Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 S E C O N D M O O N 06Eventually the conversation changed when we asked him if he wasengaged in any teaching. He became quite animated about the spreadof Buddhism in Uttar Pradesh; apparently thousands of people wereturning up to take the refuges, and he was going to Agra today for a largegathering. Not only were there popular meetings with talks, but peoplewere becoming bhikkhus—he himself had given ordination to many.Things started to link up in my mind. The Indian Buddhist revival ...Untouchables ... mass conversions ... Ambedkar.... The books state thaton October 14, 1956, the then abbot of the Burmese Vihara and seniormostbhikkhu in India, U Chandramani Mahathera, gave the five preceptsto Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar at Nagpur in Maharashtra State,thereby acknowledging his conversion to Buddhism. Even the bookscan’t say how many of Ambedkar’s followers converted with him—somewhere between 200,000 and half a million; statistics are wonderfullypliable, and who counts Untouchables? There may have beenabout sixty million of them at the turn of the century: people who wereneither completely in nor entirely out of the system of four varna(called “castes,” but maybe more like classes) that has acted as the socialand ethical base of the culture since the Aryans invaded over threethousand years ago. These “Untouchables” were not included in thevarna but were bound to its structure by the duty of performing menialtasks—such as handling corpses and excrement—on behalf of the otherswho held them in contempt and treated them as the lowest of thelow. Physical contact with them, eating with them, or drinking fromthe same well was held to defile a high-caste Hindu. Gandhi renamedthe Untouchables Harijan (Children of God) in an attempt to raise theirdignity while preserving the structure of the varna and their positionwithin it. However the Untouchables regard this title as the hypocrisyof a system trying to whitewash itself and nowadays refer to themselvesas Dalits: Slaves.Some say now that these Slaves had been the pre-Aryan inhabitantsof India—but the mainstream of the culture and its interpretations has8 2