6th
Kripasaran Memorial Lecture
Bengal
Buddhist Association.
22nd June 2015
How Buddhism was re-discovered
in modern India
Jawhar Sircar
A few days ago, the Chief
Minister of Andhra Pradesh did a bhoomi puja at a site in Guntur district that he
called the new city of Amravati, the new capital of Andhra. It is interesting
because it was in this area that Col. Colin Mackenzie had stumbled upon some
puzzling ruins in 1798, about which he had heard from local villagers. He was in the Guntur-Nellore region, as part
of the British campaign against Tipu Sultan of Mysore, and he had thus to move
on with his troops for the assault upon Tipu Sultan at Srirangapatnam. But
something must have twirled in Mackenzie's mind, because he revisited the area
several years later, in 1816: in his new capacity as the Surveyor General of
India. For the next four years, he made several illustrations of what he
thought were some old ruins of Deccan Jainism and he presented his documents
and 85 sketches of Amravati before the Asiatic Society in Kolkata.
No one understood then that
these findings actually related to another religion that India had almost
forgotten, Buddhism. It was soon to come back silently, to haunt India’s
historical landscape from which it had disappeared a thousand years ago, as
silently. So effectively had Buddhism been “forgotten” that very few people had
even a proper idea of what had been it's phenomenal contribution to art and
architecture. Almost all the grandeur that existed in pre-Islamic India, like
the mighty stupas at Sarnath and Sanchi or the ancient universities of Taxila
and Nalanda had been lying covered under centuries of neglect or destruction,
or both. The mighty stupas of yore had become ghostly ruins from which some would
steal bricks. They were reduced to just names like dhansa-stupa, which could mean “the stupa that was destroyed”, as
well as “the ruins of a stupa”. Very interesting! Even place names like Paanch-tupi (five-stupas) and Bhilsa Topes meant so little, and the
majesty of early Indian architecture and the sculpted arts of Ajanta or Sanchi,
had little relevance to Indians, just two centuries ago.
How many knew where the great
temple of Bodh Gaya ‘the veritable Vatican of Buddhism’ had disappeared? Buddhism
had survived and prospered outside its homeland, but in its cradle and nursery
its existence was snuffed out: not only physically but in terms of history,
education and popular memory. So strong was the power of ‘amnesia’ that when some
officers of the Madras Army stumbled upon some caves in the Bombay Presidency
in 1819, no one could even recall its name. So the site had to be denoted by
the name of the nearest village: Ajanta. Even after that, it took another eighty
years more for the British and Indians to understand and appreciate the real
purport of what was unearthed at Ajanta. It was only after that could we start
telling the whole world that it was this magnificent Ajanta art of India that
had influenced the religious art of more than one third of human race.
Let us quickly recapitulate
some of the other major Buddhist monuments that were discovered in less than a
century from Mackenzie’s Amaravati. The
next significant discovery made by General Ventura in 1830 who uncovered the
Manikyala Stupa at Taxila. This very ancient city, was said to be the capital
of Parikshit, the grand-son of Arjuna of Mahabharata, and Vyasa is reputed to
have had organised the first recital of the epic poem here. It had been an important Buddhist centre and
the Jataka tales describe it in great details.
Taxila had seen Darius of Persia and Alexander the Great. Taxila carried valuable evidence of several periods,
pre-Mauryan, Indo-Greek and Kushan. This ancient centre of India’s first
university had been destroyed by the Huns in the 5th century CE, but
it lay in ruins for 1400 years. They had
been lying close to the Grand Trunk Road and so near Rawalpindi: yet, no one was
really bothered to excavate the area and to rediscover its past glories. It
appears, therefore, that India had not only forgotten its Buddhist centres, but
had at times also forgotten a large part of its non-Buddhist history.
But how did the British find
out what Indians had forgotten? One was their boundless curiosity and the other
was their scorn for Indian concepts of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’, as well as for
ghosts and evil spirits that prohibited Indians from venturing into ruins.
Cobras, and other dangerous creatures that inhabited these ruins did not deter
them either. But in all fairness, some British scholars and archaeologists did
utilize Indian or Chinese texts, that
provided valuable clues to many historical sites. The question here is: Why is it that the
British used texts that were available to us, but we had chosen to ignore?
Alexander
Cunningham, who later became the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey
of India depended a lot on the testimony of Chinese pilgrims and their travel
accounts of the Buddhist sacred places in India. By using the bearings and
distances mentioned by travellers like Fa Xian and Xuan Zang, Cunningham
succeeded in fixing the locations of many of the famous sites mentioned in
ancient Indian texts and thus rediscovering them. These records, of course, had
their own limitations which resulted in all kinds of controversies as, for
instance, the identification of Kapilavastu. Here, for instance, the field of
speculation was very wide because the bearings in the accounts of Chinese
pilgrims were not consistent.
Cunningham unravelled the
mighty Dhameka Stupa at Sarnath in 1835, which was quite unlike other
hemi-spherical stupas, because it was cylindrical. It marked the spot of the ‘Deer Park’, where
Buddha gave his first sermon after attaining his enlightenment. Dhamma-Cakkappa-Vattana Sutta containing the 4
noble truths. And yet, it lay in
complete ruins that had to be rediscovered afresh.
But it was James Prinsep’s
remarkable discovery of the Brahmi script two years later in 1837 that really
shook our history. Just the words
‘Devanampiya Piyadasi’ which translate as “Beloved of the Gods of Gracious
Mein” brought Ashoka, out of the dark recesses of history. He had been
mentioned in the Buddhist chronicles of Sri Lanka by the same epithet, but he
could now be fixed with historical accuracy.
After so many years of speculation, Ashoka Maurya was finally demystified
and firmly established on the throne of Buddhism and India. This helped in
joining the dots of the missing grandeur of India’s real heritage, for none
personifies the plural soul of India more than him.
Cunningham’s discovery of
Sanchi Stupa in 1851 was perhaps the most educative of all our stupa sites, and
here again, we find that its name was lost from our memory. When one glances
through the pages of James Fergusson’s History
of India and Eastern Architecture one would observe that even as late as
the mid-19th century, this mound was in ruins and its toranas and vedikas were
covered with vegetation all over. ASI’s restoration has indeed done wonders and
we are now able to recognize the characters from the Jataka Tales that
embellish the gateways. In 1854 he
published the Bhilsa Topes which attempted to establish the history of Buddhism
based on whatever architecture and archaeology evidence so available up to that
point of history. In fact, Himanshu
Prabha Ray mentions Sanchi with special emphasis in her significant work ‘The Return of the Buddha: Ancient Symbols
for a New Nation’.
Cunningham’s doggedness led
him to rediscover and re-excavate Bodh Gaya in 1861 that Hamilton Buchanan had
reported half a century ago as a place covered by a thick forest. He had also
remarked with sadness that there was no trace or respect for the faith of the
Buddha, at all. One may be justified in feeling that as a symbol of defiance,
Bodh Gaya required more than just the forces of nature to be obliterated from
human sight and mind. Cunningham’s further discoveries in 1862-63 were as
important in the treatment of historical memory loss. He, identified Ramnagar
as the ancient ‘Ahich-chatra’; Kosam as the great ‘Kausambi’ and Sahet Mahet as
the historic ‘Sravasti’. These jewels
from our past had all to be discovered by the British, who actually retrieved
them on the basis of textual evidence and archaeology, what India had chosen to
forget.
The indefatigable Cunningham
then moved to the Bharhut Stupa and physically uprooted large numbers of stone
carvings from this site,in true imperial style, and transported them to
Calcutta’s Indian Museum. They served there as a ‘classroom’ and exhibition of
the excellence of Buddhist art and architecture. Succeeding generations of art
historians, archaeologists, museologists and connoisseurs derived their
education from these eloquent stones in Kolkata. Thus, within just eight
decades, Buddhism “that had died a natural death in India” was suddenly brought
back from the graveyard of our memory, and resuscitated. These structures and
sculptures of Buddhism compensated somewhat for the apparent lack of outstanding
tangible cultural heritage that stared blankly at us from the end of the
Harappan period: which, itself was yet to be re-discovered properly, until the 1950s.
Thus, if the grandeur of Buddhist architecture and cave temples had not been
discovered, the present country called India would not have much to show by way
of its grandest architectural heritage for about nearly two millennia years,
starting from 1500 BC: except for a few temples at places like Ellora, and
those of Pallavas.
It is still open to
speculation as to whether the Buddhist edifices that British archaeologists,
especially the Scots who went about with a mission, took pains to unearth had
actually crumbled into unrecognisable ruins.
Was it just because patronage had shifted to a revived and recharged
Brahmanism? Some felt, however, that many Buddhist sites were still better off as
compared to quite a lot of neglected Brahmanical spots. The former had, at least, some continuing
patronage from pilgrims from Ceylon, Thailand and other countries. It is of course, a fact that Indians were not
unduly bothered about this history, until Western education did the job and
therefore, it may not be surprising that there was no serious interest in
rediscovering and reclaiming our past glory. But, is rather surprising that while Ellora,
that lay on the trade routes, was never forgotten, Ajanta which is just up the
hills some distance away, lay completely obliterated from memory. We had surely exported the most significant
intellectual and cultural contribution to the world, the religion of Buddha and
of universal peace. But why did we lose the material civilization of Buddhism
almost forever, until the spade of the British archaeologists hit stones under
the ground? Charles Allen touches this
issue in his “The Buddha and the Sahibs”
as well as in his “Ashoka: The Search for
India’s Lost Emperor ” It is recalled that for nearly a thousand years,
between the reign of Emperor Ashoka in third century BCE to the death of Harsha
Vardhana in 647 AD, Buddhism had ruled the minds of innumerable Indians.
What happened during this dark interregnum of nearly twelve centuries, between
Harsha Vardhana and Amaravati that Buddhism was forgotten, so vigorously?
One can see signs of both ‘destruction’ and ‘preservation’ quite
prominently. No statue or icon of any deity has been beheaded in such large
numbers as those of the Buddha. In fact, many actually associate him not with a
full bodied statue, but with a decapitated head. We see these truncated heads of Buddha in
hundreds in museums and galleries all over India and the world but do we ask
who beheaded such a large number of Buddha sculptures? The second tendency of
‘preservation’ of Buddhist statuaries has often been for appropriating them
within the larger religion. Kalyan Kumar Dasgupta (1985, 6-7) cites several
sculptures of Bodhisattva Avalokiteswara have been taken into temples and
worshiped as the popular Lokeswara Siva in Bengal. The assimilation of diverse
beliefs, or even appropriating their best features, has been intrinsic to
Hinduism and several of the great contributions of Buddhism like ahimsa and vegetarianism, the saffron
robe, the institution of monasteries and monks have been internalised by the
major religion of India. To most common
Indians, there was really no great conflict between (say) Shaivism and Vaishnavism
or even Buddhism or Jainism, as all had the same Indian appearance and
rituals.
Is there any evidence that Buddhism was physically eliminated? This is
not the subject of the present talk and this question is an explosive one. But one would just touch upon the issue and
cite the legend of Mihirkula, the Hun ruler who was converted to Brahmanism in
the 6th century AD. He is reported to have unleashed a wave of
violent destruction of Buddhist monasteries in Punjab and Kashmir (Berzin 2001)
and this is quoted by Kalhana in his Rajatarangani
some 600 years later. The deeds of Pushyamitra Sunga, the Brahmin minister who
overthrew the last Mauryan Buddhist ruler in Magadha are also cited (Omvedt,
2013) to prove the first ‘anti Buddhist reaction’. Shashank, the ruler of
Gaur-Bangla, took pride in the destruction of many stupas and cutting down the
sacred Bodhi tree at Gaya. Even the historian SR Goyal mentions that “according
to many scholars, hostility of the Brahmans was one of the major causes of the
decline of Buddhism in India” (Goyal, 2002).
Epigraphica India (Vol XXIX P
141-144) records that Vira Goggi Deva, a South Indian king, described himself
as…”a fire to the Jain scripture……and adept at the demolition of Buddhist
canon”. It also records “the deliberate
destruction of non-Brahmanical literature like books of Lokayat-Carvaka
philosophy by Brihaspati that was mentioned by Alberuni in the 11th
century” (Mookerji: ).
Similarly, AN Longhust, who conducted excavations at Nagarjunakonda, recorded
(1938, 6) in his Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India that “the
ruthless manner in which all the buildings at Nagarjunakonda have been
destroyed is simply appalling. This cannot represent the work of
treasure-seekers alone since so many pillars, statues, and sculptures have been
wantonly smashed to pieces.” There is no doubt that Islam did play a major role
in physically destroying Buddhist centres like Nalanda and Odantapuri, and also in slaughtering thousands of monks as
well driving them away from India.
The point here is that there
may have been occasions when over-zealous groups have attacked or destroyed
some of the edifices of Buddhism, but this does not appear to be the usual modus operandi, before the arrival of
Islam. A recent study of the Bengal Puranas indubitably shows that the
Buddhists were mocked at, cast as mischievous and malicious in Brahmanical
narratives, and subjected to immense rhetorical violence. But rhetorical
attacks are not the same as physical destruction. The silent word-of-mouth
stigma that the very sight of any image or likeness of Buddha was
‘inauspicious’ was perhaps more dangerous and more effective in removing his
memory from the minds of Indians, than any real physical assault. That the Brahman
did not like the Sramana (Buddhist)
is clear from a lot of stories and sayings, though among the thousands of pages
of sacred Hindu literature, there is hardly any exhortation to go and destroy
the structures of someone else’s religion. But one cannot vouchsafe what small
overzealous groups may have committed though it is best not to enter into
speculation, as to what could have happened more than a millennium ago. Because at that time, there were reports of
strong sectarian conflicts even between different groups of Hindus and medieval
passions are difficult to re-examine, in the modern context.
When we use the term
‘amnesia’ we relate to memories of architectural and artistic grandeur of India
that was definitely Buddhist, in origin and development. We are not discounting the fact that Pala
Kings of Bengal had continued to support Buddhism between the 8th
and early 12th centuries, i.e, well after the rest of India had
moved away from Buddhism. It created the
‘Pala School of Sculptural Art’ and some of the gigantic structures of
Vikramshila, Odantapuri and Jagat Pala are evidence of their munificence. In fact Dharma Pala’s Buddhist Vihara
of Somapura in Paharpur, Bangladesh, is considered to be the largest such
structure in the Indian sub-continent and is now a “World Heritage Site”. The Palas were better known for sculptures,
and these consisted of both Buddhist and Brahmanical deities as the Palas were
rather even handed when it came to patronage of the arts. But let us not forget that even the Viharas and other architectural
creations of the Pala era lay under tons of earth once they were destroyed by
the forces of Bakhtiyar Khilji in the first decade of the 13th
century. Six hundred years is a long
enough time for people to forget even
the last gasp of Buddhism in India, especially if the mainstream of Indian
memory, attention and discourse moved away so drastically from Buddhism, even
though Southeast Asia, China, Japan and Tibet continued to follow the Pala
style of architecture.
What is interesting is that
once Buddhism was rediscovered, however, several Indians came forward to
celebrate its glory. Most of them incidentally belonged to the Brahmanical
castes that earlier had been accused of having “taken pains” to erase the glory
of Buddhism from public memory. The first name that comes to mind is Anagarika
Dharmapala (1864-1933), the Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalist and Writer who
pioneered the revival of Buddhism in India and was the first Buddhist in modern
time to preach this religion in the West and other parts of Asia. As Anagarika Dharmapala has recounted, Neel
Comul Mukherji was one of those who helped him settle down and says that when
he had visited Buddha-Gaya in January 1879 and witnessed the abandoned and
neglected condition of the central shrine of Buddhism and resolved to restore
it, it was Babu Neel Comul who had “remained true and loyal, encouraging and
protecting at all crises in the subsequent history of the Maha-Bodhi Society.
Such sweet sympathy and so much human love I was shown that the utopian idea of
the resuscitation of Buddhism in the land of its birth actually came into
objectivity”.
When the Buddha Gaya Maha
Bodhi Society was founded in Sri Lanka on May 31, 1891, its cause was taken up
not only by Buddhists, but also by other genuine souls like Mary Elizabeth
Foster and Col. Henry Alcott (1832-1987).
While the former was often called the foster mother of Dharmapala, the latter
was complimented as one who had “dedicated his life to Buddhism and the people
of Asia”. Madam Blavatsky (1831-91)
identified herself as a Buddhist but not “with the sorry state of the Buddhist
community” that they found even in Sri Lanka in the second half of the 19th
century. Alcott and Blavatsky set up the
Buddhist Theosophical Society in June 1880, though Anagarika did not join it
for ideological reasons.
One year after the founding
of the Maha Bodhi Society, Karmayogi Kripasaran Mahastavir (1865-1926) founded
the Bengal Buddhist Association in Kolkata. We are fortunate to get this
opportunity to celebrate the 150th Birth Anniversary of Kripasaranji
this year when Sir Asutosh Mookherjee was elected Life President of the Maha
Bodhi Society in 1916 unanimously, Anagarika Dharmapala said: “We thought it an
honour to have the foremost personality in Bengal as the President of the Maha
Bodhi Society. He was at heart almost a Buddhist, he openly confessed his love for
the Lord Buddha and was always prepared to help the cause of Buddhism. The
introduction of Pali in Calcutta University was due to his personal effort.”We
must also remember the role of Ven. Kripasaran in this momentous decision of
Calcutta University and in starting the study of Pali in the schools and
colleges. He urged Sir Asutosh to extend
affiliation to numerous schools and colleges.
Unlike the sophistication of Anagarika Dharmapala, the approach of
Kripasaran Mahasthavir was essentially vernacular and more earthy. He came from Chittagong, the only district in
the whole of ‘mainland’ India that had a very sizeable population of Buddhists
for several past centuries. His
preachings were essentially in Bengali and his own dialect of Chittagong, which
may explain why his fame has remained largely confined mainly to Bengal.
Kripasaran’s tireless efforts
helped in producing generations of scholars who studied the Buddhist texts once
again and conveyed the sublime messages to the modern world. Ven.Kripasaran
also selected three young students to go to the University of London for higher
studies on Government scholarship, and one of them was the iconic Benimadhab
Barua. Kripasaran was successful in convening a World Buddhist Conference,
where monks and lay congregated from many parts of the world and Buddhism was
back on the radar. In the early part of
the 20th century, the Barua Buddhists of Chittagong followed
Kripasaran to set up several Viharas
and in many cities of India, like Lucknow, Hyderabad, Shillong and
Jamshedpur. While the Maha Bodhi Society
had attached the educated and upper castes of India to part-take in the glory
of Buddhism, Mahasthavir was perhaps the first Indian Buddhist leader who spoke
for the downtrodden.
The revival of Buddhism in
the 20th century was also due to great social reformers like Jyotiba
Phule (1827-1890) and Periyar Ramaswamy (1879-1973) who relied upon Buddhist
egalitarianism as indigenous counterpoise to brahmanical casteism in
India. Movements for ‘self-respect’ like
the Dravidian one or the Dalits utilized Buddhism are extensively and Mahima
Gosain of Odisha even rejected Hinduism altogether in favour of the new
Buddhist creed. The Sakya Buddhist
Society in Madras and similar groups came up all over India to espouse
Buddhism, around this time.
Bodhanand took up the case of
Dalits and this is where the largest support base would be coming from in
modern times. His associate, Chandrika
Prasad, founded the Bahujan Kalyan Prakashan in UP.
Kripasaran Mahasthavi’s
disciple, Bodhanand Mahastavir (1874-1952) was ordained in Kolkata in his presence in
1914, though he was born into a Bengali Brahmin family. The last name that I would mention is that of Acharya Ishwardatt Medharthi
of Kanpur (1900-1971) who also took up the cause of Dalits and Buddhism most
passionately.
We
may leave the link with the Dalit movement at this stage and return to where we
were, i.e, the celebration of the re-discovery of Buddhism in modern India.
We can go on endlessly with this list
and among those who made Buddhism their central theme were scholars like
Haraprasad Sastri and several others of the Asiatic Society as well as the Bangiya
Sahitya Parishad.
But, Amiya Samanta reminds,
"Few had appreciated the teachings of Buddha so deeply as Rabindranath,
whose creative genius drew inspiration from Buddha’s teachings on social
equality and universal love and produced magnificent literature. To Tagore,
Buddha was the greatest human being and before whose image at Bodh Gaya he
chose to prostrate himself, an act which Tagore never did again in his
life"(Samanta, 1991). Tagore said
with deep emotion: “I am a disciple of the Buddha. But when I present myself before those holy
places where the relics and foot-prints of the Buddha are found I come in touch
with him to a great extent”. On 8th
May, 1935, the Buddha Purnima Day, Tagore said, “On this full-moon day of
Vaisaka, I have come to join in the birthday celebrations of the Lord Buddha,
and to bow my head in reverence to him whom I regard in my inmost being as the
greater man ever born on this earth”.
One of the most important statements made by Tagore: “Materials of
different shades of Indian thought and culture are confined in Buddhist
literature and due to the lack of intimacy with them, the entire history of
India remains unfulfilled. Being
convinced of it, cannot a few youths of our country dedicate themselves for the
restoration of the Buddhist heritage and make it a mission in life?”
Mahatma Gandhi went one step
further and said “what passes under the name of Buddhism now may have been
driven out of India, but the life of the Buddha and his teachings are by no
means driven out of India”. “Buddha
never rejected Hinduism but broadened its base.
He gave it a new life and a new interpretation”. Pacifism was impressed as part of India’s
International Dharma along with the Panchsheel Route. India appeared to have made up for all the
loss in just one century that started from the 1880s and went up to the 1980s.
Pandit Jawhar Nehru was
profoundly influenced by the Buddhist philosophy said that “The story of Gautam
Buddha has influenced me right from childhood and I liked the scientific and
ethical attitude”. On Oct 3, 1960, Nehru
declared before the United Nations General Assembly: “In ages long past, a
great son of India, the Buddha, said that the only real victory was one in
which all were equally victorious and there was defeat for no one”.
Thus, even if there may have
been some feelings of bitterness a millennium ago, there was no rancour in the
minds of any Indian, Hindu or Buddhist, when this great religion was
re-discovered. In fact, the name of
Buddha continues to be a favourite among people of this State who name
their sons as ‘Amitabha’, ‘Gautama’, ‘Buddhadev’, ‘Siddhartha’, ‘Tathagata’ and
so on, as Buddha is now the collective pride of all Indians. Plays and dance
dramas abound on his life and the Bengal and other schools of art took him to
great heights.
But it still remains a major
mystery as to how he and his contribution, as well as all major Buddhist
monuments and art was almost forgotten so completely, for a thousand years.
Scholars need to work seriously and come up with credible answers.
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