Abstract
Anagārika Dharmapāla is primarily known in India for having begun an aggressive campaign for the restoration of the Mahābodhi Temple with the Buddhists led by him. For this purpose, he founded the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891 and began publishing The Maha Bodhi journal. In line with the anti-Hindu propaganda of the Victorian Indologists, Dharmapāla in both his writings and speeches, unequivocally contested the multireligious history of the Mahābodhi Temple. Dharmapāla was also behind inspiring a mass movement of South India’s low caste Tamils to embrace Buddhism. He and Iyothee Thass urged the dalits during the 1891 census to register themselves as “casteless Dravidians.” Notably, this mass movement of Tamil dalits to embrace Buddhism, inspired by Dharmapāla, occurred half a century before Ambedkar. To the Sri Lankans Dharmapāla is known for the revival of Buddhism and as an ardent Sinhala nationalist patriot. Before Dharmapāla began his campaign, Hindu-Buddhist conflict was unheard of at Bodh Gaya. He threw an open challenge to the mahant his proprietorship of the Mahābodhi Temple. However, after failing to evict the Śaivite mahant by buying him out, on 25 February 1895, he and his associates attempted to install a Japanese image of the Buddha in the Temple. However, Dharmapāla was thwarted in his attempt by the mahant. Thereafter, he went to the court of law. The Calcutta High Court in its judgment of 22 August 1895 announced that though the temple was the property of the mahant, the Buddhists, like the Hindus, had the right to perform worship at the temple. After the court judgement, Lord Curzon decided that the temple “would be held in trust by the government.” Later in 1920, Dharmapāla took the matter to the Indian National Congress which found it impossible to handle the issue as the freedom movement itself had been affected by communalism. After independence, the Bodh Gaya Temple Act, 1949 was passed on 19 June 1949 and the government of Bihar assumed responsibility for the management of the temple. In 2002, the Mahābodhi Temple became a designated World Heritage site. The Bodh Gaya Temple (Amendment) Act 2013 allowed the Gaya District Magistrate to be the Chairman of the Temple Management Committee, irrespective of her/his religious affiliation. Though people of all Indic faiths are still free to pray and worship at the Mahābodhi Temple, they do so as if it were now only a Buddhist shrine.
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Notes
- 1.
After giving a speech at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Dharmapāla declared in his diary, “some likened me to Christ!!!” (Trevithick 2006: 95, 98). Another time, he heard the Buddha tell him in one of his dreams: “You are my cousin” (diary of 2 November 1894 quoted at Roberts 1997: 1020).
- 2.
The adjective anagārika, an antonym of agārika (householder, layman), is a person who has adopted anagāriyā (state of homelessness amounting monkhood) i.e., kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajati (to shave off beard as well as hair, put on the yellow robes, and wander forth out of the home into the homeless state (see Rhys Davids and Carpenter 1890-1911: i.60). However, Dharmapāla does not become a fully-ordained monk till about shortly before his death and remained a sort of semi-religieux adopting a sort of halfway house life.
- 3.
Anāgārika (
) as against the correct form Anagārika (
). - 4.
The threads of Buddhism-based Sinhala nationalist ideaology of post-independence Sri Lanka were at least partly embedded in the propagandist work of Anagārika Dharmapāla. The massive victory of the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) led by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike on a vanguard of Sinhala nativism is at least partly credited to Dharmapāla (see Roberts 1997: 1006–1007).
- 5.
The chemistry between Hindu and Buddhist traditions in Bodh Gayā is not only palpable with images of the Buddha per se, but also with the image of the Buddha’s foorprints. Hindu pilgrims worship the Buddha’s footprints in the Mahābodhi Temple complex as those of Lord Viṣṇu and even observe the Chhath festival in the Mucalinda pond.
- 6.
When Dharmapāla “placed the image in the Mahābodhi temple, he placed not an Indian image of Śākyamuni Buddha, as would have been appropriate at the site of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, but a Japanese image of Amitābha. Although the image of Amitābha was certainly Buddhist, it would originally have been situated in a devotional and ideological context quite different from—and quite at odds with—Dharmapāla’s own vision of simplified and purified Buddhism” (Kinnard 1898: 836).
- 7.
The High Court Case turned out to be a loss of considerable amount of money for Dharmapāla and the Maha Bodhi Society, both with meager resources at that time, as they had to pay a huge amount of money to the tune of Rs. 22,500 in legal fees (see Joshi 2019: 114). In sharp comparison to the resources. At the disposal of Dharmapāla and the Maha Bodhi Society, the mahant was enormously rich, his annual income being over Rs. 1,00,000 (see Sinha and Saraswati 1978: 81).
- 8.
After his unsuccessful adventure to instal the Japanese Buddha image, Dharmapāla shifted the image to the Burmese Rest House located in the immediate vicinity. He also made the rest house, built by the mahant for visiting Burmese pilgrims, his permanent base in Bodh Gayā. Through the act of installation of the image of the Buddha and its daily worship, Dharmapāla and his friends turned the rest house, a secular structure, into a sacred place, but not for long. Working promptly to capitalize on his legal victory, particularly when row with Dharmapāla was in the open now, the mahant made another diplomatic move in November 1895 by making a representation to the government that Dharmapāla could not occupy it permanently. The local commisioner disapproved of the conduct of Dharmapāla in installing the image and also instructed the magistrate to ordered Dharmapāla to remove the image within one month from the Burmese Rest House failing which, he was told, it would be moved to the Indian Museum in Calcutta (see Joshi 2019: 124–125). Most interestingly, now Dharmapāla appealed to the Hindus of India for support saying that “The Hindus have never been a persecuting people. Toleration is their creed. Toleration is the habit of the Hindu mind” (Anon. 1896a: 10–11). However, the offer of an olive branch to the Hindus was only ephemeral. Soon he went back to his earlier demands through confrontational campaigns. Though on 25 May 1896 the Lt-Governor permitted the Japanese image to be kept where it was, the Calcutta High Court ordered in February 1910 the ejection of Dharmapāla from the Burmese Guest House (see Joshi 2019: 125–133).
- 9.
Dharmapāla’s own knowledge of Buddhism was based upon its Western scholarly interpretations and he considered that Ceylonese Theravāda Buddhism “In its primitive purity… is only to be found in the Southern Church of Buddhism, which is identified with Ceylon” (Guruge 1965: 287). This type of views on Theravādin Buddhism appear to have vitiated the environment to such an extent that non-Theravādin pilgrims found it hard to stay at the Sri Lankan monastery. Japanese critic and philosopher Kakuzo Okakura who paid a visit to Bodh Gayā towards the beginning of 1902, started consultations with the mahant for the purpose of purchasing a plot of land to the west of the temple complex directly facing the Mahāodhi Tree to build a rest house for the followers of Mahāyāna Buddhism of Japan as their “School of Buddhism differs essentially in its tenets from those of Ceylon or Siam” (Anon. 1923: 36). Though the mahant was quite open to the idea, the Bengal government rejected the application on the ground that “the multiplication of interest there is undesirable” (Trevithick 2006: 172). Later, under the presidentship of Panchen Lama, many leading Buddhists from Tibet and the Himalayan states and some other Asian countries, the Buddhist Shrines Restoration Society (BSRS) was founded on 9 January 1906 in Calcutta. Dharmapāla considered it a rival organization and condemned its functioning (Dharmapāl 1917: 147). The BSRS, predominantly catering to Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna interests, appears to have been founded basically as these sects felt frustrated with Dharmapāla’s baised and bigoted Theravādin version of Buddhism (Anon. 1896: 2).
- 10.
The organization, founded in 1915, was originally named Sarvadeśak Hindū Mahāsabhā which in 1921 was changed to Akhil Bhārat Hindū Mahāsabhā (All-India Hindu Grand-Assembly) and became popularly known as Hindū Mahāsabhā.
- 11.
The Hindu Mahasabha defined a Hindu as “any person professing to be a Hindu or following any religion of Indian origin and includes Sanatanists, Aryasamajists, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists and Brahmos & c.” (Gordon 1973).
- 12.
Several initiatives leading to the election of a Buddhist monk as the president of the Mahasabha, was a significant move towards resolving the issue. On one hand it showed the party’s desire to co-opt the Buddhist community in the larger definition of the Hindu fold, and on the other it also displayed the inclination of the Buddhist monks to respond positively to the move.
- 13.
However, in their bid to maintain Hindu control over the temple, the orthodox members of the Hindu Mahasabha took the position that the Buddha was an incarnation of Lord Viṣṇu. For instance, the Hindu Mission of Calcutta in its special of 7 April 1935 at Trikoneshwar temple rejected the claim that the Mahābodhi Temple was “a shrine exclusively of the Buddhist world” on the ground that that only that Buddha had been worshipped by Hindus as the incarnation of Viṣṇu but also because Buddhism had been regarded “as a branch of the Aryan religion of India” (All India Hindu Mahasabha Papers, NMML, File No. C-11. Quoted at Jha 2018). The Hindu Mission, therefore registered its disapproval of the bill which proposed to form a committee for management of the Mahābodhi Temple.
- 14.
Some people have even taken the perverted view that as Muslims have been living in Bodh Gayā since the medieval period and own significant stretches of land adjacent to the sacred site “it is not only important, but also necessary, to involve local mosque authorities in any discussion regarding the future of Bodhgayā” (Joshi: 2019: 19).
- 15.
“In mid-May, a group of 2,000 Buddhist pilgrims from Maharashtra became so agitated at the presence of Hindu gods and priests at the temple here that they broke several idols and slapped several of the Hindu holy men. Deen Dyaldaya Giri, a senior official at the Hindu Math, or pilgrimage site here said ‘The basic controversy is whether it is a Hindu temple or a Buddhist temple. We see it as both.’ Swapan Dasgupta, an editor for The Telegraph, a Calcutta newspaper, and a columnist for the weekly news magazine Sunday, voices these concerns, labeling ‘insidious’ any ‘attempt to put Hinduism into the straitjacket of a codified religion,’ adding, ‘If the Buddha is outlawed from the arena of devotion, it will be another major step in the emotional fragmentation of India.’” (Gargan 1992).
) as against the correct form Anagārika (
).References
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Sarao, K.T.S. (2020). The Politics of Anagārika Dharmapāla and Its Aftermath. In: The History of Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8067-3_7
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