Ambedkar and Buddhism

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There are at present several crore untouchables in India, the vast majority of whom are underprivileged in every sense of the term. In the course of the last thousand or so years saints and reformers have sought to ameliorate the lot of the untouchables-none of them with any great success. Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, himself an untouchable by birth, who came to the conclusion that there was no salvation for the untouchables within Hinduism and that they would have to change there religion. In October 1956, he and half a million of his followers, therefore, became Buddhist and explains what Buddhism meant to him. Sangharakshita’s depth of experience and clear thinking are obvious throughout the book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sangharakshita

Sangharakshita was born Dennis Lingwood in South London, in 1925. Largely self-education, he developed an interest in the cultures and philosophies of the East early on, and realized that he was a Buddhist at the age of sixteen. The Second World War took him, as a conscript, to India, where he stayed on to become the Buddhist monk Sangharakshita. After twenty years in India, he returned to England to establish the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) in 1967, and the Western Buddhist Order in 1968. A translator between East and West, between the traditional world and the modern, between principles and practices, Sangharakshita's depth of experience and clear thinking have been appreciated throughout the world.