NON-VIOLENCE- THE BUDDHA, GANDHI & AMBEDKAR

The Buddha, Gandhi & Ambedkar

U.N.Biswas
Non-Violence ( Avihimsa/ Ahimsa)
Recorded history in India starts from 6th century B.C. That was the time of the Buddha. The Master defines and explains non-violence on different occasions. ( Dhp.225,261,270,300.)
In fact the term non-violence has been translated from the term, Avihimsa/Ahimsa used by the Buddha. The Buddha is the author of the term Ahimsa and Ahimsa way of living. He did what he said.
Ahimsa is harmlessness, non-cruelty, non-violence. This is the core meaning of non-violence. The Thought of harmlessness is avihisa-vitakka, one of the three components of Right thought of Eight Fold Path of The Buddha.
“He who harms living beings is for that reason, is not a noble one; he who does not harm any living being is called a noble one. (Dhp.270.)
“The arahats who do not harm others and are always in their actions, go to deathless Nibbana, where there is no sorrow.” (Dhp.225.)
“ Only a wise man who comprehends The Four Noble Truths and the Dhamma, who is harmless and virtuous, who restrains his senses and has rid himself of moral defilements is indeed a thera.” (Dhp.261.)
“Fully alert and ever vigilant are Gotama Buddha’s disciples, whose mind by day and by night always takes delight in being compassionate.(lit. harmless”)( Dhp. 300.)
Ahimsaka, Ahimsa, Ahimsa, Ahimsaya means harmlessness, non-cruelty and non-violence.
Compassion is the antidote of cruelty and atrocities. Non-killing is one of the Panca-silas. Non-killing however is a qualified statement. Non-violence in the doctrine of the Master is best explained in the episode of the commander-in-chief who called on the Master and asked him, ‘I defend the country from foreign aggression and maintain law and order in the times of internal troubles. In the course of my duty, I use force and in the process sometimes lives are lost. Oh master you say, abstain from killing. Am I not killing people? Am I not violating the silas? The commander was in great remorse. The Master then replied, you are doing your duty. Your duty is to protect the independence of the country and to maintain peace within the country. You do not use force for your personal craving. You are performing public duty. There is nothing wrong, if your action causes deaths.’ The commander was satisfied and left the Master.
We cannot survive without killing for our survival. Here also the Master was very clear in his directions. There may be need to kill to survive. This is natural. The way of the Buddha is the middle path. When we need to kill to survive depends on situational variables.
We can illustrate this by the recent Mumbai terrorist carnage. We were on war and we had to fight to defend and in that action we killed the enemy and some of our brave soldiers were killed. It will be absurd and foolish on our part to say that we had not been non-violent.
Let us take some contemporary dictionary meanings of non-violence.
“Non-violence is using peaceful methods, not force, to bring about political or social change.” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, P.863.)
“Non-violence implies active resistance to an unjust law or custom by such acts as demonstrations, boycotts and disruptions of the normal functioning of society
“Mahatma Gandhi, an adherent of pacifism and admittedly inspired by Thoreau’s philosophical anarchism, founded Gandhism ( or satyagrha), a specific method of civil disobedience that successfully used non-violent techniques to free India of British rule.” .”(Use The Right Word, TheReader’s Digest, London, 1968, p. 14.)
Gandhi used this method in freedom struggle. Whether this method brought us freedom is still debated. Secondly it is also not a fact that Gandhi created Indian philosophy of non-violence. In any case, we are not dealing here the history of our freedom struggle. We are only trying to rationally understand the meaning of non-violence.
The million dollar question, does caste accept non-violence or breeds violence?
Caste, Non-violence & Gandhi
Gandhi is universally perceived as a person of great eminence. He had profound knowledge of Indian society and its culture. Was he not aware of the harmful, cruel and violent character of caste? Did he not know that caste is cruel and brutal? Did he not realize that caste kills? Had he not seen victims of caste hatred? How can he then advocate caste? Being a strict follower of ahimsa, non-violence, how could he ignore the violence of caste? We are not prepared to buy the thesis that Gandhi did not have the insight of the genesis of the inherent nature of caste violence. It is needless to mention that he resorted to non-violent civil disobedience for liberation struggle. But we are on caste. How could he affirm caste when he knew that caste breeds tremendous hatred and hatred leads to violence! Let us end this section with the following table:
Ahimsa Varna( Caste)
1. Harmlessness Harm
2. Non-violence Violence
3. Non-cruelty Cruelty

Justice Social
One of the objectives of the preamble of the Constitution of India is social justice. India is a democratic country since 26th January 1950. In addition to political democracy, we have taken pledge to establish social and economic democracy in the society. This is a very important objective of the preamble of the Constitution of India and the objectives stated in the preamble of the constitution are the basic structure of the Constitution and these cannot be amended by the parliament. Social democracy means a society of equality, liberty and fraternity and this trinity cannot be separated. Unfortunately, equality is shockingly absent in our society.(1)
The society is divided into graded inequality. Secondly, economic inequality in the society is immense. Even after sixty years of Independence, we have failed achieve social democracy and without social democracy, our political democracy is meaningless.
Social equality cannot be established in caste-ridden society. Caste creates inequality, hatred and violence and therefore is not compatible with social equality. The Buddha did away with caste discrimination to introduce social equality in Indian society. This is one of the greatest contributions of Buddhism to Indian culture. To Swami Vivekananda, ‘the breaking down of caste’ by the Buddha was new in India and it was a ‘tremendous movement’.(2) The social ideal of the Buddha was equality in the society. All persons are equal. No body is born low or high. Only deeds of a person determine the position of a person in the society. Birth does not make a Brahmin or an out caste. Every individual has the freedom to make or unmake himself. Each person has to diligently work out his own salvation. Distinction on the basis of caste was not only irrational to him, it was inhuman and undemocratic. The Buddha never surrendered before the tyrannical Brahmin said Swamiji (3) He did not find any reason and ethics behind the concept of the superiority of Brahmin on the basis of birth and therefore ‘denounced’ it. He preached equality and could establish social justice. Irrationality and inhuman character of caste have been mentioned in Buddhist texts viz. ‘Vasala and Vasettha Suttas of Suttanipata, the Madhura, Assalayana and Canki Suttas of the Majjhimanikaya’ (4) The Buddha taught people to rise against caste discrimination and achieve casteless society. A socially equal society had dignity among individuals and freedom from caste bondage resulted an era of economic prosperity. Each individual could educate himself and contribute to national wealth. Down the ages, when social equality of the Buddhist order was replaced by the resurgence of rigid caste system of Brahmanism, society plunged in social strife and also lost economic prosperity.(5)
The Buddha never claimed superiority over others. He said, ‘I am a man amongst men’. (6)Gandhi intensely believed in non-violence and he not only practiced non-violence but taught others to practice it. He was always prepared to sacrifice his life for non-violence, yet there is a huge difference between the Buddha and Gandhi. As a Hindu, Gandhi believed in caste, self, soul, permanence and God. There is no existence of caste, self, soul, permanence or God in the doctrine of the Buddha. ( 7) Gandhi advocated and campaigned for the liberation of the persecuted lower rungs of the caste hierarchy within the frame work of caste system. He never sought to abolish caste system. (8) His struggle for abolition of untouchability was certainly genuine but it he never attempted to destroy caste, which is the root of untouchability. Untouchability emanates from caste. Unless the root of untouchability is cut, untoucability will continue to flourish. Dr Radhakrishan pleaded to scrape both caste and untouchability which were eating away the vitality of India.(9) Long after, the apex court of India identified caste as the root of all evils of contemporary India.
Who then after the Buddha launched vigorous movement to annihilate caste to establish social equality in India? Neither Gandhi,Nehru or Netaji but Ambedkar was the only man after the Buddha, who generated nation wide campaign for annihilation of caste in India. Gandhi opposed him and Nehru, who knew the venom of caste, yet did not join Ambedkar’s mission of social reconstruction. Had Gandhi and Nehru been with him in his efforts in this direction, history of India would have been different; Ambedkar would have created a caste less society in India. ( 10) Had only Gandhi and Nehru made common cause with Ambedkar! (11)
Ambedkar, right from his boyhood, was drawn to the casteless doctrine of the Buddha. After sustained preparations for more than three decades, on 14th October, 1956, at Nagpur, the holy place of the Buddhist Nagas,( the Ancient ancestors of Ambedkar and his people) with more than half a million of his followers, true to the great tradition of Buddhists, without shedding a single drop of blood, threw the faith devoid of social democracy in the dust bin of history and returned to the original doctrine of the Buddha; and in one stroke, revived Buddhism in India.
Thus, Ambedkar, not Gandhi, Nehru, or no one else, is the greatest non-violent social revolutionary of 20th Century. He resurrected the ideal of social justice of the Buddha and revived the original and rational Buddhism which was wiped out of India .The Buddhists of India and abroad, if the have any sense of history, must realize this truth of history.

U.N.Biswas,
Convener, Dharmachakra.

28 March 2009,
Salt Lake City, Calcutta-70091

References
1. .”( Amedkar, B.R.: Speech in the Constituent Assembly of India, 25 November, 1949.”
“We must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is complete absence of two things in Indian society. Once of these is equality. On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality which means elevation for some and degradation for others.
On the economic plane, we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty. On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”
2. Swami Vivekananda: Buddhistic India, (Delivered on February, 2, 1900 at Shakespeare Club, Pasadena, California ) The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Advaita Ashram, Calcutta, 1997, Vol.III, P. 527.
3.ibid, p.529.
4. Banerjee, Anukul Chandra: Buddhism- Its Contribution to Indian Culture, Bulletin of Tibetology, New Series, 1981, No.3, 4 August, Sikkim Research Institute of Tibetology,Gangtok, India.
5. ) Mitra, Asok: The Caste and Class in Indian Society, The Asiatic Society, 1995, p.31.
“Few people must have known better than Nehru how Varnashram and Brahmanical dominance slowly crippled India down the ages. After all this is what is implicit in a letter 1 have just referred to. He knew how India's vitality was at a high level, precisely for this reason, when Buddhism made its tremendous sweep by doing away social and caste barriers, restoring confidence and dignity among the lowest of the low ushering in social equity and equality of opportunity. Nowhere was this equality of opportunity and redemption of the lowest of the low better demonstrated than in the canonization of the eighty four Siddhas in Buddhist literature.”
“Nehru knew how Brahminical resurgence after Buddhism restored social inequality and Varnashram plunged India in to social and political fragmentation.”
“The fate of India is largely tied up with the Hindu outlook. If the present Hindu outlook does not change radically, I am quite sure that India is doomed. The Muslim outlook may be, and I think often is worse but it does not make very much difference to the future of India".
6.Swami Vivekananda: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Advaita Ashram, Calcutta, 1997, Vol.III, P. 527
7.ibid, p.529.
8. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, A Centenary Tribute,Govt. of West Bengal, Calcutta, 1993,pp.5-9. “I have never felt comfortable with Gandhiji's affirmation of Hindus' Varnashram caste or caste hierarchy. To me his nationwide, movement for social reform and his adoption of the word Harijan for his political mouth, all within the frame work of Varnashrarn fail to make much sense and there was certainly no substitute for Ambedkar's plea for equal partnership and respect for all.”
9. Radhakrishnan,S.: Speech in the Constituent Assembly of India, On Adoption of The National Flag of India, 18 July, 1949.
10. “ I feel it was tragic that Gandhiji did not make common cause with Dr. Ambedkar.”(ibid, p.31.
11. ) ibid.p.31 “Had Nehru resolutely reclaimed Dr.B.R.Ambedkar and insisted, as only he could have, yet carried the nation with him, on a time bound target of removal of discrimination against religious minorities and backward castes and classes, he would have automatically set in motion an irreversible and accelerating trend in equality, social justice and democratic norms.”
“I like to think how Dr. Ambedkar would have, helped to build a strong secular, socially egalitarian India. Ambedkar made serious contribution by insisting on the preamble and the fundamental Rights in our Constitution and its basic frame of equality and democracy. He also had a big hand in fashioning a uniform civil code, which, had we put it on the statute book, would have been removed many of the evils existing in our country today if only he had gained appropriate support from Nehru.”
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