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This essay is the first of four pieces that use the Noble Truths as analytical tools in a social context. I have been travelling to India in recent years, working with Ambedkarite Buddhists, peoples who used to be classified as “untouchable,” caught in an ancient and oppressive web of caste. Based on that experience I offer here a concise view of the suffering of caste as a sign of the First Noble Truth in our world, in confidence that eventually we will see how this suffering itself offers impetus for liberation. Our Buddhist sisters and brothers in India are not there yet. We are not there yet, in the crumbling edifice of empire. But on a clear day we can catch a glimpse of that Beloved Community. We can try to move towards it.
The Hell of Caste
There is no doubt, in my opinion, that unless you change your social order you can achieve little by way of progress…You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
—Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: Annihilation of Caste, 1936
The caste system’s historical roots, while impossible to pinpoint, go back at least to India’s Brahmanic texts of the 1st millennium BCE. These texts delineated a jati or caste system based on four varnas (literally “skin color”) that classified hereditary social standing. In time there arose thousands of caste and sub-caste or “untouchable” communities, distinguished by occupation, name, and custom. Untouchable populations were ostracized by all the other castes, excluded from religious rituals, education, and countless everyday activities.
The “hell of caste” is hard for many of us in the West to imagine, despite our own history of slavery and racism. Like the persistence of racism in the West, the Indian caste system is legally outlawed by India’s post-liberation constitution, yet it is very much alive in all of India’s huge cities and more virulently in rural areas where a majority of the population resides. There is an argument that the reality of caste hardened under British colonialism, which systematized, enforced, and used small and large distinctions as a tool of social control. These more rigid definitions of caste and position have continued as modern India has evolved into a nation presently dominated by powerful and conservative Hindu parties and social movements.
The reality of caste is hereditary bondage passed from generation to generation under a dominant Brahmanic or Hindu social system. Contrary to the Buddhist meaning of the same words which points to freedom, in this system karma means fate or the caste one is born into, and dharma means the duty to live out one’s life within the confines of caste proscriptions and expectations. These duties include strict endogamy, or marriage only within one’s caste, ensuring a fixed heredity. In daily life untouchability precludes those of different castes, or non-castes, from living within the bounds of a village, sharing food or drink, having access to education, or entering Hindu temples. Seen as “unclean,” even the shadow of an untouchable is considered polluting to caste Hindus.
This piece is excerpted from a blog post for Turning Wheel Media, a project of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Posted 25 Feb. 2013. http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/the-suffering-of-caste/