Navayana: Buddhism as Liberation

Ambedkar spent twenty years investigating alternative religions before announcing his conversion to Buddhism in 1935. He rejected Islam as too dogmatic, Christianity as too entangled with Western colonialism, and Sikhism as too closely associated with a particular ethnic community. Buddhism offered what he needed: a tradition rooted in Indian soil, founded by a figure of Kshatriya origin who rejected the Brahminic order, and built on the principles of reason, equality, and compassion rather than revealed scripture and hereditary hierarchy.

Ambedkar's reading of the Pali canon was selective but principled. He kept the Four Noble Truths (reinterpreted as a diagnosis of social suffering), the Eightfold Path (reinterpreted as a programme for ethical and social practice), the emphasis on reason and independent inquiry, the rejection of caste and hereditary privilege, and the centrality of compassion (karuna). He set aside karma as cosmic mechanism (too easily weaponised to blame the oppressed for their own condition), rebirth (metaphysically speculative and untestable), and the goal of personal nirvana (too world-denying for a liberation movement).

For Ambedkar, the core of the Buddha's teaching is not metaphysics or soteriology but social ethics: the establishment of a community (the Sangha) grounded in equality, mutual respect, and shared practice. The Buddha did not merely teach individual liberation — he founded an institution that embodied a counter-caste social order. The conversion ceremony Ambedkar led on 14 October 1956 — six weeks before his death — was not a private religious act but a mass political declaration: approximately half a million people simultaneously rejecting the caste order and entering a community of equals.

The Buddha and His Dhamma was completed shortly before Ambedkar's death on 6 December 1956 and published posthumously in 1957. The concept of Navayana — the Fourth Yana or New Vehicle — was Ambedkar's own coinage, though the term has been contested within Dalit Buddhist communities.