The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957) — Ambedkar's Last Book भगवान बुद्ध और उनका धम्म

Who was B. R. Ambedkar?

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891 – 6 December 1956) was born at Mhow in the Central Provinces into the Mahar community, then treated as untouchable. He studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, qualified as a barrister, and became the leading voice of India's depressed classes. He chaired the drafting committee of the Constitution of India and served as independent India's first Law Minister. His earlier writings, including Annihilation of Caste (1936), attacked the caste order sharply, and in 1935 at Yeola he announced that although he had been born a Hindu he would not die one. Twenty-one years later he embraced Buddhism, only weeks before his death in Delhi.

When and why it was written

Ambedkar's interest in the Buddha went back to his youth, and in the 1950s he turned to writing a full account of the Buddha's life and teaching for Indians who, as he put it in his introduction, wanted a clear and consistent statement of them. In a preface dated 6 April 1956, not printed in the first edition, he wrote that he had worked on the book for five years while seriously ill, and that it was meant as one of three books for understanding Buddhism, alongside Buddha and Karl Marx and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India.

On 14 October 1956, at the ground in Nagpur now called Deekshabhoomi, Ambedkar and his wife Savita took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from the Burmese-born monk Mahasthavir Chandramani of Kushinagar. Ambedkar then administered the refuges, precepts and twenty-two vows of his own to a very large crowd of followers, usually estimated at several hundred thousand, and held a second ceremony at Chandrapur two days later. The twenty-two vows included renouncing belief in the Hindu gods and in avatars, giving up Brahmin-performed rites, affirming the equality of human beings and following the Noble Eightfold Path. The vows remain both a foundation of Ambedkarite Buddhist identity and a subject of debate among Hindus.

Ambedkar died on 6 December 1956, soon after finishing the manuscript. The book was published in 1957 by Siddharth College Publications, Bombay, an imprint of the People's Education Society he had founded. It was later reprinted as volume 11 of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, issued by the Government of Maharashtra, and has been translated into Hindi, Marathi and several other Indian languages.

The introduction: four problems

The short introduction explains why Ambedkar felt a new account was needed. He argues that anyone relying on the Pali Nikayas finds it hard to tell a consistent story of the Buddha's life or teaching, and he sets out four problems for discussion among Buddhists.

First, the renunciation (parivraja): the traditional story says Siddhartha left home after seeing an old man, a sick man and a corpse, which Ambedkar finds implausible for a man of twenty-nine. Second, the Four Noble Truths: he asks whether they belonged to the Buddha's original teaching or were added later by monks, since in his reading they make the teaching pessimistic. Third, soul, karma and rebirth: if the Buddha denied a permanent soul, in what sense did he accept karma and rebirth? Fourth, the monk (bhikkhu): was he meant to be a perfected individual or a social servant devoted to the people? The rest of the book offers Ambedkar's own answers.

The eight books in brief

• Book One — Siddharth Gautama: How a Bodhisatta Became the Buddha (seven parts). The life from birth to enlightenment. Ambedkar's answer to the first problem is here: Siddhartha, a member of the Sakya assembly, opposes a vote for war with the neighbouring Koliyas over the waters of the Rohini river, and chooses to leave home rather than see his family punished. The book follows his study of Sankhya, meditation and asceticism, his enlightenment, and closes by comparing the Buddha with the Vedic seers, the Upanishads and his contemporaries — what he rejected, modified and accepted.
• Book Two — Campaign of Conversion (eight parts). The Buddha's hesitation over whether to teach, the first sermon at Sarnath, and the conversion of very different people: ascetics, Brahmins and kings, his own family, the 'low and lowly' such as Upali the barber and Sunita the sweeper, women including Mahaprajapati Gautami, and wrongdoers such as Angulimala. The pattern stresses that the Dhamma was open to all.
• Book Three — What the Buddha Taught (five parts). The theoretical core. The Buddha claims no divinity and calls himself a guide to the path, not a giver of salvation. Ambedkar sorts teaching into three classes: Dhamma (purity of life, freedom from craving, the impermanence of compounded things, karma as moral order); Adhamma, or what is not Dhamma (belief in the supernatural, a creator God, the soul, sacrifices and the infallibility of scripture); and Saddhamma, true Dhamma, which must spread wisdom (prajna), virtue, compassion and friendliness (maitri), and break down social barriers so that worth, not birth, is the measure of a person.
• Book Four — Religion and Dhamma (four parts). Ambedkar distinguishes 'religion', centred on God, soul and ritual, from Dhamma, centred on morality and the reconstruction of society. He reinterprets rebirth, karma and ahimsa to show how shared words hide different meanings, gathers verses on the Buddhist way of life, and collects sermons for householders and on character, righteousness, nibbana and social and political questions, including the wrongness of war.
• Book Five — The Sangh (five parts). The organisation of the monastic order, its rules and vows, the Buddha's idea of the bhikkhu as distinct from the ascetic and the Brahmin, the monk's duty to spread the Dhamma without miracles or force, the bond between monks and lay followers, and a code of conduct (vinaya) for lay people — the wealthy, householders, children, pupils, spouses, masters and servants.
• Book Six — He and His Contemporaries (four parts). Benefactors such as Bimbisara, Anathapindika, Jeevaka, Ambapali and Visakha; enemies and false charges, including the hostility of Devadatta; critics of open admission to the Sangh, of ahimsa and of the doctrine of no-soul; and friends and admirers.
• Book Seven — The Wanderer's Last Journey (three parts). The places of his teaching, final meetings with family and with Sariputta, the farewell to Vaishali, the journey to Kushinara, the question of a successor, his last words, and the dispute over his relics.
• Book Eight — The Man Who Was Siddharth Gautama (three parts). A portrait of the Buddha's personality and leadership, his compassion and care for the sick, his tolerance and sense of equality, and his likes and dislikes, including a dislike of poverty and of acquisitiveness.
• Epilogue. Tributes to the Buddha from various writers, a vow to spread his Dhamma, and a prayer for its return to the land of its birth.

Key arguments

A social reading of the Buddha's life. By replacing the legend of the four sights with a political crisis over war and water, Ambedkar presents the renunciation as a moral response to social conflict rather than a flight from the world.

Dhamma is not religion. The book's most distinctive claim is that the Buddha taught a moral and social order, not a faith built around God, soul or ritual. Morality, in this reading, takes the place that God occupies in theistic religions.

Rationalism. Belief in the supernatural, in revealed and infallible scripture, or in speculation unconnected with human welfare is classed as Adhamma. The Buddha is a 'path-finder' whose teaching is to be tested by reason and experience.

Equality as a test of true Dhamma. A teaching counts as Saddhamma only if it opens learning to all and breaks down barriers of birth. This links the book directly to Ambedkar's lifelong struggle against caste.

Reinterpretation of karma and rebirth. Ambedkar accepts both terms but reads them without a transmigrating soul and without the idea that past-life karma fixes present social status — a reading aimed at the use of karma to justify untouchability.

The monk as social servant. Answering his fourth problem, Ambedkar portrays the bhikkhu as a teacher and helper of lay society, with strong duties to the community.

In the author's words

The simple answer is, Morality is Dhamma and Dhamma is Morality. In other words, in Dhamma morality takes the place of God, although there is no God in Dhamma.

The purpose of Religion is to explain the origin of the world. The purpose of Dhamma is to reconstruct the world.

Reception and criticism

Among Ambedkarite Buddhists, often called Navayana or neo-Buddhists, the book holds the place of scripture. It is read aloud, studied in groups and sold in great numbers at Deekshabhoomi every year on the anniversary of the conversion. Admirers value it as the work that gave a mass movement of former untouchables a Buddhism centred on dignity, reason and equality, and many see its social reading of the Dhamma as the heart of Ambedkar's legacy.

Early reviews from the established Buddhist world were sharply critical. Ambedkar's biographer Dhananjay Keer records that a reviewer in the Maha Bodhi, the journal of the Maha Bodhi Society, called it a dangerous book that put hatred where the Buddha had put compassion, and that a reviewer in The Light of Dhamma, published in Rangoon, accused the author of tampering with the texts. Traditional Theravada scholars have objected above all to his doubts about the Four Noble Truths, his treatment of rebirth and karma, and his replacement of the four sights with the Rohini river story, which departs from the canonical and traditional biographies.

Later scholarship has taken a more varied view. Studies such as Adele Fiske and Christoph Emmrich's work on Ambedkar's use of Pali sources, and the annotated critical edition by Aakash Singh Rathore and Ajay Verma (Oxford University Press, 2011), trace where he quoted, abridged or rewrote his sources. Writers sympathetic to the movement, including the British teacher Sangharakshita and the historian Eleanor Zelliot, have stressed its purpose as a guide for a new community of converts rather than a work of textual scholarship. Some Hindu writers object to the book's and the twenty-two vows' rejection of Hindu beliefs, while others note that Ambedkar chose a religion of Indian origin. The debate over how far the book is interpretation and how far invention continues.

Where to read it

The full text is in the public domain in India. It appears as volume 11 of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Education Department, Government of Maharashtra), which is also distributed by the Dr. Ambedkar Foundation of the Government of India. A complete online edition based on that volume, divided by book and part, is maintained by Frances W. Pritchett of Columbia University, and scans of the 1957 first edition and of volume 11 are available on archive.org. For a scholarly reading with sources traced, see the Oxford University Press critical edition edited by Aakash Singh Rathore and Ajay Verma (2011).

Read more on this site

• B. R. AmbedkarGreat Lives
• Ambedkar on dharmaRashtriya Vichar · Thinkers
• Annihilation of Caste (1936)Books & Ideas
• The BuddhaGreat Lives

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