From: hassan@cup.portal.com (hassan monu alam)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian,soc.culture.indian,soc.culture.bangladesh
Subject: Buddhist Hindu Row
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 19:05:21 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)

Far Eastern Economic Review Aug 20
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A Hindu-Buddhist row

Ancient temple may trigger off a new communal 
crisis

by Hamish McDonald in Bodhi Gaya

For all his adult life, Prajna Deep travelled 
the railways across northern India as a ticket 
inspector, enforcing the intricate class 
barriers and entitlements of the railway 
reservation system.

Four years ago, after 32 years service, Deep 
retired. He handed his pension and plot of land 
to his wife and family and said farewell. Deep 
travelled to this neglected comer of Bihar, in 
northeastern India, and entered a Buddhist 
monastery. Now wearing orange robes and 
addressed as Bhikku Prajna Deep, he explains why 
he forsook

Hinduism. "I am from a backward caste," he said. 
"The caste system was pinching me, and I was 
sick of it. I decided to become a Buddhist. By 
converting I am away from the Hindu system."

The place where Deep tries to renounce the world 
is the birthplace of Buddhism itself. Some 2,500 
years ago, a prince from a kingdom on what is 
now the India-Nepal border called Siddartha 
Gautama left his family and wealth to become a 
wandering sadhu (Hindu holy man), seeking 
spiritual release through ascetic practices. He 
was meditating under a spreading
peepul tree (a variety of fig), when he reached 
his insight that meditation rather than 
asceticism was the path to release--and becoming 
a Buddha.

Around 300 BC, the Buddhist emperor Ashok 
constructed a temple next to the tree, on which 
around AD 600 a later ruler erected a heavily 
ornamented stone spire. The temple has suffered 
many attempts at its destruction by rulers of 
other faiths, but its original base survived and 
the tower was reconstructed in 1860-80. The 
tree, which now spreads out five huge trunks, is 
the fourth generation from the original, 
according to a sign. One legend is that Ashok's 
daughter carried a sapling to the ancient 
Buddhist centre at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka and 
that centuries later, when the original was 
burnt by a hostile king, a sapling from this 
offshoot was in turn brought back to Bodhi Gaya.

But even under the tree of enlightenment, Deep 
and other converts are finding it hard to escape 
the claims of Hinduism --or their caste 
identity.

In the inner chamber of the Bodhi Gaya temple 
where Deep watches over the stream of pilgrims, 
a large gold-leafed statue of a seated Buddha 
gazes down from an alcove in the wall. On the 
floor right in front of the Buddha statue is 
stone slab carved with a circular design This is 
a Shivalingam, a phallic image representing the 
deity Shiva. Many d the pilgrims put their hands 
together be fore the Buddha statue, then under 
the guidance of Hindu pandits (priests) sprinkle  
water and flower petals on the Shivalingam.

For the Hindus this presents no theological  or 
social problems. Buddhism shares certain key 
beliefs with Hinduism reincarnation and 
spiritual betterment over a series of lifetimes, 
and the ideal of mukti, or release from the 
material world. Gautama Buddha has been simply 
added to the pantheon of Hindu gods "There is 
one religion, one god," said Narayan Dubey, a 
pandit guarding the Shivalingam. "Lord Buddha is 
the 9th  incarnation of the Lord Vishnu, so it 
is the same thing."

But, to many Buddhists, the very  presence of 
the Hindus is offensive. "They not only worship 
their idols but they try to make our Lord Buddha 
the 9th reincarnation of Lord Vishnu," said 
Prafulla Chandra Roy, a historian who lives i 
Bodhi Gaya and campaigns for the temple to be 
handed over to Buddhist manage ment. "It has 
been an attempt by Hindus to assimilate Buddhism 
into Hindusim both by physical means and by 
theory."

The Hindu presence has triggered off a fierce 
backlash from adherents of Buddhism, a religion 
that preaches abandonment of desires and 
emotions. Like the Hindu-Muslim dispute over an 
ancient building at Ayodhya that has claimed 
scores of lives and threatened a communal 
holocaust, the Bodhi Gaya temple could be the 
pivot of another crisis.

The Hindu-Buddhist dispute is being watched by a 
circle of foreign spectators, including the 
Buddhist countries stretching from Sri Lanka to 
Japan, many of which have built monasteries in 
Bodhi Gaya for visiting monks.

On 16 May, the anniversary of Buddha's 
enlightenment, over 1,000 Buddhists crowded into 
the temple chambers and harassed the Hindu 
priests. A woman pointed to the Buddha images 
draped in Hindu colours and asked who they were. 
When the pandit replied that they were the 
Pandawa brothers, the heroes of a Hindu epic, 
she slapped him. Others smashed the water-pot 
over one of the Shivalingams.

Up to then, the Buddhist campaign to regain 
Bodhi Gaya had proceeded without violence. It 
started around 1860 when the king of Burma sent 
monks to serve at the temple. In 1891, a senior 
monk from Sri Lanka visited Bodhi Gaya and 
decided to devote his life to regaining Buddhist 
supervision. Interventions came from Buddhist 
associations in Japan, Burma and Thailand early 
this century. Some Hindu notables, such as the 
poet Rabindranath Tagore, lent their support.

In 1949, Indian authorities passed through the 
Bihar state assembly a new Bodhi Gaya Temple 
Management Act, which imposed more even control 
under a committee comprising equal numbers of 
Hindus and Buddhists. The chairmanship, and 
casting vote, went ex officio to the Gaya 
district magistrate, as long as he or she was a 
Hindu. If not, another Hindu official would be 
deputised. This left a feeling among Buddhists 
of a tilt towards the Hindus. In practice, both 
communities have had to accept some decisions 
they disagree with.

The latest events signal the injection of an 
explosive new element--caste politics. Many 
Buddhists in India are recent converts who under 
Hinduism had belonged to the so-called 
untouchable groups responsible for dealing with 
excrement and dead animals and whose very shadow 
was said to pollute others. The great 
Independence-era leader of the untouchables, B. 
K. Ambedkar, led mass conversions to Buddhism in 
the 1950s to escape the stigma of alleged 
impurity. The aggressive Buddhists who caused 
turmoil on 16 May were predominantly such 
Ambedkarites who had come in busloads from the 
western state of Maharashtra.

Historian Roy, who also belongs to the 
Ambedkarite movement, explains that the presence 
of Hindu pandits is especially provocative to 
former untouchables. "They come here to what 
they think is their own temple, and find there 
are still Brahmins and pandits bossing around 
ordinary people," he said. "They wonder why in a 
Buddhist temple there should be Brahmin 
priests."

After the May confrontation, the atmosphere at 
Bodhi Gaya has been charged. Roy received 
threatening telephone calls and letters. Slogans 
appeared on the walls around the temple grounds 
saying "Dr P. C. Roy is a thief"; "Ambedkarites 
are exports of Pak [Pakistan]"; "The Five 
Pandawas and the Shivalimgam must not be 
removed"; and "Stop becoming false Buddhists."

Some of the graffiti is signed "BJP"-initials of 
the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu 
nationalists who are India's biggest opposition 
group. BJP leaders maintain that Hinduism is a 
culture and national identity rather than a 
religion; as such converts to Buddhism, Islam or 
Christianity cannot be said to have left it.

From their side, some Buddhists allege that the 
temple management committee has been corrupted: 
funds misappropriated; branches of the tree 
chopped up and sold as souvenirs, and secret 
meetings held with Hindu extremists.

Rag Bala Verma, the district magistrate who 
talked down the 16 May confrontation, appears 
confident that it will not go further. But she 
agrees that it has the potential to become 
another Ayodhya. ''11' can be, if some vested 
interests fan it up," Verma said. "Left to 
itself it would not."

The unstable ingredient is the desperation of 
the Ambedkarites, who see the failure of Buddha 
to make lasting reforms in his own land. After 
its early peak, Buddhism went into a long 
decline, and the caste system strengthened. 
Despite recent conversions its adherents are 
still a tiny minority of India's 850 million 
people. 
Xref: sparky soc.culture.indian:37780 soc.culture.hongkong:14682