Image Courtesy:velivada.com
May 19 marks the birth anniversary of the founder of Buddhism. Born as Siddhartha Gautama in 563 B.C. to the Sakya king Suddhodana and his wife Mahamaya, Buddha eventually grew up as a great thinker who started an egalitarian religion after abandoning privileges of the aristocratic life and wandering among the less privileged, and attaining the enlightenment for a just society.
His teachings were unique in many ways and remain even more relevant today in the light of growing superstitions and bigotry across the world.
Buddha was an extraordinary child who showed early signs of his quest for truth. He began questioning why there was so much misery and human exploitation and what was behind the class conflict and uneven distribution of wealth.
He decided to leave the luxurious life to find answers to these questions and opposed an unjust war between the Sakya state he belonged to and the neighbouring Koliya rule. The war was precipitated due to conflict over the control of waters of a river that divided the two states. For this. he chose to go into exile rather than compromise on his principles for the sake of patriotism. Thus began his journey in search of the eternal truth.
He gradually found out reasons behind human sufferings and laid the foundation of a new order that challenged inhuman and orthodox value systems practiced by the dominant Hindutva driven society. Among them is the caste system that discriminates against the so-called untouchables.
Unlike other old and established religions, Buddha emphasised on the ability to question everything and not to accept anything professed in the name of faith blindly.
He also ensured that everyone in Buddhism is treated equally and embraced the ill and the destitute.
Although Buddha has been interpreted in many different ways, the analysis of his life and teachings are more logically presented by Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, a towering Indian scholar and an undisputed leader of the Dalits or the untouchables in his famous book, The Buddha and his Dhamma.
Ambedkar had later co-authored the Indian Constitution and kept fighting against repression of Dalits in the Hindutva-dominated India. Above all, he believed in science and reason and found Buddha as an answer to superstitions promoted by the Hindu priest class.
Throughout his life, Ambedkar faced caste-based discrimination first hand and was frustrated to see Hindu leadership remaining indifferent to the pain of his community. That was the precise reason why Ambedkar quit Hinduism and adopted Buddhism before he died in 1956.
The book on his understanding of Buddhism was first published after his death and became a bible of neo-Buddhists that gives hope to the Dalits who are increasingly getting alienated from the Hindu society. After all, the caste-based discrimination has only grown under a right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP government. Not surprisingly, the BJP founders believed in the caste system that enjoys religious sanction from Hinduism.
It is a separate matter that many conventional Buddhists had rejected Ambedkar’s approach.
But the book comes handy to comprehend the message of Buddha especially in these dark times of growing bigotry and pandemic. Not only do we see a spike in hate crimes in India and other parts of the world, but the science is also being challenged by the anti-maskers and Covid-19 deniers who have become emboldened because of the populist leaders. In India, the BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi have repeatedly gone to the extent of portraying Hindu mythology as science. As if this wasn’t enough, a BJP MP Sadhvi Pragya Thakur recently stated that drinking cow urine can prevent Coronavirus. The government which lacks scientific vision has clearly put the country in danger as a result of which more than 2,50,000 human lives have been lost.
Buddha, particularly of Ambedkar’s book, gives us hope as he stood up against his own government when it was determined to wage war against Koliyas without giving peace a chance. Today, when most nation states want its citizens to blindly follow them in the name of patriotic duties, we need to think of Buddha who stood up for humanity instead of jingoism.
*Views expressed are the author’s own.
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