So it's

the desexualized fraternal affection, emotion that you can have. And that's

interesting in the way in which he conceptualizes it.

So, okay. So we've gone into the political organizing or the political

structures of that time. Yeah, yeah. We've also touched upon this business of

what is the genesis theory of of buddhism the degeneration of man and the

degeneration can only be remedied by once again gaining the enlightenment is

the original thesis you have this entire theory of the king the normative king

and now we are getting into this business of the sangha and i want to get

into the sangha and you know how it is designed how it is imagined how it

finally exists

These are perhaps sometimes in contradiction with one another.

We'll get into that. But after that is when I want to get into the

contradictions of all of these things. And that I suppose will be the exciting

part. But for now, the Sangha, ma'am. Okay, so what is the Sangha? What is the

imagination of the Sangha? Why should the Sangha exist?

Yes, it's interesting.

See, initially the bhikkhus are off traveling on their own.

And they move around from wherever they can to collect

their alms. And then the rest of the day is spent in meditation and the exercise

of the dhyana that is required and so on.

Now, during the monsoons, it is not possible to do that kind of walking

around. The Buddhist texts are acutely sensitive to the time

when... The agricultural, in a sense, the agrarian revolution is happening

because rice, the monsoon is the time when crops are sown.

And the fields, the paths disappear in that.

So there are no paths left and your walking will actually crush the new

plant saplings.

It's clearly now a rice growing area that they are in the imagination. It is

Eastern European Bihar that is at the heart of this even

conceptual imagination.

So this is happening. So then they are advised for four months not to move

around. And some little, you know, some kind of habitations are described as

getting. So Anathapindika gives a garden to them to stay in. And so they reside

over there and so on. So during those four months, they're not wandering

around. So what you're getting then is your relationship with

the village or the community from where you go and get your food and whatever it

is.

being broken at least at that point of time.

The Sangha then begins to emerge from that situation where You settle. You're

staying in those places. And then at the end of the day, rules have to be created

for the management of yourself. You're no longer a lone ascetic, a lone chap

wandering around. You are now living in larger communities.

And so a large number of institutions are put into place and a large number of

rules are also being devised to make it possible for you to live.

In that fraternal fashion, without too much...

tension. Plus, there is this whole business of how do you deal with the

Sangha is also meant to live an ethical life.

So if you're doing any wrongdoing and so on, then they create traditions in which

every 15 days you collect and you recite the Patimukha.

It's a series of rules that you recommit yourself to.

And you also indicate if you've done any faults and then the Sangha will decide.

in what manner you have to be.

You have to be made aware of what you're doing and then not repeat it thereafter.

So rules start to come into being. And the Sangha then begins to be that.

Early on, they're not meant to acquire property.

They're not meant to even...

change and money is not allowed to you.

You begin with very moving ways in which you actually don't even take cloth.

You take rags from what has been thrown in. That's why you'll find that the

Buddhist monks sometimes have patches, you know, the equivalent of patches.

Even their modern clothing is cut up to suggest that their patches stitch

together and so on. It's really living off very minimally the community.

cast off, so various kinds and so on. But it gets more complex and as they

proceed, a lot of things happen in the Sangha which the Buddha had not

envisaged as far as I can remember. Starting with the rebellion in his own

lifetime when they were trying to split the Sangha. That is also there.

Splitting the Sangha is a crisis that's looming at different possibilities in

different ways.

Now, we'll get into the contradiction that I do want to, obviously, that's the

part I'm really excited about, like I said. But, you know, if you look at the,

again, the standout feature of this Sangha, of people who in other

religions are just a collection of priests.

Now, these people are not necessarily priests in any officiating sense, number

one. They have a touch and go relationship with the lady, which is

they come for the alms.

But they are not part of their daily lives.

If you really seek out their counsel, you'll have to go to where the Sangha

is, I suppose, you know, and seek out some knowledge.

And the one big thing which you mentioned, again, in a small line, it's

so important.

They do not have the power to condemn you.

The clergy, this is a clergy of some sort.

Right. Unlike any other clergy that we have seen, which is so conjoined with

the monarchy, we are looking at, firstly, a clergy which is developed,

which is imagined as a separate entity from the state.

It has nothing to do with the state.

And it doesn't have any power to condemn. You know, this business of

throwing the Bible.

At somebody.

Right. This business of saying that you are a lechha, you are a chandala, you

know, we are condemning, we are cursing you. The only thing that a Buddhist monk

can do by way of showing dissent or disagreement with something that the

lady might have done is to overturn the begging bowl and say, I will not accept

your dana.

Yeah. It is powerful as a concept. It is quite exciting for somebody who doesn't

believe in these, you know, these Bible throwing priests.

Yeah, it's true.

Actually, the relationship with the lady is also quite moving because

you get food, but you're supposed to teach them the dhamma in return.

So it's a transaction.

It's not a one-sided relationship.

leading them towards Dhamma and they are feeding you and ensuring that you are

reproduced so that you can continue to do your practices so that you can

ultimately go on that, reach the final goal as it were. So that relationship is

quite interesting and even this overturning of the bowl and so on. These

are rules that come into existence over a period of time.

But the Buddha is often invited to people's houses to eat.

And we know, you know, I mean, he went from the courtesan on the one hand to

the metalsmith on the other.

He made those distinctions between the high and the low.

Whoever invites him first, he takes on. So there is an interesting account of

the Ambapali who has invited them for the meal.

And then the Lichvis get to know that and they go and invite him and say, come

for a meal. And he says, no, I'm already committed to tomorrow's meal with the

Ambapali. And so they go off and try and persuade Ambapali to withdraw the

invitation so that he will come.

to them. And she refuses to. And he stays by his commitment.

So it's an interesting relationship.

Nobody's an outcast.

And Ghanikas joining the Sangha are very interesting.

They are not only Ambapali, but there are other Ghanikas.

Ghanika is the equivalent of a, let's say,

well, a woman who

in return for sexual favors.

He says, quote unquote, is giving you for mercenary reasons.

So, Ghanikas are quite common in thing and the status, they were not also

regarded badly because the city's prestige would go up

according to its Ghanika. So, Salawati was a Ghanika, Amrapali was a Ghanika.

And many of them end up finally in the Sangha. So they give up. And when they

end up in the Sangha, they also write poetry. They write the Gathas. And then

they also talk about themselves in that. The Gathas themselves become very

moving, both from the men and the women, the Thera Gatha and the Theri Gatha.

Because these are...

verbalizations or things that have

been put in place, articulations of the ordinary people who have now

reached a certain stage and who can reflect back on their own histories.

So the Theri Gatha is...

We are partial to Therigatha, I'm afraid.

No, no, we're going to get into the Therigatha. That's one of the loveliest

things for me in terms of a discovery within the Buddhist literary world.

Just another few normative, idealistic descriptions. Let's get into that and

then we'll get into the complications. So we have discussed the normative king.

We've discussed the normative sangha. Another element of this normative sangha

or the way it is ought to...

have been, how it was imagined, is that it should maintain, it should be a group

of intellectuals that maintains distance from the king and any kind of state

power. Bhikkhu should not comment about the king or worldly affairs or

statecraft.

In a sense, they are, how do you say, anti-politics?

In a sense, let's say they need to stand out of the world of power. See,

One dichotomy that the Buddha is born into almost is the dichotomy between the

world of power and the world of spirituality, the search.

So even the storyline tells us that when he's born, the soothsayer has come along

and there is a reading of his...

what might be called as an astrological chart or whatever it is, in which the

Brahmin priest is saying he'll either be a great

emperor or he will be a spiritual announcer.

So the split in Buddhist imagination is between the

world of power

and the world of spirituality.

And you cannot mix those two up, which is why the Buddha has to leave home.

And he can't be, I'll be the king and then I'll do whatever I like and I'll

spiritualize everybody.

No, he has to go and find his own path outside the world of power.

You cannot, you know, that Gordon Mammon kind of thing that is stated. But it's

very clear, the split.

exists in the imagination at the time when the Buddhist texts are being

already written up and whatever it is and so it's there. It's a dichotomy that

you have which is sustained.

Now within that framework then the manner in which people express their

relationship to

And there is an extraordinarily

large number of creative ways in which this

expression of their spiritual experience is articulated.

And that is what you find both in the Thera Gatha and the Theri Gatha.

And in the Theri Gatha, it is often tied up with the, they are in that sense

gendered. You know, what the theorists are saying comes from their world of

experience as men.

What the theories are saying is very much an emanation from their experiences

as women.

And that's very striking. In that sense, it's very powerfully gendered and in

very moving ways.

Now, if you get into the contradictions of this pristine world that is imagined,

one of the first things, I suppose, the first principles that were in a sense,

violated over time, you know, is the meddling in politics. I just want to get

into that for a bit, you know, and then we'll get into the gender question.

There are so many other questions, even including on caste, you know, for

example. But let's get into this business of the Sangha and politics.

You have two examples, one from Mahayana, one from Theravada.

In the case of the Theravadan traditions, you saw what is happening,

at least in the last few decades, perhaps a century even, in places such

as Sri Lanka, Myanmar, you know, the emergence of this very politicized body

of the monks.

And then you have a much older example of a theocratic state, which is Tibet,

right? In which the whole establishment, the establishment itself is a theocracy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So do you want to like get into this business of where exactly the

degeneration happened? What role? And then, okay, so you're talking about

the...

the Sangha and politics and then you also have a figure like Ambedkar who is

also actually trying to you know present this as liberation theology means what

it is a practice of a certain anti-caste and the practice of anti-caste is in

itself political so you know so these three types of politics a theocratic

state a state in which monks have a very important role such as in the Theravadin

traditions that we have seen and this Ambedkarite thing these three

See, one of the interesting things about the original

imagination, as articulated as close to the Buddha's own

teachings as far as I can make out, is that you keep these worlds separate.

And I can control the world of the Sangha and

I can order it, I can actually create traditions within it.

which can, in a sense, be ethicalizing the way in which institutions

can be governed.

So which is why, you know, he does use the vote, does suggest consensus, but

then if it doesn't work, then suggests the vote and so on. So the Sangha is

meant to be a place where you try and build consensus. If it doesn't happen,

then you try and work in these ways.

The king's world is one which is, as I've stated earlier, it's drunk with

power, is that kind of world. Now that is difficult to ethicalize, except when

you think of the Chakravarti Dhammikodhammaraja, which he also tries.

So there are multiple ways in which he's trying to bring, say, for instance, the

Buddhist.

political imagination into working in a certain kind of way where you might be

able to ethicalize power.

So those are things that he is trying to do. In reality, history goes in another

direction.

And hardly anyone actually subscribes to the Buddha's theory

of power.

in terms of its moderation and whatever it is. And I remember when I went and

lectured for the first time in Sri Lanka and I was talking about Buddhism,

immediately it strikes, it's a slap in the face because the worst kind of

example that you can see of politics being, you know, sort of dominating the

way in which the monks, the bhikkhus,

function. You see in Sri Lanka, it's no holds barred, it's vicious

in the way it happens and so on. And I realized for the first time that

if Buddhism gets conflated with state power,

then it's very difficult for it to sustain its original idealistic

impulses. It just gets dragged down by the dynamics of political power, which

is actually both arbitrary and despotic at the end of the day. So that's

something that was quite striking in what happens. So the idea that you

would...

the bhikkhu should actually advise the king is not there in early Buddhist

texts at all. You know, he's given you the model. Now the king should follow

it. He's not going to whatever. And it's very interesting that he's asked

something about, actually people, there are people who want the Lichavi Ganaraja

to be destroyed.

And they are trying to find out why, how they can do that.

So the Brahmin Vasakara, comes along and asks

the Buddha a question. And the Buddha answers it obliquely. He says, as long

as the Lichwis can stay united

and stay, you know, the way they are, nobody can beat them. Because they are

extremely powerful in...

through the democratic principles that they are following. I mean, whatever

model that they have followed.

And the Brahmin Vasakara understands this to mean sow the seeds of dissension

among them and let them fall apart where each of these Kumaras

begin to see themselves as the arbitrary, the big king, and they'll

fall apart. And actually, that is what happens as far as the literary Ganaraja

is concerned.

But he will not, he does not actually, that's a world that is separate.

He, his advice, I mean, he gives you this, if you stay united, nobody

can beat you.

But the Brahmin uses it very effectively to sow the seeds of dissension. And he's

a Brahmin. Right, right. And there are many in the Sangha. We'll come to that

also. But ma'am, again, something I wanted to reflect on, or rather

something I want you to reflect on, is something that came up to me, which is,

so you have the figure of Constantinople in the context of Christianity, 300

years after Christ.

There's this...

royalification, this royal stamp that Christianity receives.

And from there on forward, we know what the clergy was up to.

You know, in the Crusades up until now, I mean, I don't know if those of you

want to, you know, you should read our Bishop Franco story, you know.

And in the Buddhist scheme of things, on one side in the film, we have Ashoka

presented as this Kakavati, as almost the person who comes closest to the

normative.

Imagination of a king in the Buddhist thing. But also, empirically speaking,

Ashoka is the first one who starts meddling in the Sangha. Yeah, yeah.

So tell me, what are your reflections on that? Like, is Ashoka a Constantine kind

of a figure?

Because he's, okay, when I say meddling, to the extent that he decides to expel

some people because they're not following the... That is like quite a

transgression. I mean, that's quite a... Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

But I'll come to that in steps.

See, Ashoka is this contradictory figure. I've never been a great, great

admirer of his because I feel his conversion to Buddhism itself is a

slightly fake.

Myth. It's a bit of a myth. I mean, look at the impulse.

He attacks the one place which he has not inherited.

He does decimation over there and he brings back thousands of prisoners from

there.

Why is he bringing them back from there?

Because then he can use them in production over here. You know, there'll

be survival labor in the Gangetic Valley. Otherwise, what's the point of

bringing these characters and whatever?

So, his early years are terrible, in my opinion.

And to the extent that he has sorrow, to some extent, I feel even that is a

little fake.

I'm very... I get attacked by everybody. Ashoka is not...

feeling offended, don't worry. I don't know. See, look, the regret, the one,

you know, there's a lot made out of the fact that he expresses regret.

He expresses regret for the great amount of slaughter that he was given. I mean,

and the Nehruvian types and all will valorize him because he's promoting

peace and whatever it is.

But the fact of the matter is, you know, that inscription is not in Kalinga.

It is not in Arissa.

It is in the northwest.

region. Oh.

So, he's not expressing regret to the people whom he has actually, whatever.

So, I see this as a kind of state, you know, he's a savvy king,

let's put it like that.

As any king.

Yeah. And he's quite keen on, to the extent that he does ethicalize power,

there's no doubt that he's interesting.

But, I won't say that he's entirely, that would be too simplistic for me.

He's using Dhamma in an instrumental way to unite his people. I wouldn't go in

that direction. I think he genuinely believes that there is baseline values

in the Dhamma, which he'd like to promote. And those are certainly coming

out of Buddhism. They're not coming out of anywhere else. They're not coming out

of any existing other.

way of thinking so to that extent he is an extraordinary figure and I will grant

him that you know that is he there is some notion of kingship you have to

remember that that he is coming at the end of a line of kings who have just

been literally drunk with power that description and brahminical because his

father is that shepherd king who was turned into a Kautilya

It's the grandfather.

Actually,

they're from the shepherd community.

He gets Sanskritized by Kautilya. Upward, in a certain kind of way. Which

is how all kings must have started. It's not unique.

Kings are not born as Kshatriyas. There are hardly any Kshatriyas.

Kshatriya is a trope.

My statistical analysis of the people who appear in the Buddhist texts

is that there is, except for a few kings who call themselves Khatryas, there are

no Khatryas.

So it's a category that is in the Brahmin imagination put down as one of

the four, whatever it is. So in that sense, everybody who is actually moving

up into power is going to claim that status for himself.

And to that extent, whatever it is, they'll start with tribal. origins and

they'll end up in whatever it is and that's historically happened throughout

time so now the more interesting thing for me as far as the

Sangha is concerned and as far as even Ashoka is concerned

is that he does try he's also being some kind of a

he's being a king who's trying to ensure that the Sangha conforms to

his notion.

So he never gives up on power.

He works with power.

He's a good, what would you call it?

I wouldn't call it diplomat.

He's good at crafting an image for himself.

I don't say he's fake, but he's good at...

Let me ask you like this. Is he a departure from the past? It's a

threefold question.

Is he a departure from the past? Number one.

Is he somebody who gave us the first concepts of a welfare

state, which is something which is claimed, right? And also, is this person

our most crucial link to Siddhartha Gautama?

In the sense, in the sense that if it weren't, now there is a lot of criticism

that you can make again, drawing the biblical, the Bible example of, you

know, Constantinople and all of that. If that hadn't happened, the Bible wouldn't

have come to where we are now.

So, you know, is he, so the three questions are, well, is he the most

important link between Buddha and us?

Number one. Number two is,

He somewhat, in some ways, the progenitor of this concept of a welfare

state. I doubt that that might be true, but let's take that as a question

anyway. And, you know, this business of, did he break from the past?

How do we see this? I think he's breaking from the past to the extent

that all the examples that we get up into that, even in the age

of the Buddha, is the king with unchecked power.

Now, if there is unchecked power, who's going to actually be the, let's say,

ensure that there is a certain standard, there is a way in

which you use it. To the extent that he's thinking of ethicalizing power, he

is unique.

Okay, there's something that is happening over there. And he probably

derives it from Buddhism,

from his understanding of Buddhism and his understanding of the Buddha.

And, you know, from maybe the suttas like the Chakravarti Dhammikodharma Raja

that is circulating at that point of time. So there is kind of a kind of,

let's say, there's a grid map that he can fall back on. There's a kind of

normative system that he can fall back on.

That he uses in very, he's very strategic about that. He is an unusual

king. There's no doubt about it. And he does regret. I do believe that he does

regret the killings that he does. But the fact is that he doesn't drop state

power completely.

And that is the difference between, say, for instance, someone who would have

been...

He's unique because after what we get, we get his father and his grandfather as

examples and they are not very good examples as far as we are concerned.

So to that extent, and nobody ever ultimately later on also was able to

come close to his model of sort of ethicalizing power.

So now equally he's interested, he's got messianic zeal. So he believes that the

Sangha should be a certain kind of way. So he's a king in that sense of the

term. He's not standing outside that world, which is meant to be the

spiritual, which is meant to be self-governing to some extent. He's

interested in saying, these are the ones who are defaulting. They should be

excised and so on. So he's got the notion of a king who is also

determining.

The actions within the Sangha. Now this division, this is a problem as far as

I'm concerned. In the old, in the structure that the Buddha devises, these

two worlds are completely separate.

Yeah. You're not meant to mix them up.

So you think he's, you know, I mean, just to psychoanalyze this character,

he's trying to be a Kakavati or Chakravarti and a Bodhisatta at the same

time. to some extent, you know, because... But that's a contradiction.

That is a contradiction. Of course it is. And for the Buddha, it's very clear

that that's a contradiction.

You can either go this route or you can go that route. You can't go both.

So in that sense... But I suppose the challenge for every Chakravarti is that

he will try and be...

be someone who's above the rest of the... Son of God complex.

If not son of God, at least the savior of humanity kind of thing, you know, at

the end of the day.

That he's ethical, I won't deny.

That there is an ethics for working in him, I certainly am not going to deny,

you know. I mean, it may be simplistic, you know, planting trees, digging wells

and all the rest, but there is a notion of power, which is...

can be used to alleviate people and their needs. To that extent, I

think he is unusual.

And I don't think we don't get any king before or after who has the same,

whatever, image.

I think where the rift I'm describing is that in the world of the Buddha, these

are two clear divisions.

Yes, he must be, that person is also meant, dhammiko dhamma raja, he should

be. But he's not mixing those two worlds. So him policing the Sangha is

not acceptable in that split.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. And it's extremely distorted, whatever does exist everywhere.

Yeah, but then, you know, in the imagination,

Buddhism is a contrast with Brahmanism.

There's no doubt about that.

That's a standard thing.

within the history of the way in which these, let's

say, the next four, five, six hundred years is taking place. And we must

remember that Buddhism is spreading, has spread into all of South Africa. I mean,

the fact that the film actually goes all the way to Andhra and then to Nagpur, it

is really peninsular India that is the thrust.

And in that area, Buddhism is very powerful and it also circulates in

multiple ways. One of the ways, for instance, it'll end up, there's a brief

reference, I think, in the film, I'm not sure, but the way it ends up in Tamil

Nadu, for instance, where the two famous texts, the Shira Padhikaram and the Mani

Meghalaya are regarded as these great classics of the Tamilians, that the,

you know,

The dynamics in the Shire Padhikarim is the usual, you know, sort of business of

there is a man and he's wealthy and he gets drawn to, he's got a good wife and

then he gets drawn to the courtesan, the whatever, Madhvi.

And then it goes to the next. And then, of course, there's the Patni cult and

all, which is associated with Kanagi.

But then it goes to next generation.

in which Manigam Meghalaya, who is the daughter of Kovalan and Madhuri,

she got the dilemma of what is she going to do with herself?

Is she going to go the direction of Sringara or is she going to go into the

direction of the religiosity, the ethical life?

And it's a big struggle that she has at that point of time because the prince is

pursuing her.

But she chooses to go the path of the bhikkhuni. Instead of a Sringara.

Instead of a Sringara, which is quite... But then she does something to my mind,

which is absolutely extraordinary, which would indicate that Buddhism circulates

not only as the Dhamma and whatever it is, but it circulates in a certain kind

of way as a kind of ethics, which we've not given enough importance

to.

She gets this magic bowl from somewhere.

She herself, through the twists and turns of her life, she ends up in a

prison for a while because she's being regarded as whatever it is and so on.

But anyway, she gets a magic bowl. And that magic bowl is the Akshapatra. It

can be replenished constantly.

She uses the bowl and the food that she can produce to feed two categories of

people.

prisoners and the famine stricken.

Now, how do you look at that?

It's precisely the prisoners are clearly being halved out

and whatever.

But the prison is also a site for humane intervention.

And in the times that we are living in currently, you know, where everybody's

been tossed into prison.

It's a very powerful thing. I mean, I've never, I was blown over completely by

it. So if you look at the values that Buddhism has promoted,

centrality of that, and that will give us the link to Ambedkar. See, Maitreya,

Maitreya, and

Maitreya and Karuna.

See, these are the two things that he's actually asking.

You cannot see it in any other ethical religion or any other

sect that you can see. To elevate Mithya and Karuna to that level,

if you practice that, then you're the true Buddhist.

So compassion is such an extraordinary thing.

It's just mind-blowing.

Absolutely mind-blowing. Radical, we talk on radical love today. Yeah, it's

incredible. It's absolutely incredible.

And so, to that extent, I think, the Ambedkar, and see,

if we go, return back to the Douglas Ober and his work and whatever it is,

what happens to the, what happens to Buddhism within India, it just

disappears over a period of time, okay? The best of it and the worst of it, all

goes.

then you're left with nothing. Left with nothing. Now, accept the memory of it

being an alternative way of being and an important...

there is something around the values of Buddhism that are still circulating in

some form.

So at the end of the day, when you, and it's anti-casteness in some ways,

because let's not forget that the famous text, Vajrasuchi of

Ashwagusha, that is discovered in the 1840s in Nepal.

It's a complete attack on...

The stupidities of Brahmanism and the fourfold system, it's only 44 verses.

Okay. The diamond cutter.

Yeah. I and a younger colleague, a younger student colleague are working

on this and we are sitting on it and sitting on it for a variety of reasons,

but it's supposed to come out soon.

It's actually very powerful because it's only these 44, but it's a complete

attack on the idea that You can control reproduction and it's an attack on

endogamy, the possibilities of endogamy. That I see is, if there's a controversy

today about Brahmanical patriarchy, it's coming. You are hysterically enforcing

endogamy because that's the only way you can reproduce caste and the hierarchy.

But that is the very thing that the Aswakusha is saying.

And sometimes people are even saying it's not us for Kushra, it's somebody

else. Because the other two texts that he's written are so different and so

unusual. I mean, he's written Buddha Charita and he's written Saundra Ananda.

Buddha Charita is the story of the Buddha.

It's in early hybrid Sanskrit, it's called. So it's the beginnings of a

certain language.

So there's that text. And then there's Saundrananda, which is clearly a text

about a young man who leaves his wife and goes off and joins the Sangha. And

there's longing on both sides because they haven't given up on their own

relationship with each other and so on.

is only 44 verses and it is very powerful because it's mocking at the

idea that the brahmin is born out of a the mouth of the of the uh of the

brahma and b that there is Anyone over there is practicing endogamy because

everybody over there is defaulting on the endogamy principle.

Everyone is, you know, having children by some Urvashi and various, you know,

whatever it is, but they're certainly not practicing endogamy. So it's a very,

this is, now that is coming back in 1840s, it's being

discovered in.

in Nepal,

when it's to be translated and spoken, the Brahmin who is asked to do this,

he says, I won't do it unless you publish my rejoinder.

And he's dictating that rejoinder. And the rejoinder turns out to be longer

than I have. And it's hysterical. They know what it means, yaar. They know what

it means to do that. And at the same time, somebody in Maharashtra is

publishing it and Jodhpur Phule is endorsing it.

So that's the history.

of the mocking at the caste.

So that history is not completely lost at the end of the day. It might go into

subterranean places, but obviously it exists as an alternative at the end of

the day. So I think that when we think of the 19th century and the revival

of Buddhism, you're extracting from all sorts of places where it has gone.

That becomes a stream of its own in a way in which it can challenge the

way in which the

Indian religious tradition has been reduced to the caste system in that

sense. So it's an alternative. The other thing is that people are actually

looking, a lot of modern thinkers.

are looking for some way in which you can, in your own tradition, you will

find something which is actually something you can relate to. You know, I

mean, both secular democracy, humanism, and all of those

features which are completely absent in Hinduism is there in these

ways. So the work of, say, People like Rahu Sankrita and even someone like,

what's his name?

Kosambi. Old man Kosambi, that is the... Dharmanand.

Dharmanand. Dharmanand Kosambi, who remains a searcher all his life also.

But apart from him, apart from this Acharya Narendra Dev.

Acharya Narendra Dev is a socialist, complete socialist.

He is also drawn.

He's someone important in UP politics. He's a socialist.

He's also drawn to... So there's Rahul Singh. So to the modern imagination,

this hierarchical society is an anathema. They don't want it. They want

to chuck it.

Can I say over here, in terms of the clash of progressive ideas, no, clash or

rather this coming together of progressive ideas, this 1840s

discovery... And to me, see, this is a controversial thing I believe in. At

least seen from the Dalit perspective, the white man came as a liberator. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

And more so became a liberator after the crown took over. Yeah. You have the

establishment of the Department of Public Instruction. The first time in

the history of the subcontinent that you have common instruction.

Yes. And all of these things.

This white man did not become civilized suddenly, right? Not sitting under a

tree for sure.

It happened because of enlightenment.

The period of enlightenment has already dawned in Europe.

And so exciting to see that the same term is used. You know, the period of

enlightenment. So this period of enlightenment fills in this person a

zeal for a perhaps a more democratic, more just world. Because this British

officer who has found this document of the Vajrasuchi in Nepal,

understands its importance, understands its humanist dimension.

And also, when we say that white man came as a liberator, sorry, I don't mean

it in any pro-imperialist sense, you know, but nevertheless, you are looking

at a generation of newly educated, first time educated Dalits and Avarna's

and Shudra's who are receiving this as a sort of

Education about themselves.

Or at least education about their own origins, where they come from. And the

fact that you don't really have to go and import marks.

No. So you have, to my mind, reading Ober's book, the thing I finally got is,

okay, Ambedkar also didn't get this sitting under a tree. There is a

lineage, there is an order of developments that happen. Starting with

this 1840s discovery, Ayyutitas, Phule,

Then you have also the Chakma, the Chakma Queen and all those things that

they were doing. The Rakhine people, you know, how they are experimenting. And

also this Bengal Buddhist Association.

Very, yeah, very important. And all of them are anti-caste. Yeah, yeah. In

their motivation. Yeah, yeah. And for once, they seem to have got fuel.

Fuel in terms of, okay, there is liberation theology here. There is an

alternate ism.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but I was just trying to say that, you

know, the white man, you know, having suddenly opened these doors for us is a

very significant moment in the Dalit timeline.

Yeah, yeah.

The way they've extracted it to, in a sense, counter

the ways in which you say the British power came, you know, sort of dull and

dust and whatever it is, it's important.

But I also think that they must be...

We need to look for it. There must be a lot of material, which may not be

directly radical in terms of saying throughout the caste system. But look at

the entire bhakti tradition in Maharashtra. It is something that is

actually engaging with the idea of birth-based...

birth-based hierarchy and also the stupidities of expecting that ritual

is going to take you anywhere and so on. So I think that tradition doesn't go

away. To some extent, I'd like to connect this with something that

we've dropped behind, which is the Therigatha.

Now in the Therigatha, there are a whole series of, I won't go there for the

moment, very beautiful moving verses in which

Women's experiences are sought to be given a space for articulation.

But there's a lovely account.

of a woman called uh there's actually one that chandra bhan has also worked on

and there's one uh which uh this theory um is uh her name

is she is literally means little in uh in bali uh so she's small

and it's the way we trivialize you know the the servant of the house is often

treated as a Bachcha, little, you know, in that sense of term.

Infantilized. Infantilizing in some. She may be a grown-up person, but her name

is Poonia.

So she goes every morning to fetch water from the river.

Because she's a kumbha dasi, so she brings water for the household.

She has to do repeated rounds.

Now, she finds a man, a Brahmin, taking dips in the water, muttering and

shivering.

Saying some incantations, you know. So she then asked, the gatha is set like

this. She asked this man, see, I come here for fear of my mistress's

blows.

What makes you come?

and take these dips muttering and shivering as you go along because it's

obviously uncomfortable you know at the end of the day she's being very

practical and saying why are you doing this and he says because i will ghost

the taking the dips will take me straight to or whatever give me moksha

or give me some liberation so then she says uh oh is that

so

That means the fishes and the tortoises and all in the water must be going

straight to heaven.

Yeah. And then she's saying the mortar must be very clever because it knows

that it has to wash off your sins, but it has to keep your merit.

So it must be very clever.

Now, the Brahmin is cut to size and he realizes how stupid it is. And so he

says, oh, okay. And he reneges, I mean, basically.

says, I'll give you, you be my teacher and I'll give you garments or whatever,

give you robes for it and so on. She says, thank you very much, boss. And she

leaves him to his new life and she moves on.

It's very, very practical and very lovely. So poignant also, yeah.

Poignant.

Interestingly, I was stating this in one of my lectures in Pakistan. I used to go

and teach in Lahore, in a women's studies course in Lahore. So I mentioned

this in a lecture that I was supposed to give.

Now, what was fascinating is that the crowd over there came back and said to

me, there is exactly the same metaphor that is being used in Sufi literature.

So the fact of the matter is that the Brahmin's incantations and whatever it

is, the mumblings and jumblings are being made of Throughout history, the

fact is they don't get into high canon.

And so they don't end up in the Vajrasuji, but they are there all over

the place. So this everyday way in which Brahmanism is actually

mocked at is also a very important history that you have.

To extract that and then to tell it now as a story that is as much a part of

your culture and tradition as the one that says hierarchy, hierarchy,

hierarchy. That's, I think, the job that we have to do.

In all of this that you've said, one thing that keeps coming, we keep coming

back to and we are, you know, not really getting into is this question of the she

in Buddhism.

And let's deal with it.

in fundamental ways and there's a fundamental contradiction which your

book itself points to it's so heartbreaking that this character who's

giving you rationalism who's giving you a marxist thought 2500 years before marx

you know who's who's imagining a state uh in a completely different way a king

in a different has such a stunted view of women siddhartha gautama was somebody

who came crashing down in my imagination in the way he deals with this lady who's

literally brought him up by hand. Who is that?

Mahaprajapati Gautami, his aunt, who has raised this little boy to become this

Prabuddha.

And this little boy grows up to say, you are only not fit to enter the Sangha.

And it's so difficult for me to go.

And see, I think little visually, you know, so each of these scenes is coming

back to me.

So what is the scene?

It talks about this old woman with cracked feet coming to the doorstep of

the Sangha, only to be turned away by that little boy who she raised by hand.

And then who intervenes on her behalf?

Who she revived with her milk.

She's the milk mother.

Because the mother dies.

And so she's the one who feeds the baby. And it's very moving because she gives

her own child away. She's also had a child at the same time. And that child

is... nursed by a wet nurse, a maid.

And she feeds the Buddha.

So he's her milk mother. Milk mothers are very important, actually, in Indian

tradition. World over, I would say.

World over, but here also, I mean, she's the one who gives you life.

That one gave you birth, but she's the one who gives you life.

And he turns her away, saying you are not fit to be... Yeah, now my...

You know, I started off by being really, really brutal.

I was so angry with the Buddha for doing this and whatever, because the scene, as

you say, is very moving. I'm walking and walking in the hot sun and the dust and

she's got cracked feet. And as you say, and by the way, she's not alone. She's

got a bunch of women who are pursuing her with that or whatever it is.

And he turns around and says, no.

you have to plead through Ananda. She's not even directly going and speaking to

this man.

So, so then she doesn't give up.

She continues.

What would you have done?

I might have challenged the Buddha and said, how dare you?

I raised you.

I raised you after drinking my milk.

I gave you life.

You're blocking me off on my spirituality.

But be that as it may, that's... See, one of the... Because this was a real...

I am drawn to the Buddha very, very powerfully, okay?

Because he does have a compassion which I don't see in other systems.

So to that extent, I am drawn to the Buddha. But this was a big letdown.

And then you proceed.

She continues.

Ananda is speaking on her behalf and on the behalf of all women to let

them into the Sankha.

He's saying no.

Ananda is very dear to him, but he's still saying no to her.

Then it carries on and there's a second round. And then in that second round

again, hot and dusty and all, they're arriving and then it comes around. Now,

Ananda uses a different track.

And he says, if they were to strive,

would they reach the goal?

And the Buddha is at least honest enough to say, that yes, they will reach the

goal. And at that time... And the goal is salvation or nibbana.

But it is only available to those who have actually renounced the world.

In the early Buddhist tradition, I can't be a householder and reach nibbana,

okay? In that life, I'll have to carry on.

So in a sense, in a very critical way, that means you're blocking off their...

their right to achieve nibbana.

And that's the, what would you call it, the

dialectical jam that he puts upon Buddha, is that Buddha is not able

to say that they can't reach the goal.

Yes, if they strive, they will reach the goal. He said, then you have to let them

in. Because then how will he reach the thing? And the Buddha then has to

renege. He has to backtrack. And he says, all right.

Then he creates those stupid rules.

Ten rules in which he says, these rules they have to follow, whatever it is.

Outrageous, those rules. Outrageous and especially one of them is very stupid.

Very, very stupid.

They have to bow before any junior monk. Junior monk.

And this I found very offensive because this is a culture that celebrates

seniors over juniors, no?

On the whole. So it seems really churlish on the part of them. But the

answer gives you the clue.

He says, no, even the other sects do not permit it. See, he's

bound by the code that these other sects are following.

And that's the difficulty with him.

So in that sense, I think Ananda is the real feminist because not only does he

argue their case, but you know, he's chastised for it.

He doesn't become an arhat in his own tie

at that stage. He's charged with the fact that he commits two wrongs. He

argued the case for women.

And then he allowed women to weep over his body so that they dropped tears and

sullied the master's body.

And he's so dignified and so fantastic. He says, I don't think I did wrong.

But if you say so, then you punish me.

So he's the real hero. A prisoner of conscience, I mean. Yeah.

But he's quite fantastic in that sense. I love the character of Ananda. Yeah,

he's really quite... Because this thing of, you know, just if you're wondering

this teardropping and all of that, essentially after the Buddha passes,

there is this whole congregation to mourn over the remains of the Buddha.

And these Malda women are not allowed to access those remains and to see the last

remains of the Buddha. So Ananda intervenes on their behalf.

And there's a beautiful sculpture.

I mean, a sculpture that I've been able to find, which has got a coffin below

and the fire above it. So it's not very clear whether he was buried or the

coffin was set on fire.

But there's actually a photograph of that situation.

in the Buddhist narrative. So, you know, that last scene in which

he's being cremated, that's something that's actually been visualized in some

sense of the term.

Now, I think the only way we can make sense of this is that actually this has

been strategic. All of this has come down to us through the intercession of

the monks.

They have kept the tradition alive. The bhikkhus have kept it alive.

This is a device that they've created to suggest the dialectic, I mean, the

dilemma within the tradition in which the dialogue takes place between, you

put the male point of view, give it through the

founder, the teacher.

And you put the other alternative view with the more compassionate, the more

egalitarian view through Ananda. And at the end of the day, you move forward to

an extent, but you don't actually, you don't

disorder the gender, the men over the women. So in that sense, it's the

dilemma that they have had to...

to resolve.

And it is a tradition. You put the official point of view in the mouth of

the master.

And you put the alternative point of view in Ananda's thing.

So, you know, at the end of the day, the texts have redacted

and told us the story of the Buddha.

And there has been, I don't think these are

There's obviously editing and there's also crafting and casting

of a certain kind that has probably taken place to maintain the larger

ethos of the time.

And that line is very critical.

Even the other sects do not permit it because he won't go beyond that.

He sees his location among the...

shamanic traditions and of course other sects means he's referring to other

shamanic texts sects and not the brahmanic sects but you know this helps

me understand ma'am when you talk put it like this you know this hierarchy

created between the word of the prophet and the word of the student and the

reason it makes sense for me today is because now it helps me understand that

the way the present orders treat women yeah and women bhikkunis. I have the,

you know, it's a very unsavory experience for me to see how Suniti

bhikkuni is treated.

Suniti bhikkuni is one central character in this film.

In fact, this Watcherism series, which started a couple of years ago, I think

three years ago, the first interview, one of the first interviews was with

Suniti bhikkuni.

Nagpur-based Dalit feminist lawyer, was a criminal lawyer and all of that, gives

up that whole practice and becomes a bhikkuni.

only to find that she cannot be ordained as a high priest. Yes.

So to do that, and here's the funny part. So you have, okay, so the

Therigatha is in a sense deriving from the Theravadin tradition, right? But

this lady, and of course the Theravada monks even today have a female order and

all of that. But then they refused to, you know, give her this high priestess

thing, you know, this title.

So she has to go to, what is that place in?

Bihar, where every year Buddhists gather.

Nalanda? Not Nalanda.

Bodh Gaya. Bodh Gaya.

Gaya, Bodh Gaya. Sorry.

She goes to Bodh Gaya where she finds some Mahayana priestess who's come all

the way from China, barges into her gathering, literally, you know, breaks

the door down, enters with her followers and says, I've come from Nagpur.

I need this ordainment and that she's taken in by this.

group of women nuns who've come from China and then the ordainment happens.

And she is somebody who doesn't stop at that.

She goes on to provoke the Nagpur uncles even more. Okay, by doing what? By

ordaining a male priest.

Oh, very good.

Wow, son. You know, like, not only have you broken all the... But we complete

it. We complete it. And that male monk goes on to then marry also.

Okay.

And...

No, no, she doesn't marry him. No, no, no.

He marries somebody else. They marry somebody else, but defend it using a lot

of theological tools, references, historical things. Actually, there's a

really interesting way in which I think history, mobilizations,

inequality, and so on. And I like the story you've told me because one of the

things that I feel in history has not been...

recorded enough is actually the struggle of the workers, the

Dasakarmakaras of the Mahant, the Bodhgaya

Matha, which there was a big case around that. Actually, that went

to, it came under the land sealing.

And then it was contested by the Mahants who said that it should be exempt

because it's religious property.

And the Supreme Court at that time, which was progressive, said, no, it came

under the sealing laws because there was something like 10,000 workers or

whatever. It was strange. It was an unusual dynamic because they did not

have intermediaries. They had no tenants on that land. It was the Mahant and it

was the Mazurs.

direct whatever.

So the Mahants, the Mazdurs did all the work and then of course the

goods, the produce went to the Mahants. And there was a big struggle

at the time of the socialists and a bunch of feminists

who were involved, who were very active in the socialist group at that stage.

And some young men went along and mobilized the workers over here. By the

way, Krishnambal Jagannathan from Tamil Nadu also went and she was a Dalit

feminist in her time, I suppose. Which time are we talking about? This is 80s.

Okay.

So she also goes there and so on. So they run this movement.

And at the end of the day, I mean, it's very creative. I won't go into the

details of the movement.

But at the end, they land is then, they win the struggle and the

lands are to be now distributed amongst the Mazurs.

At that stage, the women come on and say.

We want the land in our own names. We are mazdoors in ourselves and we are

also mazdoors. So we want the land in our names, not in the names of our

husbands and not joint patas.

We want it in our names. And they got it. So the female Mazdoor among the...

Yeah. They got it. They got it.

And then many years later, one of them was answered. I think her name was Kunti

Devi. She's asked, so how do you feel about it? And they've got very small

pattas, you know, one bigger or whatever it was.

Some of the men had even sold it off and whatever.

But this... The women tended to keep it.

And this woman, she's asked,

how do you feel about this? And she says, when I stand on my land and I look

at the sky above, I feel very good.

So she carried the logic of the struggle, whatever. And then she does

something even more interesting because there's some temple or the other which

doesn't allow the Dalits to come in.

So she decides that she doesn't believe in this.

She doesn't believe in the gods at all. She's sufficiently radical for all of

that stuff. But she wants to make a claim for the fact that she has a right

also to enter the thing. So she makes a lightning move. She goes streaky.

Manimala, who has been, was active in the, she's a Dalit woman who has been

active in the socialist group. She was describing this to me and she said she

made this, she streaked. across to the to the idol touched it and came running

back and said so big deal you know kind of whatever I said I don't believe in it

I'm not a believer but I had to I had to prove my equality and that move she also

proved its inanimate nature which is it's a piece of stone yeah absolutely so

it is delicious so I at the end of the day You can see everything coming full

circle as far as I'm concerned.

You know, the egalitarianism, the possibilities and so on. That is why I

want to get into this question of, so therefore you have structural problems

with the way the faith has been structured for women.

Yeah. So then obviously the natural question arises that in the time of the

Buddha itself, why were women so keen to join the Sangha?

you kind of suggest some answers in the sense that these are women who are

trying to, first and foremost, break out of the mortar and pestle.

Just as my mother and, you know, my friends and anybody, all these women who

we know, you know, are essentially their thing is to break out of that yoke.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And there, I think, is an opportunity for us to do a reading of some of this

Therigatha poems.

you take your pick, I'll take mine.

Do you have one that you want to refer to? We have like the whole Therigatha

here.

Do you want to pick one or two that you want to read out?

And we can get into this question of why are these women in the end of the day

making these choices?

Yeah, yeah. Because Therigatha is as good an explanation you can find to

understand the minds of women who in a sense are breaking something, breaking a

wall down. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I'll read the one.

If you've got the, there's one in which there's an older woman who's climbed

the, there are two that I like a lot. One is that Jeeva one that I was telling

you about, which is, it's, I don't know what it's called. It may not be called

Jeeva. I know it as the Jeeva one. So then there's this.

So I'll narrate two of the theories versus the first one is very poignant

because it's about a woman who's lost her child. She's actually the... queen

and she and it's a girl child that she's lost the child has died and so she goes

to the charnel field and she's mourning over there and she's calling out and

saying oh jiva oh jiva and she's that is the lament and then she gets a voice

back from the thing from the there's an echo back for the response to her

which says in this charnel field everyone was once a jiva

Which one are you mourning for?

So it's like the inevitability of death and the inevitability of the... So the

mourning has to be, I mean, it's not a unique phenomenon to you.

It's in the nature. And the Buddha, after all, all is impermanent.

Everything is going to end.

After all, the last sight that he sees, apart from the illness and whatever it

is, is the corpse. So the death is absolutely laid on. It's going to happen

at the end of the day.

Whole drama is how do you reconcile, how do you understand that phenomenon?

So anyways, there's one. But then there's another one which is also very

interesting and full of, in some way, joyous.

There's an older woman, Bhikone, she's reached the,

clambered up a mountain and she's

standing there with the stick over it and she said,

And she says, I'm old and tired now.

And proceeds and says, but over me, I'm old and

tired now, but over me spreads the breath of liberty.

So she's reached the stage where she has achieved the goal of liberty.

It's very nicely articulated.

It's longer. These two verses, we retranslated for the

sources, you know, the book that the

feminists in Hyderabad brought out, which was women writing in

India. They wanted us to include the Theri Gatha. So actually the women

writing in India, please note that, begins with the Theri Gatha.

That is, it's the oldest.

The world's oldest women's literature.

So we translated, re-translated four of them, Kumkum Roy and I, and these two

are among that four.

So, you know, we can perhaps end on that note.

Thank you. But before that end, I just want to get into one thing about the

Therigata which comes.

up recurrently and it's a little uncomfortable for us to deal with in

from our present uh lens is this discomfort with the body this uh

disgust for uh sex and sexuality

So the renunciation is something which sits very uncomfortably with the worldly

thing. And herein, therefore, I want to just like throw in the last provocation,

which is that, you know, so you have Buddhism, you have Brahmanism, and you

have a third, which is Tantra or the Tantric faith in which you have the

sacred feminine.

And we have history shows that both Brahmanism and Buddhism have borrowed,

appropriated liberally from Tantric.

faith systems, in which the central thing is to celebrate

the body, to reach the divine through the body and things like that. And here

you have this one kind of disgust almost for the body. How do we contend with

this thing?

See, this is actually the male misogyny transferred upon the feminine.

It's their problem.

It's their inability to actually pursue renunciatory goals, which is the

absolute abstinence of the withdrawal from sexuality.

So to that extent, I think the problem is with the male

monk.

The manner in which the texts have been cast and recast and so on is to project

that.

The only way they can sort of cut themselves off is by turning that into

something which is disgusting at the end of the day, trivializing it and

disgusting and so on. But I was also struck by, I had to write another essay

at some point of time around.

celibacy, monasticism and stuff like that. So I found references to a

Buddha being more liberal in certain ways because there is a

particular monk who in fact the rules of chastity come into being because

initially there are no rules of chastity. There's a monk who goes back

home for the begging bowl and the family grabs him because the lineage is good.

to die out.

And so they grab him and say, no, no, no, at least stay one night and have one

child at least. And so he reneges and he has that encounter.

Okay, whatever it is, that's stated in a... But the more interesting one is the

one in which a woman joins a sangha and discovers later on that she's pregnant.

Now, the whole attitude of the Buddha is very compassionate towards her.

So she's come, she's reversed the world, but she's carrying a child.

So he makes arrangements for her, appoints someone to look, help her, look

after, and when the child is born, to then...

help her in looking after the child. So in a sense, there is no, you know,

actually, you have to read between the texts, between the narratives and so on,

and then try and suss out where it is. So the humanity cannot actually

disappear completely.

And there is some way in which it forces you into.

But the principle is that, you see, it's not only

celibacy. It's because sexuality and reproduction are

at the heart of the productive relations also.

So there's a challenge over there. How do you build an egalitarian society with

no investment in property and whatever it is, if you're actually part of the

world of reproduction?

So you have to...

withdraw from the world of reproduction and the world of production in order to

be able to pursue the goals that you are, which is why you have to beg your

food and do whatever it is and so on. So it's the imagination at an early point

of how you can extricate yourself from this

world.

It's like feminists today will turn around and say, or even the queer

community will turn around and say, actually, you're trapped by sexuality

and reproduction.

Sure.

And the whole system is geared in that direction.

How do you actually...

you know, achieve yourself or what you're looking for. So there's some

interesting way in which the challenge has to be met and you come up with what

you think is the most workable and creative response to that situation.

It's faulty in the long run, but at the end of the day, you have to then give it

to them. This is as far as the imagination of the Buddha went.

It's faulty in the long run. In the long run, nothing lasts.

And in the long run, everything changes. Everything changes. And the Buddhism

essentially is a certain... And moves into so many... As you yourself say,

there's Tantric Buddhism, there's...

Between Hinayana and Vajrayana, there's also Mahayana, which I find very moving.

Because the idea that I have to struggle all by myself to achieve this goal of

liberation, you know, I mean, I'll be, I'll really stop this whole thing.

And here you have, in Mahayana, you have the compassionate Buddha who puts his

hand right down to the lowest hell and pulls people up.

and goes along. And he said, I will not become a Buddha till others have also

joined me on that. Now that's actually taking compassion to a very high level.

And in the end, I think what Ambedkar is working from and what he's extracting

from Pali Buddhism and why it's Pali Buddhism rather than any other is

actually the Karuna and the Maitreya.

And for him, that is fundamental.

And that's the only way he can build a new order in which there isn't this

hatred and, you know, between. So how do you hit at caste?

How do you actually destroy caste?

If all human beings, you are compassionate and you have Karuna

towards them, then... Why do you need anything more than that? I mean, it's

the highest ethics at the end of the day. So I think that Ambedkar was

absolutely bang on in going for Pali Buddhism, not for Mahayana, not for any

other. It is Pali Buddhism.

Of course, he is also very creative because he recasts the storyline

completely. I mean, he reads into the text.

Buddha and his Dhamma is very much Ambedkar's reading of that situation.

You know, how can he stay in

Hinduism? I mean, he has to break with Hinduism. And the only alternative

within the soil that we've got is Buddhism.

And it has to be Pali Buddhism for that reason.

So he goes back to it. So at the end of the day, I think that's...

I mean, I'm moved by the fact that Ambedkar finds Bali Buddhism

and early Buddhism as the means from which he developed.

And he's very creative. He rewrites everything.

He rewrites the Buddha leaving his wife and going off. He rewrites every

critical episode to satisfy modern...

sensibilities and his notion of manliness.

But the fact is that at the end of the day, you don't want God.

You want liberty, equality, fraternity.

Where will you get it? You'll only get it in Pali Buddhism and not anywhere

else.

I don't want to add to what you said. I think this should be the final word on

this discussion.

few things that I couldn't cover. And for that, you have to read Uma

Chakraborty's book to get an idea of, like she says, the social milieu. The

title itself suggests that the social milieu of the time of the Buddha, the

political organizations, and also the nature of the Sangha. Actually, that is

one of the things that I wanted to discuss.

I promise you, I'm going to take it up in my subsequent conversations. But for

now, Dr. Uma Chakraborty, thank you so much for this.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for letting me go back to Buddhism.

Thank you.

In this special series on Watch Your Ism, five of the world's leading experts

on Buddhism talk about the relevance of an ancient ideology in modern times.

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