Abstract
Abstract
The article explores the ways in which Buddhism had reinvented itself in a modernist idiom to deal with social and political conditions in India and Sri Lanka. This is done primarily by looking into the work of Anagarika Dharmapala, Iyothee Thass and B.R. Ambedkar. In general, the article is an attempt to place in context how political conditions of specific times and expectations of democracy play an active role in refashioning a religious ideology into an engaging political force.
Introduction
When the new State of Democracy in South Asia Report was launched a few weeks ago in Bangalore, attention of the media was drawn to one of its specific findings. It reported the people’s perceptions about the role of religious leaders in politics. The media highlighted the finding recorded in the Report that ‘close to one third of every respondent in South Asia favour[ed] a role for religious leaders as against politicians in major decision making in their country’ (State of Democracy in South Asia Report II 2016: 28). Media reporting juxtaposed this finding with another: declining public trust in political parties and the increasing tendency in South Asia for its citizens to place greater trust in non-elected public institutions. Political parties, the most important institution in democratic participation and governance, recorded a dismally low level of public trust in South Asia. Other non-elected public institutions that commended a similarly high level of public trust are the judiciary, the army, the police and the civil service.
Understandably, this finding was newsworthy for the media as well as to those concerned with the future of already fragile democracies in South Asia The State of Democracy in South Asia (SDSA) finding suggests two types of negative political possibilities of religion in politics. First, South Asia’s general crisis of democracy would be further heightened if religious professionals become professional politicians with agendas that are devoid of any significant democratic content. In fact, political agendas of some activist religious professionals have earned bad names, for not-so-good reasons, for being exceedingly ethno-communitarian and illiberal. The problem then is not so much about religion as one of religion without democratic content becoming an agency of political transformation. Second, with the rise of religion in politics, the separation between religion and the state which liberal democracy, the South Asian socialist tradition as well as India’s modern republican tradition have consistently maintained is now under severe stress. In some instances, the distinction seems to be on the road to disappearing.
Meanwhile, in recent years Sri Lanka has had several contrasting experiences of Buddhist religious leaders being active in the arena of democratic politics. At the 2005 parliamentary election, nine Buddhist monks were elected to parliament as MPs from a Sinhalese nationalist party. Responding to sudden upsurge of popular sympathy due to some specific and context-bound circumstances, this party in fact fielded throughout the country an all-monk list of candidates. The MP monks promised moral purification of political life. Before long, as MPs, the politician monks themselves became embroiled in public controversies, got their moralistic claims seriously tarnished amidst corruption allegations, and began to lose public support, sympathy and enthusiasm. Then in 2014, a Buddhist monk, Maduluwave Sobhita, leading a civil society movement, spearheaded a formidable political challenge against the authoritarian regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. It was this monk’s intervention and leadership, on the twin slogan of democratisation through constitutional reform and social justice, that created space and momentum for opposition political parties to form a broad political front and dislodge by electoral means an autocratic government which earlier appeared invincible. While this senior established monk, who was a veteran political activist, led a social movement for democratic revival and reform, a younger monk, Galaboda Aththe Gnanasara, who is a newcomer to political activism, began to lead a new and militant Buddhist movement called Bodu Bala Sena (The Buddhist Brigade). Bhikku Gnanasara’s political trademark was open incitement to direct violence against the ‘enemies’ of the Sinhalese nation and Buddhism, who happened to be ethnic and religious minorities. He soon launched a hate campaign against Muslims in the style identified with his counterpart in Burma, Bhikkhu Wirathu. When contesting the parliamentary election in 2015, he and all his Buddhist militant candidates managed to garner only a few thousand votes countrywide. Perhaps, Sri Lanka’s democracy is reluctant to show too much kindness to Buddhist monks with illiberal political agendas. Democrats in South Asia can take a sigh of relief appreciating how parliamentary democracy still retains its capacity to punish those who abuse it for illiberal ends.
Our democratic anxieties about the entry of religious functionaries into politics emanate not from such positive examples we may occasionally find but from the negative ones that are aplenty in contemporary South Asia. In fact, the apprehension comes not due to religionists being involved in politics per se but because of their new propensity, marking a new point of departure, to enter the legislative and executive spheres of the state, as we have been seeing in both India and Sri Lanka. That apprehension can be sourced to three other interrelated factors. First, contemporary religious political functionaries are not usually known for making any direct contribution to enriching the democracy discourse. Second, religion-inspired political projects have been, by their very nature, intensely communal and narrowly communitarian, therefore they carry a distinct burden—an incapacity to be politically pluralistic. Third, there is a general tendency in religion-inspired political movements to be able to control the political discourse in general even while occupying the fringe of the political spectrum. Right-wing religious groups in the political margins, even without much electoral success, have often demonstrated an incredible capacity to define the terms of the political debate by capturing the political discourse.
With these observations in the background, I like to develop the following argument that is related to the topic of my talk: democratisation challenge arising from the religion–politics nexus in South Asia today can be better handled if, and only if, the secular, this-worldly political commitments of religions are made open to democratic scrutiny, external critique and humanist-pluralistic reworking. Historical experiences show that religion’s role as a cultural and intellectual resource for democratisation has been highlighted in conjunctions where it is a weapon of the weak, counter-hegemonic as well as counter-statist while being sensitive to the inherently pluralistic constitution of societies and cultures. However, the dilemma in our times is that counter-hegemonic mobilisations inspired by religions have also become struggles for counter-democratic alternatives. Being a weapon of the weak is no guarantee for religion-inspired political resistance to advance the democratic struggle. It is this possibility of religion turning itself into a communal political dharma that sustains our democratic anxieties about almost all the emerging political theologies. Hent de Vries presents this as a specific ‘predicament’. Showing a Janus face, de Vries writes, religion in politics, or the theologico-political, in its present-day manifestations, reveals a dual possibility. ‘A potential source of inspiration and democratic openness, it simultaneously—and inevitably—presents a danger of dogmatism and hence of closed societies and mentalities’ (de Vries 2006: 3).
Keeping this theologico-political conundrum at the back of my mind, in this talk I will try to map out diverse possibilities of engagement between religion and politics by taking the diverse paths of modern Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhisms as a comparative case study. I begin the discussion by briefly outlining the trajectories of how modern Sri Lankan and Indian Buddhisms came into being through encounters with colonial and post-colonial modernities. Then I will show how the modern political dharma of Buddhism in Sri Lanka developed with a specific preoccupation with the question of the nation disregarding the question of the social. Thereafter, I will discuss, briefly, the emergence of Buddhist movements in modern India possessing a distinct focus on the social question. The final part of my talk is devoted to drawing contrasts between the modern Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhisms to highlight the nature of their encounters with democracy and their consequences. I employ the term ‘modern’ Buddhisms to suggest that in both India and Sri Lanka, what emerged as a revived Buddhism during the twentieth century have been subtle reconstructions of the Southern or Theravada Buddhism that has been largely preserved in pre-colonial Sri Lanka, and of course Burma and Thailand, after its disappearance from India during the twelfth century. My term ‘Buddhisms’ in the plural suggests that modern Buddhist revivals developed in twentieth-century Sri Lanka and India could better be viewed as having produced two somewhat diverse strands, with specific doctrinal and praxis orientations. There has been very limited and infrequent intellectual interaction between the two strands, even when the Sri Lankan version had begun to inhabit the Indian social and intellectual space since the early 1890s. The two strands have evolved and continue to function in each society with a great deal of autonomy from each other.
Modern Sri Lankan Buddhism: Orientations and Phases
The story of modernising transformation of Sri Lanka’s Theravada Buddhism began during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These trajectories of transformation up to the late twentieth century, spanning over two-and-half centuries, can be reconstructed as one with six phases, or moments, with specific institutional, organisational, doctrinal and political orientations.
Institutional Rebellion
The first phase of Sri Lankan Buddhism’s modernity covers roughly a period of nearly 100 years from the late eighteenth to the late nine-teenth century. The key feature of this phase was the internal institut-ional rebellion launched by monks who belonged to non-dominant and subordinate caste communities of the low country Sinhalese society. The revival of the Sangha order occurred during the early eighteenth century in the Kandyan provinces and established, under the patronage of the Kandyan King, the hegemony of the upper caste aristocracy within the larger Sinhalese Buddhist social organisation. In social terms, this revival was something like a counter-revolution, because it excluded non-upper caste monks from receiving higher ordination, or upasampada. Higher ordination is the most important rite of passage for novice Buddhist monks to be accepted as full, rights-bearing members within the Sangha order. The monks of non-dominant caste groups rebelled against this aristocratic caste monopoly by establishing a rival and parallel fraternity in 1802 (Malalgoda 1976). They did it by obtaining higher ordination directly from the Burmese Buddhist monks, thereby bypassing the Kandyan Sangha hierarchy as well as the Kandyan monarchical state. The new Sangha order, which opened its doors to any individual without caste considerations, came to be known as Amarapura Nikaya, or Burmese fraternity. This bloodless rebellion of institutional reform continued for another century. A new caste-less Sangha fraternity called the Ramanna Nikaya was established in 1862. The formation of the Amarapura and Ramanna Sangha fraternities, and the subsequent proliferation of many sub-fraternities for different subaltern caste communities of the Sinhalese society, is the most significant democratic reform and restructuring to which the Sri Lankan Buddhist Sangha institution became subjected to in its entire modern history. It is a continuing irony that none of the official histories of the two fraternities acknowledge the democratic essence of the institutional rebellion spearheaded by the educated elites of the intermediate as well as marginalised caste communities. Two interpretation of this silence are possible. The first is that the Sri Lankan Buddhist intellectual culture did not possess a conceptual apparatus, a vocabulary, for democracy and social equality to articulate the meaning of that ‘rebellion’ in socially egalitarian terms. The second is that since the democratisation of the Sangha order occurred before the language of modern democracy became available in Sri Lanka, the reform was not registered in the archives of social history as an index of democracy.
Laying the Conceptual Buddhistic Foundations for the Sinhala Nation Under Colonial Conditions
The second phase of transformation of modern Sri Lankan Buddhism began in the context of Buddhist–Christian encounters spread throughout the nineteenth century. These encounters consisted of public controversies, or debates, which a group of low country Buddhist monks had with Christian missionaries, during the second half of the nineteenth century. There were five major debates and the Sinhalese–Buddhist nationalist lore describes them, in Sanskritised Sinhalese, as Pancha Maha Vadaya. Public debates between Buddhist priests and Christian missionaries have been a fairly regular feature throughout the nineteenth century (Harris 2006; Young and Somaratne 1996). Christian missionaries usually initiated these debates as a part of their strategy of proselytisation. Their basic objective was to publicly expose, defeat and humiliate the Sinhalese Buddhists demonstrating that Buddhism was a ‘false religion’ with a weak, logically inconsistent and false salvation promise. In the Sinhalese nat-ionalist historiography, it is this experience of ‘humiliation’ that is often cited as the key emotional factor to trigger Buddhist culturalist and identitarian assertion. In the Sri Lankan case, a sense of religio-culturalist protection and regeneration thus emerged as the dominant response even in social protest movements against the colonial policies. This tendency found its clearest expression in the temperance movement that assumed an anti-colonial mass character in the early decades of the twentieth century (Jayasekera 2017).
By the mid-nineteenth century, the intensity of these Buddhist–Christian debates had reached a high point when the Buddhist response to Christian theological challenge became something like an organised mass movement of resistance. Events of the debates became public spectacles and the news spread rapidly through the emerging mass media. A popular consciousness of collective Buddhist identity, across class and caste divisions spread rapidly. Thus emerged a subjectivity of subjection as well as assertion. The cultural assertion was seen as part of an imagined global collective in conflict with Christianity. Importantly, this was the moment to which the genealogy of the modern concept of Sinhala Buddhist nation can be traced. This was also the time of expanding print capitalism in colonial Sri Lanka with newspapers, booklets and pamphlets on all kinds of controversies constituting the new social media enjoying a huge popularity and reach.
This set in motion the conditions for the emergence of the first popular social movement, bringing together the social and intellectual elites as well as ordinary people, in the low-country colonial Sinhalese Buddhist society, on the basis of a collective group identity, transcending caste rivalries that were often fuelled by Buddhist monks themselves. Letters and diary entries of Anagarika Dharmapala, Sri Lanka’s pioneer Buddhist revivalist of the late nineteenth century, often blame Buddhist monks of various caste-based sub-fraternities for fuelling caste wars. These caste wars probably were the dark side of the institutional democratisation within the Sangha order (Kariyawasam 2009) that saw several new Sangha fraternities being formed by different caste communities, backed by the newly emerged professional and business elites of each community. What nevertheless seems to have developed in response to these caste wars is the clearly discernible structure of a broad and flexible culturalist group identity and consciousness as Buddhists, defined against the Christians and Christianity, the common enemy. However, it marked the beginning of an irreversible process, that was to take a clear shape a decade or two later, of Buddhism being accorded the secular role of being the primary and foremost identity marker of the ‘Sinhalese nation’. If secularisation of religion complementary to—and not in conflict with, as often assumed—its other-worldly mission was a major facet in the process of cultural modernity and democratisation, then the second half of the nineteenth century saw Sri Lanka’s Theravada Buddhism being transformed into a this-worldly social ideology of urban social classes that were developed under the conditions of Sri Lanka’s colonial capitalism. It was an ideology that could be shared by, and available to, a vast array of caste communities, transcending the traditional cultures of caste exclusivity and exclusion. Thus, caste conflicts within the Sinhalese Buddhist society were to be subsumed within, and mediated by, a new secular ideology of national solidarity constructed on the shared idea of Buddhistness.
Interpreting the culturalist assertion of Sinhalese Buddhists against Christianity requires the recognition of group humiliations experienced under colonialism in a context of asymmetrical power relations between Buddhists backed by the native merchant class and the Christians backed by the globally positioned colonial state. However, the resistance to Christianity lacked a clear political content that could be described as politically anti-colonial, even though the subaltern caste communities of the Low Country constituted the bulk of the social forces that participated in that resistance. Buddhistic cultural assertion was not political resistance against the colonial rule.
Buddhism as a World Religion and Its Metaphysical Turn
The mid-nineteenth century was the moment for world religions in Europe, America and Japan. And indeed, almost like a coincidence with the growing momentum for world religions imaginations, the third phase of Buddhist modernity roughly began in the late 1880s and its key feature was the dialogue with religious and philosophical traditions out-side Sri Lanka’s Theravada paradigm. Its foundations were laid during the Buddhist–Christian debates that spread since the early nineteenth century. During these public debates, that were conducted at public gatherings as well as in print media and sermons, the Sinhalese Buddhist intellectuals were forced, for the first time, to defend the philosophical and doctrinal tenets of Theravada Buddhism as well as its popular practices against sustained attacks from a non-Asian, Judeo-Christian and European paradigm that was seeking world intellectual and spiritual hegemony (Harris 2006). In this encounter, Sri Lankan Buddhists seem to have gained entry to the competitive field of world religions. In the encounter with Christianity, the Buddhist intellectuals began to acquire a new position of importance since it was they who could counter the Christian critique and also reconstruct Buddhism as a philosophical alternative to global Christianity. It also marked the metaphysical turn in modern Buddhism in Sri Lanka, with a privileged role for an educated elite to highlight the intellectual and philosophical superiority of the Buddha’s teachings over those of Jesus Christ.
There were two other groups of ‘outsiders’ who opened for Sri Lankan Buddhists the doors of the European and broadly Asian religio-philosophical strands. The first group was ‘orientalist Buddhists’, some of whom maintained close intellectual links with leading Sinhalese Buddhist monks and lay literati (Amunugama 2016; Guruge 1984; Kemper 2016). Wilhelm Geiger and Rhys Davis were two key examples. Geiger, a German philologist, and Davis, who started the influential Pali Text Society in London, were leading Pali scholars in Europe at the time. The second group was the American and British Theosophists. The founding leaders of the world theosophy movement, P.B. Blavatsky and Henry Olcott, came to Sri Lanka in 1880, embraced Buddhism, and inaugurated the Buddhist Theosophical movement in Sri Lanka. When the Sri Lankan Buddhist intellectuals were looking for international support and solidarity, particularly from the West, in their continuing battle with Christians, the European orientalists and Theosophists provided emotional, moral and intellectual support for the new generation of Buddhist intellectuals who were also looking for support from Burma, Thailand and Japan (Amunugama 2016; Blackburn 2010; Kemper 2016). This was the new moment of internationalisation of Sri Lanka’s Theravada Buddhism. This European exposure was closely followed by a revival of close networking with India, after centuries of civilisational closure between the two societies in the wake of Buddhism disappeared from where it originated.
The encounters with European orientalist Buddhists and American and British theosophists had two somewhat interrelated transformatory consequences for Sri Lanka’s Theravada Buddhism during the early twentieth century. First, Sri Lankan Buddhist intellectuals began to reconstruct Buddhism as a ‘world religion’, highlighting a universalist moral and philosophical paradigm as its doctrinal core. Second, there emerged a new generation of theosophy-inspired Buddhist reformists who constructed a new form of Sri Lankan Buddhism, separating it from its popular, syncretic and peasant foundations. The process of the emergence of a scientific, rational and metaphysical strand of Buddhism with an appeal to urban, bourgeois and educated elites had begun earnestly during the 1890s. Obeysekere has characterised one strand of it as ‘protestant Buddhism’ highlighting the inspirations it derived from the protestant Christianity as well as its close identity with the interests and ethos of the emerging Sinhalese capitalist class (Gombrich and Obeysekere 1990; Obeysekere 1970). By the first decade of the twentieth century, this strand of Buddhism had crystallised itself into something like a modern intellectual Buddhism as well, with a global focus. Anagarika Dharmapala, the foremost Buddhist missionary who played a pioneering role in restoring the Theravada Buddhism in modern India, was a key local figure in this particular transformatory process (Amunugama 2016; Kemper 2016). We will discuss Dharmapala’s transformatory contribution to modern Sri Lankan Buddhism in the next section.
Politically Sinhalised Buddhism
The fourth phase of Buddhist modernity in Sri Lanka is closely identified with Anagarika Dharmapala, to whom we have already made brief reference. In fact, if there was one individual to have had a singularly crucial transformatory impact on Sri Lanka’s Buddhism as a secular intellectual force during the first half of the twentieth century, it was none other than Dharmapala. In his thought and activism, modern Sri Lankan Buddhism re-emerges itself acquiring a dual identity. One possessing an ethico-moral doctrinal system concerned with other-worldly salvationist goals as inherited from the classical Theravada tradition, and the other intimately connected with this-worldly materialities of the Sinhalese nation and its core social constituency—the urban merchant and professional classes. In Dharmapala’s thought and action, metaphysical and secular Buddhisms met in symbiosis. Its immediate social constituencies, the Sinhalese merchant and professional classes, were engaged in an intense economic competition with Tamil, Muslim and Indian migrant trading communities, within the limited scope of a colonial mercantile economy. With regard to the doctrinal dimension, Dharmapala claimed with a great deal of passion that Buddhism as a moral and philosophical system possessed greater relevance than either Christianity or Hinduism to the modern world faced with multiple moral crises. He began to advocate this position on the global stage at the Word parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in September 1893 and continued it for four decades. Maha Bodhi, the monthly journal he founded in 1891 and edited till his death in 1933, was the main instrument through which he propagated Buddhism globally as an ethico-philosophical alternative to Christianity
Anagarika Dharmapala had a dual career. He was a global Buddhist missionary committed to propagating the Theravada Buddhism in Asia and the West. In this task, he was the most committed and active figure of the universalist Buddhist intellectual cadres trained by the Buddhist Theosophical project of Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. Outside Sri Lanka, he tried to present himself as a Buddhist intellectual universalist, despite his antipathy towards Christianity and Islam. The other dimension of his career was political and ideological. The reinvention of the this-worldly mission of Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism to serve the political goals of the modern Sinhalese ‘nation’ was the pioneering and enduring contribution made by Dharmapala. Intensely parochial at home, Dharmapala’s contribution to this second goal was multiple. He was the principle author of modern Sinhalese Buddhism’s successful transition from being a faith and philosophy to a becoming dynamic political dharma, serving the political interests of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese ethnic community. Universalism abroad and parochialism at home made up the contradictory unity of Anagarika Dharmapala’s intellectual career.
Dharmapala was indeed the first Sinhalese intellectual to propagate the concept of Sinhala Jaathiya in a political sense of the modern nation state. He was also the first Sinhalese to have been exposed through world travel to the development of the modern nation state in Europe and Japan as a new global politico-cultural phenomenon. Before his intervention, the Sinhalese concept of Jaathiya, as we can gather from the Sinhalese literary and polemical sources, had two meanings. The first referred to the caste group, which was most prevalent. The second was the Sinhalese Buddhist cultural community with a shared religious identity. The second meaning—‘we, Buddhists’—evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century, in opposition to Sinhalese Christians. The primary political concept which Dharmapala invented and propagated tirelessly for about three decades was ‘Sinhala Jaathiya’ in the sense of the modern nation state. Jaathi gothra was the Sinhalese word Dharmapala later invented to refer to caste identity, as opposed to the macro concept of Jaathiya to refer to the nation that could transcend and encapsulate individual jaathi gothra. Quite interestingly, the concept of jaathiya, or nation, in its twentieth-century sense had not yet figured in the polemical and propagandist literature proliferated around these debates during the mid-nineteenth century. It was probably constructed a little later, during the decade of the 1890s, through a hermeneutical exercise that posited all the ethnic and religio-cultural minorities in Sri Lanka as competitors, sources of threat and simply ‘enemies’. In this definition of the Sinhalese nation as a political community, Buddhism was to be the sole and exclusive possession and identity marker of the Sinhalese nation. In fact, Dharmapala launched a weekly newspaper in May 1906, on the Vaishaka Day, which he called Sinhala Bauddhaya (Sinhalese Buddhist). Thus, the enduring legacy of Dharmapala in Sri Lanka is that he constructed a modern political theology of Buddhism, giving expression to anxieties, fears and political visions of the ‘Sinhalese nation’ arising from colonial conditions as well as economic completion with ethnic minorities. This to a great degree is the source of the limited capacity and intellectual unwillingness of Lankan Buddhism for a dialogical engagement with modern democracy’s normative principle of ethnic-cultural diversity and pluralism.
Radical Public Buddhism
The fifth phase, the emergence of what can be described as a ‘radically engaged Buddhism’, developed during the 1940s. This movement pioneered and led exclusively by a group of Left-oriented and activist intellectual monks, associated with the Vidyalankara monastery (pirivena). These monks were initially inspired by Anagarika Dharmapala’s Buddhist activism, but they were not heirs to his kind of ethno-political theology of Buddhism. Theirs was a different form of public and political Buddhism, a socially oriented strand of Buddhist interventionism. Inspired by socialism and a vision of left-oriented political reconstruction, they attempted to develop a Buddhist project of social service combining Buddha’s message of ‘serving the people’—bahu jana hithaaya—with the modern socialist ideal of class equality. Their initial mentor was Rahul Sankrityayana, who came to Sri Lanka in 1927 to teach Sanskrit at the Vidyalankara College, Colombo (Chudal 2016). Sankrityayana seems to have done something very unusual by introducing his young student monks of the Sri Lanka’s orthodox Theravada tradition to Western philosophy and political thought, Indian and Mahayana philosophy, and Marxist/socialist ideas as well. In Benares and Calcutta, where some of these young monks came for higher education during the early 1930s, they were further exposed to radical anti-colonial politics as well as socialist politics of Shri Narendra Dev (Saranankara 1997: 122–46). The latter headed the Kashi Vidyapith in Benares, which was a centre of the radical wing of the Indian national Congress and the Congress socialists. Upon returning to Sri Lanka, some of these activist monks also had close links with two Sri Lankan Left parties at the time, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party as well as Left-controlled trade unions. That was during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Thus, they represented a new generation of intellectual monks with exposure to secular education, global intellectual movements and the Marxist/socialist thought. Indeed, they were not traditional monks in the conventional Sri Lankan Theravada mould either. They described themselves, and were even branded by their adversaries, as ‘political monks’. Their idea of politically engaged Buddhism had two distinctive elements: (a) dissidence and dissent within the existing Sangha order by rejecting the authority of the orthodox and traditional leadership of the Sangha hierarchy and (b) radical reinterpretation of the goal of Buddhist monkhood to argue that the immediate ethical goals of the monks should be a secular commitment to what they articulated as ‘social service’, ‘serving the people’ and ‘serving the humanity’. and not to the individual-centric spiritual purification. Hadipannala Pannaloka, Walpola Rahula, Narawila Dhammaratana and Yakkaduwe Pannarama were the leading intellectual monks of this new and radical strand of Buddhist political dharma.
These dissident monks tried to develop an anti-establishment and broadly progressive neo-Buddhist movement intellectually led by monks and monks alone. They also tried to bring about an ideological synthesis between Theravada Buddhism and Marxism yet giving priority to the social egalitarian message found in the Buddha’s teachings. Walpola Rahula’s book, the Heritage of the Bhikku, which was first published in 1944 as Bhikshuwage Urumaya (Heritage of the Bhikkhu) in Sinhalese, was a seminal interventionist text in this neo-Buddhist attempt (Rahula 1974). In this book, Rahula examined one of the fundamental doctrinal problems encountered by radical Buddhist monks: How to reconcile their open and activist political engagement with the traditional soteriology of achieving Nirvana? Would it amount to renouncing the original goal of monks, in favour of a this-worldly commitment? In resolving this paradox, Rahula employed two significant discursive manoeuvres. He brought back the social welfare ideal of the Buddha’s teachings which had remained marginal in the dominant Theravada orthodoxy. This he did to justify the argument that the changed historical and social conditions have now made the nibbanic ideal no longer realistic and immediately achievable. At the same time, he summoned intellectual resources of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist cultural tradition to substantiate the point that social service and political engagement have been integral to Sri Lanka’s Sangha culture and the Sinhalese cultural heritage. Interestingly, Rahula did not summon any arguments from Marxism to construct a Buddhist theory of politics, for the obvious reason that he and his groups of monks had already been subjected to public vilification by the right-wing political and Sangha establishments for being Marxist rabble rousers.
Statist Buddhism
The transformation of Buddhism into Sri Lanka’s state-protected religion is the last important development that occurred in its modernist reconstruction. It occurred during the early decades following the political independence of 1948. This transformation marked a return to the pre-colonial paradigm in which there was a close symbiosis between the state and Buddhism and secular power and spiritual power. Sri Lanka’s post-colonial transformation of modern Buddhism, which began during the early 1950s, was a two-way process. The first was the emergence of the Sinhala majoritarian nationalism as the dominant ideology determining the state policy and even the character of the post-colonial Sri Lankan state. The second, a consequence of the first, was the statist character assigned to Buddhism by the Buddhist community as a legitimate corollary of the ideal of decolonisation and the goal of securing political sovereignty. This position was even constitutionalised in 1972 when Buddhism was declared Sri Lanka’s ‘foremost religion’. During this phase, the radical and social transformatory strand of Buddhist Sangha was totally absorbed into the newly emerged statist Buddhist current, with many of its leading activists becoming either intellectual cadres of the Sinhala-Buddhist statist nationalism or power brokers for the Sinhalese political class (Houtart 1974; Phadnis 1976;Smith 1996).
Why did the politically engaged radical Buddhist strand disappear without taking its project to any significant political outcome and before long disappear into the statist Buddhist mainstream? An answer to this question requires fresh research. If I may speculate an answer, even the Marxism-inspired radical monks did not separate, or reconceptualise, the nexus between the social and the national. Theirs was a half-hearted and vaguely defined articulation of the commitment to the social question of inequalities. Ironically, all these radical monks belonged to the upper caste fraternity of the Sri Lankan Buddhist monks, the Siamese Fraternity of Kandy. None of them was organically linked to any social movement for social equality within the caste-divided Sinhalese society. To begin with, there were no such egalitarian social movements, except the Left-led working class movements in the late colonial Sri Lanka. The Indian Dalit Buddhist movements, with their primary focus on social equality, provide a contrasting example. In the next part of the talk, I will briefly explore the political dharma of the Indian Dalit Buddhism and its engagement with Indian democracy.
Modern Buddhism in Twentieth-century India
The regeneration of Buddhism in India during the early twentieth century was an outcome of two external interventions, the theosophical-Mahabodhi Society initiatives that began in the 1890s and the Dalit Buddhist movement that also began during the 1890s and culminated in the inauguration of the Navayana Buddhist movement led by B.R. Ambedkar during the mid-1950s. These two movements actually constituted two strands of modern Buddhism in India, with virtually no mutually transformative dialogue between them.
The theosophical-Mahabodhi strand of Buddhism in India remained essentially elitist, and confined mainly to a kind of intellectual Buddhism, with minimum emphasis on rituals or social engagement. Sri Lankan Buddhist missionary, Anagarika Dharmapala, remained for 40 years the leading intellectual figure in this elitist Buddhist movement, headquartered in Calcutta. The Mahabodi Movement had branches in Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Bodh Gaya, Saranath, Lumbini and Lucknow. While his personal energies were spent mostly on securing the control of Buddha Gaya for Buddhists, Anagarika remained the leading Buddhist missionary for the Sri Lankan version of Theravada Buddhism in India and also the West. He produced an extensive body of writings in English on Buddhism, often entering into polemics with European Buddhist scholars whom he viewed were influenced by the Mahayana versions of the Buddha’s teachings. He was also thoroughly critical of what he thought as the Hindu attempts made by Hindu intellectuals to absorb Buddhism into the larger pantheon of Hinduism. He resisted the argument that Buddhism was philosophically and intellectually inferior to Hinduism. The Book Review column of the Mahabodhi Journal, which he often wrote, was quite daring in confronting this strand of scholarship on Buddhism. Dharmapala wrote a thoroughly critical review of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s the Buddha and His Gospel, ending the essay by suggesting that Coomaraswamy should learn Pali to read authentic Buddhist texts (Dharmapala 1917). He was livid with Coomaraswamy’s comments such as that the Buddha ‘never encountered a capable exponent of the highest Vedantic idealism’ and that there was no evidence whatsoever ‘to show that the Buddhists ever really understood the pure doctrine of the Atman’ (Coomaraswamy 2003(1916): 197–98). Dharmapala responded in his review:
Dr. Coomaraswamy is an art critic, and we admire his enthusiasm in the field of arts, but when he departs to other fields which are not his own the he flounders … Dr. Coomaraswamy’s Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism is we repeat is a sorrowful disappointment to the student who wishes to get a knowledge of the pure teachings of the Buddha. To get a correct idea of the teachings of the Tathagato, one thing is absolutely necessary, and that is to read the original texts in Pali, along with the commentaries. Only then one could get a correct idea of the Nirvana dhamma as enunciated by the Buddha gotamo. Leaving the hard wood and the trunk and to judge a tree by a few leaves is hardly possible. Dr. Coomaraswamy has presented us with a few dry soiled leaves, and we reject them since we possess the original tree in full vigour… To every enemy of Buddhism we cordially commend the volume, although the price is very high, and beyond the reach of the poor. (Dharmapala 1917: 15 and 20).
Dharmapala consistently and passionately made the argument that Buddha’s interventions and teachings constituted a clear break from Hinduism, marking an entirely new philosophical and ethico-moral beginning. He believed that the restoration of Theravada Buddhism as a separate religion, autonomous of Hinduism, in India would bring emancipation, both spiritual and social, to millions of poverty-stricken Indians.
If the Mahabodhi Buddhist movement remained primarily an elitist and intellectual movement, jointly led by Bengali Bhadraloks, there was a subaltern strand of Buddhism among the untouchable communities of Southern India. Iyothee Thass’s conversion to Buddhism and his movement of Sakya Buddhist Society predated the mass conversion of Members of the Mahar community of Maharashtra to Buddhism in 1956. In this talk, instead of providing even a brief account of the Buddhist movements of the pariah, panchama and mahar Dalit communities of South India, I wish to make two comparative observations that might enable us to understand how Sinhalese Buddhism and Indian Buddhism had encountered democracy in two distinct ways.
The first comparative observation is about the contrasting trajectories of these two strands of Buddhism. The modern Indian Buddhist movements originated on the social question and the core theme of its entire political theology was the eradication of social inequality structured on caste differentiation and oppression. However, the modern Sri Lankan Buddhist movements did not take up the theme of social equality, directly, or as a specific and clearly articulated normative goal. The key themes on which the Sri Lankan Buddhist political dharma invested its resources were the nation, state and national sovereignty. While the Indian Buddhists were attracted to Buddhism primarily because of its social emancipatory promise, the Sri Lankan Buddhists inherited Buddhism with a historical legacy of it being the ideology of the nation and the state. Even under colonialism, the modern Sri Lankan Buddhism’s politics of resistance was confined to a culturalist and metaphysical opposition to Christianity and a rejection of the European culture. Despite Thera-vada Buddhism’s social egalitarian teachings, modern Sri Lankan Buddhist thought and discourse ignored the question of social equality, with only a nominal commitment to the social egalitarian ideals articulated primarily in Wasala and Vasetta Suttas. Not acknowledging the presence of any caste-based social inequalities in the Sinhalese Buddhist society, it produced, as we have already noted, a nationist political dharma as the unifying ideology of the Sinhala nation.
A second contrast between Sri Lanka and India’s modern Dalit Buddhisms is the following: when Indian Dalit Buddhists foregrounded the social question as central to their political project, there was a comprehensive language of democracy available to them, encompassing individual, civil, political and group rights. However, when Sri Lankan Buddhists brought the question of nation to the core of their collective imagination during the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no vocabulary of democracy or rights available to them to conceptualise and articulate the struggles for equality in a language other than one in a moralistic, or karmic, discourse. And that was not a discourse of social resistance and change, but one of legitimising the existing inequa-lities in a crude interpretation of karma as a template of consequences of actions in the past lives. Their invented new discourse was one pertaining to the nation, with Buddhism as the primary collective bond that ties together the members of the imagined community of the Sinhalese Buddhist cultural community across caste, class and regional divisions. A parallel process occurred in Sri Lanka’s nineteenth-century Tamil society, too, with Hinduism as the primary identity marker of the freshly imagined Tamil nation. Indeed, the nationist imagination occurred in Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese and Tamil social formations alike, much prior to the availability of conceptual categories of democratic consciousness and critique. When a language of democracy and rights became available, the nationist and statist commitments had already colonised the political consciousness of the Sri Lankan Buddhists. And they continued to determine the content of the political dharma of the nation and the state. It became reinforced when the ethnic minority politics began to argue for a radical review and reformulation of the dominant imaginations of the Sri Lankan nation and the state. The national and state sovereignty discourse thus blocked, and even disabled, the emergence of a genuinely social reformist and pluralist Buddhist political dharma in the island. It is no accident that a neo-Buddhist social movement like Sri Lanka’s Sarvodaya could make Buddhism-inspired interventions in Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis only in a discourse of moral righteousness devoid of political arguments for reconstruction.
The second contrast I just mentioned had a dramatic early illustration during the first phase Sri Lankan Buddhism’s modernity which I outlined at the beginning of this talk. To recall that account, the rebellion, launched by the Buddhist monks of the intermediate and subordinate caste communities in the low-country Sinhalese society was a major act of resistance to caste discrimination in modern Sri Lanka. But what is surprising in that rebellion is the unavailability of a language of equality within the Theravada Buddhist tradition through which the resistance and the acts of rebellion could have been articulated either in metaphysical or secular terms. The original Sinhalese sources of that period show no reference made by the rebellious monks to even the Buddha’s social egalitarian teachings in order to theorise and justify their institutional rebellion for equality. The puzzling issue is that here was a rebellion that led to the institutionalisation of claims to equality, inclusion and group rights within Sri Lanka’s Theravada Sangha organisational structure without a language of expression. The rebellion also resulted in democratising the relations between the Sangha and caste-structured lay society. Paradoxically, when the language of equality and democracy became available during the last phase of the British colonial rule, the Buddhist movement’s democratic reform potential had diminished, because the political question of the nation and sovereignty had totally subsumed and pushed to the margins the social question of equality. Democratic reforms for equality without a discourse of equality, this was the most intriguing dimension of the aborted democratisation process generated during the early phase of modern Sri Lankan Buddhism.
The consequences of this contrast have been felt partially in the absence of a sustained dialogue between the modern Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhist movements. My contention is that the weak dialogue between the two is primarily due to the lack of a discourse of social equality as well as a commitment to societal democratisation in the Sri Lankan Buddhist movement. A number of examples can be cited to show how nebulous were the links between the two Buddhist resurgence movements. The first example is the early and premature dissolution of cooperation between the Tamil Dalit Buddhists and the Mahabodhi movement in India. The history of the Dalit politics in Southern India can be constructed by means of the accounts available in the writings of Omvedt (2003), Aloysius (1998, 2012), Geetha and Rajadurai (1993, 1998) and Ayyathurai (2011). These sources show that the early attraction to Buddhism among the Tamil Dalit intellectuals occurred during the 1870s and 1880s. They had happened quite independent of any inspirational push from the Sri Lankan Buddhists. However, with the entry of the Theosophical movement into India and Sri Lanka, a new link was established between Madras and Colombo Buddhists. A branch of the Mahabodi society was established in 1897 by Anagarika Dharmapala. A Dalit Buddhist delegation led by Iyothee Thass and M. Singaravelu visited Sri Lanka in 1898. P. Krishnaswamy was also in the delegation. The delegates met the High Priest Hikkaduwe Sumangala and Sri Lankan Buddhist leaders at the Vidyodaya Pirivena in Colombo. According to Sri Lankan sources, the highlight of their visit was their public embrace of Buddhism at a ceremony held at the Vidyodaya monastery. The ceremony was presided over by High Priest Sumangala, the undisputed Theravada Buddhist intellectual leader at the time, with a global reputation. This was probably not an event of conversion but a ceremonial taking of Five Precepts by the visitors from Madras. The Dalit Tamil delegation visited the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. On their return, they established the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras. The Sakya identity of the Tamil Dalit Buddhists was an attempt to recover the lost right to social equality grounded on the assertion that they these Dalit communities were the Buddha’s kinsmen—descendants of the Sakya clan of North India before they were disempowered and subjugated in the Brahmanic social order.
It is also intriguing that although both the theosophical society and Mahabodhi society had branch offices and lay following in Madras, there does not seem to have developed a close interaction between them and the Sakya Buddhists. Aloysius observes that the activities of the Sakya Buddhist Society and the Mahabodhi society ‘were distinct and their relationship was not always cordial as years went by’ (Aloysius 1998: 58). Iyothee Thass distanced himself from Mahabodhi Society because he ‘sensed a lack of commitment of the core Buddhist ideal of social egalitarianism’ (Aloysius 2012: xiii–xiv). Obviously, for the elitist Sinhalese Buddhists and the Sangha hierarchy, social egalitarianism was not a core Buddhist ideal, as it was for Dalit Buddhists in Madras. Initially, there were interactions and even intellectual collaboration. For example, when Lakshmi Narasu, a leading Buddhist intellectual who influenced the Indian Dalit Buddhist movements, first published his book The Essence of Buddhism in 1907, it was Anagarika who wrote the Preface. Ambedkar wrote the Preface to the Third Edition in 1947. Anagarika’s diaries and letters indicate that by the second decade of the twentieth century, the relationship between the two groups had become rather sour. There is also much sarcasm and ridicule in Anagarika’s references to ‘Madras Buddhists’. These references suggest three reasons for this estrangement—personal, institutional and doctrinal. The personal factor appears to have emanated from the elitist class attitude of the Mahabodhi leadership towards the Tamil untouchable Buddhists, as implied in the negative Sinhalese terms that Anagarika as well as some Sri Lankan monks had employed in their correspondence. The institutional factor revolved around a property dispute. When the Tamil Buddhists in Madras wanted to set up an office and school., Anagarika, as he usually did in many similar instances, made a generous financial contribution from the Mary Foster Fund. However, when differences developed between the two sides towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Anagarika appears to have demanded the property to be handed over to the Mahabodi Society. The Sakya Buddhists refused to do so, and the relationship deteriorated resulting in an exchange of a series of somewhat acrimonious letters. Equally interesting is the doctrinal dispute, as it becomes evident in the Dharmapala diaries as well as letters. The Sri Lankan Buddhists became unhappy with the way in which Sakya Buddhists in Madras interpreted the Theravada concept of rebirth, or punarbhava, on the suspicion that they had freely borrowed from the Mahayana and Hindu theories of rebirth. Aloysius provides a useful insight into this dispute.
Mahabodhi Society preached the existence of rebirth and a future life for the individual soul, and thus set up a sphere of the unknowable and non-rational just like any other religion. But, Narasu, following the core Buddhist doctrine of none-substantiality (anatman) and non-eternity (anitya) of the soul, interpreted along with Iyothee Thassar and others that the rebirth [in] Buddhism refers not to the individual soul, but its karma or activities. (Aloysius 2012: xiv).
We need to recall here that Anagarika and the Mahabodhi Buddhists were particularly worried about what they saw as distortions of the ‘pure’ teachings of the Buddha by new converts to Buddhism in India as well as Europe, because of the external influences as well as what the Sri Lankans saw as their superficial doctrinal understanding. We need also to recall that Sri Lankan Theravada intellectual tradition has been built on a rigid dichotomy of samyak ditthi versus miccha ditthi—orthodoxy versus heresy—which tolerated no room for any liberal interpretation of the orthodoxy.
The second example comes from Sangharakkhita’s biography of B.R. Ambedkar. Sangharakshita, the English Buddhist monk, makes an interesting revelation of the social, or class, nature of the Indian Mahabodhi movement. At their first meeting at Ambedkar’s Bombay residence, Ambedkar showed resentment when Sangharakshita introduced himself as having been associated with the Mahabodhi Society of Calcutta. To quote Sangharakshita:
…Ambedkar seated himself behind his desk and, after we exchanged usual amenities, fixed me with an unfriendly stare, and demanded belligerently, ‘why does your Mahabodhi Society have a Bengali Brahmin for its President?’ The word Brahmin was not only emphasized but was pronounced with such contempt and scorn that the whole Brahmin caste, as well as any organisation so misguided as to have a Brahmin for its president, was at once consigned to a kind of moral dustbin. Realizing that Ambedkar took me for one of the Bhikkhus (mostly Sinhalese) who ran the Mahabodhi Society’s various pilgrim—centres, I hastened to make my position clear. It was not my Mahabodhi Society, I explained. Sangharakshita further explained that he was not a member of the Mahabodhi Society, and one of the reasons for why he did not belong to it was that ‘it has a Brahmin for its President as well as a Governing body that was dominated by Caste Hindus who had no real interest in Buddhism’ (Sangharakshita 1986: Chapter 2).
Anagarika Dharmapala, Iyothee Thass and B.R. Ambedkar
There are three individuals who in a very significant way personify the modern Buddhisms in Sri Lanka and India, Anagarika Dharmapala, Iyothee Thass and B.R. Ambedkar. If Iyothee Thass and B.R. Ambedkar are credited with reinterpreting Buddhism for the Indian society, which originated in North India 26 centuries ago, Dharmapala is remembered for reviving and regenerating Theravada Buddhism as a major religio-intellectual force in Sri Lanka as well as India against the backdrop of its decline and decay. Some Indian neo-Buddhists who are followers of Ambedkar even consider Anagarika Dharmapala as a Bodhisatva (a future Buddha or a Buddha to be) and the second Dharmasoka of India. Both Dharmapala and Ambedkar lived and worked in South Asia more or less as distant contemporaries. Both were products of the Theosophical and Orientalist Buddhist revival in Asia, Dharmapala being its more immediate heir. Dharmapala was of course the senior of the two too. He was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1864, and died as a Buddhist monk in 1933 at Saranath where the Buddha delivered his first sermon. Though he found himself mostly in the company of Indian elite Buddhists, Dharmapala was not insensitive to the caste-based social oppression in India. He often expressed his dismay at the extreme levels of poverty and exploitation to which the ‘teeming millions of India’ had been subjected. He believed that the only religion that will bring blessings upon them was the Buddha’s dharma. He wrote in the Mahabodhi Journal, 1 year before his death, as he did a number of times before: ‘There are 141 million fallen people in India, who are victims of ignorance, superstition and fatalism. To raise them to a higher level should be the aim of our Buddhist brothers of Japan, Burma, Siam and Ceylon’ (in Guruge 1991: 571). Well, the fact of the matter is that neither those Buddhist brothers nor Dharmapala himself seems to have had any inclination towards taking up the question of social equality and reform in any creatively new way.
Ambedkar was junior to Dharmapala by 27 years. He was born in a rural village in Madhya Pradesh, Western India in 1891, and died in 1956 in Delhi. Ambedkar became a Buddhist only 6 months before his death, in a mass conversion ceremony. If Dharmapala was a revisionist revivalist, Ambedkar was a radical reformist. After Dharmapala’s death in 1933, a better relationship between Ambedkar and Mahabodhi society seems to have developed. The Mahabodhi Journal, under the editorship of Devapriya Walisinha, had even invited Ambedkar to contribute articles. Indeed, in 1951, Amebdkar wrote a special article on invitation to the Vaishaka Special issue of the journal. At Ambedkar’s mass conversion Diksha ceremony held in May 1956, Devapriya Walisingha and two Sri Lankan Buddhist monks attached to the Mahabodhi Society were present side by side with India’s greatest Buddhist reformist of modern times.
Although Anagarika Dharmapala lived in India for 40 years in his adult life leading India’s Buddhist revivalist movement, there are no records of any personal encounter between these two most important Buddhist lay figures of modern Asia. Dharmapala’s meticulously maintained diaries or the vast body of personal correspondence now available do not show that the two had even exchanged correspondence. Both were indeed prolific letter writers. One explanation is that Ambedkar was perhaps too young to be personally in touch with Dharmapala. Ambedkar returned to India in 1923 and 10 years later Dharmapala passed away. While there are no records to indicate that the two had met, there are also no records either to suggest that Ambedkar was particularly inspired by any of Dharmapala’s interpretations of the Buddha’s doctrine. He may have seen Dharmapala’s rendering of Buddha’s teaching too socially conservative and too elitist for his liking. Sangharakshita’s biography of Ambdekar suggests that Ambedkar was quite suspicious of Mahabodhi Buddhism because of its close association with the Brahmin elites. The fact that three giants of Buddhist intellectualism—Iyothee Thass, Dharmapala and Ambedkar—had no mutual intellectual influence is no historical accident too.
I like to explore this puzzle by asking a somewhat provocative question: What does the absence of direct links between Dharmapala on the one hand and Iyothee Thass and Ambedkar on the other mean in symbolic terms? Does it mean that as exemplars of modern Buddhism they travelled along two paths that were moving along two different directions with no possibility of meeting? Finding an answer to this question calls for a comparative study of how modern Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhists and their key theorists encountered, negotiated and settled accounts with colonialism, traditional religions, social structures, social and cultural practices, dominant ideologies and of course demands for democratisation. Looking at it through a comparative lens, it is not difficult to point out that the modern Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhists have constructed their own projects of modernity paths differently—Indian Dalit Buddhists through social reconstruction and the Sri Lankan Buddhists through cultural reconstruction. This distinction has also given specific character to the ways in which the Indian Buddhists, who happened to be mostly Dalits, and the Sri Lankan Buddhists have related themselves to modern democracy—the Indian Buddhists centre-staging the societal question and their Sri Lankan counterparts the nationist question.
This fundamental contrast also constitutes and defines the different ways in which these Buddhist communities have encountered and responded to modern democracy. Understanding these contrasts can also help us to make sense of why there has been very little intellectual engagement between the Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhists, despite the fact that a Sri Lankan Buddhist in the early twentieth century played a key role in reviving the glory of Buddhism in India. This has been so despite the fact that a number of Indian scholars, who later became intellectual giants in India, had learned Pali and Buddhism at monastery schools in Sri Lanka during the first half of the twentieth century. Many of them studied at Vidoyada monastic college in Colombo which was not known for social radicalism or political activism. These Indian scholars, not even Dharmanand Kosambi or Rahul Sankrityayan, do not seem to have facilitated much interaction between Sri Lankan Buddhists and the Indian Dalit Buddhists. Meanwhile, the Mahabodhi Buddhists almost as a habit refrained from reinterpreting the Buddha’s teachings in a social emancipatory sense as Thass and Ambedkar did. As an orthodox Buddhist missionary, Dharmapala highlighted in India the dimension of other-worldly emancipation as found in Buddha’s teachings, while also emphasising their relevance as a system of moral teachings in ethical and psychological sense. Thass and Ambedkar travelled along a different Buddhist path and brought the dimension of this-worldly, social emancipation as the central concern of modern Buddhist ethical commitment. In doing so, Ambedkar even went to the extent of rejecting two of the core concepts of the Buddha’s teaching as found in the Pali cannon, the Four Noble Truths and the conception of Karma. In Buddha and his Dhamma, Ambedkar argued that Chaturarya Sathya (the Four Noble Truths) doctrine was probably a later addition to the corpus of Buddha’s teachings. No Sri Lankan Buddhist would have dared to undertake such a radically heterodox and revisionist project. Not unexpectedly, the Mahabodhi Journal had a dismissively critical review of Ambedkar’s Buddha and His Dhamma. This was two decades after Dharmapala’s death.
Sri Lanka’s Political Dharma of Buddhism: Two Encounters with Democracy
Sri Lanka’s political change after independence of 1948 has been marked by a profound crisis of its democracy. The crisis found its expression in the majoritarian transformation of the state with increasing alienation of the ethnic and cultural minorities and eventual emergence of the ethnic conflict and the secessionist civil war. The contribution made by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ideology and social forces to this crisis of democracy has been documented in a fairly extensive body of scholarly literature (DeVotta 2007; Seneviratne 2000; Tambiah 1992). How has Sri Lanka’s Buddhist political dharma responded to this crisis of democracy? Has it demonstrated any degree of dharmic flexibility and creativity to review its basic tenets and consequences? Three trends appear to have emerged during the past 60 years.
The first is the reaffirmation, during the 1950s to 1970s, of the nationist and statist political dharma of Buddhism. It reasserted the legitimacy and sanctity of majoritarian democracy, and the unitary state. On the question of citizenship, it constructed a rights discourse that defended a group rights approach for the majority Sinhalese Buddhists and individual rights approach for the ethnic minorities. Sri Lanka’s 1972 and 1978 Constitutions were moments in which this reaffirmed nationalist political theology of Buddhism was brought into synthesis with a combination of liberal and illiberal paradigms of constitutionalism.
The second trend was the attempt to build an argument during the 1980s to construct a Buddhist theory of just war. The Jathika Chinthanaya school of Sinhala-nationalist thought was the leading intellectual current which argued for a more radically militant re-construction of the twentieth-century Buddhist political dharma. The Jathika Hela Urumaya, a political offshoot of the Jathika Chinthanaya group, deployed a few of its young Buddhist monks to construct an elaborate Buddhist theory of just war, reinterpreting Buddha’s sporadic teachings on secular themes in bringing them in dialogue with the pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist historiographical texts that had elements of such a theory. Both Jathika Chinthanaya and Jathika Hela Urumaya intellectuals were very keen to update and make contemporary the Dharmapala project of Buddhist political dharma by producing a just war theory that could possess the same political attraction and effect as the Christian, Islamic and Hindutva just war theories. Interestingly, none of these efforts has so far produ-ced any Buddhist theory of just war for the Sinhalese national project, demonstrating that Theravada Buddhism, even in its modern Sri Lankan politicised versions, lacks any metaphysical or ethical resources lending themselves to the production of a credible conception of violence.
The third is the relative flexibility to accommodate diversity and group rights of the minorities, still acknowledging the position of pre-eminence of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in a framework of thin pluralism. This is a new approach of conditional tolerance, which has emerged in the context of popular rejection of the radically militant and violence-oriented rearticulations of the Buddhist political dharma by newly emerged groups of activist Buddhist monks. The rejection was registered at extremely poor voter responses these groups have received at elections, despite the constant mediatisation of their hate-generating ideologies and violence-driven political activism. However, this thin-pluralistic accommodation of minority cultures and rights by the mainstream Buddhist political dharma in Sri Lanka does not spring from any specific reinterpretation of any tenet of Buddhist teachings. It also remains completely within the orthodoxy. It has been advanced as a response to the sustained criticism encountered by the Buddhist mainstream that has failed to respond to the political realities of a multi-ethnic society in deep political crisis. The ethical-intellectual argument of thin pluralism is built on the Buddhist normative principle of tolerance, not equality.
Does all this mean that in its encounters with the crisis of democracy
in contemporary Sri Lanka, Buddhist political dharma has become
flexible? While answering ‘yes’, one must also be cautious not to exaggerate its quality and depth of flexibility, precisely because it has not yet found a clearly articulated conceptual statement. In a way, the emerging thin pluralism of Buddhist political dharma is also one without an intellectual leader.
Democracy and the Question of Religion
It is now time for us to return to the question with which we began this discussion: Does religion facilitate or hinder democratisation? There is no easy answer to this question. The historical patterns of the relationship between religions and democracy indicate varieties of encounters between the two, with varied consequences for both. Perhaps the easiest answer to our question, which arises from the contrasting experiences of Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhist movements, is that it has done both. Under certain circumstances, religion has facilitated democratisation and under other conditions it has not been so.
If we make a generalised point, modern democracy in a historical sense is a recent intruder, and sometimes a self-invited guest, in societies where religion has already defined social and political institutions, power relations and worldviews of the people in that society. And then democracy, in its liberal, representative modes, has made some fundamental interventions to reconstitute the political as well as social institutions and processes. It has transformed the nature of the political institutions, state–society relations, notions of citizenship and rights, and power relations at social and individual levels. Democracy has enabled marginalised and disempowered communities to think about, aspire for and achieve rights and gain access to power. Rarely have religions achieved this feat, even though religions too have enabled human communities to resort to organised and collective action. Then this distinction also marks a fundamental difference between religion and democracy because what we see in political theologies is syntheses of religion as a faith and an ideology, guiding communities to secular political action. South Asia provides continuing reasons to be cautious about how politically mobilised religions have given rise to communitarian and communalist justifications for the politics of dividing people and preventing human solidarity despite the superficially universalist claims—universalism abroad and parochialism at home!—of these religions. Unlike religion, democracy does not divide people. It enables solidarity. In this specific sense, religions have pre-democratic potentialities re-energised under conditions of colonialism, modernity and capitalism. One task we seem to be having before us for better political futures in South Asia is to make possible new conversations between religions and democracy.
However, such conversation is not easy. One major reason for the difficulty emanates from our continuing reluctance to critique political projects that are either rooted in, or justified in terms of, religious claims. There is hardly any serious democratic critique of political dharmas, except demonstrating our unease at the emergence of yellow clad religious functionaries replacing political theorists as guides to good society. A democratic critique of political dharmas in South Asia is an urgent task although it might invite a great deal of existential risks to the community of critics. Yet the hope that such a conversation should lead to some kind of rearticulation and reconstellation of religion and politics mediated by democratic normatives is worth exploring. It can bring a pluralistic ethic to political dharmas and imbibe the religious with democratic sensibilities of pluralism. Otherwise, South Asian democracies run the risk of being pushed into a monistic turn philosophically, intellectually and politically.