Why Pushyamitra was more "secular" than Ashoka

(Published as a chapter in K. Elst: Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple, Delhi 2003. A bad case of the political abuse of history concerns Ashoka, glorified by Jawaharlal Nehru as the emperor who was first bad and Hindu, then "converted" to Buddhism and became good. This wilfully distorting spin has led to the ignoring of an earlier testimony which suggests a different story.)  

 

 

Why Pushyamitra was more "secular" than Ashoka

 

Let us elaborate one example of pro-Buddhist bias in modern indologist scholarship. It has to do with a story of alleged Hindu persecution of Buddhism by Pushyamitra, a general in the service of the declining Maurya dynasty, who founded the Shunga dynasty after a coup d'état. This story serves as the standard secularist refutation of the "myth" that Hinduism has always been tolerant.

 

Thus, the Marxist historian Gargi Chakravartty writes: "Another myth has been meticulously promoted with regard to the tolerance of the Hindu rulers. Let us go back to the end of second century BC. Divyavadana, in a text of about the second-third century AD, depicts Pushyamitra Shunga as a great persecutor of Buddhists. In a crusading march with a huge army he destroyed stupas, burnt monasteries and killed monks. This stretched up to Shakala, i.e. modern Sialkot, where he announced a reward of 100 gold coins to the person who would bring the head of a Buddhist monk. Even if this is an exaggeration, the acute hostility and tensions between Pushyamitra and the monks cannot be denied." (Gargi Chakravartty: "BJP-RSS and Distortion of History", in Pratul Lahiri, ed.: Selected Writings on Communalism, People's Publishing House, Delhi 1994, p.166-167)

 

We need not comment on Chakravartty's misreading of Divyavadana as a person's name rather than a book title. Before considering the context, remark the unobtrusive bias in the assumption that the supposedly "undeniable" conflict between the king and the monks proves the king's intolerance. The question of responsibility is evaded: what had been the monks' own contribution to the conflict? When Shivaji had a conflict with the Brahmins (see Jadunath Sarkar: Shivaji, Orient Longman, Delhi 1992/1952, p.161, 165-167), all secularists and most Hindus blame the "wily, greedy" Brahmins; but the Buddhist monks, by contrast, are assumed to be blameless.

 

The story is given in two near-contemporaneous (2nd century AD) Buddhist histories, the Ashokavadana and the Divyavadana; the two narratives are almost verbatim the same and very obviously have a common origin (Avadana, "narrative", is the Buddhist equivalent of Purana; Divyavadana = "divine narrative"). This non-contemporary story (which surfaces more than three centuries after the alleged facts) about Pushyamitra's offering money for the heads of monks is rendered improbable by the well-attested historical fact that he allowed and patronized the construction of monasteries and Buddhist universities in his domains. After Ashoka's lavish sponsorship of Buddhism, it is perfectly possible that Buddhist institutions fell on slightly harder times under the Shungas, but persecution is quite another matter. The famous historian of Buddhism Etienne Lamotte has observed: "To judge from the documents, Pushyamitra must be acquitted through lack of proof." (History of Indian Buddhism, Institut Orientaliste, Louvain-la-Neuve 1988/1958, p.109).

 

In consulting the source texts I noticed a significant literary fact which I have not seen mentioned in the scholarly literature (e.g. Lamotte, just quoted), and which I want to put on record. First of all, a look at the critical edition of the Ashokavadana ("Illustrious Acts of Ashoka") tells a story of its own concerning the idealization of Buddhism in modern India. This is how Sujitkumar Mukhopadhyaya, the editor of the Ashokavadana, relates this work's testimony about Ashoka doing with a rival sect that very thing of which Pushyamitra is accused later on:

 

"At that time, an incident occurred which greatly enraged the king. A follower of the Nirgrantha (Mahavira) painted a picture, showing Buddha prostrating himself at the feet of the Nirgrantha. Ashoka ordered all the Ajivikas of Pundravardhana (North Bengal) to be killed. In one day, eighteen thousand Ajivikas lost their lives. A similar kind of incident took place in the town of Pataliputra. A man who painted such a picture was burnt alive with his family. It was announced that whoever would bring the king the head of a Nirgrantha would be rewarded with a dinara (a gold coin). As a result of this, thousands of Nirgranthas lost their lives." (S. Mukhopadhyaya: The Ashokavadana, Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 1963, p.xxxvii; in footnote, Mukhopadhyaya correctly notes that the author "seems to have confused the Nirgranthas with the Ajivikas", a similar ascetic sect; Nirgrantha, "freed from fetters", meaning Jain.) Only when Vitashoka, Ashoka's favourite Arhat (an enlightened monk, a Theravada-Buddhist saint), was mistaken for a Nirgrantha and killed by a man desirous of the reward, did Ashoka revoke the order.

 

Typically, Mukhopadhyaya refuses to believe his eyes at this demythologization of the "secular" emperor Ashoka: "This is one of the best chapters of the text. The subject, the style, the composition, everything here is remarkable. In every shloka there is a poetic touch.(...) But the great defect is also to be noticed. Here too Ashoka is described as dreadfully cruel. If the central figure of this story were not a historic personage as great and well-known as Ashoka, we would have nothing to say. To say that Ashoka, whose devotion to all religious sects is unique in the history of humanity (as is well-known through his edicts) persecuted the Jains or the Ajivikas is simply absurd. And why speak of Ashoka alone? There was no Buddhist king anywhere in India who persecuted the Jains or the Ajivikas or any other sect." (The Ashokavadana, p.xxxviii)

 

This just goes to show how far the idealization of Buddhism and Ashoka has gotten out of hand in Nehruvian India. When the modern myth of Ashoka as the great secular-Buddhist ruler is contradicted by an ancient source (one outspokenly favourable to Buddhism and Ashoka) which shows him persecuting rival schools of thought, the modern scholar (a Hindu Brahmin) still insists on upholding the myth, and dismisses the actual information in the ancient source as a "great defect". Moreover, the non-persecution of other religions, claimed here for Ashoka against the very evidence under discussion, was not unique at all: it was the rule among Hindu kings throughout history, and the Buddha himself had been one of its beneficiaries.

 

It is at the end of the Ashokavadana that we find the oft-quoted story that Pushyamitra offered one dinara for every shramanashirah, "head of a Buddhist monk". (Mukhopadhyaya: The Ashokavadana, p.134) Not that he got many monks killed, for, according to the account given, one powerful Arhat created monks' heads by magic and gave these to the people to bring to the court, so that they could collect the award without cutting off any real monk's head. 

   

At any rate, the striking fact, so far not mentioned in the Pushyamitra controversy, is that the main line of the narrative making the allegation against Pushyamitra is a carbon copy of the just-quoted account of Ashoka's own offer to pay for every head of a monk from a rivalling sect. Hagiographies are notorious for competitive copying (e.g. appropriating the miracle of a rival saint, multiplied by two or more, for one's own hero); in this case, it may have taken the form of attributing a negative feat of the hero onto the rival.

 

But there are two differences. Firstly, in the account concerning Pushyamitra, a miracle episode forms a crucial element, and this does not add to the credibility of the whole. And secondly, Ashoka belongs to the writer's own Buddhist camp, whereas Pushyamitra is described as an enemy of Buddhism. When something negative is said about an enemy (i.c. Pushyamitra), it is wise to reserve one's acceptance of the allegation until independent confirmation is forthcoming; by contrast, when a writer alleges that his own hero has committed a crime, there is much more reason to presume the correctness of the allegation. In the absence of external evidence, the best thing we can do for now is to draw the logical conclusion from the internal evidence: the allegation against Pushyamitra is much less credible than the allegation against Ashoka.

 

Mukhopadhyaya can only save Ashoka's secular reputation by accusing the Ashokavadana author of a lie, viz. of the false allegation that Ashoka had persecuted Nirgranthas. Unfortunately, a lie would not enhance the author's credibility as a witness against Pushyamitra, nor as a witness for the laudable acts of Ashoka which make up a large part of the text. So, Mukhopadhyaya tries to present this lie (which only he himself alleges) as a hagiographically acceptable type of lie: "In order to show the greatness of Buddhism, the orthodox author degraded it by painting the greatest Buddhist of the world as a dreadful religious fanatic." (The Ashokavadana, p.xxxviii). 

   

However, contrary to Mukhopadhyaya's explanation, there is no hint in the text that the author meant to "show the greatness of Buddhism" by "painting the greatest Buddhist as a religious fanatic". By this explanation, Mukhopadhyaya means that the writer first made Ashoka commit a great crime (the persecution of the Nirgranthas) to illustrate the greatness of Buddhism by sheer contrast, viz. as the factor which made Ashoka give up this type of criminal behaviour. There is a famous analogy for this: the cruelty of Ashoka's conquest of Kalinga was exaggerated by scribes in order to highlight the violence-renouncing effect of Ashoka's subsequent conversion to Buddhism. But in this passage, Buddhism plays no role in Ashoka's change of heart: it is only the sight of his own friend Vitashoka, killed by mistake, which makes him revoke the order. And it was his commitment to Buddhism which prompted Ashoka to persecute the irreverent Nirgranthas in the first place.

 

Buddhism does not gain from this account, and if a Buddhist propagandist related it nonetheless, it may well be that it was a historical fact too well-known at the time to be omitted. By contrast, until proof of the contrary is forthcoming, the carbon-copy allegation against Pushyamitra may very reasonably be dismissed as sectarian propaganda. Yet, we have seen how a 20th-century Hindu-born scholar will twist and turn the literary data in order to uphold a sectarian and miracle-based calumny against the Hindu ruler Pushyamitra, and to explain away a sobring testimony about the fanaticism of Ashoka, that great secularist avant la lettre. Such is the quality of the "scholarship" deployed to undermine the solid consensus that among the world religions, Hinduism has always been the most tolerant by far.

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The wheel of the world ruler

Bovenkant formulier

Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective, this is the subject and subtitle of a much-needed project: classifying what in history Belgium had to do with the emerging superpower India. As this book is unlikely to be translated, I take it upon myself to summarize some of its salient findings. Compiler of the book is the Slavicist and historian, Professor Idesbald Goddeeris, whose focus is the history of colonization and now, increasingly, of modern India. Previously he wrote a standard work on the history of India together with Prof.Em. Winand Callewaert.

The title, The Wheel of Ashoka, is a reference to La Roue d' Açoka, title of the memoirs of Prince Eugène de Ligne (1959), the first Belgian ambassador in independent India (1947-51). Although an admirer of his class peer Jawaharlal Nehru, he did not quite believe in the latter’s identification of this symbol of Emperor Ashoka . Rightly, he wrote that this was an older symbol of empire, the ideal of the Cakravarti or " wheel turner ", the emperor who is in the centre of administration and receives tribute from all the vassal states. The ideal of the universal ruler existed for centuries, though Ashoka (not Queen Victoria, as too many Westerners still think) was the first who realized it by uniting most of the subcontinent under one scepter.

Belgians in India, politically

In strictly political terms, Belgium and India have had little to do with each other. Some Belgian seamen were employed by the Portuguese fleet and thus were among the first to colonize some peripheral regions of India, especially Sri Lanka and Goa. In 1498 Vasco da Gama landed in the southwestern coastal city of Kozhikode (Calicut). That area, cocopalmwaving Kerala and neighboring Sri Lanka, were regarded as the earthly paradise. An Antwerp imprint of Thomas More's book Utopia therefore contains a poem by the humanist Pieter Gillis which is partly in the local language, Malayalam.

In 1500 the Portuguese trading posts became the Estado da India, the base of some Flemish travellers, including diamond traders and missionaries who tried to win souls, on site or farther inland. For example, while in prison awaiting his execution, Moghul prince and throne pretender Dara Shikoh reported profound discussions with the Flemish Jesuit Father Busée. In 1602, the Netherlands founded the United East India Company (VOC), also an employer of a lot of Flemish adventurers. Christophe Vielle (Louvain-la-Neuve) and Michael Limberger (Ghent) present an overview of these early contacts, from antiquity to about 1700. The following contributions deal with the next stages of colonization , which include the momentary Ostend counterpart of the Dutch East India Company in ca. 1720.

The Kingdom of Belgium (1830-) had no structural links with India, only a lot of personal and business contacts, with the diamond trade as its crown jewel, and only in the last twenty years, the fast-growing Indian investments in the Belgian industry. When still a prince, Leopold II paid a visit to India in 1865, and Albert I, his successor as king, did so in 1925. It was especially his wife Elizabeth who conceived a lifelong fascination with India . She took up practising yoga and received some well-known yoga masters. Brussels became one of the main centres for introducing yoga to the West.

 

In 1943, the Flemish collaboration leader Hendrik Elias received his Indian counterpart Subhas Chandra Bose, or so history has come to call them, but both saw themselves more as freedom fighters. Bose was killed in 1945 in Taiwan, but his country was independent two years thereafter, while Flanders is still waiting. In the reserved atmosphere of the Cold War, King Baudouin (r.1951-1993) waited until 1970 before paying this Soviet ally a state visit.

At a slightly lower protocol level, however, there had been a major contact between Belgium and the fledgling Indian republic concerning the Kashmir issue. In 1947, this principality had not joined the newly independent India nor the tear-away state of Pakistan. When irregular forces from Pakistan invaded the area, it acceded to India and was narrowly saved by Indian troops, who began the reconquest of the state. This would have been completed in 1948, were it not that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had already referred the matter to the nascent UN. Precisely that month, Belgium presided over the Security Council, and so it was up to the Belgian diplomacy to resolve this conflict. A thankless chore, and we cannot say it was really  "resolved" : for we hear frequently in the news that as late as in 2014, there is still a Kashmir question, with the same line of control as in 1948, an effective boundary between the recaptured territory and the third of Kashmir that is still under Pakistani occupation. In that area in 1947-48, Pakistan has wiped out all non –Muslims, and it has refused to vacate the conquered territory, a condition imposed by the UN for a plebiscite. In 1965 and 1999 there were more wars over Kashmir, and it became a sde flashpoint in the 1971 Bangladesh war. In 1948-49, the Belgian diplomats acquired the reputation of being very pro-Pakistan, and so the Kashmir issue has continued to fester. At this point, this review adds the information that one of the best sources of information on Kashmir is the bulletin issued by the former professional soldier Paul Beersmans, who stayed in the area for long as a UN observer and revisits it frequently.

"Oriënt"

The book reports correctly that there has been a shift from the study of the classics ("Indology") to the sociological approach ("South Asian Studies") within the Orientalist departments. The authors, like most intellectuals involved, seem to find this good and normal, but we have our doubts. The “natives” concerned are still very focused on their classics. Islam’s Western advocates strongly support "studying not Islam but Muslims", but the Muslims themselves faithfully keep to their source texts. Their Islam is in essence, following the scripturally recorded example of the Prophet, but what postmodern Islamologists choose to study is precisely the non-Islamic element in the lives of Muslims. In Hindus, the role of the scriptural corpus is less pronounced but still stronger than the trendy neglect of the classics presupposes. This shift takes place both in India itself, where Sanskrit comes increasingly under pressure, and in the entire West, where not only Orientalist chairs be abolished, but in parallel also Latin and Greek, along with history. The classics and any reference to the past are wilfully side-tracked by socialist policy-makers ideologically driven to capture the population under a dome of contemporaneity. On this, they make common cause with the liberals, who shut down chairs of Latin or Sanskrit in pursuance of the Thatcherite principle of abolishing everything that is not immediately self-supporting or lucrative, “to invest less in chicken and more in eggs".

Consubstantial with the rejection of classical studies is the use of "Orientalist" as a term of abuse. Orientalists were eccentric scholars of Asian cultures to the extent that they devoted a lifetime to studying them. They and their perfectly venerable discipline, Oriental studies, were vilified by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian who claimed that they had only been water-carriers of the colonial or imperialist project by purposely devising a contempt -laden characterization of Oriental man. In his famous book Orientalism (1978), Said only defended Islam by denouncing its Western analysers, though his approach has been applied to other fields within Oriental Studies. He painted Islam as a pathetic victim, although the British in India persisted in honouring and maintaining the Moghul empire until 1857, and made ​​common cause with the Muslim League against a freedom movement identified as Hindu. Among the colonial powers it was only Portugal that had attacked Islam as such. It is somewhat understandable that Muslims still flaunt Said’s thesis: after all, he served their interests. But for others it is quite ridiculous, partly because his book is teeming with factual errors, partly because of its over-all nature of what should be called a conspiracy theory: the so-called scholars across countries and centuries actually were all agents of imperialism, and their seemingly scientific theories were only coded weapons to belittle the Asian civilizations and put them in manageable boxes.

Since about 1990, all students of Political Science and Oriental Studies are given large doses of Said’s worldview, a trend that will no doubt be studied one day as a textbook example of a politically motivated aberration In the present book, different contributions show its influence. Thus, we find an example of this “Orientalism” discourse in an otherwise very informative chapter of this book, "shapes of the spirit" by Patrick Pasture and Elwin Hofman (both historians from Leuven), about the history of yoga. This is hardly a reproach to the authors: they only apply a theory which, although wrong, happens to be the prevalent paradigm. In any case, their trendy proposition that yoga is but a Western-inspired recent phenomenon is factually incorrect. The yoga tradition has existed since at least three thousand years. The very popular Bhagavad-Gita exhorted its hero Arjuna two thousand years ago to “become a yogi”, the Yoga Sutra was commented by many ancient and more recent philosophers, the postures of hatha yoga are the subject of written instruction recorded since a thousand years.

At most, some foreign elements have been included: around 400 AD the Chinese notion of the "microcosmic orbit" (a guided tour of attention along the spine up to the crown and along the front back down) had a formative influence on the so-called kundalini yoga and the chakra system; and around 1900, some elements of Western gymnastics crept into Hatha Yoga, especially the headstand and the concatenation of 12 ancient postures into a dynamic sequence, the " salute to the sun”. The approach to the postures, which requires total relaxation and slow performance, however, is unknown in the West, except precisely in recent disciplines that draw on Hatha Yoga in this regard. Conversely, the western pelvic floor muscle exercises that every pregnant woman nowadays, are actually inspired on the yogic mula bandha ("root lock"), not to mention the numerous neuro- and psychological techniques that are based on ancient Indian meditation exercises. A recent example is Mindfulness, a velvet version of Vipassana meditation which was, among others, already practiced by the Buddha.

Jesuits

The topic of a playful chapter illustrates the Zeitgeist before and after independence quite well: Belgian comic-strips. We see the gradual elimination of the existing stereotypes and prejudices. The recent economic and demographic history is also discussed, including the experiences of the now numerous Indian students in Belgium, and a description of the newly built Jain temple in Antwerp by museum curator Chris De Lauwer, who regularly guides visitors there.

An important aspect, especially for the historically very Catholic territory of Flanders, is mission history. After the Congo, India was the destination of most of the missionaries from our region. In Kerala, Panjab and especially Chotanagpur (today Jharkhand and a part of West Bengal), they could leave their mark. The Jesuit mission expanded from Kolkata to the tribal area west of the city, and there the mission of Constant Lievens s.j. played an important role. The naive tribals understood nothing of the property laws the British imposed, and lost their mineral-rich lands to urban investors; so Lievens offered them legal support. "Fire must burn", was his motto. Another important figure was Herman Rasschaert s.j, who tried to intervene in religious riots and was slain by his own tribals on March 24, 1964 (exactly 50 years ago). Recently, the pastoral responsibility was transferred to indigenous priests .

Typical of the Flemish priests, unlike for example the American missionaries, was their attention for the vernacular languages. Camille Bulcke s.j. wrote a Hindi dictionary that is still authoritative. The tribal languages ​​in Chotanagpur were written down for the first time, provided with modern terminology, and introduced as medium for primary education. In 2000, the Hindu nationalist government added some languages to the list of official languages​​, including the tribal language Santali. That these tribal language were upgraded is the merit of the Government, to be sure, but that they had become mature vehicles of culture and therefore came to be considered for official status at all, was mainly the work of the Flemish Jesuits .

Belgian research into India is the subject of a contribution by Winand Callewaert (Leuven). Important scholars include Charles de Harlez (Louvain), Louis de la Vallée-Poussin (Ghent) and Etienne Lamotte (Louvain) . A well-known name in the Flemish movement is Walter Couvreur, co-founder of the Flemish nationalist party in the 1950s, but here mainly the Sanskritist who also taught Hittite and Tocharian (Ghent) . Then comes the more recent research, including my own professors Pierre Eggermont and Gilbert Pollet (Leuven). The latest generation includes among others Christophe Vielle (Louvain) and Eva De Clercq (Ghent). I should add that Callewaert himself is no doubt the most famous Belgian scholar in modern India, writer of a vast Hindi-English dictionary of the devotional movement and editor of many works by or about popular devotional saints (Dadu, Ravidas and others), whose followers deeply venerate him. Foremost in this category is his editing the Guru Granth, the holy book of Sikhism.

Since completeness is not of this world ("only Allah is perfect"), we cannot summarize the whole book. But we can warmly recommend it, there was a real need for a work that presents all this information.

Idesbald Goddeeris , ed : Het Wiel van Ashoka. Belgisch-Indiase Contacten in Historisch Perspectief (Dutch: “The wheel of Ashoka, Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective”), Lipsius , Leuven 2013 , 243 pp. , € 29.50 , ISBN 978 90 5867 954 3 .

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When did the Buddha break away from Hinduism?

 

 

 

Orientalists have started treating Buddhism as a separate religion because they discovered it outside India, without any conspicuous link with India, where Buddhism was not in evidence. At first, they didn’t even know that the Buddha had been an Indian. It had at any rate gone through centuries of development unrelated to anything happening in India at the same time. Therefore, it is understandable that Buddhism was already the object of a separate discipline even before any connection with Hinduism could be made.

 

 

Buddhism in modern India

 

In India, all kinds of invention, somewhat logically connected to this status of separate religion, were then added. Especially the Ambedkarite movement, springing from the conversion of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar in 1956, was very driven in retro-actively producing an anti-Hindu programme for the Buddha. Conversion itself, not just the embracing of a new tradition (which any Hindu is free to do, all while staying a Hindu) but the renouncing of one’s previous religion, as the Hindu-born politician Ambedkar did, is a typically Christian concept. The model event was the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis, possibly in 496, who “burned what he had worshipped and worshipped what he had burnt”. (Let it pass for now that the Christian chroniclers slandered their victims by positing a false symmetry: the Heathens hadn’t been in the business of destroying Christian symbols.) So, in his understanding of the history of Bauddha Dharma (Buddhism), Ambedkar was less than reliable, in spite of his sterling contributions regarding the history of Islam and some parts of the history of caste. But where he was a bit right and a bit mistaken, his later followers have gone all the way and made nothing but a gross caricature of history, and especially about the place of Buddhism in Hindu history.

 

The Ambedkarite worldview has ultimately only radicalized the moderately anti-Hindu version of the reigning Nehruvians. Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, Buddhism was turned into the unofficial state religion of India, adopting the “lion pillar” of the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka as state symbol and putting the 24-spoked Cakravarti wheel in the national flag. Essentially, Nehru’s knowledge of Indian history was limited to two spiritual figures, viz. the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, and three political leaders: Ashoka, Akbar and himself. The concept of Cakravarti (“wheel-turner”, universal ruler) was in fact much older than Ashoka, and the 24-spoked wheel can also be read in other senses, e.g. the Sankhya philosophy’s worldview, with the central Purusha/Subject and the 24 elements of Prakrti/Nature. The anglicized Nehru, “India’s last Viceroy”, prided himself on his illiteracy in Hindu culture, so he didn’t know any of this, but was satisfied that these symbols could glorify Ashoka and belittle Hinduism, deemed a separate religion from which Ashoka had broken away by accepting Buddhism. More broadly, he thought that everything of value in India was a gift of Buddhism (and Islam) to the undeserving Hindus. Thus, the fabled Hindu tolerance was according to him a value borrowed from Buddhism. In reality, the Buddha had been a beneficiary of an already established Hindu tradition of pluralism. In a Muslim country, he would never have preached his doctrine in peace and comfort for 45 years, but in Hindu society, this was a matter of course. There were some attempts on his life, but they emanated not from “Hindus” but from jealous disciples within his own monastic order.

 

So, both Nehru and Ambedkar, as well as their followers , believed by implication that at some point in his life, the Hindu-born renunciate Buddha had broken away from Hinduism and adopted a new religion, Buddhism. This notion is now omnipresent, and through school textbooks, most Indians have lapped this up and don’t know any better. However, numerous though they are, none of the believers in this story have ever told us at what moment in his life the Buddha broke way from Hinduism. When did he revolt against it? Very many Indians repeat the Nehruvian account, but so far, never has any of them been able to pinpoint an event in the Buddha's life which constituted a break with Hinduism.

 

 

The term “Hinduism”

 

Their first line of defence, when put on the spot, is sure to be: “Actually, Hinduism did not yet exist at the time.” So, their position really is: Hinduism did not exist yet, but somehow the Buddha broke away from it. Yeah, the secular position is that he was a miracle-worker.

 

Let us correct that: the word “Hinduism” did not exist yet. When Darius of the Achaemenid Persians, a near-contemporary of the Buddha, used the word “Hindu”, it was purely in a geographical sense: anyone from inside or beyond the Indus region. When the medieval Muslim invaders brought the term into India, they used it to mean: any Indian except for the Indian Muslims, Christians or Jews. It did not have a specific doctrinal content except “non-Abrahamic”, a negative definition. It meant every Indian Pagan, including the Brahmins, Buddhists (“clean-shaven Brahmins”), Jains, other ascetics, low-castes, intermediate castes, tribals, and by implication also the as yet unborn Lingayats, Sikhs, Hare Krishnas, Arya Samajis, Ramakrishnaites, secularists and others who nowadays reject the label “Hindu”. This definition was essentially also adopted by VD Savarkar in his book Hindutva (1923) and by the Hindu Marriage Act (1955). By this historical definition, which also has the advantages of primacy and of not being thought up by the wily Brahmins, the Buddha and all his Indian followers are unquestionably Hindus. In that sense, Savarkar was right when he called Ambedkar’s taking refuge in Buddhism “a sure jump into the Hindu fold”.

 

But the word “Hindu” is a favourite object of manipulation. Thus, secularists say that all kinds of groups (Dravidians, low-castes, Sikhs etc.) are “not Hindu”, yet when Hindus complain of the self-righteousness and aggression of the minorities, secularists laugh at this concern: “How can the Hindus feel threatened? They are more than 80%!” The missionaries call the tribals “not Hindus”, but when the tribals riot against the Christians who have murdered their Swami, we read about “Hindu rioters”. In the Buddha’s case, “Hindu” is often narrowed down to “Vedic” when convenient, then restored to its wider meaning when expedient.

 

One meaning which the word “Hindu” definitely does not have, and did not have when it was introduced, is “Vedic”. Shankara holds it against Patanjali and the Sankhya school (just like the Buddha) that they don’t bother to cite the Vedas, yet they have a place in every history of Hindu thought. Hinduism includes a lot of elements which have only a thin Vedic veneer, and numerous ones which are not Vedic at all. Scholars say that it consists of a “Great Tradition” and many “Little Traditions”, local cults allowed to subsist under the aegis of the prestigious Vedic line. However, if we want to classify the Buddha in these terms, he should rather be included in the Great Tradition.  

 

Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha was a Kshatriya, a scion of the Solar or Aikshvaku dynasty, a descendant of Manu, a self-described reincarnation of Rama, the son of the Raja (president-for-life) of the Shakya tribe, a member of its Senate, and belonging to the Gautama gotra (roughly “clan”). Though monks are often known by their monastic name, Buddhists prefer to name the Buddha after his descent group, viz. the Shakyamuni, “renunciate of the Shakya tribe”. This tribe was as Hindu as could be, consisting according to its own belief of the progeny of the eldest children of patriarch Manu, who were repudiated at the insistence of his later, younger wife. The Buddha is not known to have rejected this name, not even at the end of his life when the Shakyas had earned the wrath of king Vidudabha of Kosala and were massacred. The doctrine that he was one in a line of incarnations which also included Rama is not a deceitful Brahmin Puranic invention but was launched by the Buddha himself, who claimed Rama as an earlier incarnation of his. The numerous scholars who like to explain every Hindu idea or custom as “borrowed from Buddhism” could well counter Ambedkar’s rejection of this “Hindu” doctrine by pointing out very aptly that it was “borrowed from Buddhism”.

 

 

Career

 

At 29, he renounced society, but not Hinduism. Indeed, it is a typical thing among Hindus to exit from society, laying off your caste marks including your civil name. The Rg-Veda already describes the Muni-s as having matted hair and going about sky-clad: such are what we now know as Naga Sadhus. Asceticism was a recognized practice in Vedic society long before the Buddha. Yajnavalkya, the Upanishadic originator of the notion of Self, renounced life in society after a successful career as court priest and an equally happy family life with two wives. By leaving his family and renouncing his future in politics, the Buddha followed an existing tradition within Hindu society. He didn’t practice Vedic rituals anymore, which is normal for a Vedic renunciate (though Zen Buddhists still recite the Heart Sutra in the Vedic fashion, ending with “sowaka”, i.e. svaha). He was a late follower of a movement very much in evidence in the Upanishads, viz. of spurning rituals (Karmakanda) in favour of knowledge (Jnanakanda). After he had done the Hindu thing by going to the forest, he tried several methods, including the techniques he learned from two masters and which did not fully satisfy him,-- but nonetheless enough to include them in his own and the Buddhist curriculum. Among other techniques, he practised Anapanasati, “attention to the breathing process”, the archetypal yoga practice popular in practically all yoga schools till today. For a while he also practised an extreme form of asceticism, still existing in the Hindu sect of Jainism. He exercised his Hindu freedom to join a sect devoted to certain techniques, and later the freedom to leave it, remaining a Hindu at every stage.

 

He then added a technique of his own, or at least that is what the Buddhist sources tell us, for in the paucity of reliable information, we don’t know for sure that he hadn’t learned the Vipassana (“mindfulness”) technique elsewhere. Unless evidence of the contrary comes to the surface, we assume that he invented this technique all by himself, as a Hindu is free to do. He then achieved Bodhi, the “Awakening”. By his own admission, he was by no means the first to do so. Instead, he had only walked the same path of other Awakened beings before him.

 

At the bidding of the Vedic gods Brahma and Indra, he left his self-contained state of Awakening and started teaching his way to others. When he “set in motion the wheel of the Law” (Dharma-cakra-pravartana, Chinese Falungong), he gave no indication whatsoever of breaking with an existing system. On the contrary, by his use of existing Vedic and Upanishadic terminology (Arya, “Vedically civilized”; Dharma), he confirmed his Vedic roots and implied that his system was a restoration of the Vedic ideal which had become degenerate. He taught his techniques and his analysis of the human condition to his disciples, promising them to achieve the same Awakening if they practiced these diligently. 

 

 

Caste

 

On caste, we find him is full cooperation with existing caste society. Being an elitist, he mainly recruited among the upper castes, with over 40% Brahmins. These would later furnish all the great philosophers who made Buddhism synonymous with conceptual sophistication. Conversely, the Buddhist universities trained well-known non-Buddhist scientists such as the astronomer Aryabhata. Lest the impression be created that universities are a gift of Buddhism to India, it may be pointed out that the Buddha’s friends Bandhula and Prasenadi (and, according to a speculation, maybe the young Siddhartha himself) had studied at the university of Takshashila, clearly established before there were any Buddhists around to do so. Instead, the Buddhists greatly developed an institution which they had inherited from Hindu society.

 

The kings and magnates of the eastern Ganga plain treated the Buddha as one of their own (because that is what he was) and gladly patronized his fast-growing monastic order, commanding their servants and subjects to build a network of monasteries for it. He predicted the coming of a future Awakened leader like himself, the Maitreya (“the one practising friendship/charity”), and specified that he would be born in a Brahmin family. When king Prasenadi discovered that his wife was not a Shakya princess but the daughter of the Shakya ruler by a maid-servant, he repudiated her and their son; but his friend the Buddha made him take them back.

 

Did he achieve this by saying that birth is unimportant, that “caste is bad” or that “caste doesn’t matter”, as the Ambedkarites claim? No, he reminded the king of the old view (then apparently in the process of being replaced with a stricter view) that caste was passed on exclusively in the paternal line. Among hybrids of horses and donkeys, the progeny of a horse stallion and a donkey mare whinnies, like its father, while the progeny of a donkey stallion and a horse mare brays, also like its father. So, in the oldest Upanishad, Satyakama Jabala is accepted by his Brahmins-only teacher because his father is deduced to be a Brahmin, regardless of his mother being a maid-servant. And similarly, king Prasenadi should accept his son as a Kshatriya, eventhough his mother was not a full-blooded Shakya Kshatriya.

 

When he died, the elites of eight cities made a successful bid for his ashes on the plea: "We are Kshatriyas, he was a Kshatriya, therefore we have a right to his ashes". After almost half a century, his disciples didn’t mind being seen in public as still observing caste in a context which was par excellence Buddhist. The reason is that the Buddha in his many teachings never had told them to give up caste, e.g. to give their daughters in marriage to men of other castes. This was perfectly logical: as a man with a spiritual message, the Buddha wanted to lose as little time as possible on social matters. If satisfying your own miserable desires is difficult enough, satisfying the desire for an egalitarian society provides an endless distraction from your spiritual practice.

 

 

 

The Seven Rules

 

There never was a separate non-Hindu Buddhist society. Most Hindus worship various gods and teachers, adding and sometimes removing one or more pictures or statues to their house altar. This way, there were some lay worshippers of the Buddha, but they were not a society separate from the worshippers of other gods or Awakened masters. This box-type division of society in different sects is another Christian prejudice infused into modern Hindu society by Nehruvian secularism. There were only Hindus, members of Hindu castes, some of whom had a veneration for the Buddha among others.  

 

Buddhist buildings in India often follow the designs of Vedic habitat ecology or Vastu Shastra. Buddhist temple conventions follow an established Hindu pattern. Buddhist mantras, also outside India, follow the pattern of Vedic mantras. When Buddhism spread to China and Japan, Buddhist monks took the Vedic gods (e.g. the twelve Aditya’s) with them and built temples for them. In Japan, every town has a temple for the river-goddess Benzaiten, i.e. “Saraswati Devi”, the goddess Saraswati. She was not introduced there by wily Brahmins, but by Buddhists.

 

At the fag end of his long life, the Buddha described the seven principles by which a society does not perish (which Sita Ram Goel has given more body in his historical novel Sapta Shila, in Hindi), and among them are included: respecting and maintaining the existing festivals, pilgrimages and rituals; and revering the holy men. These festivals etc. were mainly “Vedic”, of course, like the pilgrimage to the Saraswati which Balaram made in the Mahabharata, or the pilgrimage to the Ganga which the elderly Pandava brothers made. Far from being a revolutionary, the Buddha emphatically outed himself as a conservative, both in social and in religious matters. He was not a rebel or a revolutionary, but wanted the existing customs to continue. The Buddha was every inch a Hindu.

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