Why did Ambedkar misundersand and reject the Vedic path?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
your question is now where did ambedkar go wrong in understanding him there’s a rejected religion so who did he not get to read the writing of the acharyas what exactly happened religion if we consider there are different faces of the religion there can be a cultural face face means what appears to us it is the cultural face there is a social face there is an intellectual face i’m not pha i’m not saying phas i’m talking about fac what appears so for example some people come to a temple and the primary thing they’re trying to do is i feel so peaceful when i come to temple i feel so calm i feel so nice so and they come for that particular feeling there are others who may come because they like the classes even if you come to a temple and there’s no class what is the point of coming okay we must come for darshan but i want to hear some class so there’s an intellectual case then there is a social face social face means you come to a temple because there are people who may like people who like you you like to be in that social circle so these are all different aspects of religion and sometimes one aspect can consume a person’s consciousness so much that other aspects get overshadowed so i’ll give a simple example where it can happen even in the devotee community so for example if you go to africa among the devotees so there are native africans who are practicing and then indians who are going to africa and they are practicing and although they transit at a spiritual level everyone they understand their devotees but still there are some there are some distances so suppose somebody comes and sees some indian comes there and they say there’s so many africans and that person has some social condition social conception these are blacks one of these blacks doing in our temple then that social person the social tension that is there that itself may become so consuming because you just can’t appreciate the intellectual aspect of it blacks are coming in are they discriminating against blacks or are they abusing the blacks what are they doing some people just get so consumed in that so some people try to see you know in ISKCON itself if you’re born in the Brahmana family do you get more respect or if you’re born in a Shudra family do you get less respect so fortunately by Prabhupada’s mercy that sort of thing is not there we just focus on how nicely a devotee is practicing bhakti but there are social issues that can come and that do come at times so now we do say that Varanashram is based on qualities that is scriptural position but the social historical reality is that for many centuries the caste system has been based on birth and due to being based on birth there have been a lot of atrocities that have happened of course having said that a lot of atrocities have happened and without minimizing the atrocities still there is also the element that these atrocities have been disproportionately demonized also in every society there are atrocities if you consider what the britishers did not what the european emigrants did when they went to america you know they didn’t just discriminate against the native americans they practically eliminated them so in every society there has been this kind of discrimination and the catholic church went and they conquered mexico and annihilated the whole mexican community they would give blankets they would say that these native americans were impossible blankets and the blankets would be filled with deceased jews and then now this is i’m not saying all christians do this this is very very important among christians also there are sattvic rajasic tamasic and among hindus also there are sattvic rajasic tamasic so they would distribute deceased blankets and when the patients would get diseased they would give medicines to those who would convert to christianity that’s how they converted now this is not just in christianity mind you when among hindus it has happened is a real life stories that if there is a child a shudra child who is starving or is dying of thirst and the shudra had five or six year old child that doesn’t know anything and he goes and drinks water from a well which is meant to be brahmanic which is meant from which brahman is supposed to drink now yeah it’s a contamination it should not be done but there has been disproportionate reaction where the higher caste people have just beaten that child and the child is dying now this is again this is not brahmanical culture this is tamasic culture this is tamas tamoguna misappropriating brahmanical principles you understand this brahmanical purity is an important point suppose i am if i am going to do it if somebody comes and touches me somebody who’s an unclean that’s not a good thing but that doesn’t mean that i’m going to beat that person up you know i have to be careful so that i don’t come in contact with the person at that time and i can go can properly go into idiocy so the responsibility for purity is on me it is not judgmentally condemning others as being impure so what happens in tamoguna we take standards which are meant to elevate us and we use those standards for pushing others down you understand the difference the standards are meant to raise us up but rather than raising ourselves up through the standards we use the standards for pushing others down and this happens when we are in rajoguna tamoguna so the in the history of hinduism there has been a lot of social discrimination and ambedkar was in his own way a very intelligent person and his childhood he he writes in his biography also in his autobiographical accounts he writes about the discrimination that he suffered so he was once going in a tonga and he had paid for the fare and the tonga driver who was driving when he came to know that he was from a lower caste he actually stopped the tonga and he turned it around and turned it upside down and threw him out of the tonga and then he went to wash the tonga so now you can imagine a young man if he gets this kind of experience what is he going to think about it so he in his own way he after he faced this persecution on the caste basis after that he tried to understand where it came from and he he read some books he read Manu Samhita now Manu Samhita itself in its beginning says that this is not a time independent authority that means it is not all the principles of Manu Samhita are going to be applied all times these are more of so this is more of social dharma this can change according to time and place this is more of these are more of social conventions so Manu says that if a panel of wise brahmanas comes together and says that this particular rule will not be applied then that’s fine but he found that Manu Samhita contained many objectionable things objectionable according to modern values and also in fact that it was being very dogmatically imposed so so he towards the end of his life he tried to protest against Hindu against this caste discrimination in India and now it’s a very complex thing but he had his whole theory that what was India at that time should be divided into three parts there should be Muslim Pakistan there should be a Hindi Northern India and there should be lower caste South India and there should be three separate countries but of course that proposal was not accepted and then he became the framer of the constitution and the constitution is a very overall it’s a very balanced document with respect to secularism and other things but towards the end of his life he felt that his attempt to reform Hinduism from within helped him and although he was an intellectual critic of Hinduism at the still he was overall sympathetic of broad Indian culture and that’s why when he rejected Hinduism he said I’ll reject Hinduism in the way that is most that is the least injurious to India and that is since by accepting another Indian religion which is non-discriminatory and that’s he accepted Buddhism there if you look at the history of that times there were there are messengers to representatives from Christianity from Islam all of them were you join us because you know we we don’t have this caste system of course they do not have a caste system but discrimination is there in every religion the Hindus who converted to Christianity and those who convert to Islam they find that there are gradations within them also it’s just the gradation is not because of any discrimination not because of a religion it is because of the mindset the mindset is Isaac or Thomas it can be discrimination so anyway after he converted his Buddhism became increasingly hostile towards its parent religion so now we may say that okay Buddha generally what we say is Buddha came because there was too much meditating in the Hindu culture in the Vedic culture and he taught everything is a Ahimsa that is true but religion is not something which is static religion also evolves according to time so Buddhism as it exists now is at least as it exists in India Buddhism as it exists in America or in the West it is seen as a very progressive and moderate religion where Dalai Lama asked what is the essence of religion he said it’s a compassionate service not God not devotion to God it’s compassionate service so this is something which appeals to people and among all the religions in the world Buddhism in the mainstream media is the religion that is best portrayed many many famous Bollywood stars are Buddhists and they unapologetically proclaim their Buddhism but very few other religious stars can do that with respect to their other religions now very other very few Hollywood stars can do like that so the point I’m making is that Buddhism India because it evolved or not evolved it got a major boost when Ambedkar with his all his followers converted to Buddhism and they came from particular social agenda so in fact at when Buddhism when Ambedkar converted to Buddhism there was you know this Dalai Lama we all know that Panchal Lamas so one of the Panchal Lamas for India who was concerned with Indian affairs he wrote a book called Ambedkar’s Hinduism no sorry Ambedkar’s Buddhism and he said that what Ambedkar has adopted is not Buddhism at all because what Ambedkar because Ambedkar I was not going to his ideology right now but many fundamental principles of Buddhism such as karma such as now Buddhism accepts reincarnation but doesn’t accept soul so for 2500 years Buddhist thinkers are not able to explain what is it that reincarnates but they accept reincarnation so the point is that the soul no sorry reincarnation and karma are accepted as central tenets of Buddhism but Ambedkar devalued them he didn’t exclusively reject them but he did not give them any importance so the Buddhist thinkers at his times Buddhist leaders of his time he says what he’s accepting is not Buddhism actually because he’s not accepting mainstream principles of Buddhism so he accepted Buddhism not primarily because of Buddhism’s intellectual opinion he accepted it primarily as a means to reject the caste discrimination that was then Hinduism and that he did because his approach to Hindu scriptures was shaped primarily by the social experience of Hinduism not an intellectual exposure to Hinduism I’m not saying he was not intellectual he was intelligent but his exposure to Hinduism was not primarily through Hindu intellectuals so that is the background and Buddhism as it exists today in India actually now again when I say when we say Hinduism but there are all kinds of people with Hinduism there can be fraudulent Babas there can be pure Vishnavas there can be so much in between so Buddhism is also like that there is a whole spectrum but Buddhism as an influential today it is more of a or at least Buddhism the Buddhist followers of of Ambedkar and they are the most visible and active segment of Buddhism in India today they are more social actives than spiritual actives they are concerned more with the way the countering the caste discrimination which is there and that is definitely there it’s undeniable and it needs to be countered but in English they are saying don’t throw the baby with the bath water that means if a mother has bathed the baby the bath water is dirty so you should throw in the dirty bath water it’s not like because my baby has bathed in this so I should treasure the bath water also but again throwing away the bath water first take out the baby don’t throw the baby out also so don’t throw the baby out of the bath water so unfortunately what happened is in his rejection of Hinduism he rejected everything that was good in Hinduism also and unfortunately now the caste-based tensions in India are still very high and overall the and the ideological critique of caste-based Hinduism is so prominent in the consciousness of most Buddhists that the other universal non-discriminatory aspects of Vedic wisdom are often completely overlooked so what we need to do is if we say if any social socio-cultural or socio-intellectual teacher Ambedkar is one example but any socio-intellectual leader if he has taken certain positions if he has made certain statements if rather than just condemn statements now he did one thing is that which is in one sense offensive that he has this whole Manu Samhita Dahan Din and they get copies of Manu Samhita wherever they are and they burn it and they consider that as a moment of liberation as a celebration of liberation and that provoked a lot of Hindu mainstream leaders so now that it was his way of expressing his anger at the discrimination that was there but unfortunately that was what that created further anger and that created further hostilities so what we need to do is that we recognize that there is caste discrimination and that needs to be corrected and as far as I can see the way to correct it it has been already done in the Sikon Vaishnav Prabhupada and if you understand the spiritual wisdom and if you understand how the division was originally meant for meant for cooperation not for discrimination and then it was misappropriated so the misappropriation the need to be rejected but the essence needs to be preserved that requires proper presentation proper practice and proper purification so if we do that then this we can understand his position whatever positions he has taken and we can also address the underlying concerns in a proper way. 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