Write short note : Impact of Buddhism on Indian society (2000)
Buddhism arose in the Gangetic plain of the sixth–fifth century BCE as a sramanic (renunciatory) movement, and its challenge was organisational before it was doctrinal: it attacked sacrifice, the priestly monopoly of scripture and the ranking of worth by birth. Its impact on Indian society is therefore best read institutionally.
A challenge to the Vedic social order
- The dhamma located moral worth in conduct and intention, not in birth, and preaching in Pali and the Prakrits broke the Sanskrit monopoly that had reserved scripture to the twice-born. The yajna economy, which converted wealth into ritual rank through Brahmin priests, was declared wasteful.
- Max Weber, in The Religion of India (1916), observed that Buddhism remained a religion of contemplative virtuosi: the layman earned merit by supporting monks. It offered individuals an exit from caste while leaving the lay social order largely in place.
The sangha as a new form of association
- The sangha was ordered by rule and by seniority of ordination rather than varna, held property corporately, decided collectively and codified discipline in the Vinaya. Within its boundary, ritual rank was suspended — the first large Indian association organised on achieved membership.
- Admission of the bhikkhuni order gave women a recognised religious vocation that the Brahmanical ashrama scheme withheld, though its rules kept nuns subordinate to monks: equality of entry, not of standing.
Urbanism, trade and the state
- Romila Thapar, in From Lineage to State (1985), links the sramanic sects to the second urbanisation of the Ganga valley. Towns, coinage, artisan and merchant guilds (shreni) and the gahapati household produced groups whose wealth carried no ritual rank; Buddhism honoured frugality, labour and trade without requiring status to be purchased from priests.
- Ashoka’s patronage in the third century BCE carried the dhamma along trade routes as a translocal civilisational idiom, linking kingship to an ethic rather than to sacrifice.
Absorption, decline and return
- The Brahmanical order answered by absorption: retreat from animal sacrifice, the taking up of ahimsa and vegetarianism, and finally the Buddha’s placement among Vishnu’s avataras. With royal patronage withdrawn and monasteries dependent on land grants, Buddhism had largely faded in India by the thirteenth century.
- B. R. Ambedkar‘s conversion at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, with hundreds of thousands of followers, and The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), recast it as Navayana — a this-worldly ethic of prajna, karuna and samata directed against caste. Gail Omvedt, in Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (2003), reads it not as quietism but as India’s oldest anti-caste tradition.
- Census 2011 counted about 8.4 million Buddhists, 0.7 per cent of Indians, of whom some 6.5 million live in Maharashtra — a distribution that maps the conversion movement rather than the ancient faith. Mass diksha ceremonies continue each Dhammachakra Pravartan Din.
Conclusion
Buddhism’s significance for Indian society lies less in the number of Buddhists than in the pressure it exerted: it forced Brahmanism to absorb non-injury, to organise monasticism, and to live with a permanent internal critique of birth-ranked worth. In the twentieth century it supplied Dalit politics with something Sanskritisation could never offer — an exit that refuses the hierarchy instead of climbing it.