Buddhist Audio Books

From chapter 19: The Presence in the Corner

I had met Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the leading personality of the Federation, in 1952, after having been in correspondence with him two years earlier. On that occasion we had met at Rajgir, his residence in Dadar, in the heart of industrial Bombay, and I had asked him, probably with his recent article `The Buddha and the Future of His Religion' in mind, whether he thought Buddhism had a future in India. His reply was an indirect one. He had no future in India, he declared bitterly (he was at that time in the political wilderness), as if his own future in India and that of Buddhism were inextricably interconnected. But his attitude, or at least his mood, had since changed. Having realised, after a lifetime of unsuccessful campaigning, that the Caste Hindus were not going to give up their traditional inhuman treatment of the Untouchables, as the Scheduled Castes and Depressed Class people were popularly known, he had come to the conclusion that he and his followers would have to change their religion. They would have to become Buddhists, Buddhism being a religion that was of Indian origin, that was rational, and that treated men (and women) according to their worth, not their birth, i.e. not according to their (hereditary) caste. Within the last few months he had twice visited Buddhist Burma, and only days before our second meeting, which took place on 25 December, he had installed an image of the Buddha in the temple that had been built by members of the Scheduled Castes community at Dehu Road, near Poona.

We met not in Dadar but in the Fort area of Bombay, in Dr Ambedkar's office on the top floor of Buddha Bhavan, one of the buildings of the Siddharth College of Arts and Science. In appearance he was greatly altered. At the time of our first meeting his demeanour had been belligerent, and his expression grim and lowering, and though inclining to corpulence he had seemed in good health. Now, three years later, he was quieter and more subdued, and so crippled by arthritis that, as he explained when apologizing for receiving me sitting down, he could stand only with difficulty. But though quieter and more subdued he had, as it seemed, made up his mind that he and his followers should become Buddhists, and was even now drawing up plans for the revival of Buddhism in India. These plans he explained to me at some length, adding, with evident emotion, that he intended to devote the rest of his life to Buddhism. Mrs Ambedkar, who stood beside him as he sat behind his desk, appeared to support his plans, and from time to time intervened to reinforce a point he had made, especially when his energy flagged. For my part I explained, in response to Dr Ambedkar's enquiries, that formal conversion to Buddhism consisted in `going for Refuge' to the Three Jewels, i.e. the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, and in undertaking to observe the five basic principles of ethical behaviour. One could `take' the Refuges and Precepts from any monk or other senior Buddhist. All the same, he and his followers would be well advised to take them from someone like U Chandramani of Kusinara, probably the seniormost monk in India, rather than from a junior monk like myself (Ambedkar had asked me if I would be willing to perform the conversion ceremony for them), as the Buddhist world would probably then take their conversion to Buddhism more seriously. Before we parted the Scheduled Castes leader asked me to write to him recapitulating what I had said about conversion. He also asked me to explain to his followers what conversion to Buddhism really meant. On my acceding to both these requests, he promised to see that a talk was organized for me by his lieutenants in the city.