Periyar participated in a function to celebrate the 2501 st
birth anniversary of the Buddha at Maha Bodhi Sangham at gmore,Chennai, on 15th
May 1957 and made the following observations –
~~~~~~~~~~
Why do we celebrate Buddha’s birthday? Buddha jayanthi does not
mean worshipping a picture or an idol of Buddha with camphor, coconut and
eatables. It means that we have decided to learn something from Buddha’s life
and teachings and follow them in our own lives. I am taken for an atheist. If
nastika means a person who denounces the Vedas, Sastras (Doctrines) and Puranas
(Mythologies), I am undoubtedly one. I believe it is right and proper for a
person of that description to speak on Buddha. A man who believes in the Vedas,
Sastras and Puranas must indeed be very clever to speak on an occasion like
this. He must be one who is well – trained in deceiving the people and one who
is hypocrite himself. It is not uncommon for such a man to speak of Buddha as
some ancient sage or mahatma (Supreme Soul) akin to those he reveres.
Neither Rishi nor Mahatma
Buddha was neither a saint nor a mahatma (Supreme Soul). He was
one who actually opposed the Hindu saints (rishis) of old times and that is why
we are here to celebrate his day. Just as Buddha is no rishi or mahatma, so is
Buddhism not a religion in the accepted sense of the word. Many people wrongly
regard Buddhism as a religion. A religion must have a god in its center. It
must have also things like heaven (moksha) and hell (naraka) and soul and the
lord (paramatma), sin (papa) and virtuous deed (punya). To be a great religion,
one god is not enough; there must be many of them. These gods must have wives,
concubines and all conceivable human relationships. Indians are familiar only
with such a religion.
Rational thinking the greatest attribute
To start with, Buddha declared that it is not at all necessary
for man to concern himself with god. He wanted people to be bothered with man
alone. He did not speak about moksha (heaven) and (hell) naraka. He laid stress
on man’s character and right conduct. Wisdom with rational thinking, he said,
was the greatest attribute of man. A thing is not to be believed in just
because a rishi (sage) said it or a mahatma wrote it. It is absolutely
necessary for every intelligent human being to examine a proposition with his
own intellect and arrive at the truth himself.
Buddhism is therefore not a religion and we have pleasure in
participating in Buddha’s birthday only for that reason. Buddha’s rationalism
called forth a severe reactionary opposition. He lived some 2,500 years ago
when barbaric religious practices were the order of the day in India. He stood
up boldly against the religion of the day; and the great opposition to his
teaching is proof of Buddha’s greatness and the power of his word. The people
who wrote and spoke after him to destroy his rationalist platform, tell the
tale of the stupendous efforts undertaken to revive the shaken barbaric Hindu
religion.
Reference in Ramayana about Buddha
The Ramayana has spoken ill of Buddhism. The Ramayana was
rewritten to take its later huge proportions to counter Buddha’s teachings. The
Ramayana which existed prior the Buddha was only a small story. The Vaishnavite
Nalayira Prabandham, the Saivite Thevaram etc. have taken pains to ridicule and
belittle Buddha. The Buddhists and the Jains have been decried as atheists, robbers,
murderers, and enemies of vedic sacrifices. The Siva Bhaktas (devotees of
Sivan) have prayed to Siva to give them the power to molest the wives of
Buddhists.
The meaning of Nastika
Buddha is ordinarily taken to refer to a person. Buddha means
buddhi or intelligence. Anyone who uses his intelligence is a Buddha. All
people are endowed with intelligence but only those who use it intelligently
can be Buddhas. The word Siddha conveys a similar meaning. Siddha is one who
controls his sense. God Vishnu is the center for Vaisnavism; but for Buddhism
buddhi or intellect is the center. To-day the word ‘nastika’ (atheism) is made
to one, who denies the existence of god. But the fact is that one, who denies
the existence of god and uses his intellect and logically argues about things
is taken for a ‘nastika’ (atheist). People who denounce Brahmanism are also
treated as nastikas (atheists).
Twisted to all terrible meaning
Sometime ago a Buddhist conference was conducted at Erode. The
Head of the World Buddhist Society, Mr. Mallala Sekhara, very nicely said in
his opening address that we were all gathered there as so many Buddhas. The
Encyclopedia Britannica has described Buddhism as one which calls for the use
of Buddhi or intellect and which denounces blind belief.
To-day intellect is hardly given any place of importance.
Schools and colleges do not ask people to use their intelligence and question
tradition, reaction, and superstition. If a few do use their intellect, they
are immediately branded as ‘nastikas’ (atheists), an appellation that has
really no meaning. The rationalist has often to take great trouble to deny that
he is a nastika (atheist), for the term has been twisted to mean all terrible
things.
Even the Buddha did not ask people to blindly believe what he
preached. He called upon them to weigh his words, shift them according to their
intelligence and accept that part of them which appeared to them to be
reasonable.
Looked at heavens with naked eyes
Gouthama Buddha preached his principles to people 2,500 years
ago to suit their illiteracy then. The wisdom of the people had its limits.
What was said then cannot all be cent per cent true to-day or cent per cent
applicable to-day. To take the Buddha word for word to-day, is, to my mind,
another form of ‘asthikam’ (atheism). People looked at the heavens then with
naked eyes and could know only broad features. To-day we see through powerful
telescopes and examine the black spots on the sun. To believe only in what the
ancients knew is to limit human creative intelligence and purposeful progress.
Aryanism made the country barbaric
It would be true to Buddism to assert that knowledge improves
with advancing times and that we must adjust our ideas in relation to the
progress made. Sticking to old ideas as the final word, is to betray
intellectual backwardness and stop all advancement in rationalism.
Buddha arose at a time when Aryanism had made the country a
primitive barbaric irrational land. The men who wrote the Sastras and Puranas
were intelligent in their own way, to suit their imperialist colonialist
tendencies. The good of the masses was never their concern. The Sastras and
Puranas prove the point beyond doubt.
Puranas dated after Buddha
When stating that the history written by the Britishers must be
disbelieved, the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in the North India keeps on writing
about the silly Mythologies and the undemocratic Sastras. Mr. Munshi was at the
head of it. Dr. Radhakrishnan and millionaire Birla are important members in
it. They have produced a book on the “Vedic Age” and Mr. Munshi has a great
part in it. Even there it has been said in the foreword: “The ancient days were
barbaric. The Puranas and the Itihasas are not history and they do not record
the happenings of the period. It is all imagination. The word ‘Vyasa’ means
story writer”. The Puranas entered the people’s heads and started to rule them;
and that was the cause of our difficulties.
More than 75 per cent of the Puranas are stated to date after
the Buddha. To counter the rationalist teaching of the Buddha, the Puranic
rishis (sages) wrote the stories about the avatars (incarnations), the chief of
which is that of Krishna, to divert the people and attract them to Brahmanism.
Miracles of Hindu deities have always excited the special attention of the
people and Krishna’s epic is full of sex and obscenity. Having done this much,
divinity was also added to it and the Bhagavad Gita was written and added on to
the Mahabharata at a much later period.
Buddha for our Revolutionary purpose
On the 23rd January 1954, we conducted a Buddhist Conference at
Erode. Why did we do it? Was it to make ourselves Buddhists? Did we call upon
the people to desert the Hindu religion and go over to Buddhism? No. For what
then was the conference called in the name of the Buddha? It was because we
find in the teachings of Gowdhama Buddha full support for all that we want and
for all that we want to destroy as degrading to the Hindus. Buddha’s
philosophy, his tenets, and his sermons stand by our Self-Respect and
Rationalist movements. The gods, creeds, Sastras, Puranas and Ithihasas that
enslave our people are the things we want to discard and Buddha’s teachings and
principles are of tremendous value to us for our revolutionary purposes.
An authority for our ideals
Some of the things we propagate to-day were taught by Gowdhama
Buddha 2,500 years ago. The Buddhism serves as an authority for our ideals.
When the Self-Respect ideals are propagated by a mere Ramasami, (Periyar) there
are some, who feel that he is not big or important. They think that I could not
be bigger than the Gita. For such people at least the authority of the Buddhism
is a great encouragement. It will not then be so easy for the traditionalists
to brush aside our ideals. They require to be told that rationalism is as old
as the Buddhism, and that nothing very much new is being said now.
Accepted and worshipped by Hindus
For historical reasons, Buddha has been accepted by the Hindus.
He is even being worshipped. Yet history tells us that the Buddhists were
subjected to persecution and torture, their monasteries were burnt down, and
their religion very nearly suppressed in India by the Hindu fanatics. Some
Buddhists were set adrift on the high seas and left to die. In spite of all
that, it has never been possible for the Hindus to erase the memory of the
Buddha from the Hindu mind.
Brahmins made him Avatar of Vishnu
Finally the Brahmins were obliged to accept Buddha as the tenth
avatar of Mahavishnu, thus making Buddhism a sub division of the all – embracing
Hinduism, akin to saivism and vaishnavam. They may or may not have done the
right thing in those old days, but the fact remains that Buddhism did not
completely disappear from the Indian soil. The government of free India has
also found it impossible to forget Buddha. His teachings have been accorded
official recognition to the exclusion of those of Saivism and Vaishnavism – the
right and the left hands of Brahminic Hinduism.
Dharma Chakra in National Flag
The Buddhist symbol of the Dharma Chakra has found an honoured
place in our National Flag. The Asoka pillar at Sarnath consisting of the four
lions has been adopted as our national architectural symbol and this has become
the emblem which adorns the shoulders of all our military officers, the bonnets
of all our ministers, state cars and the post cards of every day use in the
remotest villages. Since independence, Buddha’s birth day has been declared a
public holiday.
Can our movement belittled
What do all these mean?
It means that the government of free India has accepted Buddha
and his teachings. It has not been possible for the government to adopt any
Hindu symbol, Saivite or Vaishnavite as the national symbol. This means that
Hindu symbols are unfit for All – India national purposes. I regard this as a
revolutionary turn in our people’s history. If therefore we point out that the
Self-Respect Propaganda that we make, was the subject of the Buddha’s teaching
2,500 years ago, it must be possible for the people to realize that we are
doing no more than what the government itself has already accepted. It is
therefore impossible for the Brahmins, Congressmen, Pandarasannadhis,
Sankaracharyas and Matathipathis to belittle our / Reformation movement.
Kural twisted to suit Brahminic teachings
One of the subtle tricks of Brahmins was to accept rationalist
teachers as their own and then twist and turn their teachings to suit the
undemocratic, authoritarian Brahminic teachings. First they did it with Buddha.
Next they did it with hiruvalluvar. Before the Self-Respect Movement adopted
his Kural as its scripture, the Brahmins and their Sudra slaves had also spoken
highly of the Kural only to twist its real meaning. Brahmin commentator
Parimelazhagar has imported into his commentary most of the Aryan tenets, and
almost succeeded in hiding the genuine truths of Thiruvalluvar thoughts. It was
only after we took up his Kural and expounded its real truths that it started
to shine once again in all its ancient glory and splendour. To-day the whole
land is filled with Kural associations and groups. More and more of the Kural
is prescribed for study in schools with less and less of the caste and
superstition-ridden texts of Aryan translation in Tamil like the Ramayana and
the Mahabharatha. We are now doing a similar thing to Buddhism. The truth about
this religion is being propagated, to the dismay of the orthodox, tradition –
bound Hindus. Their jealousy anger does not however, bother us.
No wisdom in Saints’ Teachings
Buddha gave the first place to rationalism. He refused to find
wisdom in the writing of the ancient saints or divine scholars. He wanted the
people to search for the truth themselves. Refusing comment on the existence or
otherwise of a thing called god, he proceeded to dethrone atma or soul, since
atma had been used as the spark of the paramatma or god, thereby bringing in
the idea of god in a different way. A spark of god cannot be the instrument to
gather sin and virtue, evil and righteous deed, since god has been described to
be perfect and all –wise. It was this incorrect inter-relation between the atma
and the paramatma (Soul and Supreme god) that came in for severe criticism at
the hands of Buddha. Idolatry in all forms, the worship of personal gods,
ritualism and superstition were all condemned by Buddha. Almost everything held
divine and sacred by the Aryans received hammer blows in Buddhism.
Gods with murderous weapons
Archaeologists have proved that many Hindu temples of to-day
were formerly Buddhist Vihars. It has been asserted that even Srirangam,
Kancheepuram, Palani and Thirupathi temples were originally temples of Buddha.
Temples that once harboured the beauteous Buddha a full of grace, love and
compassion, were made to harbour warlike gods bearing in their hands murderous
weapons. There is hardly a Hindu god who does not sport a deadly weapon to
prove that these gods have some killing to their credit. Saivites and
Vaishnavites are loud in their talk about god being love. This is all
hypocrisy. This tall talk is belied by the very murderous appearance of the
gods. Where is the connection between love and violence? The strangest thing is
that in spite of the worship of the warlike gods, Hindus are by and large the
most cowards when compared to all other nations.
~~~Excerpts from Collected Works of
Periyar E.V.R., by Dr. K. Veeramani~~~
(Source -
http://velivada.com/2017/05/14/periyar-said-buddha/)
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