Savarkar and Modi, beginning and end of Hindutva

(Hindu Human Rights, 1 June 2015; India Facts, 1 June 2015)
 

 

Hate mongers

Hate mongers often need concocted stories to buttress their political message. In India, these are most common in that peculiar Indian form of hatred: anti-Brahminism. As the local counterpart to what anti-Semitism has been in the West, it fantasizes about how Brahmins have only domination over us lesser mortals as their uppermost concern. Everything a Brahmin does, just has to be a wily stratagem to manipulate others. With their greater book-orientedness and heavy overrepresentation in the writing professions, they control public discourse and make others look at the world through Brahminical glasses. No matter how you try to gain autonomy, they manage to outwit you, even to the point of taking control over progressive movements, even over anti-Brahminism itself.

 

Against such a formidable enemy, any means are justified. That may well be the reason why Abheek Barman chose to write the misleading opinion piece: “Why did PM Modi skip mentioning Savarkar at the Mathura rally?” (Economic Times, 27 May 2015). Alternatively, given the preponderance of borrowed, deformed and simply mistaken historical ideas in the anti-Brahmin movement, he may only have been misinformed.

 

For starters, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar did not found “the ‘parivar’, that he started and which now holds the reins of power in New Delhi”. He was president of the rivalling Hindu Mahasabha in 1937-43, though not its founder: when it was created (1915 or 1922, depending on the definition), as also in 1925 when the RSS as backbone of the Parivar (family) was founded, he was in jail and barred from participating in politics. He did, however, launch the concept Hindutva as a political category common to several Hindu Nationalist organizations, and indeed adopted as central to the RSS worldview.

 

Much is made also of Savarkar’s plea to the British for a lenient treatment, and his pledge of loyalty, after he had been confined to the Andaman Penal Colony. Anti-Hindus let on their secret fear of Savarkar as a Hindu leader when they assert that he should have locked himself up in stern but sterile opposition, merely being heroic and dying – the very policy that the Rajputs pursued, ultimately to the detriment of the Hindu cause. The truth is that Savarkar was too intelligent for that. He played his cards well and managed to actively serve the Hindu cause once again after his early release. It is this strategic acumen that Nehruvians like Barman cannot forgive him for.

 

It must be admitted, though, that the anti-Hindu camp is very savvy in its use of arguments developed by anyone, as long as they are useful for the anti-Hindu cause. Seeing that Savarkar was being lionized by the Hindus, someone at the Communist fortnightly Frontline decided to belittle Savarkar as essentially a coward who had others do the killing that he planned, moreover a toady of the British. In reality, the British gave Savarkar two life sentences and many years of actual imprisonment for his proven anti-British opposition, much harsher than anything that the luxury inmates Gandhi and Nehru have had to endure, let alone the caviar Communists at Frontline. Their attempts to cut him to size only draw attention to the fact that they aren’t qualified to touch his feet.  Yet, ill-conceived as this anti-Savarkar mudslinging was, it has been taken over by all anti-Hindu spokesmen and is now being used to maximum effect. This contrasts with Hindutva behavior: when any new pro-Hindu argument is launched, the Hindu Nationalist movement will ignore it and fall back on the same worn-out outpourings of long-dead stalwarts like Guru Golwalkar, blind to the proven impotence of this outdated rhetoric.

 

 

 

Gandhi

indu cause once again after his release

 

Then, we see Mahatma Gandhi for the umpteenth time called the “Father of the Nation”. Though quite vain (as when he condoned the crowd demanding that MA Jinnah address him as “Mahatma” rather than “Mister”), Gandhi himself would have rejected this epithet. It stems from the new-fangled Nehruvian notion that India is a “nation in the making”  conceived by the political unification under Queen Victoria, whereas Gandhi saw himself as a son of an age-old nation. This falsehood is a cornerstone of the Nehruvian rhetoric, but then nobody in his right mind had considered falsity and Nehruism incompatible.

 

Gandhi is also termed an “implacable opponent of the British, who won independence for India”. Though admittedly very common worldwide, this myth crumbles when you investigate it properly. His love of the British came out several times in successive wars when he organized military or humanitarian support for the British camp, or when he forced the apparent Congress candidate for the first Prime Ministership, Sardar Patel, to step down in favour of the anglicizer Jawaharlal Nehru. The confused and contradictory course he charted, actually caused serious setbacks to the freedom movement. Ultimately it was Britain’s weakening in World War 2 and India’s heightened self-confidence through its wartime record that convinced the British to withdraw. As the decolonizing British PM Clement Attlee later confided, Gandhi’s role had been “minimal”.

 

 

Trinity

 

That Narendra Modi singled out Deendayal Upadhyaya, co-founder of the Jan Sangh, predecessor of the BJP, as “one of the three pillars of Indian politics”, together with Mahatma Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia, would be a fit topic for criticism, for it is indeed an ill-conceived choice. Lohia launched casteism in politics, a tendency here flatteringly referred to as opposition to “upper-caste domination over subalterns”. Gandhi’s policies of strict non-violence and economic primitivism, if followed, would have finished India long ago.

 

Upadhyaya had the merit of coining the phrase “Integral Humanism”, which in a nutshell says everything Dharmic politics should be. It would still be a good thing if the BJP today would highlight “Integral Humanism” as its real ideological commitment, instead of weasel terms like “Nationalism”. Call it “Dharma” for Indians and people with a vivid Indian connection, “Integral Humanism” for foreign consumption or in English-language media.

 

Unfortunately, in his elaboration of this bright idea, Upadhyaya proved too attached to the RSS fixation on a “national soul” (ultimately stemming from European Romantic thinker Johann Herder), which took up all the space in his booklet with the promising title. People who knew him confided to me that he was an all too ordinary man, which corresponds to the verifiable mediocrity of his ideas. But for Barman, these are trifles pertaining to the contents of his ideological work, unimportant next to the damning indictment that he was “a Brahmin” and “an early member of the RSS”. What much of ideology he does consider, is sweeping and inaccurate (“hostile to the all ideas of individualism, capitalism, democracy and communism”), but we can put that down to the space constraints of a mere column.

 

 

Why not Savarkar?

 

Anyway, the crucial question for him is also crucial for us: “But why did Modi skip Savarkar, whose image in Parliament he paid homage to, soon after becoming PM? The RSS celebrates him as ‘Veer’ or ‘valiant’. From the 1920s, he was the main ideologue of the RSS that came into being on Vijaya Dashami, 1925. Savarkar wrote its basic text, ‘Hindutva’ in 1923.”

 

Indeed, though Savarkar was formally not one of them, his Hindutva ideology was all-important to the RSS and its daughter organizations, including the present ruling party. Why did Modi not even mention him? Has he been superseded by more recent Hindu ideologues, such as that other Jan Sangh president, Balraj Madhok, or by historian Sita Ram Goel, or by later converts to Hindu politics like Arun Shourie and Subramanian Swamy?

 

And it is not that Modi was shy about naming names. Mentioning Gandhi may have been in deference to the actual moral aura that the Mahatma still enjoys worldwide, and Upadhyaya may have been unavoidable for an RSS loyalist. But he lionized Lohia of all people, the stalwart of the divisive casteist poison that has so long paralyzed Indian politics. He actually preferred the socialist caste-monger Lohia to Savarkar, as well as to all other unnamed Hindu leaders and thinkers.

 

Could the reason be that Modi partakes of the intellectual culture of the RSS: borrowing from Nehruvian sources, playing by the rules laid down by the enemy? But such considerations are outside the Nehruvian worldview, which catalogues anything done by any Hindutva hate figure as wily, fanatic, part of a tough secret plan motivated by Hindu interests. It just doesn’t occur to Barman that nominal Hindu Nationalists are really obedient playthings in his own side’s own hands. Not that they themselves fail to treat Hindus as enemies, but Hindus refuse to see this and treat them as their own standard, as their Guru. Even when securely in power, Hindu Nationalists still crawl before the secularist standard.

 

 

Savarkar’s sins  

 

Anyway, Barman puts it down to a belated recognition of Savarkar’s own sins. The worst is of course that he was “a Chitpavan Brahmin”. At age 12 already, young Savarkar took a leadership role in a communal riot. That he was an accomplice in the assassination of a British official should count as relatively good (if not the means, at least the purpose) for an avowed admirer of “implacable” opposition to the British. Ah, but that admiration was only meant for Gandhi, the man responsible for many thousands of deaths during the Partition massacres, the man who let others do the killing (described as an act of cowardice in Savarkar’s case) all while keeping his own hands clean even to the point of becoming a by-word for non-violence.

 

Barman also claims that Savarkar “wrote of the ‘unity’ of all Hindus, but his writing had no place for Muslims, Sikhs or other communities”. It is only a dogma of the Nehruvians, including the separatist section among the Sikhs, that Sikhi is a separate religion. From a scholarly viewpoint, of course Sikhs are Hindus: all Indian “unbelievers” were called just that by the Muslim invaders who introduced the very term “Hindu”. And at least Barman should know that from a Hindutva viewpoint, Sikhs are Hindus just as Buddhists, Tribals and other Indian religionists are. That precisely is what “the unity of all Hindus” means. Barman is a frog in the well who projects his own limited and ignorant Nehruvian worldview onto more mature views.

 

Then, Barman accuses Savarkar (and another Chitpavan Brahmin, prominent freedom fighter BG Tilak) of having espoused the Aryan Invasion Theory. This is the cornerstone of British rule in India, of missionary propaganda and of the anti-Brahmin agitation among Tribals, Dalits, Dravidians; indeed, of Barman’s own anti-Brahminism. And it is true that Savarkar was wrong in this regard, having been mesmerized by the then all-powerful belief that linguistics had somehow proven he Aryan invasion and thus overruled Hindu tradition, which knows of no Aryan invasion but only of several “Aryan” emigrations. (But while Savarkar was wrong 90 years ago, under several constraints, the anti-Brahmin movement entertains the same mistake even today.) Contrary to Barman’s claims, it was not exported from India to Europe but had been invented in Europe ca. 1820, after several decades of assuming that the newly-discovered Indo-European language family had originated in India.

 

Let us face the fact here that Savarkar’s worldview was influenced by the then Zeitgeist (spirit of the times), which no longer obtains. Likewise, Mahatma Gandhi is badly outdated, as are Ram Manohar Lohia (though sinister disintegrationists including Barman try to keep his legacy alive) and Deendayal Upadhyaya. It is one of the worst traits of Hindu Nationalism that it refuses to grow and just keeps on hero-worshipping long-dead leaders without making their inspiration evolve with the times.

 

 

Savitri Devi

 

And then Barman gets really off track: “Savarkar’s story has a sinister follow up. By the late 1920s, a European woman called Miximiani Portas travelled to India, where faced with deportation, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, then the only Indian supporter of Nazism and Japanese expansionism across Asia. (...) Inherently racist, but with a mystical awe of ancient Hindu and Egyptian civilisations, Savitri gobbled up Savarkar’s bizarre Aryan theories. (…) ideas of Aryan racial supremacy, and the inherent ‘sub-humanity’ of other people, travelled via Savitri Devi to Adolf Hitler. She believed that Hitler was the divine power that would deliver this world from the Kali Yuga. Savitri Devi – and Savarkar – helped Hitler form his bizarre racial theories.”

 

Having devoted a few hundred pages to the sad case of Savitri Devi (chapters in The Saffron Swastika, 2001, and  in Return of the Swastika, 2007), I will not fill up this limited space with the many reasons why Barman’s version is worse than imaginary. The reader merely has to consider the chronology to see that this is impossible. Adolf Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf, full of “Aryan racial supremacy and the inherent ‘sub-humanity’ of other people” in 1923, when Maximiani Portas was a young student and Savarkar a prisoner. Until then, Savarkar had only written a few books about Indian history, which didn’t interest Hitler, and about the anti-colonial struggle, which Hitler strongly opposed. So no, Savarkar did not influence Hitler and did not give him the very European idea of the Aryan race. (But at least, Mein Kampf and Savarkar’s Hindutva were written at the same time and both in captivity, a likeness about which astrologers and fantasy writers like Barman could certainly think up a good story.)  

Maximiani Portas brought her Aryan theory with her into India, as she had learned it in Europe. She only took Indian ideas with her back to Europe when she could leave India at long last in 1945, too late for Hitler to learn anything from her. Incidentally, she had taken the name Savitri Devi shortly after settling in India, years before she married Mukherji. It is but one of the many mistakes of detail accumulated in Barman’s brief column. She did have a peculiar veneration for Hitler as well as for Genghis Khan and for Pharaoh Akhenaten, the founder of monotheism and iconoclasm (a tradition that has particularly victimized Hinduism through Islam). She prefigured the many Westerners who have travelled to India to brew their own combination of Hindu and Western ideas, and who often ended up getting sun-struck.

What Barman strategically omits, is that after the outbreak of World War 2, Savarkar immediately offered help in the anti-Nazi war effort and started recruiting for the British-Indian Army. Indeed, Gandhi would deride him as a “recruiting officer”, forgetting how he himself as a British loyalist had recruited Indian volunteers for the British war effort in the Boer War, the Zulu War and World War 1. Of course, in Barman’s game, it is “heads Hindus lose, tails anti-Hindus win”: if Savarkar had sided with the Axis against the British (as the secular Leftist Subhas Bose did), he would have been denounced as a proven Nazi, and now that he worked for the opposing camp, he is denounced as a British toady. In reality, he had only India’s best interests at heart, which he thought were best served by enlisting in the British-Indian Army, just as Bose thought that enlisting in the Axis Armies was the best course to India’s independence. Barman with his puny divisive ideas would not understand, but Savarkar and Bose, for all their differences, were first of all patriots.

 

Conclusion

Why did Narendra Modi not enumerate Savarkar, as the coiner of the political category Hindutva, among his political role models, when he did include the whimsical Mahatma, the divisive Lohia, and the mere follower Upadhyaya? For a reason that doesn’t figure in Barman’s worldview: BJP secularism. Whereas Nehruvians like to portray the RSS-BJP as a formidable enemy mercilessly pursuing the Hindu agenda, the fact is that most BJP stalwarts prefer to keep the Hindu agenda as far removed from their policies as possible. They serve their time in government and enjoy the perks of office, meanwhile hopefully cleaning up the economic mess that Congress has left behind, but never touching a serious Hindu concern with a barge-pole.

This even counts for the Prime Minister, whom Barman and his ilk have spent a dozen years demonizing as a Hindu fanatic. The Hindutva once espoused by the Jan Sangh (1952-77) should be updated, the old formulas should be allowed to evolve, of course. But most BJP stalwarts are not interested in any evolution of their ideology, the only evolution they can conceive of is betrayal. They have never developed an ideological backbone; instead, they have continuously borrowed conclusions from the Nehruvians and others who did their own thinking for non-Hindu purposes. They had the pick-pocket mentality of getting things on the cheap, of being mentally lazy and borrowing their ideas from elsewhere.

That is why both BJP Prime Ministers thus far, Atal Behari Vajpayee and now Modi, have professed their secularism. No, not age-old Hindu “secularism” (in the sense of religious pluralism) but the anti-Hindu ideology that is falsely called “secularism”. They essentially live up to the standards set by their enemies because their movement has never seriously developed a perspective of its own.

Read more!

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.

Read more!