Ayodhya, Mecca: same struggle! (What if Rama and Mohammed were born elsewhere?.)

(First offered to First Post on 19 May 2022, but deemed too controversial in view of the erupting Nupur Sharma affair; then published by Pragyata magazine, Delhi, on 7 July 2022) This week we’re not going to write about the Kashi Vishvanath, except for remarking that its claim to historicity is weaker than that of its counterparts in Ayodhya and Mathura. It is obvious that historical characters including Rama and Krishna, later deified but originally just human beings born from a womb like everyone else, had a birthplace. We can still argue about its location, but that some actual birthplace lurks somewhere is unavoidable. That Shiva sent down a Jyotirlinga to Kashi, however, will be dismissed by rationalists as just a story, a mere manner of speaking without any factual historical dimension. Just as they make fun of the belief that Yahweh sent down the Biblical Ten Commandments or that Allah sent down the Quran. For secular legislation regarding sacred sites, this possible absence of a solid foundation to these beliefs is totally immaterial. Places of pilgrimage are protected regardless of whether the reason for their sacredness can be proven. The Israeli government facilitates pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre where Jesus supposedly lay buried, and to the Al-Aqsa mosque. Yet it is not impressed with the revelation of the Sepulchre’s location to Constantine’s mother Helena in a dream. Nor with the Islamic tradition that the Prophet flew to Al-Aqsa on a winged horse. The French governments, often militantly secularist, have had a good laugh at Catholic beliefs about the Virgin Mary’s apparitions in Lourdes, yet they facilitate a pilgrimage there. So, the fact that worshippers of Shiva, Rama and Krishna venerate specific sites in Kashi, Ayodhya and Mathura is enough for officially recognizing and protecting them. When? Nevertheless, historians still have the liberty to be curious about the factual basis of these beliefs. Regarding Kashi, they tend to consider the Jyotirlinga belief as outside history. Regarding Mathura, they see no reason to doubt the belief about Krishna’s birth. But regarding Ayodhya… In her recent book about the Ramayana, Sanskritist Neena Rai compares the measurements of the relevant sites and distances in Valmiki’s Ayodhya with those actually found in today’s Ayodhya. She opines that this may not be the same town. In my judgment, too hastily, for even Valmiki may have been mistaken. Apart from the trivial demythologizing option that he may have been wrong, or that as a forest-dweller he could only describe the city from hearsay, he may not have foreseen geographical changes. Indeed, a river-bed can gradually or dramatically shift location, so even if he was truthful and accurate in locating a building "by the riverside", it may be far from that riverside today. The present town is already more than three thousand years old according to archaeologists, and houses a Hindu religious site deemed Rama’s birthplace. But was this the palace of the Solar Dynasty to which Rama's father Dasharatha belonged? According to Valmiki, Rama was born in the very palace built by his distant pre-Vedic ancestor Manu. Here, a possible problem with Rama’s own chronology becomes really acute. Whether Rama’s epic adventure was historical or not, he himself was at any rate a historical figure, appearing in the Puranic king lists. (For those faux skeptics who think these are just myth: there would be no history of Mesopotamia or Egypt extant but for their king lists.) But when did he live? This much we know for certain, that it was earlier than the Bharata dynasty’s war of succession, which refers to Rama's story as a fact from the past. The report about this war, much embellished, became Vyasa’s Mahabharata epic (just like Homer’s Iliad from ca. -700 was dimly based on a historical war from ca. -1200). Bypassing the traditionalists who insist that this war took place ca. -3139, which is a chronology invented only ca. +500, we stick by the modern sciences and their convergence on a much less spectacular date, roughly -1500. It so happens that -1500 is about the farthest we can stretch the known archaeology of the Rama Janmabhumi site. During the Ayodhya agitation ca. 1991, India’s legendary archaeologist BB Lal, still active today at age 101, gave a lecture to an audience of Sadhus. He explained that his team had found temple pillars on the contentious site, and the Hindu claim on it was thereby assured. This much, they liked; but they were disappointed when he continued. Digging deeper, Lal's team had found human leftovers as early as the -2nd millennium. To the Sadhus, even Krishna lived in the -32nd century, and Rama still earlier; so archaeology had not confirmed this? When they protested, Lal famously replied: “I am not saying this, but my spade tells me so.” You might yet save the day by observing that Lal had excavated only a small part of Ayodhya; or by accepting the Aryan Immigration chronology (which BB Lal rejects). This holds that after entering in -1500, the Aryans in Haryana wrote the Rg-Veda, and among their nephews in Ayodhya, Rama was born in -1200 or so, and Krishna in Mathura still later. This would narrowly put Rama within the period identified by archaeology. Yet even then it would not be satisfactory. Human habitation at the site should spread thousands of years farther back, as it was no less than the palace of the already-ancient Solar dynasty. Maybe the Solar Dynasty was not that static? This is suggested by the detail that Rama’s father Dasharatha organized a population transfer within his domains. That the townfolk vacated the city after Rama’s passing also indicates a more mobile view of Ayodhya. And when centuries later, the city was rediscovered and revived, presumably by Vikramaditya, he may simply have been mistaken in his choice, or he may have had a reason for deliberately locating his favourite city elsewhere. So it is possible that the real capital of the Solar Dynasty is still waiting somewhere underground for excavation. On the other hand, Rama’s background may be less glorious, but his modest birth location may be exact. When the Ayodhya debate raged thirty years ago, I sometimes thought to myself: there is, in spite of the ongoing peak in research, much on Ayodhya that we don’t really know yet. Common people including the many Twitter polemicists are quick to pronounce their proposals “proven”, but historians should be more hesitant in passing judgment. This doubt regarding Ayodhya brings to mind another sacred city with a far more controversial location: Mecca. In the Ayodhya controversy, the lead in disputing Rama's birth location was given by the secularists, not the Muslims, but just to spite the Hindus, many Muslims followed suit. They wouldn't have done so if they had been more aware of the problems surrounding Mohammed's birthplace. The Saudi government has initiated big construction projects in Mecca with considerable demolitions. When this happens in old cities, say Kashi, the archaeologists come flocking, for the diggings by the construction company throw up many old artefacts that will interest them. Well, in Mecca they find nothing. On pre-Islamic maps, Mecca finds no mention. The Quran’s description of the city layout and the landscape, with a river and olive trees and a Kaaba surrounded by idol temples, do not correspond to the Mecca we know. It is unfit to be a crossroads of caravan routes. That's way exactly during the years of the Ayodhya conflict, Danish historian Patricia Crone concluded that in Mohammed's lifetime, Mecca did not exist. Even in the first century of Islamic history, the mosques were not directed towards Mecca. Islam itself admits that the original Qibla (direction of prayer) was more to the north, which it identifies as Jerusalem, but another city nearby could also do. Indeed, another city fits the bill, as mapped out in great detail by the Canadian historian Dan Gibson: Petra, in modern-day Jordan. This place also had a Kaaba housing a Black Stone, a meteoric rock fallen from heaven and therefore held sacred (essentially like Kashi's Jyotirlingam). A half century after the Prophet's death, one Abdullah ibn-al-Zubayr rebelled against the Ummayad Caliphate of which he had been an official. He spirited the Black Stone away from Petra and installed it in a backwater in the Arabian desert (where no existing townfolk could lay claim to it), where a new sacred site then sprang up. Then he made his own rebellion part of the power play of a Mesopotamian clan that would later become the Abbasid Caliphate. Summing up: in this emerging scenario, the Prophet was not born in Mecca at all, but was relocated there long after his death as part of the upcoming Abbasid clan's rewriting of history. To be sure, Muslims argue against these discoveries. They resist modern insights in the same way that the Ayodhya Sadhus resisted archaeology as an independent source of chronology. In the real world, this debate will go on, just like the search for the early Solar capital will resume. But in a secular state this won’t matter: the sacredness of all sites with a religious meaning is guaranteed. Also reassuring for the Hajjis (pilgrims to the Black Stone) is that the object of their pilgrimage is not something contingent like Mohammed's birthplace. Even if this is accepted to be near Petra, many miles away from Mecca, the actual object of the Hajj is still verifiably present in Mecca: the Black Stone. This way the beliefs underpinning the Muslim pilgrimage may be saved by Islam's only idol.
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What the West’s academy has to say on Ayodhya

  

What the West’s academy has to say on Ayodhya

(Pragyata, 24 December 2020)

 

At this year’s digital version of the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Conference, the most agenda-setting event worldwide in the field of religious studies, several of the hundreds of sessions were devoted to Hinduism Studies. Of these, one (Boston, 9 dec 2020), presided over by Diana Dimitrova, addressed “The Ayodhya Verdict: The Jurisprudence and Geography of Modern Hinduism”. Nothing important, this report of ours: just letting you know what goes on in influential places. The on-line programme book announced:

“This panel examines the 2019 Supreme Court of India’s controversial judgement on the ‘Ayodhya Dispute’, M Siddiq (D) Thr Lrs v. Mahant Suresh Das & Ors, in order to better understand modern Hinduism as a juridical and geographic phenomenon. Two papers focus on the jurisprudence (legal theory) of the judgement itself: how Rāma is conceived of as a juridical person capable of owning land; and how the court’s privileging of Rāma’s rights over those of Muslim litigants effectuates a legal endorsement of majoritarian Hindu claims to contested spaces by state institutions. How does the legal language of the judgement recast Ayodhya and India more broadly as a ‘Hindu’ space? In what ways is modern Hinduism shaped by the language of law? Conversely, the next brace of papers posit that text of the judgement itself is the culmination of longstanding practices of Hinduizing India’s geography. These papers explore the religious practices - temple building, pilgrimage, and intense devotion to Hanuman - whereby Hindus built possessory claims over the contested space in Ayodhya. Thus, this panel theorizes modern Hinduism majoritarianism’s spatial and legal dimensions.”

 

No Ayodhya debate

So, the actual Ayodhya debate, about the history of the site, was starkly avoided. In the past, the Indologists all meekly parroted India’s Eminent Historians that there never was a temple there, that it was merely a Hindutva concoction. It would be in the scholarly fitness of things if they were to face their mistake, acknowledge that they had made a false allegation of a “concoction” and that the evidence has robustly confirmed the demolished temple scenario. But they haven’t done that on any forum whatsoever.

The judicial aspects were safer ground for the Eminent Historians and their foreign allies: the insiders among them know of their hilarious defeat in the scholarly debate, so they avoid or muzzle any mention of it. Their ostentatious position of around 1990 was proven wrong and is now all the more embarrassing in proportion to how high-profile it was back then. So, their loyalists in the US likewise tiptoe around the issue.

Even many of their followers abroad have gone remarkably silent on the Ayodhya history: they still do obligatory instalments on what they call “Hindu history manipulation”, but whereas the Ayodhya debate used to be their crowning example, now it has gone down the memory hole, though in fact it was the one case that was fought out in the public square and came to a clear verdict both scholarly and judicial, viz. to the complete detriment of the anti-Hindu camp. Thus, the Flemish tabloid De Morgen (25 March 2020) did a multi-page article on an alleged policy by Narendra Modi to rewrite history, but innovatively left out all reference to the Ayodhya affair (my reply: “Negationisme in India”, Doorbraak, 5 April 2020, English translation: Koenraad Elst: . Negationism in India, and in De Morgen).

The only ones in the anti-temple camp who are staying the course and repeating what they used to say in the 1990s are people who haven’t paid attention for the last 20+ years. At the Leiden conference in July 2019 of the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS), an all-Korean panel discussed India’s religious conflict. They were well-meaning and had nothing of the foaming hatred against Hinduism that many secularists and their Western acolytes display, but they were poorly informed; or rather deliberately misinformed, most of them having studied in Delhi at JNU. So, while saying nothing about the scholar’s debate on the Ayodhya site’s history, they focused on some conspiracy theories featuring the Hindu forces, e.g. that the public works in Varanasi to open a corridor between the Gyanvapi mosque (standing on the Kashi Vishvanath site) and the river, intended to make it more visible, are “in reality” Narendra Modi’s and Yogi Adityanath’s preparation for engineering a new temple-mosque controversy.

Anyway, it was in the audience that someone brought the long-buried claim of a no-temple scenario in Ayodhya back to life. Unbelievably, Italian scholar Marzia Casolari (who wrote about alleged links between Italy’s Fascist regime and the Hindutva movement, as discussed in K. Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p.483-500) still voiced the belief that it was merely a British divide-and-rule concoction launched by Montgomery Martin. Why would they concoct a novel mosque-replaces-temple scenario when there were so many of these present in India, often clearly visible with the temple remains worked into the mosque, and often affecting other prominent Hindu sacred sites (as in the aforementioned Gyanvapi mosque)?

Anyway, this flight of fancy only survived the first months of the Eminent Historians’ offensive, for pre-colonial testimonies of the Hindu pilgrimage to the contentious site soon surfaced. The negationist story therefore had changed already in the beginning: from blaming the British to blaming the Ramanandi Sadhus. But time had stood still in the minds of the meekest followers, including Dr. Casolari’s: having interiorized the victory claims of the anti-temple camp thirty years earlier, she kept on repeating them in blissful ignorance of the scholarly defeats meanwhile suffered by her side.

Otherwise, the no-temple claim has been buried even by India’s anti-Hindu forces, and though this news has clearly not reached all their loyalists, their American friends have clearly come to toe their line. Although, the next speaker made a semi-exception.   

 

Rama as litigator

Christopher Fleming addressed the topic: “In Breach of Trust with God? Fiduciary Principles and the Bar of Limitation in the Ayodhya Verdict”.

“My paper attends to a novel facet in the Supreme Court of India’s controversial 2019 judgment concerning the ‘Ayodhya Dispute:’ the fiduciary relationship between the juridical person ‘Ram Lala Virajman’ and his erstwhile servants (shebaits), the Nirmohi Akhara. The Nirmohi Akhara, a monastic order, had long claimed the right to represent Ram Lala Virajman (a perpetual minor under the law) and to enjoy a percentage of the revenues brought by pilgrims coming to Ayodhya. The court, however, found that, despite their representations otherwise, the Akhara had acted against Ram’s best interests (collaborating with Muslim litigants and undermining Ram’s proprietary claims) in a mala fide (bad faith) manner. Ironically, the court ruled that the Akhara’s breach of trust with Ram constituted a ‘continuing harm’ that protected Ram’s suit O.O.S. No.5 of 1989 (Regular Suit No.236 of 1989) from the bar of limitation. My paper concludes that the way the court construed Hindu religiosity as a justiciable form of Trust with a deity is a unique feature of modern Hinduism as a legal phenomenon.”

These are details about a well-known fact, though certainly surprising to outsiders: that a Hindu deity can be a party to litigation, and that it has the status of a minor as his case has to be taken up by a guardian. The perceived divergence between the deity’s interests and its guardian’s position in this particular case adds spice to this exotic situation. This is not controversial, so here we need not go deeper into it.

However, in presenting the verdict, Fleming claimed in passing that the Supreme Court in its verdict was non-committal on the historical question. Naturally, he too avoids going into the history question itself, and even the judicial treatment of that evidence is passed over swiftly. This much is true, that the Supreme Court did not explicitly base its verdict on the history question, partly even falling back on the inertial reasoning of the 1885 Court case, when the status quo (then de facto Muslim possession, now de facto Hindu possession) as such was taken as sacrosanct. Earlier, Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao had wanted to base the solution on the historical facts, which they knew to be the pre-existence of a Rama temple; and the UP High Court had, after ascertaining the historical evidence, given its verdict on this basis.

This verdict was confirmed by the Supreme Court. The whole background gives a central place to the historical evidence, which the Supreme Court wouldn’t go against. Still, unlike the UP High Court, which for years had been preparing a verdict based on the evidence, the Supreme Court looked hesitant to follow the evidence, which would necessarily lead to a pro-temple verdict. From the media reports, admittedly a doubtful source, the Supreme Court seemed to be more resolutely “secularist”, meaning prejudiced against the Hindu position.

This appeared from a strange episode in mid-2019, of which we must await the explanation from the jurists involved. The Supreme Court seemed to throw out all that had been acquired in terms of evidence, and instead leave it to a compromise between the parties. It declared that it did not want to impose a verdict, instead preferring a negotiated solution. (Imagine the murderer of your daughter standing trial and the judge declaring: “No, we don’t feel like sitting in judgment. Try to find an agreement with him.”) This was back to square one, reopening all possibilities, depriving the Hindu side of the lead that it had built on the scholars’ and archaeologists’ findings.

Moreover, the Hindu negotiator appointed by the Supreme Court was Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, which raised some eyebrows. His record in interfaith discussions was rather spineless, with booklets about Christianity and Islam churning out the usual flaky sentimental pap, and a video debate with Zakir Naik bandied about by Muslims as a shattering victory for their side. On the other hand, he has set up a network of meditation centres in the Middle East, which is extremely meritorious and makes up for any shortcomings by far; but it also makes him vulnerable to blackmail from the Muslim side. However, during this episode, he consulted with a very goal-oriented VHP, that monitored the mediation closely. At any rate, the sell-out that some observers had feared, never materialized. No one wanted to give up his claim, as the judges had hoped. So, a disappointed Supreme Court gave up on this mediation gambit and took up the process of judgment again.

The verdict that resulted was predicated partly on other considerations (like the status quo factor confirming the extant Muslim possession in 1885 and the extant Hindu possession in 2019) than the long-available proof for the temple, which had earlier already informed the UP High Court’s verdict. But if the evidence had not been there (let alone if it had pointed the other way), it is strongly to be doubted that the Supreme Court would have awarded the contentious site to the Hindus.   

 

Space

         One of the buzzwords of Subaltern and other Grievance Studies is “space”. The third speaker, Knut Axel Jacobsen, dealt with “Hinduization of Space and the Case of Ayodhyā”:

“This paper discusses Hinduization of space as a historical process in India. It presents some central features in the development of Hindu pilgrimage sites and makes some comparisons with modern and contemporary developments. The close connection between political power and expansion of sacred sites is analyzed and the paper looks in particular at sacredness as a form of land appropriation and the function of parikrāmas as a way to construct and mark religious boundaries. The paper looks at different ways Hindu sacred sites have been constructed and expanded in the past and compares these processes with the present Hinduization of space in India and especially with the contemporary centre of Hinduization policies of Ayodhyā.”

Throughout the whole field of Hindu Studies, you just have to get used to the omnipresence, though in different doses, of the Marxist-inspired reduction of religion to worldly categories. Prominent among these is “appropriation”, as in e.g. “cultural appropriation” or indeed “sacredness as a form of land appropriation”. There are power dynamics, to be sure, but you’re never going to understand Rama worship and the place of the Ayodhya site in it by forever dragging it down to the political level; just as Romila Thapar or Richard Eaton were fated never to understand the Muslim invaders’ iconoclastic zeal given their reduction of temple destruction to a mere political statement. It is an occupational hazard of post-religious scholars of (or opinionators on) religion that they just don’t understand the passion involved in their subject, including the destructive passion springing from a religion’s iconoclastic doctrine.  

To be sure, economic and political dimensions of religious activity also exist, and may present legitimate objects of study. We can’t hold it against Jacobsen individually that he chose this theme, but having followed the scene for decades, we know that the academic authorities in this field do channel all scholarly energy towards this reductionist view of Hinduism. This is much less true for other religions: it is Hinduism that is very disproportionately targeted for reduction to its external dimension.

 

The Marwaris

Another form of reductionism focuses on the financial dimension of Hindu initiatives. Thus, Jeremy Saul dealt with “The Ayodhya Decision and Marwari Merchants: Financing Ram Devotion Through Hanuman”:

“This talk focuses on the decades leading up to the Ayodhya decision as a time of Marwari merchants’ cultural activism, when they championed devotion to Hanuman as a representation of Ram. The rise of Hanuman worship was thus a stand-in for the long-stalled Ram temple-to-be in Ayodhya. The Marwaris, prosperous merchants who reside in cities throughout India but trace their ancestry to northern Rajasthan, modified their longstanding reverence for ancestral shrines in their Rajasthan homeland, long reified as a symbol of ancient Marwari dignity, into Vaishnava (Ram-oriented) temple devotion in that region. They thus adopted the Hindu nationalist ideology of reviving Ram’s mythological domain onto Marwari ancestral piety. Thus, this talk argues, the chronology of Marwari donations to Hanuman temples in Rajasthan has closely paralleled the historical trajectory of the Ram Janambhumi movement. The patronage arose as a consequence of the formation of urban Marwari devotional organizations dedicated to Rajasthani folk manifestations of Hanuman during the late 1980s, just as public enthusiasm for the Ayodhya movement was reaching its climax in the destruction of the Babri mosque.”

This was an interesting but perfectly inconsequential piece of research in the margin of the very consequential Ayodhya affair, the kind that our academics fill their time with to distract from the real issue. The noteworthy aspect was a little contemplation on the Kothari community. It was mentioned that among these Marwaris in Kolkata were the Kotharis, who count in their ranks the brothers Ram and Sharad Kothari, who were martyred during the Ayodhya agitation in late 1990. The speaker claimed that the Kothari sub-caste belongs to the Terapanthi Oswal Jain community, which doesn’t practice murtipuja (“idol-worship”).

That is when discussant Deepak Sarma intervened, who said his very own wife is a Kothari Jain. He agreed that it was odd for the Kothari brothers to be that deeply involved with Vaishnava worship when they shouldn’t have been into “idol-worship” in the first place. He was smirking and dismissive of the Kotharis’ doctrinal inconsistency.

In fact, this intervention exemplifies how estranged the Indo-American secularists are from the reality of India’s religious landscape. As we have been able to ascertain ourselves in Delhi and Gujarat, there is no fixed boundary between Vaishnavism and Jainism, they are communicating vessels with lots of intermarriage within the Bania class. Mahatma Gandhi was a Vaishnava Bania but had the Jains’ extreme concern for non-violence. We have visited the Kothari family’s home in Kolkata to pay our respects to the martyred brothers, and we saw nothing non- or anti-Hindu there. The idea that Jainism (or Sikhism, Virashaivism etc.) is separate from Hinduism, a kind of anti-Hindu revolt, is a figment of the secularists’ imagination. They cultivate the Christian misconceptions about religious boundaries (which they think can only be crossed by “conversion”, e.g. Khushwant Singh describing Banda Bairagi’s entry in the Khalsa as a “conversion”), as if they are first-time tourists bringing their baggage of Christian categories to Hindustan.

 

Feedback

         Through the chat facility, I put the following feedback in writing:

“Contrary to what Christopher Fleming claims, the court-ordered excavations in 2003 did yield evidence that the structure replaced a Hindu temple: this (rather than the plentiful documentary evidence) was the main ground for the UP High Court's 2010 verdict. It confirmed what earlier partial excavations since 1974 had found. Far from being a ‘Hindutva concoction’, it was confirmed by the participant senior archaeologist KK Mohammed. The High Court also called a line-up of ‘eminent historians’ who had earlier pleaded in public that there never had been a temple there, to the witness stand. One after another, they collapsed and were reduced to stammering: ‘I have never been to the site’, ‘I am not an archaeologist’; their evidence for a non-temple scenario amounted to exactly zero, and they were fiercely reprimanded by the Court for their misuse of authority to mislead the public.

“The Ayodhya evidence debate has presented the hilarious sight of an entire academic and mediatic establishment in India and abroad denying what had been a matter of consensus till the mid-1980s, and this on the strength of strictly no evidence at all. In all these years, documentary and archaeological evidence for the demolished temple has been accumulating, and some has kept on coming to light even after the debate had ended. This to the extent that the judges simply couldn't push a verdict going against this wealth of evidence. Now that the Ayodhya dispute is over, the question remains when all these academics are going to climb down from the denial of history on which they had staked their august reputations. The present power equation, which has allowed them to get away with this historical negationism in years past, and to keep the lid on their defeat now, is not going to last forever.”

Talking to those people is like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean. Probably it will go nowhere, but there still is that slim chance of someone somewhere picking it up. It just might set a consciousness revolution in motion. 

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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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