Why Ambedkar Turned To Buddhism

TITLE: Why Ambedkar Turned to Buddhism – A Powerful Strategy Explained CHANNEL: Devdutt Pattanaik DATE: 2026-04-30 ---TRANSCRIPT--- How did Ambedkar re-imagine Buddhism? That’s something that fascinates me. My name is Dave Patnak and I write on mythology and when you study mythology, you also want to study the history of mythology. How stories change over time, how symbols change over time, how ideas change over time. And I found it fascinating how Sri Ambedkar Baba Sai Ambedkar who wrote the constitution of India re-imagined Buddhism and for me this was political master stroke. I the more I read about it the more impressed I am and I thought I should make a video about it. Now I come from a upper class sena background which means in today’s political circles people like me are not allowed to comment on ambedkar or Buddha but you know it’s a video so watch it. So as a child you know one is not exposed much to cast especially when you live in an elite neighborhood in Mumbai but you notice things like vessels are kept separately for staff people are not allowed to use toilets not allowed to sit in certain places and you wonder why that is and you’re just told that’s the way it is only later you realize this has to do with cast issues and I had heard of ambitkar a little bit because of you know the annual functions which would be there there would be these processions but I didn’t know much about him until I read Amarchitra Kata and in Amaritra Kata I read a story which really deeply affected me it tells about how American was in London he was in a library and because he was poor he couldn’t afford food so he would study in the library for a long long time but not eat food because he had no money he had no money to eat food and one of the professors who used to come to the library noticed this and uh realized what the situation was and went out of his way and ensured that he always got food that he got food to eat so that he could pursue his studies and it suddenly struck me the power of Saraswati and Lakshmi. What transforms Bhimra Ambedkar is his knowledge. Saraswati enabled him to come out of it and getting access to Saraswati is not easy. It is controlled by people who have access to Lakshmi. So he needed someone to help him uh go to the best colleges. He needed someone to help him provide him food and nourishment so that he could study well. And you suddenly realize how important wealth is. But wealth alone is not just what makes an Ammedkar. Yes, they gave him access but ultimately it is he who sat in the library. It is he who read the books. It is he who thought about it, did critical thinking and came back to India and forced Indians to confront our reality with cast. But most importantly uh is his relationship with Buddhism and I found that most interesting. See Gandhi had understood the power of religion in India. He had transformed aimsa from a spiritual tool into a tool for social justice. And therefore aimsa which basically I mean its real sense of the word aimsa is fasting to death. That is what the ajikas and the jins used to do in the ancient times. It is not about eating vegetarian food which is the very lazy understanding of a himsa that is popular today. But aimsa basically meant non-conumption and basically fasting to death. The oldest monuments in India are for the Ajivikas in Barabar caves in Bihar where you know monks would go and fast unto death. People they had possessed nothing. They had no family. They had no jvika. They had no livelihood. They would give up family. They would give up clothes. They would stop eating and they would try to fast to death. And that is the origin of a himsa. But Gandhi turned it around and said, you know, the British have weapons. They have power. We cannot defeat them through force. And therefore we’ll use a moral high ground and we will use the moral high ground and we will follow nonviolence. So he’s politicized and weaponized nonviolence and um that’s what he did and I think uh Ambedkar would have noticed it and realized the power of religion and what about the people he was representing the disenfranchised dalit lobby I mean the word dalit is used by people somebody use the word bahujan somebody uses the word harijan all kinds of words are being used but what it means is a group of people in our country who were treated as untouchables whose shadows were said to be impure and they were kept side the village and it’s a small proportion 10 to 15% of India I small but significant in Indian terms and you know the ancient words for these were words like chandara and people who lived in the crematorium who dealt with dead bodies and there this great divide if brahmans were the pure end of the Hindu spectrum the chandars were the impure end and in between was this the other casts who had a lot of fluidity who could move up and down the hierarchy but the chandalas were there was this glass ceiling which they could never cross and that’s An important point to remember and of course cast is a topic by itself but America represented this lobby. He ensured that everybody paid attention to this lobby that we did not ignore them as they had been ignored for thousands of years and that’s remarkable and for that he needed Buddhism. Now Buddhism hadn’t been discovered in the 19th century by the British. In India it had been forgotten. Nobody remembered Buddhism at all. Buddhism was in China was in Southeast Asia but Buddhism was not remembered at all. and it was rediscovered. But what Ambedkar did is he created a new kind of Buddhism. It is called Nava Yamana Buddhism. So it’s scripturally not exactly what’s there in the Vin Pitaka or what you read in Buddhist scriptures or the Pali scriptures or even the Mahayana Sanskrit scriptures. It is not what Nagarjuna wrote. It is not what Buddha Gosha wrote. It is a very very different Buddhism because it is a political form of Buddhism called Navayana the new boat the new way of thinking and here it is it is a political statement it is about social justice it’s about equality it has not to do with nirvana the purpose is not nirvan the purpose is to get dignity and respect in society so the purpose is very different remember Buddha comes from an affluent sarada background all the people challenge this today but we He came from an affluent background for the very least. He was a prince from Kapilawastu on the border of India and Nepal and the Nepalese say he was Nepalese, Hindus say he’s Indian and all kinds of everything becomes a territory. But the point to remember is that he came from a very privileged background. He was educated, he was rich. So this is a very interesting point to remember. And he realized um that life is full of suffering because we want things. We desire things and therefore the only way to break free from suffering is to give up desires, walk away from desires and he became he promoted the monastic order and um in the end he said when all desires are over there’s no identity it is nibban or nirvan um so this is the broad idea of Buddhism in its very basic form but when a miracle is talking about Buddhism he’s not really referring to this idea He’s not talking about nirvan. He’s not talking about duka. He’s not talking about rebirth at all. He in fact says karma is a theory which was used um to keep people in place that they couldn’t challenge the society. They were told this is your karma. If you do your follow your cast duties properly in your next life you’ll be born in a better life. In this life nothing can be done. The decision has been taken. And he didn’t agree with this idea. And he said Buddha didn’t say that. He created this new form of Buddhism which does not talk about duka does not talk about nirvana does not talk about rebirth karma it talks about equality and it talks it he didn’t promote monasticism he definitely did not promote a vegetarian diet um remember Gandhi promoted a vegetarian diet and in in promoting a vegetarian diet he was supporting cast system which I’m sure the Gandhians will not like to hear but the fact is in sabarata Asham today uh only vegetarian food is allowed. So uh you know dalits may cook but so long as they cook vegetarian food it is okay and that’s a new form of castism across our country. The merkar knew this he caught this he understood the manipulative nature of the elite classes of India. how they used words, twisted words like nowadays you have a whole bunch of people saying how varna is not cast and jati is cast and actually cast was flexible and all these games that are played and I think was extremely intelligent and he figured it out and he was to and he said no that’s not it and for him Buddhism was a tool for social justice for dignity and he said that as long as one is part of the Hindu hierarchical system this will not work and therefore one has to break away from it and therefore he presented Buddhism an opposition to Hinduism and this kind of discourse was necessary in a democratic system you need this it’s unfortunately democracy is based on opposition by becoming Buddhist made a statement he said I’m not a Hindu I’m not part of your hierarchical system and that is a very powerful statement and now you can see how the parliament is uncomfortable with this idea and says if you convert out of Hinduism you are no longer going to be part of the cast system. Of course if you convert into Christianity and if you transform into Islam you lose your cast status. Uh but what about Buddhism? Uh if I convert to Buddhism is my cast still valid? if I convert to sikism is my cast still valid? I think this is where religion and politics starts to play a role and they always have played a role. Um and this is something that Ambedkar understood. So when we see the mythology of Buddha and you see the politics of Buddhism, you see a very different story emerging. And I noticed that when I write on Buddha, people from the Dalith lobby get very upset. The Bahudan samaj gets very depressed because sad they are talking about how can you talk about Buddhism but are we going to talk about Nayana Buddhism? Are we going to talk about Nikaya Buddhism? Are we going to talk about Mahayana Buddhism? Are we going to talk about Tantric Buddhism? There are so many Buddhisms in the world and it is something that there is no one Buddhism and we know that as Brahminism became important Buddhism was wiped out of India and old Brahmin shrines be you know uh were really when you start looking at some of these shrines you start noticing that they were probably at one time Buddhist shrines. Buddhist gods and goddesses became Hindu gods and goddesses. Jen uh gods and goddesses became Hindu gods and goddesses. And this is an old practice in India. An old abandoned temple is taken over by the next community and they transform. So many many places in India you’ll see uh Jane statues uh which have become images of uh Vishnu or Shiva. And of course the Buddhist lobby will say it’s actually a Buddha statue but it’s actually a Jane statue. And the difference how do you know the difference is because Buddha always body is always covered with a cloth. It’s never naked. And the Jane statues are not covered with cloth. And in Jane statues, there is a bilateral symmetry in the images. The hands are always placed like this. Bilateral symmetry. The legs are crossed in a particular way. Buddhist images do not have this bilateral symmetry. The hand is either raised or touching the ground. And therefore, when people tell me that, you know, this is a Buddhist statue, I said, “No, that’s a Jane statue.” actually and the fact is whether it’s Buddhist or Jani it has been taken over by a later maybe a lingayat group sometimes maybe a Shiva worshipper Vishnu worshippers but that is not the Buddhism that Ambedkar was interested in Ambedkar was interested in social justice and equality he uh rejected rebirth now remember the Jataka tales the Jataka tales are about the Buddha in his previous lives which means Buddhism is firm firmly entrenched in the theory of rebirth and in the Jataka tales um Buddha takes 550 lives he takes the form of plants and animals and humans as kings and merchants before he’s born as Gautama Buddha um there is the pankara Buddha before Gautama Buddha there are multiple Buddhas out there but what is interesting is in the Jataka tales Buddha never takes a female form Buddhism looks at the female body as inferior Ior you have to have a male body in order to become the Buddha. In Jinism also you have to get a male body before you can become a tankara. The the female body is rejected. The Tara images appear only in the 8th century. And the reason the female form of the Buddha becomes important is because in China there was an empress called the Empress Vu who used and again weaponized Buddhism to defeat the Confucian and the Tawoist scholars of her court in order to become the empress of China. She’s only empress of China uh in 800 AD uh roughly the time when Hunang uh came to India and it is she who introduced the idea these gigantic Buddha statues and female Buddha statues aalokeshwara yin so Buddhism generally doesn’t like women and Ambedkar was very clear gender equality he have a very strong right he believed that women should get equal share of the family property and women owe a lot a lot to Ambedkar’s arguments he was right there talking about women’s right long before it became fashionable. Now, Buddha had become very popular in the early 20th century because of two things. The British had translated the Pali texts and had read about the Buddha and they had the archaeological survey had discovered Buddhist sites especially Ashoken stopas and suddenly India had a history which nobody talked about the Buddhist period of India about Ashoken pillars about stupas you had the caves of western Maharashtra of the stupas of Nagarjun Konda the artwork of Gandhara and suddenly The Buddhist world had opened up and the British argued that the Brahmans had deliberately hidden these stories. And many many colonial historians and even modern historians argue that this was a deliberate act of erasure just as the Brahmans never spoke about untouchability and erased them and invisibleized them that erased the Buddha. So there was a kind of and Ambedar would have been hearing these arguments and reading about these arguments. We know that he He argued against the Arian invasion theory. He did not know about the genetic research that we know today where we know that the Z93 Y chromosome comes from the steps region and is found across North India and in the upper cast Brahmin community of South India and it comes only in 1500 BC via the Arians. So there is this Arian migration definitely took place but Ambir did not agree. He said no no no there was no invasion of this sort. We I do not agree with the colonial theory of invasion. He did not know the genetic data. He would have changed his mind because he was extremely critical thinker and he valued science. Uh but of course when he was writing about these things this knowledge was not there. It’s a recent knowledge. But America noticed how Buddha was being used by different lobbies. There was of course Buddha’s ainsa. He did not promote violence. Very different from the Bhagat Gita which promoted violence. And the British used the Bhagat Gita as saying look the Hindus are violent and Buddhists are nonviolent and they use this to create tension between the two lobbies and Gandhi said well I follow a himsa and therefore Buddha was naturally linked towards the Gandhian doctrine. Nehu looked at Ashoka’s pillars and said that’s a great role model to have. He was afraid because remember all the kings in India would look at Ram as the model king. But in Ramayan there’s a story of Shambuka the lowcast man whose head was cut off because he wanted to become a uh hermit a monk a biku and therefore he was prevented from doing so in the Walmiki Rama and the story is there in the Walmik although nobody talks about it and therefore that make made him a problematic character and therefore how do you need a role model for India and um Nehu decided to make a foca the role model the one who had fought the great Khalinga for and now regretted it and Buddhism transformed him. In in ways you’ll see the the Buddhist symbol the lion which is there is supposed to be Buddha Buddha the speech of the Buddha represented through a lion’s roar which is very strange because Buddha’s first lecture was given in a deer park and who eats deer lion why would you use lion as a symbol of Buddhism is something that escapes me but then royal kings Ashoka decided he needed a lion because the Persian kings had lions and even today you see how all the politicians loved lions. It’s a symbol of domination. It’s a symbol of power and that’s what you see the Nehuvian images. And Sadhurka also had opinions about uh Buddhism if I’m not mistaken. He said that you know we became a passive people because of Buddhism and we have to reclaim our military warrior heritage and that is very important. And this is where Ambedka did his master stroke. He said I’ll convert to Buddhism on mass and he does that. He said I don’t die Hindu. And by doing that he took Buddhism away from people who were trying to claim it in different ways. Whether it was Saburakar, whether it was Neu, whether it was Gandhi, he said, “No, I will now look at Buddhism in a very different way. Make it a political tool for dignity and respect.” And Nayana Buddhism was born. But it is very different from Mahayana Buddhism. It is very different from Tantik Buddhism. It is very different from Nikaya or the old Buddhism. uh and one must remember that the in Southeast Asia you have Nikaya Buddhism. This is looks at Gautama Buddha and um it talks about Buddha the teacher. uh but if you go towards China and Japan you have Mahayana Buddhism where you pray to the Buddha to solve your problems and there are bodhic satwas like Padmapani and Vajraani and then you have the tantric Buddhism which is really magical Buddhism where you have guardian gods and you have sexual and violent imageries on Tibetan and of course Dalai Lama never talks about it and that is a different topic by itself that’s a very different Buddhism so Buddhism transforms Buddhism goes to America and Europe and becomes what is called Berkeley Buddhism it is all about peace and love and it forgets the fact that Buddhism was sponsored by merchants, monks, traders. It is the original protoc capitalism. That’s another Buddhism which we know about. But Amirkar Buddhism was a unique unique invention of the 20th century which brought religion and made people question so many things about Indian history, about Indian mythology, about Brahminism, about cast. provokes you to think about so many things and for that we should forever be grateful to Ambedkar’s ideas of Buddhism.