Ambedkar founded Navayana Buddhism as a reconstruct-the-world alternative to caste Hinduism

Evidence

After twenty years of contemplation, during which he studied Islam as well as Christianity, Ambedkar turned to Buddhism. This, too, he entered in his own, distinct, angular way. He was wary of classical Buddhism, of the ways in which Buddhist philosophy could, had and continues to be used to justify war and unimaginable cruelty. (The most recent example is the Sri Lankan government’s version of state Buddhism, which culminated in the genocidal killing of at least 40,000 ethnic Tamils and the internal displacement of 300,000 people in 2009.272) Ambedkar’s Buddhism, called ‘Navayana Buddhism’ or the Fourth Way, distinguished between religion and dhamma. “The purpose of Religion is to explain the origin of the world,” Ambedkar said, sounding very much like Karl Marx, “the purpose of Dhamma is to reconstruct the world.” On 14 October 1956, in Nagpur, only months before his death, Ambedkar, Sharda Kabir, his (Brahmin) second wife, and half a million supporters took the vow of the Three Jewels and Five Precepts and converted to Buddhism. It was his most radical act. It marked his departure from Western liberalism and its purely materialistic vision of a society based on ‘rights’, a vision whose origin coincided with the rise of modern capitalism. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 439

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Navayana Buddhism/The Fourth Way and its religion-versus-dhamma distinction.