We are in urgent need of spiritual leadership equal to the interlocking social, economic, political, and ecological crises of our time – crises that are, at their root, relational and dualistic, born of the many ways human beings have learned to treat one another as separate, as ranked, as disposable. Nearly seventy years before this call was written, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar arrived at strikingly similar terms for a comparably total crisis. In 1956, nearly a decade after Indian Independence, Ambedkar embraced Buddhism, an act that opened a new window through which to view Indian history, particularly for the lower castes and all those who had long suffered under the hierarchies of the caste system. The process of building a new India had already set in motion a range of competing ideological visions, each seeking to reconstruct a national culture capable of honouring both the proud heritage of the ancient past and the egalitarian promises of the modern future. This search drew many creative thinkers toward a progressive and experimental modernism in art and culture, pursued as a common project across ideological and sociological divides.
Yet despite genuine good intentions and shared dreams of a modern India, the country continued to suffer under the weight of entrenched caste divisions and inter-religious tensions. Historical figures such as Kabir, Raidas, Tukaram, Ayothee Dasa, Narayana Guru, Periyar Ramaswamy, Basavanna, and the great social reformer Mahatma Jyotiba Phule had tirelessly fought for the eradication of untouchability and, in the face of severe opposition, worked toward the education of Shudras, Untouchables, and women in pre-modern caste-based society. For these reformers, liberation from caste exploitation, gender oppression, and cultural subjugation – the achievement of liberty, equality, and fraternity – was of paramount importance. Without such liberation, the suffering and exploitation endemic to the Indian socio-cultural environment would continue to be perpetuated by those who wielded dominant power in both society and state.
The forces that proclaimed a vision of a new India – forces largely led by dominant-caste intelligentsia – could therefore offer little genuine inspiration to the cultural and artistic expression of the nation’s downtrodden. It was precisely this reality that led Dr. B. R. Ambedkar to chart a distinct course of evolution for the marginalized and progressive masses of the nation. What was a source of cultural pride for some was, for others, a source of deep pain and historical hurtful humiliation. The social struggle to claim what was rightfully due became a defining imperative for most of the lower castes in post-independence India.
Ambedkar saw no hope for these communities within the confines of a Brahmanical-Hindu culturally hierarchical society. His vision for India’s downtrodden combined the possibilities of democracy with the promises of egalitarian Buddhist philosophy, a vision that lay explicitly outside the inhuman caste system and the fragmented cultures it produced. His ideas of a free India were anchored in the principles of Justice, Dignity, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, which he conspicuously enshrined in the Preamble of the Indian Constitution. Buddhism, for Ambedkar, provided the philosophical foundation upon which a democratic, egalitarian, and casteless Indian society might be built.
The acute awareness of inequality and exploitation created the urgent need to free human beings from all unequal systems and to integrate this aspiration into the central teachings of the Buddha’s compassionate humanism. Dr. Ambedkar was firmly of the opinion that genuine reform could only take place through a transformation of the heart and mind. In his philosophy, religion does not exist for its own sake but must always serve the development of the human person. His revolution was non-violent, oriented toward peace and harmony among different castes and religions, with the ultimate aim of establishing true humanity in a free India. These were the foundational ingredients of Ambedkarite cultural and socio-spiritual imagination and, this essay will suggest, they are also foundational ingredients for any contemporary Buddhist movement chaplaincy that hopes to hold both the intimate work of bearing witness and the structural work of transformation.
The flowering of oppressed people’s creative expression in independent India came much later, following the unprecedented social liberation of formerly Untouchable communities in the 1970s. This awakening took the form of an oppressed – Dalit, if I may use the political category – cultural and literary movement, which first emerged in Maharashtra before spreading across other regions of India. Guided by a new aesthetic shaped by the spiritual philosophy of Buddhism and the humanistic vision of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, a new culture and creativity emerged, seeking to offer an egalitarian model and a transformative message to Indian society. The awakening of Buddhist creativity brought about a sea change in the form and content of literary and dramatic arts since the 1970s, yet it remained to be more fully expressed in the visual and performing arts – forms which, in the contemporary context, have become among the most elitist and esoteric of all cultural practices.
They alone rise who strive. Some of you nurse the wrong notion that you will not rise in this world. But remember that the age of helplessness has ended. A new epoch has set in. All things are now possible…[i]
The path that Dr. Ambedkar charted for Indian society to bring about radical transformation was comprehensive, operating simultaneously at the socio-political, cultural, psychological, and spiritual levels. Notably, he understood both the self and culture not as fixed, unchangeable givens, but as dynamic and revisable categories. It is here that Buddhism, with its foundational emphasis on experience as flux and transformation, plays a dominant role – a role that Ambedkar himself exemplified through his own journey of conversion and renewal, and a role that positions his thought as an early and rigorous instance of nondual approaches to relational crisis: Ambedkar refused to separate the inner transformation of mind from the outer transformation of social and political order, treating each as incomplete without the other.
Where to Go? A Brief Overview of Dr. Ambedkar’s Quest for a New Identity
Ambedkar’s lifelong quest for a new human identity reached its culmination just two months before his death. On October 14, 1956, at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur – now remembered as the site of the Great Mass Conversion – he embraced Buddhism along with several hundred thousand of his followers. In doing so, he infused a new confidence into his people and into Indian society at large, leaving behind the inherited identity of caste and declaring his new Buddhist identity as a “new birth.”[ii]At his conversion ceremony, while delivering his speech and administering the twenty-two vows, he declared: “I am reborn today.”[iii]
This declaration was both a deeply personal act of conviction and a conscious effort to lay down a path that others could follow, a path toward a new human identity, or what may be called the recognition of the true Human-Self. It is also significant that in this project of transforming and contextualizing identity, Ambedkar deliberately chose a religion of Indian origin, one that could both legitimize the claims of the Untouchables and affirm their rightful place within the Indian heritage.
Ambedkar firmly held that the Buddha was an Enlightened person, not a god in the conventional sense. He emphasized that while human beings possess both body and mind, mere physical freedom is insufficient. For a full human life, freedom of the mind is of prime importance. Through his conversion, Ambedkar thus made a successful attempt to emancipate the Untouchables from their identity crisis, restoring them with new moral confidence and providing them with a new, dignified sense of self.
Recent scholarship on what is now widely termed Navayāna or Ambedkarite Buddhism has clarified just how deliberate this reconstruction was. Ambedkar’s own text, The Buddha and His Dhamma, reframes the Buddha less as a teacher of release from the cycle of rebirth than as a teacher of social emancipation and ethical practice; dukkha, the suffering at the centre of the Buddha’s teaching, is recast in explicitly social terms – as inequality, humiliation, and structural oppression rather than only the inward suffering born of craving and attachment. Liberation, in this reading, is not release from samsara alone but emancipation from oppressive social structures and the building of an ethical community grounded in equality.[iv] This is precisely the move that makes Ambedkar’s Buddhism a resource for movement chaplaincy rather than only for individual pastoral care: it insists, as a matter of doctrine and not merely of application, that the mind cannot be liberated in isolation from the social body it inhabits.
The Role of Buddhism in Dr. Ambedkar’s Vision
Buddhism is, without question, an inseparable part of ancient Indian heritage. It erects a path of emancipation and liberation from suffering for all human beings, irrespective of caste, colour, race, or gender. Historical and cultural memory are indivisible parts of the human self. Lower-caste people have been systematically denied many forms of rights within the Indian caste culture, a reality that testifies to the painful degradation of human existence wrought by untouchability and the caste system, practices that remain disturbingly present in contemporary Indian society.
Buddhism transformed the hierarchical trajectory of Indian cultural history. As the Buddha taught, every self possesses an equal capacity to achieve Buddhahood (sambodhi), and this capacity is entirely independent of caste. The enlightened self is, by definition, beyond discrimination of birth, caste, race, colour, or gender. Each person can attain enlightenment; the self therefore holds an equal potential for inner development and cannot be denied its capacity for growth on the basis of birth or social origin.
Dr. Ambedkar truly recognized that the concept of caste, and indeed all forms of inequality, is ultimately rooted in the mind. He acknowledged this in one of his most celebrated insights:
The greatest thing that the Buddha has done is to tell that the world cannot be reformed except by the reformation of the mind of man, and the mind of the world.[v]
This was, for Ambedkar, the great project of reconstructing Indian culture: reviving the egalitarian and humanistic values already latent within the Indian heritage, specifically through a return to Buddhism from its own native soil. He elaborated on the transformative function of religion in the following terms:
The function of the Dhamma (religion) is to reconstruct the world, is to cleanse the mind of its impurities and to make the world the kingdom of the righteousness. Its function must promote learning open to all and must break down barriers between man and man, and should teach that the Worth not Birth is the measure of man.[vi]
It is important to distinguish Ambedkar’s philosophical position from that of Karl Marx. While both were concerned with the liberation of oppressed people, Ambedkar’s struggle for emancipation was not aimed merely at material goals or the acquisition of political power. Rather, it sought the spiritual transformation of human beings, a transformation modelled on the enlightenment of the Buddha himself. Ambedkar led his struggle by recognizing both self-respect and the spiritual needs of the human person:
With justice on our side, I do not see how we can lose our battle. The battle to me is a matter of joy… For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is a battle for freedom. It is a battle for the reclamation of the human personality.[vii]
Unlike Marx, Ambedkar affirmed the necessity of religion for a free society, while insisting that not every religion is worth having. In his celebrated essay Buddha or Karl Marx, he wrote:
Religion is necessary for a free society, not every religion is worth having. Religion must relate to the facts of life and not to theories and speculations about God or soul or heaven or earth. It is wrong to make God…, soul…, animal sacrifice as the centre of religion. Real religion lives in the heart of man and not in the Shastras (sacred texts). Man and morality must be the centre of religion. If not, religion is a cruel superstition. The function of religion is to reconstruct the world and to make it happy and not to explain its origin or its end. Worth and not Birth is the measure of man. What is important is high ideals and not noble birth.[viii]
Applied Theology: The Fundamental Pillars of Ambedkar’s Dhamma
The passages assembled above are not, on close reading, a loose collection of aphorisms. Taken together, they constitute what might be called Ambedkar’s applied theology, or, adapting Paul Tillich’s phrase, a reasoned discourse of ultimate concern addressed not to metaphysical speculation but to the concrete reconstruction of persons and societies. Scholars have already begun to describe Ambedkar’s mature religious writing in comparably systematic terms, reading The Buddha and His Dhamma as an instance of Ambedkarite Buddhism functioning as a liberation theology in its own right.[ix] What follows unpacks six interlocking pillars of that applied theology – a first attempt at what this essay proposes calling a Dhammology, a systematic, socially engaged account of the Dhamma’s public and political function, offered in the same rigorous, applied spirit in which Ambedkar himself worked.
I. The Anthropocentric Principle: Religion for Human
Ambedkar inverted the customary relationship between religion and the human person. Where conventional religious authority typically subordinates the person to doctrine, scripture, or priestly office, Ambedkar insisted that religion exists solely for the development of the human person and possesses no legitimate purpose apart from that end. A religion that demands the sacrifice of human welfare, dignity, or reason to preserve its own institutional or doctrinal continuity has, on this principle, already failed the only test that matters. This anthropocentric reversal is the axis on which the rest of Ambedkar’s applied theology turns, and it anticipates by decades what the field of socially engaged Buddhism would later formalize as a defining commitment: that Buddhist practice is validated by its capacity to relieve concrete suffering and reconstruct social relations, not by its fidelity to inherited cosmology.[x]
II. Moral Centering and the Metric of Worth
If religion exists for man, then man and morality – not God, soul, ritual, or scripture – must occupy religion’s centre. Ambedkar’s formula, worth and not birth is the measure of man, functions simultaneously as ethical claim and sociological indictment: it names the single criterion by which any human being’s standing ought to be judged, and it exposes the caste order’s founding violation of that criterion, since caste assigns worth by accident of birth rather than by ethical achievement. This pillar reorients the entire apparatus of religious value away from ritual purity and toward character, conduct, and contribution – precisely the reorientation that socially engaged Buddhist ethicists have identified as central to any Buddhism capable of addressing structural, rather than merely personal, forms of suffering.[xi]
III. Fallibilism and the Rejection of the Sanatan
Ambedkar’s insistence that nothing is infallible, nothing is binding forever, and everything is subject to inquiry and examination performs a double labour. Doctrinally, it echoes the Buddhist teaching of anicca, impermanence, extended from the psychophysical world to social and religious institutions themselves: no social arrangement, however ancient or however sanctified as sanatan, or eternal, can claim exemption from critical scrutiny. Philosophically, it also carries the unmistakable signature of Ambedkar’s training under John Dewey at Columbia, where he absorbed a thoroughgoing experimentalism that treated every belief, institution, and social arrangement as a hypothesis to be tested against its consequences for human flourishing rather than a fixed truth to be defended.[xii] Fallibilism, in Ambedkar’s hands, becomes an emancipatory doctrine: if nothing is sanatan (eternal), then the caste order’s claim to eternal, scripturally sanctioned status is itself falsified by the very impermanence Buddhism teaches.
IV. Process Ontology: Being Is Always Becoming
Ambedkar’s claim that being is always becoming extends the fallibilist principle from social institutions to the self. Just as no social arrangement is permanent, no self is a fixed, finished substance; the human person, like everything else in a universe governed by dependent origination, is always in process, always capable of further ethical and spiritual development.[xiii] This process ontology underwrites Ambedkar’s own biography: his conversion was not merely a change of religious label but a lived demonstration that identity itself is revisable, that the Untouchable-self assigned at birth is not a metaphysical destiny but a social construction that can, through disciplined effort, be unmade and remade. The same conviction underlies contemporary socially engaged Buddhist accounts of social transformation, which likewise refuse to treat oppressive social identities as fixed, and instead approach both self and society as sites of ongoing, intentional becoming.[xiv]
V. Radical Equality: Worth and Not Birth
Building on the moral centring described above, Ambedkar’s applied theology insists that all human beings are equal in the one sense that finally matters religiously: each possesses, as noted earlier in this essay, an equal capacity for sambodhi, for enlightenment, entirely independent of caste, race, colour, or gender. What is important, in Ambedkar’s own words, is high ideals and not noble birth. This pillar supplies the doctrinal warrant for the constitutional principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity that Ambedkar enshrined in India’s founding document: the Constitution’s egalitarianism is not, on this reading, a secular import grafted onto an indifferent religious tradition, but the political expression of a prior and more fundamental Buddhist claim about the equal worth of all persons.
VI. Universal Maitri: Loving-Kindness Owed Even to the Enemy
The final and most demanding pillar is Ambedkar’s insistence that loving-kindness or fellowship toward all must never be abandoned, and that one owes it even to one’s enemy. This is maitri raised to its most exacting standard: not benevolence extended selectively to allies and co-religionists, but a discipline of compassion that holds even under conditions of betrayal or defeat. Ambedkar’s own political biography contains a striking, if bitterly contested, instance of this pillar in practice. In September 1932, during the crisis precipitated by Mahatma Gandhi’s fast unto death against separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, Ambedkar chose to negotiate rather than allow Gandhi to die, signing the Poona Pact in exchange for reserved rather than separately elected seats – a settlement Ambedkar himself would later condemn in the sharpest terms as a coerced surrender of his people’s constitutional safeguards.[xv] Subsequent Ambedkarite scholarship has read this episode as exposing a fundamental asymmetry between two spiritualities of nonviolence: Gandhi’s fast functioned, in this critical reading, as an instrument of moral coercion deployed in defence of caste Hindu political hegemony, while Ambedkar’s decision not to let Gandhi die, even at what he himself judged to be ruinous cost to his own community’s political power, enacted precisely the unconditional maitri his later Dhamma would make central to Buddhist ethics – loving-kindness extended to an adversary at real and reckoned cost, rather than proclaimed only where it was safe or costless to do so.[xvi]
Read together, these six pillars describe an applied theology that is anthropocentric in orientation, ethical rather than metaphysical in centre, fallibilist and processual in epistemology, radically egalitarian in its account of human worth, and unconditional in its demand for loving-kindness. This is precisely the profile scholars of socially engaged Buddhism have identified as characteristic of the movement Thich Nhat Hanh named engaged Buddhism in Vietnam decades later – a Buddhism whose contemplative and ethical resources are deliberately mobilized toward the transformation of unjust social structures rather than reserved for private cultivation[xvii]. Ambedkar’s Navayāna Buddhism, formulated a full generation before that term entered wide circulation, stands as one of engaged Buddhism’s earliest and most systematically worked-out instances – a Dhammology, and the specific historical resource this issue’s call for a Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy might most productively theorize forward.
Keep reading the full essay in our issue, “Movement Dharma: Towards a Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy.”
SANTOSH RAUT (also known as Maitriveer-Nagarjuna) hails from Maharashtra, the heartland of the Ambedkarite Buddhist movement. A Dhamma teacher, theologian, and scholar of Buddhist Aesthetics and Philosophy, he has long been a thought leader and organizer within broader Asian networks of Engaged Buddhism. Following his doctoral studies in Buddhist Aesthetics, Kant, and Schopenhauer at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Coddington Court UK, Santosh joined the Department of Aesthetics and Philosophy, EFL University in Hyderabad as an Assistant Professor. He combines this work with his role as Deputy-Chairman of the Nagarjuna Training Institute and founder of The Babasaheb Ambedkar Philosophical Society (BAPS) at Nagaloka in Nagpur. Founded in 1994 near the site where Dr. Ambedkar formally converted to Buddhism in 1956 along with hundreds of thousands of followers, Nagaloka is a major Ambedkarite hub connected to the Triratna Bauddha Mahāsaṅ gha (TBM). Currently, Santosh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, where he previously served as a Buddhist Ministry Initiative Fellow
Art by Maria Reneé Johnson
[i] For details see B.R. Ambedkar’s speech at a Meeting of Untouchables, in February, 1933, Bombay.
[ii] Ambedkar’s 22 Vows at the conversion ceremony, October 14, 1956, Deekshabhoomi, Nagpur, India. Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s Conversion, Critical Quest, New Delhi, 2005, p. 25.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Menšíková, Navayana Buddhism and Social Emancipation in Modern India, Journal of Global Buddhism 2023, Vol.24 (2): 64–82, (2023); also Witkowski, as cited in Navayāna Buddhism and the Conditions of Religious Continuity, Religions 17.7 (2025): 821.
[v] Ambedkar, B. R., Buddha or Karl Marx, New Delhi, India: Critical Quest, 2010
[vi] Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma, (Book III, What is Sadhamma), p. 279. Vol 11, BAWS.
[vii] Dr. Ambedkar delivered this historic speech on July 20, 1942, at the All India Depressed Classes Conference held in Nagpur. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches Vol. 17 Part Three Dr. B . R. Ambedkar And His Egalitarian Revolution, p. 276
[viii] Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, Chapter 18, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches Vol Vol 3, p. 442.
[ix] Rebecca Sablok, Dr. Ambedkar’s Encounter with Buddha: Ambedkarite Buddhism as Liberation Theology, Proceedings of EHSSS-17 (2017). 7th International Conference on Education, Humanities and Social Sciences Studies (EHSSS-17) May 2-3, 2017 at Pattaya (Thailand)
[x] Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, eds., Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, SUNY Press, 1996.
[xi] Sulak Sivaraksa, Seeds of Peace: A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society, Parallax Press; Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism (1996).
[xii] Scott R. Stroud, The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction, University of Chicago Press, 2023.
[xiii] Also see, Raut Santosh I., “Three S’s of Being: Swayambhu, Skahndhas, and Sunyata in Amnedkar’s Deconstrucgtion of Caste,” CASTE A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, 7(1), 1–26. 2026.
[xiv] Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism (1996); on the systemic dimensions of greed, ill-will, and delusion, see David Loy’s writing on the “three poisons.”
[xv] Poona Pact; Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar–Gandhi Debate , Haymarket Books, 2017.
[xvi] Roy, The Doctor and the Saint, Haymarket Books, 2017.
[xvii] Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism, 1996.
