Indians and Westerners who know Buddhism through Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and other modern pamphlet literature, sometimes believe that the Buddha started a movement of social reform, mobilizing against caste and recruiting among low-caste people. As against this, Chinese and Japanese Buddhists who have studied their religion only through its source texts, think that Buddhism was an elite movement, recruiting among the upper castes and patronized by kings and magnates. We will argue that these believers are right, while the neo-Buddhists in India and outside enthusiasts in the West are wrong.
A good place to start is the Buddha's use of the term Ārya. Buddhists claim that when the Buddha lived and
taught, the term Ārya had a general
psychological-ethical meaning “noble”, a character trait larger than and not
dependent on any specific cultural or religious tradition or social class (let
alone linguistic or racial group). It is used in the famous Buddhist
expressions, the “four noble truths” (catvāri-ārya-satyāni)
and the “noble eightfold path” (ārya-astāngika-mārga).
However, we must look at the historical data without assuming modern and
sectarian preferences.
Firstly, we must take into account the
possibility that the Buddha too used the term Ārya in the implied sense of “Vedic”, broadly conceived. It no
longer meant “Paurava”, the ethnic horizon of the Veda-composing tribes
(whereas in Anatolian and Iranian it would retain this ethnic meaning, “fellow
citizens” against “foreigners”, “us” against “them”), but in the post-Buddha Manu Smrti and in general Hindu
usage, it would retain the association with the Vedic tradition, hence the
meaning “civilized” in the sense of “observing Vedic norms and customs”. The
Buddha too may have conceived of his personal practice as restored-Vedic and
more Vedic than the “decadent” formalism around him. “Back to the roots” is of
all ages, and it may have affected the Buddha as well. What speaks in favour of
this thesis is that the Buddha himself, far from being a revolutionary,
appealed to the “ancient way” which he himself trod, and which “the Buddhas of
the past” had also trodden.
After Vedic tradition got carried away into
what he deemed non-essentials, he intended to restore what he conceived as the
original Vedic spirit. After all, the anti-Vedicism and anti-Brahmanism now
routinely attributed to him, are largely in the eye of the modern beholder.
Though later Brahmin-born Buddhist thinkers polemicized against Brahmin
institutions and the idolizing of the Veda, the Buddha himself didn’t mind
attributing to the Vedic gods Indra and Brahma his recognition as the Buddha
and his mission to teach. His disciples took the worship of the Vedic gods as
far as Japan.
As Luis Gómez [1999: “Noble lineage and august
demeanour. Religious and social meanings of Aryan virtue”, in Bronkhorst &
Deshpande: Aryan and Non-Aryan in South
Asia, Harvard, p.132-133] points out, the Buddhist usage of Ārya is subject to “ambiguities”, e.g.
in the Mahāvibhāsā: “The Buddha said,
‘What the noble ones say is the truth, what the other say is not true. And why
is this? The noble ones […] understand things as they are, the common folk do
not understand. […] Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are
possessed by those who own the wealth and assets of the noble ones.
Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are possessed by those
who are conceived in the womb of a noble person.’”
At the end of his life, the Buddha unwittingly
got involved in a political intrigue when Varsakāra,
a minister of the Magadha kingdom,
asked him for the secret of the strength of the republican states. Among the
seven unfailing factors of strength of a society, he included “sticking to
ancient laws and traditions” and “maintaining sacred sites and honouring
ancient rituals”. [Dīgha Nikāya 2:73]
So, contrary to his modern image as a “revolutionary”, the Buddha’s view of the
good society was close to Confucian and indeed Brahmanical conservatism. Far
from denouncing “empty ritual”, he praised it as a factor of social harmony and
strength. He wanted people to maintain
the ancestral worship of the Vedic gods, go to the Vedic sites of pilgrimage
and celebrate the Vedic festivals. In this light, his understanding of Ārya may have been closer to the
Brahminical interpretation of the term as “Vedic” than nowadays usually
assumed.
This even applies to the Buddha’s view of
caste. Of most of the hundreds of men recruited to the Buddha’s monastic order,
we know the provenance, hence the caste. More than 80% of the hundreds of men
he recruited, were from the upper castes. More than 40% were Brahmins. The
Buddha himself was a Ksatriya, son of the President-for-life of the
proud Sākya tribe, and member of its
senate. His lay patrons, who had their personnel or their feudal subordinates
build monasteries for the Buddha, included most of the kings and magnates of
the nether Ganga region. Indeed, this patronage is the main reason why Buddhism
succeeded in becoming a world religion where most other contemporaneous sects
dwindled and disappeared.
The successor-Buddha prophesied for
the future, the Maitreya, is to be born in a Brahman family, according to the
Buddha himself. When the Buddha died, his ashes were divided and sent to eight
cities, where the elites had staked their claims purely in caste terms: “He was
a Kshatriya and we are Kshatriyas, so we are entitled to his ashes.” Clearly,
his disciples, after undergoing his teachings for forty-five years, were not in
the least hesitant to display their caste in a Buddhist context par excellence.
In his study of caste and the Buddha (“Buddhism, an atheistic and
anti-caste religion? Modern ideology and historical reality of the ancient
Indian Bauddha Dharma”, Journal of
Religious Culture, no.50 (2001)), the German Indologist Edmund Weber quotes
the biographical source-text Lalitavistara
and concludes: “The standpoint which caste a Buddha should belong to has not been
revised in Buddhism up to the present day. It is dogmatised in the Lalitavistara in the following way: a
Bodhisattva can by no means come from a lower or even mixed caste: ‘After all
Bodhisattvas were not born in despised lineage, among pariahs, in families of
pipe or cart makers, or mixed castes.’ Instead, in perfect harmony with the
Great Sermon, it was said that: ‘The Bodhisattvas appear only in two kinds of
lineage, the one of the brahmanas and of the warriors (kshatriya).’”
A word returning frequently in
Buddhist texts is “nobly-born”. Buddhists were proud to say this of their Guru,
whose noble birth from the direct descendants of Manu Vaivasvata was an endless
object of praise. Birth was very important to the Buddha, which is why his
disciples wrote a lot of hagiographical fantasy around his own birth, with
miracles attending his birth from a queen. The Buddha himself said it many
times, e.g. of the girls who should not be molested: they should be those of
noble birth, as distinct from the base-born women who in the Buddha’s
estimation were not equally delicate.
The Buddha also didn’t believe
in gender equality. For long he refused to recruit women into his monastic
order, saying that nuns would shorten its life-span by five hundred years. At
long last he relented when his mother was widowed and other relatives,
nobly-born Kshatriyas like the Buddha himself, insisted. Nepotism wasn’t alien
to him either. But he made this institution of female monastics conditional
upon the acceptance that even the most seasoned nun was subordinate to even the
dullest and most junior monk. Some Theravada countries have even re-abolished
the women’s monastic order, and it is only under Western feminist influence
that Thailand is gradually reaccepting nuns.
The
Buddha’s ascent to Awakening was predetermined by physical marks he was born
with, according to his disciples. Buddhist scripture makes much of the Buddha’s
noble birth in the Solar lineage, as a relative of Rāma. The Buddha himself claimed to be a reincarnation of Rama, in
the Buddhist retelling of the Rāmāyana
in the Jātakas. He also likened
himself to the mightily-striding Visnu.
Later Hindus see both Rama and the Buddha as incarnations of Vishnu, but the
Buddha started it all by claiming to by Rama’s reincarnation.
To play devil’s advocate, we could even extend
our skepticism of the Buddha’s progressive image to an involvement in the
racist understanding of Ārya. Some
pre-WW2 racists waxed enthusiastic about descriptions by contemporaries of the
Buddha as “tall and light-skinned”. [Schuman, H.W., 1989: The Historical Buddha, London: Arkana, p.194] That would seem to
make him “Aryan” in the once-common sense of “Nordic”.
Nowadays, some scholars including Michael
Witzel [on his own Indo-Eurasian Research
yahoo list] suggest that the Buddha’s Śākya tribe may have been of Iranian origin (related
to Śaka,
“Scythian”), which would explain his taller stature and lighter skin in
comparison with his Gangetic fellow-men. It would also explain their fierce
endogamy, i.e. their systematic practice of cousin marriage. Indeed, the Buddha
himself had only four great-grandparents because his paternal grandfather was
the brother of his maternal grandmother while his maternal grandfather was the
brother of his paternal grandmother. The Brahminical lawbooks prohibited this
close endogamy (gotras are exogamous)
and, like the Catholic Church, imposed respect for "prohibited degrees of
consanguinity"; but consanguineous marriages were common among Iranians. (They
were also common among Dravidians, a lead not yet fully exploited by
neo-Buddhists claiming the Buddha as “pre-Aryan”.) The Śākya tribe justified the practice through pride in
their direct pure descent from the Ārya
patriarch Manu Vaivasvata, but this
could be a made-up explanation adapted to the Indian milieu and hiding their
Iranian origin (which they themselves too could have forgotten), still visible
in their physical profile. So, that would make the Buddha an “Aryan” in the
historically most justified ethnic use of the term, viz. as “Iranian”.
At any rate, nothing in
Buddhist history justifies the modern
romance of Buddhism as a movement for social reform. Everywhere it went,
Buddhism accepted the social mores prevalent in that country, be it Chinese
imperial-centralistic bureaucracy, Japanese militaristic feudalism, or indeed
Hindu caste society. Buddhism even accepted the religious mores of the people
(a rare exception is the abolition of a widow’s burial along with her husband
in Mongol society effected by the third Dalai Lama), it only recruited monks
from among them and made these do the Buddhist practices. In “caste-ridden
India”, the Buddhist emperor Aśoka dared to go against the existing mores when he
prohibited animal-slaughter on specific days, but even he made no move to
abolish caste.
Buddhism wasn’t more casteist
than what went before. It didn’t bring caste to India anymore than the Muslims
or the Britons did. Caste is an ancient Indian institution of which the Buddha
was a part. But he, its personal beneficiary, didn’t think of changing it, just
as his followers in other countries didn’t think of changing the prevailing
system.
(first published on the Hindu Human Rights website)
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