In a past article, we had argued that the Buddha lived and died as a Hindu and
that Bauddha Dharma is nothing but one of the sects within Hinduism.
Ambedkarite neo-Buddhists and Ambedkar-touting secularists are understandably
furious when their ambitions for a separate identity or their schemes for
pitting Hindus against Hindus are thwarted. So we received a number of
questions meant as rhetorical and as exposing the hollowness of our claim. Six
are from a certain S. Narayanaswamy Iyer, then three more by a Dr. Ranjeet
Singh. We reproduce them and then answer them. First Mr. Iyer’s questions:
(1) Which of our four Vedams did Buddha
follow in his teachings?
Throughout his text, Mr. Iyer presupposes one of the
most common weapons which the enemies of Hinduism use: changing the definition
of “Hinduism” to and fro, depending on their own best interest. Thus, the
Christian mission lobby swears that “tribals are not Hindus”, except when tribals
defend themselves against encroachment by Bengali Muslim settlers or take
revenge on the Christians for having murdered Swami Lakshmananda and four of
his assistants; then they are suddenly transformed into “Hindus”. Here, as long
as convenient, “Hindu” is narrowed down to “Brahmanical”. The Vedic tradition,
started among the Paurava tribe established in Haryana, was the most
prestigious tradition, first to take the shape of a fixed corpus and learned by
heart by a class of people set apart just for this purpose. Tribe after tribe
adopted this tradition, all while maintaining its own identity and religious
practices. Kings in Bengal and South India imported the Vedic tradition and
gave land to settle Brahmin communities just to embellish their dynasties with
this prestigious Vedic tradition. But other traditions existed alongside the
Vedas, both among speakers of Indo-Aryan and among Dravidians and others. Many
non-Vedic elements come to light in a corpus collected in the first millennium
CE, the Puranas. Many more were incorporated by the later Bhakti (devotion)
poets or have subsisted till today as part of oral culture. All these Pagan
practices together, Vedic and non-Vedic, constitute “Hinduism”.
When the Muslim invaders brought the Persian
geographical term “Hindu” into India a thousand years ago, they meant by it: an
Indian Pagan. In Islamic theology, Christians and Jews count as a special
category, and Parsis were often considered as Persian and not Indian Pagans.
But all the other Indians were called “Hindus”. Whether tribals, Buddhists
(“clean-shaven Brahmins”), atheists, polytheists, Brahmins, non-Brahmins, the
Lingayats, even the not-yet-existing Sikhs or Arya Samajis or
Ramakrishnaites,-- all of them were Hindus. It is now a mark of anti-Hindu polemicists
that they manipulate the meaning of “Hinduism”, and interpret it more broadly
or more narrowly as per their convenience. The first rule of logic is “a = a”,
i.e. “a term retains the same meaning throughout the whole reasoning process”.
So, against these manipulations, we will stick to one meaning for Hinduism,
viz. the historically justified meaning of “all Indian Pagans”
The Buddha had, according to Buddhist scripture,
received a Kshatriya upbringing. That means his outlook was formed by an at
least passive initiation into the Vedas. Never in his long life did he
repudiate this. On the contrary, he only developed ideas that were already
present in the Vedic tradition. Thus, “liberation” was a goal that the
Upanishadic thinkers had invented and that set them apart from practically all
others religions (certainly from Christianity and Islam). Meditation or yoga as
the technique to achieve this liberation was first mentioned in the Upanishads.
Buddhist scripture mentions two meditation teachers with whom the Buddha
studied. At most he invented a new meditation technique, Vipassana (now
vulgarized as “Mindfulness”), but meditation was an existing tradition into
which he was initiated by older masters, and to which he contributed his own
addition, like others did. Reincarnation and karma are at the heart of
Buddhism, and is the first thing which outsiders associate with Buddhism; but these
concepts were introduced in the Upanishads. Even the repudiation of what the
Vedas had become, particularly the repudiation of ritualism, is already found
in the Upanishads. And so is the rejection of desire, the extolling of the
value of compassion (daya), and the first options for celibate monkhood. When
Buddha became a recluse, he followed a path that was already well established,
and that is already mentioned in the Rg-Veda, though only in the third person
(the Vedic poets themselves were elite figures and a different class from the
renunciates). The Buddha rightly said that he had not invented anything new,
that he was only treading an ancient path formerly trodden by the earlier
Buddhas.
Hindu attitudes to the Vedas varied greatly. Some had
never heard of them, some had heard the names but knew little of their
contents, some thought they were interesting literature but not a guiding light
for moral decisions or choosing a way of life, some adopted practices which
they called Vedic though they were not, some paid lip-service to the Vedas, and
some really practised Vedic rituals or learned the Vedas by heart. Within this
continuum, the Buddha took his place, without this ever being a problem for the
Brahmins. The only two attempts on his life were committed by a jealous pupil
of his own, a leading Buddhist. Still, he died at an advanced age.
(2) Which of our 330 devathaas did
Buddha worship?
The more usual number is 33, but modern tourists (and
therefore also the secularists) have opted for 330 million. This number is
based on a mistranslation of “33 big gods” as “33 crore (= ten million) gods”. Anyway, the
number can vary, but yes, there are quite a few, let us settle for “a lot”.
Like many elite characters and thinkers, the Buddha is reputed to be into other
things than worship, as were many people in Vedic society. Sankhya was an
atheist school, as was early Vaisheshika, and so were Jainism and the Charvaka
school. The Mimansa school, orthodox par excellence, taught that Vedic rituals
are effective alright, but the gods invoked during the ritual proceedings are
mere cog-wheels in the magical mechanism set in motion by the priests. These
gods have no reality in themselves and only exist in so far as they are
invested with existence by the human beings who “feed” them. So, atheism was a
recognized option among the Hindu elite, of which prince Siddhartha Gautama,
the Buddha, was a prominent member.
All the same, he paid homage to the gods on some
occasions. His breakthrough to liberation was followed by an intervention of
the supreme gods Brahma and Indra, asking him to share his bliss and teach his
way to liberation with others – the very start of Buddhism. Had the Buddha or
even the later editors of the Pali Canon been as anti-Vedic as the present
neo-Buddhists imagine, they could easily have censored this episode out. At the
end of his life, during which he was regularly consulted on political matters
because he was after all very at home in statecraft, he was asked by the
authorities of a republic to formulate the qualities by which a state prevents
decline. In reply, he listed the “seven principles of non-decline”, and among
them is an abiding maintenance of ancient religious traditions, including
rituals and pilgrimages. The ancient religious practices which he knew, were
Vedic or at any rate Hindu ones. Buddhist monks later carried Vedic gods such
as Indra, Brahma, Ganapati and Saraswati to foreign lands. Japanese temples are
dedicated to Benzai-ten or Saraswati, some house the “twelve Adityas/Ten”. The
Shingon sect of Buddhism has a quasi-Vedic ritual called “feeding the gods”,
exactly the same conception as in the Vedas. Thai and Indonesian Buddhists have
adopted the cult of Rama, whom the Buddha did not really worship but whom he
venerated as a great scion of the Aikshvaku lineage to which he himself
belonged, and of whom he claimed to be a reincarnation. Neo-Buddhists object to
the long-established Puranic teaching that both Rama and the Buddha are incarnations
of Vishnu, but the germ of this teaching was planted by the Buddha himself when
he claimed that Rama and he were the same person.
(3) Which of our samskaarams did Buddha
tell his followers to observe and perform?
Samskaarams (life rituals) are meant for people living
in society, as the Vedic poets did. Renunciates are living outside society,
often they perform their own funeral upon “leaving the world”, and after that
the samskaarams no longer apply to them. The Buddha founded a monastic order,
an organized form of renunciation. He did not found a separate non-Hindu
religion (the way the first Christians did), for his lay followers were part of
Hindu society. Mostly we are informed of their caste provenance, their families,
their marriage situations. Whatever customs or rituals applied in their
respective Hindu communities applied to them as well. Jains developed a
separate lay community, but even these lay Jains are part of Hindu society.
They observe caste, often intermarrying with non-Jains belonging to the same
caste but not with Jains belonging to another caste. In Buddhism, even this
much separateness did not exist. Buddhism was nothing but a monastic community
within Hindu society. So the Buddhist order did not observe Hindu lay society’s
life ritual, just as many non-Buddhist renunciates didn’t.
(4) Which of our varnaashrama rules,
duties and practices did Buddha teach his followers, and which of those do they
perform today?
Caste is a part of lay society, not applicable to
renunciates. Their names revealing their caste provenance are replaced by
monastic names. The questioner also betrays his short-sighted assumptions by
projecting the caste relations of recent Hindu society on that of the Buddha’s
time. Social order was in flux at the time, with the Buddha e.g. defending
caste as defined by the paternal line regardless of the mother’s caste against
king Prasenadi disowning his wife and son when he finds out his wife (and therefore,
he assumes, his son) isn’t a true Kshatriya. Clearly, both conceptions of
caste, viz. in the paternal line vs. full endogamy, were competing at the time,
with the Buddha taking the then more conservative position, while later the
principle of full caste endogamy (only marriage within one’s own caste) was to
prevail. Mind you, the Buddha didn’t use this excellent opportunity of a king’s
question on caste matters to fulminate against caste. If he was an anti-caste
revolutionary, as Dr. B.R. Ambedkar imagined, he would have seized this
opportunity to condemn caste itself, but he didn’t.
Caste was in existence but considerably more relaxed
than in later centuries. For this reason, the Buddha’s attitude was more
relaxed too, unlike the obsession with caste among the neo-Buddhists. Moreover,
he had chosen not to rock the boat in a society that tolerated and maintained
his monastic order. In every country where Buddhism found a place, it accepted
whatever social arrangement prevailed. In Thailand, it didn’t abolish
hereditary monarchy though this is a casteist phenomenon par excellence. In
China it didn’t abolish the centralized-bureaucratic empire. On the contrary,
when the Buddhist White Lotus sect drove out the Mongol dynasty, its leader,
who had started out as a Buddhist monk and was deemed the Maitreya Buddha,
established a new imperial dynasty, the Ming, replacing the Mongol ruling class
by a Chinese ruling class but leaving the exploitative system in place. In
Japan, it didn’t abolish militaristic feudalism; instead, its Zen school became
the favourite religion of the Samurai warrior class. So, in India too, it fully
accepted the arrangement in place, recruited mainly among the upper castes
(most Buddhist philosophers were born Brahmins), and concentrated on its
spiritual mission. Buddhism as an anti-caste movement is just a figment of the
secularist imagination.
(5) Which Hindu priests initiated Buddha
into sannyaasam?
Any lineage is founded by someone who takes the jump. Later on, it is continued
by followers who go through an initiation ceremony; and when succeeding their
guru, they go through an investiture ceremony. But the founder just has his
moment of enlightenment. Asking about the founder’s initiation is the mediocre
mind’s imposing his humdrum norms onto a genius. Thus, Ramana Maharshi was
unprepared when suddenly, the insight overcame him; he didn’t receive it from a
teacher. Even so, when Siddhartha Gautama went to the forest, he did become a
pupil of at least two meditation masters. Probably they put him through some
kind of initiation, though we don’t have the details on it.
The questioner means “Vedic” whenever he says “Hindu”,
and projects everything we now know as Hindu (decried by the Arya Samaj as
“Puranic”) onto the Vedic age. The institutionalization of Sannyaasa
(renunciation) took on a shape recognizable till today with Shankara in ca. 800
CE. In the Vedic age itself, the current formalities of Sannyaasa did not
exist. When Yajnavalkya retired to the forest (the occasion on which he
pronounced his famous exposition of the Self to his wife Maitreyi), he did not
have to take anyone’s permission. Valmiki of Ramayana fame set up his own
hermitage, as did seer Vasishtha and his wife Arundhati. So he starts imposing
current Hindu norms on the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago. This just
illustrates the over-all unhistorical character of the neo-Buddhist rhetoric.
(6) When and where did
the initiation take place?
As a youngster, the Buddha must have gone through the
thread ceremony making him a full Kshatriya. This was unlike most modern
Kshatriyas, who leave it only to the Brahmins to don the thread. Then, he went
through the marriage ritual, at least according to the Pali Canon. Some
scholars doubt that he had a wife and son and think that later scholars have
merely turned a particular nun and a particular monk into his mother and son.
Be that as it may, Buddhist scripture makes no effort at all to deny that he
had gone through whichever appropriate Hindu rituals were part of the life of
anyone belonging to his class and age group.
Later, when he became a renunciate, we are vaguely
told that first he searched alone, then he had some companions (though we don’t
have all the details about their relations), then he had two successive
teachers. To be a renunciate at that time, he did not have to go through
specific rituals, but he may have. Then, after he reached his awakening, he
became the topmost man in his universe and didn’t recognize any living human
being above him and empowered to put him through further ceremonies. His pupils
became monks through a ceremony (dharmam
saranam gacchami, “I take refuge in the dharma”), just as every other Hindu
sect has its own procedure for allowing new members in. The relation of his
pupils to him was the same as that of other renunciates to their guru. The
institution of guru-dom was, again, exported by Buddhism as far as Japan.
Then we consider Dr. Singh’s additional questions:
1) Which were the rules, duties and
practices he himself followed at that particular time, had followed and used to
follow before in the youth and pre-Buddhahood mendicant life?
As the Pali Canon
explains, he was the son of the President-for-life of the Shakya tribe, a
Kshatriya by birth and upbringing. After he became a renunciate, he practiced
asceticism and several meditation techniques of which names are given, though
we cannot be sure which techniques are meant by these names. At any rate, they
are the same names and probably refer to the same techniques which are
incorporated in the Buddhist training scheme before the meditation technique
that brought the Buddha his awakening.
2) Was his marriage with Yashodhara, his
first cousin, in accord with the Vedic rules: as per Shaastra injunctions?
Writing only came to
India after Alexander, i.e. well after the Buddha. Though the Shaastras contain
older material, they were at any rate written centuries later than the Buddha. In
the age of the Vedic seers, they were totally non-existent. So, unless Dr.
Singh insists that the Vedic seers were un-Hindu, it is not a defining trait of
a “Hindu” to follow the Shaastras. Like most anti-Hindu polemicists (and, alas,
quite a few pro ones too), he displays a most unhistorical conception of what
“Hinduism” means, projecting recent notions onto ancient history.
What this question
alludes to, is the difference in marriage customs between the Shakya tribe and
the Brahmanical injunctions. The Brahmins practise, and their Shaastras
prescribe, rules of “forbidden degrees of consanguinity”. By contrast, certain
other peoples, such as the ancient Dravidians or the contemporaneous Muslims,
practice cousin marriage. In this case, we find that the Shakya tribe practiced
cousin marriage. The Buddha’s father and mother had been cousins, and his own
reported union was also between cousins. The Shakyas were apparently aware that
within the ambient society, they stood out with this custom, for they justified
it with the story that they had very pure blood, being descendants of patriarch
Manu Vaivasvata’s repudiated elder children, who had arrived at sage Kapila’s
hermitage in the forest and built a town there, Kapilavastu (where the Buddha
grew up). So, to keep Manu’s blood pure, the Shakyas had to marry someone with
the same blood.
Some scholars say this
is just a story made up to convince their neighbours. The true account,
according to them, is that the Shakyas were originally an Iranian tribe that
had moved along with the great migration eastwards, from the Saraswati plain
into the Ganga plain. The prevalence of cousin marriages was one of the main
differences between Iranians and Indians. That contemporaries describe the
Buddha as tall and light-skinned seems to conform to the Iranian identity.
Nowadays also, after twelve centuries in India, Parsis are still physically
distinct. Well, be that as it may, the custom of cousin marriage was at any
rate in existence among the Shakyas, whatever its provenance.
What we have here, is
a typical case of Brahmanical norms being overruled by caste autonomy, another
defining feature of Hindu society. For comparison, consider two rather dramatic
examples. Widow self-immolation (sati) is forbidden in Brahmanical writings
since the Rg-Veda, where a woman lying down on her husband’s funeral pyre is
told to rise, to leave this man behind and re-join the living; yet the custom
flourished among the Kshatriyas, particularly the Rajputs. Brahmins could lay
down norms all they wanted, and ambitious lower castes might well imitate these
Brahmin norms; but if a caste decided to defy these norms, there was little
that could be done about it. For another example: abortion is scripturally
condemned as one of the worst sins. Yet, some castes, such as notoriously the
Jats, could kill their unwanted children before or even after birth. If today’s
India has a problem with the balance between the sexes because so many girl
children are being aborted, this is very much against the Shaastras (though
secular feminists addressing ignorant Western audiences will still blame “Hinduism”).
But caste autonomy means that the caste Panchayat (council) and not the
Shaastric law is the ultimate arbiter. So, if the Shakyas insisted on
maintaining their own non-Brahmanical marriage customs, Hindu society allowed
them to do so.
3) How; on what authority and provision of
the scriptures, Hindu Shaastras, had he entered the fourth aashrama and entered
sanyaasam, a born prince as he was? Was it dharma for him, a born prince? Was
it in accord with and as per the teachings and provisions of the scriptures and
enjoined for princes, members of the Kshatriya varna? Is it and has it been so
prescribed and postulated? If yes; could we know how and where? On what
scriptural grounds: what pramaanas, words and provision of the scriptures?
Here again, we have a lot of projection of later Hindu scripture onto Hindu
society during the Buddha’s life. First off, the notion of a “fourth aashrama”
is – and here I break ranks with most Hindus and most Indologists – a confused
compromise notion. The Vedic system very sensibly distinguished three stages of
life: before, during and after setting up one’s own family, i.e.
Brahmacharya/student, Grhastha/householder and Vanaprastha/forest-dweller. The
first stage is devoted to learning, the second to founding and administering
your family (until your daughters are married off and you first grandson born),
the third is devoted to renunciation. This renunciation could take different
forms and have differently conceived goals, but at least since Yajnavalkya, it
was understood as looking for the Self, working on your liberation. This is not
split into two, Sannyaasa is not more renounced than the Vanaprastha stage. It
is only when ascetic sects introduced renunciation not as a sequel but as an
alternative to family life, that Brahmins fulfilled their typical function of
integrating new things by extending the aashrama scheme to include Sannyaasa.
So, what Buddha entered was not a “fourth stage” (he was still in the second
stage and had never even entered the third stage), but an alternative to the
second stage (family life), viz. renunciation as a full-time identity and
lifelong profession. Just as Shankara was to do, and as Hindu monks mostly
still do. Being pluralistic, Hindu society recognizes different forms of
renunciation, both after family life and instead of family life..
As a Kshatriya, it was
not considered the Buddha’s dharma to renounce the world. His father hoped his
son would succeed him to the throne and made every effort to keep him from
renouncing the world (including his caste vocation). Similarly, Shankara’s
mother tried to dissuade and prevent her son from becoming an early renunciate,
as he was her only hope of her having grandchildren. Hindu society recognizes
the option of monkhood as an alternative to family life, but this doesn’t mean
that individual Hindu lives and schemes cannot be adversely affected by this
option. Both Siddhartha and Shankara disappointed their families and renounced
their caste dharma to become monks.
Conclusion
Neither of the
questioners has been able to pinpoint a moment in the Buddha’s life or
preaching when he made a break with Hinduism. He inherited most of his ideas
from the ambient Hindu tradition, and stands out mostly by the institution he
founded, the Buddhist monastic order. His meditation technique may be his own,
though with a canon written two centuries after his death and by scribes who
were less than impartisan, we don’t really know what happened. His intellectual
system mostly systematized ideas which were in the air and had already found
mention in the Upanishads. Among his monks, Brahmin philosophers gradually
refined and perfected his philosophy, ascribing most of their new ideas to the
master himself.
When Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
“converted” to Buddhism in 1956, he made his co-“converting” followers promise
that they would renounce Hinduism and specific Hindu practices. It was the
first time in the history of Buddhism that this happened. The Buddha had never
renounced, or made his novices renounce, any religion they formerly practiced –
in fact, the notion of “a religion” (as opposed to “religion”, a very
approximate translation of “dharma”) hardly even existed. Ambedkar’s involved
the typically Christian notion of conversion as “burning what you have
worshipped, worshipping what you have burned”. The box-type notion of religious
belonging, with rejecting one identity in order to be able to accept another,
is fundamentally un-Hindu. In other countries too, entering Buddhism did not
entail any formal renunciation of Daoism, Shinto or any other tradition. So,
when Ambedkar and his hundreds of thousands of followers (mostly caste-fellows
from his own ex-Untouchable Mahar caste) “converted” to Buddhism, most Hindus
saw this as just an entry into a particular Hindu sect. As V.D. Savarkar
commented, Ambedkar “conversion” was a sure jump into the Hindu fold.
Buddhism was classed
as a separate religion from Hinduism because travelers and then scholars had
first become aware of it outside India. When separated from its Hindu roots, it
did take on a life of its own. Yet in India, it was not more than one of the
many Hindu sects, although numerically the most successful one.
Finally, the Buddhist
separatist polemic is fundamentally unhistorical in projecting contemporary
Hindu traits onto ancient Hindu society. Unfortunately, this also counts for
much Hindu activist polemic. Shaastric norms are absolutized, when in fact they
were changing throughout history. And most importantly, devotional theistic
forms of Hinduism, now long predominant, are projected onto ancient Hinduism
which had several distinct conceptions of the divine, including atheism. It is
common for Hindus to lambast non-Hindus as “atheists”, as if there were no
atheist Hindus. The category “atheists” would naturally include Buddhists, who
can therefrom deduce a separate non-Hindu identity. This way, narrow-minded
Hindus themselves reinforce the unhistorical neo-Buddhist separatism.