Among the many threads woven through the spiritual and political life of Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), none reveals his syncretic imagination more clearly than his recurring dialogue with the figure of the Buddha. From his early career through to his final years, Gandhi continually cited the Buddha as the exemplar of ahiṃsā (non-violence) and self-sacrifice, describing him as one of the ‘greatest teachers of mankind’.Footnote 1 Yet this was the same Gandhi who repeatedly insisted that Buddhism ‘was a part of’ Hinduism and that the Buddha ‘did not give the world a new religion’.Footnote 2 These two statements—one universalist, the other assimilationist—capture the enduring tension in Gandhi’s relation to Buddhism: admiration tempered by appropriation, reverence intertwined with re-inscription into a Hindu continuum. This tension has, of course, drawn sustained scholarly attention. Some find in Gandhi’s Buddhism an ethical convergence with modes of compassion found in Buddhism; others, a strategic domestication that muffles Buddhism’s capacity for social critique.Footnote 3 This article re-examines Gandhi’s uses of Buddhism across his career—textually, doctrinally, and politically—by re-reading the primary record preserved in his writings and speeches.
The argument that emerges is threefold. First, Gandhi’s engagements with Buddhism were primarily exemplary: the Buddha functioned for him as an ethical paradigm more than as a source of doctrine. Second, Gandhi reinterpreted Buddhist categories within a Hindu theistic framework, translating them into a sanātana ethical vocabulary that could underpin his pedagogy of non-violent resistance to British rule. Third, the political effects of this translation were double-edged—enabling inter-religious coalitions while constraining the radical potential that Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and others would later recover through formal conversion to Buddhism. This article argues that Gandhi’s engagement with Buddhism was neither incidental nor purely moral: it involved incorporating Buddhist ideas into a Hindu theistic framework and translating them into an ethical language suited to anti-colonial political action, thereby reshaping both Buddhist and Hindu vocabularies of ethics. By tracing this evolution textually and contextually, it demonstrates how Gandhi’s universalism simultaneously enabled cross-religious solidarity and neutralised Buddhism’s radical social critique.
The study of Gandhi’s engagement with Buddhism has evolved through several historiographical stages. Early commentators, including some of Gandhi’s first biographers—such as Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar in his eight-volume life history—have tended to reference and treat Gandhi’s admiration for the Buddha, albeit briefly, as an index of his universalism.Footnote 4 Later scholarship builds on this rudimentary treatment by emphasising the harmony between Gandhi’s ahiṃsā and Buddhist karuṇā (compassion) but leaving aside doctrinal questions. Stress is placed here on ethical continuity rather than doctrinal difference, with Gandhi’s relationship to Buddhism portrayed primarily as a moral–spiritual affinity grounded in compassion and non-violence.Footnote 5 Additional scholarship in this vein, however, has reframed this engagement by situating Gandhi within global discourses on religious pluralism.Footnote 6 He is situated here as a figure who transformed the metaphysical universalism of Aldous Huxley and John Hick into a practical ethic of mutual respect and moral equality across cultures.Footnote 7 Gandhi becomes a moral innovator who redirected the conversation on religious pluralism from speculative metaphysics to lived ethics. These studies further highlight his insistence on moving from simple tolerance to equal respect for all religions as representing a critical step beyond hierarchical or ‘triumphalist’ inclusivism, replacing the homogenising impulse of metaphysical universalism with a dialogical model of coexistence rooted in moral responsibility and the mutual enrichment of traditions.Footnote 8
Other studies instead engage in doctrinal exploration and compare Gandhi’s understanding of ahiṃsā with Buddhist ideas and theories, including conceptualisations of karuṇā, śūnyatā (emptiness), and pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination). While Margaret Chatterjee notes the close alignment in views between Gandhi and Mahayana Buddhism, Nicholas Grier and Martin Adam further illustrate that the dialogue between Gandhian and wider Buddhist thought is not one of simple borrowing but of structural analogy—an intersection where two traditions, Gandhi’s theism and Buddhism’s non-theism, articulate a common moral psychology of non-violence through divergent ontologies of reality.Footnote 9 Their combined analyses demonstrate how ahiṃsā, when read through Buddhist lenses, becomes a bridge concept linking Gandhian ethics with Buddhist philosophy: an ethics of emptiness grounded not in metaphysical possession of truth but in the ceaseless relational practice of compassion. Gier interprets Gandhi’s ahiṃsā through Mahayana compassion and interdependence, finding deep harmony between them; Adam compares the same ethical unity while insisting on their ontological divide—Gandhi’s essentialist ‘Truth’ versus Buddhism’s non-substantial emptiness. Indeed, they illuminate how both Gandhi and Buddhism articulate a shared moral psychology of selfless compassion that bridges but does not necessarily erase the doctrinal boundaries between the wider Hindu and Buddhist worlds.
Faisal Devji, however, points to the limits of attempts to trace Gandhi’s ahiṃsā to specific religious doctrines, arguing that these traditions do not easily yield a clearly political interpretation nor provide straightforward historical precedents for the distinctive way Gandhi deployed non-violence in his political career.Footnote 10 Indeed, further scholarship on Gandhi’s engagement with Buddhism foregrounds instead the politics of appropriation. Shruti Kapila situates his non-violence and satyāgraha (civil resistance) into a framework that reworks religious and philosophical traditions into modern political practice.Footnote 11 Valerian Rodrigues and Gopal Guru instead interpret Gandhi’s inclusive Buddhist hermeneutic through Ambedkar’s critique. Rodrigues shows that Gandhi’s reliance on moral persuasion and interior transformation—his discouragement of mass conversion—is traced to a distinctive moral epistemology that privileges conscience, reasoned dialogue, and self-suffering over institutional or structural change.Footnote 12 Guru extends this argument, claiming that Ambedkar’s disagreement with Gandhi was not merely political but moral and epistemological. His analysis demonstrates how Gandhi’s moral paternalism and appeal to conscience limited his imagination of liberation for Dalits, whereas Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism represented a radical epistemic rupture—a move from Gandhi’s ethics of persuasion to a new ethical rationality grounded in equality and moral autonomy.Footnote 13 From this perspective, Gandhi’s assimilative reading of Buddhism also becomes symptomatic of a wider politics of containment.
Taken together, this literature on Gandhi’s engagement with Buddhism maps a field structured by three principal axes—ethical convergence, doctrinal difference, and political consequence—but these axes have rarely been placed in sustained conversation with one another. As mentioned, studies that emphasise ethical convergence, such as those exploring the shared moral psychology of compassion between Gandhi and Buddhist thought, often stop short of engaging the deeper philosophical disjunctions that underlie that harmony. Conversely, doctrinal analyses that stress Gandhi’s theistic essentialism and Buddhism’s anti-essentialist śūnyatā tend to remain confined to metaphysical critique, without considering how these distinctions shaped Gandhi’s public rhetoric or strategic mobilisation. Similarly, works that foreground political consequence have typically treated ethical and doctrinal questions as background considerations rather than as integral to Gandhi’s political reasoning. This article seeks to bridge these divides by synthesising the three strands through a single, integrated interpretive frame. Drawing upon the 100-volume collection of Gandhi’s writings and speeches posthumously published by the Government of India, it offers a diachronic textual analysis that tracks how his ethical borrowings, doctrinal translations, and political applications of Buddhist concepts intersected and evolved over time.
By reconstructing the shifting grammar of Gandhi’s Buddhist citations—and by examining how they were invoked, redefined, and deployed—it also demonstrates that Gandhi’s engagements with Buddhism cannot be understood along a single axis of moral harmony, philosophical contrast, or political pragmatism alone. Instead, this article argues that Gandhi’s discourse on Buddhism is best read as a dynamic interplay between ethical aspiration, doctrinal reinterpretation, and political strategy—a conversation among axes that earlier scholarship has tended to treat in isolation. In bringing these axes into dialogue, the article not only recontextualises Gandhi’s Buddhist references but also highlights the methodological value of reading ethical, metaphysical, and political registers together in the study of Gandhian thought. Moreover, the intent here is not to foreclose on the possibility of reading Gandhi’s work from other religious perspectives; rather, as this article demonstrates, there are distinct advantages in considering the place of Buddhism in Gandhi’s endeavours.
Gandhi’s early encounters with Buddhism
Gandhi’s first sustained encounter with the Buddha occurred not in India but in Victorian London, mediated by English prose and verse. As he explained before an audience of Buddhists and their allies in Calcutta in 1925, ‘nearly 40 or 38 years ago, I went to England as a lad and the first religious book that was placed into my hands was The Light of Asia’. As he stressed to those gathered before him, ‘I had read nothing of any religion in the world, nothing therefore of Hinduism.’Footnote 14 Edwin Arnold’s immensely popular poem—subtitled The Great Renunciation and published in 1879—was one of the most widely read orientalist works of the late nineteenth century and depicted the Buddha not as a philosopher of metaphysical negation but as a saintly moral reformer, a prince who forsook privilege for compassion and the service of suffering humanity. Presenting the life and teachings of the Buddha in an accessible English verse form, Arnold—an acclaimed poet, journalist, and educator—wrote for a Western readership largely unfamiliar with Buddhism, and the work played a major role in popularising the Buddha as a universal moral teacher and introducing Buddhist themes to modern audiences. Gandhi’s initial encounter with the Buddha was thus profoundly significant as it marked the beginning of his self-conscious spiritual education and illustrates how his first exposure to religion was mediated through colonial and cross-cultural channels rather than inherited directly from his own Hindu milieu. Gandhi here not only identified the Buddha as his earliest moral teacher but also acknowledged the paradox that his introduction to Indian spirituality came through an English-language poem written by a Victorian Indophile. It dramatises a moment of estrangement that would define much of Gandhi’s intellectual development: he discovered India and its moral heritage through the interpretive lens of the West.
As a young law student in London, Gandhi’s response to The Light of Asia must be read against the broader intellectual climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this encounter reveals the hybrid conditions under which modern Indian religiosity was being reconstituted in the late nineteenth century. Wildly popular with Victorian audiences, Arnold’s poem embodied and also exported a new kind of Buddhist modernism.Footnote 15 It spread a now familiar Western image of Buddhism as a ‘nondogmatic creed of mindfulness and self-cultivation’, allowing readers in both Britain and South Asia to treat Buddhism as ‘a model religion for modernity’ free from the ‘literalism and authoritarianism’ of colonial Christianity.Footnote 16 For Buddhist readers, too, the vision of Buddhism presented in the poem arguably also formed the basis for a ‘new politics’ framed around cultural identity. Among educated Indians, the poem also achieved canonical status, functioning again as a charter text for religious modernism. Its blank verse form became seen not only as a great Buddhist work but also as a marker of India’s cultural prestige and as a symbol of its ‘simultaneous’ modernity and antiquity. Furthermore, through its numerous dramatisations and vernacular retellings, it offered colonial Indian publics a sense of belonging and an imagined community that ‘transcended’ identities based upon religion, caste, language, region, and politics.Footnote 17 For both subcontinental and Western audiences, its narrative of renunciation therefore appealed to a generation searching for a non-sectarian idiom of spirituality compatible with liberal values.Footnote 18
Gandhi’s first meaningful understanding of religion—as an ethical narrative of renunciation, compassion, and self-discipline—was thus shaped not by traditional Sanskrit scripture or Brahminical instruction but by Arnold’s humanistic portrayal of the Buddha as a moral reformer and universal exemplar. The intellectual climate in which Gandhi developed his distinctive approach to religious universalism was also profoundly shaped by the Theosophical movement and the wider neo-Hindu and esoteric discourse that circulated between Britain and the subcontinent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, sought to promote ‘the brotherhood of man’, encourage the comparative study of religions, and investigate the hidden powers of life and matter, thereby framing religion as a universal and comparative field of inquiry rather than a single doctrinal system.Footnote 19 Central to this programme was the claim that the major religious traditions shared an underlying spiritual wisdom; accordingly, theosophy integrated Hindu and Buddhist ideas into a universalist framework and relocated its headquarters to India in 1882, where it gained influence among educated elites and reform movements.Footnote 20 In colonial India, theosophy became intertwined with a broader intellectual milieu alongside organisations such as the Brāhmo Sabhā and the Ārya Samāj, all of which attempted to reinterpret Hinduism so that it appeared compatible with Western science, rational ethics, and modern social reform. These movements addressed what Mark Bevir describes as a cultural crisis among Western-educated Indians who perceived a conflict between inherited religious traditions and the rationalist worldview introduced through colonial education.Footnote 21 By reasserting the spiritual value of Indian traditions while presenting them as rational and morally sophisticated, theosophy helped cultivate confidence in India’s civilisational heritage and supplied intellectual resources for nationalist discourse. Its influence was also institutional and political: the networks created through the Theosophical Society fostered cooperation between Indian reformers and sympathetic Western intellectuals and contributed to the development of an all-India political consciousness, even shaping some of the ideological foundations of the early nationalist movement.Footnote 22
At the same time, Gandhi’s own understanding of religion emerged within this wider global religious discourse of colonial encounters and intellectual exchanges. His inner belief that all religions ultimately refer to the same truth was undoubtedly shaped by esoteric currents connected with the Theosophical Society and related networks. His early contact with theosophists during his years in London and his continuing engagement with theosophical circles during his time in South Africa illustrate how these global intellectual exchanges formed part of his religious formation.Footnote 23 These encounters exposed him to a comparative understanding of religion in which Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian traditions were interpreted not as mutually exclusive systems but as partial expressions of a shared spiritual reality. When viewed against this backdrop, Gandhi’s characteristic interpretive strategies—harmonising religious traditions, translating them into ethical principles, and mobilising them for moral and political reform—closely resemble the broader theosophical paradigm that sought to reconcile religions within a universal spiritual framework and employ them in projects of social, civilisational, and political renewal. In this sense, his religious universalism can be understood not simply as a personal theological conviction but as part of a wider intellectual movement that reframed the world’s religions as complementary sources of moral insight suited to the ethical and political challenges of modernity.
For a young student, immersed in an alien London world of Victorian respectability, Christian preaching, and the intellectual milieu of occultism and theosophy, Arnold’s rendering became a moral and cultural bridge—an imaginative space where the ascetic heroism of the East met the humanitarian conscience of the West. The Buddha of The Light of Asia was a figure who embodied moral courage, self-discipline, and pity, virtues that would later inform Gandhi’s own conception of ahiṃsā as an active, self-transforming force. Though he did not explicitly admit as much, this early encounter was also especially transformative as it introduced Gandhi to a Buddha stripped of theological complexity yet radiant with ethical purity, and it suggested to him that religion’s essence lay not in ritual or creed but in the lived practice of compassion. The episode, therefore, also anticipated Gandhi’s later insistence that religion was not inherited by birth but chosen through reflection and lived experience. It further foreshadowed his enduring orientation towards moral universalism: that the truths of any one tradition can illuminate the conscience of all humanity. In this brief recollection to his Calcutta audience, finding the Buddha became a formative movement for Gandhi when religious belonging ceased to be a matter of cultural inheritance and became, instead, a quest for truth and meaning.
Gandhi’s assimilation of the Buddha into his own pantheon of exemplars—the Krishna of the Bhagavad Gītā, the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, and the humanistic Jesus of Tolstoy—thus reflected a broader tendency in colonial religious thought to reinterpret religious figures across traditions for new moral and political purposes.Footnote 24 Indeed, the Buddha appears regularly in Gandhi’s writings as a synonym for self-control and compassion. The Buddha, he wrote, ‘renounced every worldly happiness’ because he wanted to ‘share with the whole world’ his happiness, which was ‘to be had by men who sacrificed and suffered in search of truth’. The Buddha was, he noted, a ‘great teacher’ who strove to bring humanity nearer to Truth.Footnote 25 These references already display the two interpretive moves that would later characterise Gandhi’s reading of the Buddha: universalisation (presenting the Buddha as a teacher for all humanity) and indigenisation (portraying him as an Indian reformer who could be reclaimed within Hindu tradition). His reading of the Buddha became entwined with his project of reconstructing Hinduism as a moral community rather than a ritual hierarchy. Sikhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism did not represent separate religions for Gandhi. ‘All these four faiths and their offshoots are one’, and as he maintained, ‘Hinduism is an ocean into which all the rivers run.’Footnote 26 This insistence reveals Gandhi’s assimilationist impulse: Buddhism is valuable not as a separate religion but as a corrective movement within a continuous civilisational whole. Such framing served multiple purposes. It allowed Gandhi to claim the moral prestige of the Buddha for the nationalist cause while avoiding the charge of promoting sectarian division; and it cast Indian religious history as a series of internal reforms, thereby legitimising his own efforts to ‘purify’ Hindu society from within.
Reinterpreting the Buddha: ethics, religion, and reform
At the same time, Gandhi’s identification of the Buddha as a reformer rather than as a founder risked erasing the profound doctrinal rupture that Buddhism represented in its historical context—the Buddha’s rejection of Vedic ritualism, priestly mediation, and the hierarchies of caste that underpinned Brahminical orthodoxy. In describing Buddhism as an extension or purification of Hinduism, Gandhi effectively subsumed its critical distance into a vision of civilisational continuity, transforming what had once been a radical religious revolution into an episode in the moral self-correction of Hinduism. This interpretive move—consistent with Gandhi’s broader hermeneutic of inclusivity—had far-reaching implications. It allowed him to appeal to the Buddha’s moral authority without confronting the structural inequalities that the historical Buddha had sought to dismantle. Critics such as Ambedkar would later seize upon precisely this point, contending that Gandhi’s reading neutralised Buddhism’s emancipatory potential by translating its call for liberation into a harmless reformist idiom.Footnote 27 Gandhi insisted on what he saw as the moral unity of India’s religions: diversity of practice and theology, he argued, merely veiled a single ethical essence grounded in satya (Truth) and ahiṃsā. The Buddha’s teaching itself, in Gandhi’s view, did not mark an abandonment of Hindu civilisation but rather revealed the ever-renewable presence of Truth within it. The Buddha thus became, in Gandhi’s imagination, the emblem of a perennial reforming impulse in Indian spirituality, a teacher who rediscovered rather than reinvented the eternal law of non-violence—an interpretation he reiterated in speeches, writings, and conversations that consistently presented India’s religious diversity as the manifold expression of one unbroken moral tradition.
Gandhi’s own pedagogical genius lay in his capacity to turn spiritual ideals into public performatives. The figure of the ascetic renouncer—the saṃnyāsin who relinquishes desire—became a template for the civic virtues required of satyāgrahis. The Buddha’s ‘great renunciation’, which he first learned about from The Light of Asia, offered the most vivid historical model for this moral drama. Gandhi often quoted the story of Siddhartha Gautama’s departure from his palace, on his quest, which ultimately resulted in Buddhahood, to demonstrate that true leadership required detachment from power and possessions. The erstwhile prince was living ‘not much above his people’, Gandhi reminded his followers, implying that the authenticity of moral leadership depended on proximity to the poor.Footnote 28 Renunciation, for Gandhi, was thus never merely personal; it had pedagogical and political axes. The renouncer instructed by example, his self-discipline exposing the moral bankruptcy of worldly pursuits. The Buddha’s life dramatised this principle more completely than any other Indian figure, and Gandhi appropriated it to construct a new form of political asceticism. The ashram or hermitage became his institutional embodiment of that ideal: a community of disciplined individuals practising poverty, celibacy, and labour as instruments of truth. In this sense, Gandhi’s Buddhism was less about doctrine than about habitus—the creation of embodied practices that mirrored the moral economy he admired in the Buddha’s sangha of ordained monastics.
If Gandhi’s admiration for the Buddha began with renunciation, its conceptual heart lay in ahiṃsā. ‘Great as Buddha’s contribution to humanity was in restoring God to His eternal place,’ as Gandhi explained at a Buddhist college in Ceylon, ‘greater still was his contribution in his exacting regard for all life, be it ever so low.’ His description here demonstrates both the strength of Gandhi’s ethical reading and the unmistakably theistic language through which he articulated it. The ahiṃsā that Gandhi found in the Buddha was not an abstract metaphysical insight into dependent origination but a moral law grounded in what he elsewhere called ‘the moral government of the universe’.Footnote 29 His public teaching on non-violence thus combined three registers. First, ahiṃsā was an ontological principle: life is one, and therefore to harm another being is to injure the unity of existence. Second, it was an epistemological stance: knowledge of truth is impossible without purity of heart, and purity of heart is impossible without the refusal of violence. Third, it was a social and political programme: non-violence is the practical method through which moral truth can be realised in collective life. These registers overlap with, but are not identical to, the Buddhist understanding of non-harming as both cause and consequence of awakening. In early Buddhist texts, the precept of ahiṃsā functions as a rule within the Eightfold Path, supported by mindfulness and right intention; in Gandhi’s re-reading, ahiṃsā becomes the very ground of being and the method of politics simultaneously.Footnote 30
Indeed, the most concrete expression of Gandhi’s causal reasoning involving non-violence appears in his arguments about diet. ‘[Hindus] eat every bit of the meat with the greatest delight, thinking that it has been sanctified because of presentation to Kali,’ Gandhi lectured in Ceylon, ‘[s]o the Buddha said, if you want to do any sacrifice, sacrifice yourself, your lust, all your material ambition, your worldly ambition.’Footnote 31 The rhetorical structure of this passage is paradigmatic: Gandhi first acknowledges the ritual’s internal logic (sacrifice as offering), then reverses its direction by redefining the proper victim—the self. The Buddha functions here as both an ethical witness and a point of reference: his example authorises a reinterpretation of Vedic ritual as a moral discipline of self-sacrifice. Here, Gandhi also connects ethical causation to the meaning of sacrificial practice, arguing that moral responsibility extends through the entire chain of actions that links human appetite to the death of an animal. In Buddhist philosophical terms, this corresponds not to the scholastic doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda itself but to a moral analogue of interdependence—an insistence that every act is enmeshed in wider networks of consequence. Gandhi’s deployment of this causal reasoning in public sermons turned everyday consumption into a site of spiritual politics, a move that showcases what Adam calls Gandhi’s ‘intuitions regarding the nature of spiritual realisation’.Footnote 32 His condemnation of animal sacrifice naturally also intersected with his campaign for vegetarianism. For him, abstention from meat was a practical corollary of ahiṃsā. By tracing the causal chain from consumption to killing, he demonstrated that moral responsibility extended beyond immediate acts. In this argument, Gandhi frequently invoked Buddhist and Jain precedents, noting that ‘the supreme virtue of non-violence has been accepted by all in India’. As he argued, ‘Jainism and Hinduism are not so different’ and ‘[t]he religion named after Gautam Buddha cherishes the same ideals as Hinduism’.Footnote 33 Gandhi here further collapses doctrinal distinctions into ethical continuity, reframing the historical plurality of Indian religions as a shared ethical lineage centred on compassion towards all living beings.
The positive content of ahiṃsā was, however, equally central. Gandhi objected to the reduction of non-violence to mere abstention, insisting that true ahiṃsā demanded active benevolence. He compared the Buddhist virtue of karuṇā to his own concept of universal love, highlighting how the Buddha’s compassion was not confined to mankind but extended to all living beings. ‘Does not one’s heart overflow with love to think of the lamb joyously perched on his shoulders?’ he remarked to a hostess, before insisting ‘[o]ne fails to notice this love for all living beings in the life of Jesus’.Footnote 34 In this respect, Gandhi’s reading of Buddhism resembles the ethical outlook found in Mahayana Buddhism, where compassion is seen as the active expression of prajñā (wisdom). As Gier notes, Gandhi’s practice of non-violence closely reflects this Mahayana idea of universal responsibility towards all beings.Footnote 35 At the same time, Gandhi reshaped these ideas by linking ahiṃsā to his own devotional belief in God and by shifting the emphasis from Buddhist philosophical teachings about reality to a unified moral vision that was distinctively his own. In Gandhi’s understanding, compassion arose from the reverent awareness that every living being was animated by the same divine essence. Gier’s formulation helps clarify why Gandhi’s ahiṃsā could be simultaneously introspective and activist—it was grounded in the faith that non-violence was not only a practical method or a metaphysical truth but the visible expression of an underlying unity between self, God, and world. This theistic recasting of emptiness thus gave Gandhi’s ethics its peculiar power: it made the moral law both universal and intimate, binding the cosmic to the personal and transforming Buddhist metaphysical insight into an ethic of devotional responsibility.
If non-violence formed the metaphysical core of Gandhi’s Buddhist assimilation, fasting embodied its ethical enactment. The moral psychology of self-suffering became the axis around which Gandhi organised both personal discipline and political strategy. His famous assertion from 1933 that ‘my fast was not directed to a political purpose at all … it was a purely spiritual act after the same style as Buddha’s, only upon an infinitely humbler scale’ makes explicit the genealogical line he drew from Buddhist renunciation to modern civic fasting.Footnote 36 For Gandhi, voluntary suffering (tapasya), was simultaneously purification and communication: a mode of self-education and a method of appealing to the conscience of others. It is therefore tempting to read Gandhi’s fasting as a modern political re-enactment of the view of the bodhisattva (awakened being) to suffer for the liberation of all. The analogy, however, must be articulated precisely. In Buddhist teaching, the bodhisattva’s self-sacrifice is soteriological: he endures duḥkha (suffering) to save others from it. Gandhi’s self-suffering, by contrast, is dialogical. The bodhisattva works through cosmic time; Gandhi’s fasts sought to affect a specific historical audience—the British colonial state or communal antagonists. Yet the motivational structure is analogous: suffering was transformed into a medium of truth. As Gandhi keenly noted, the Buddha himself ‘attained self-realisation’ only after ‘suffering many privations’, and this insight became the cornerstone of his belief that truth could never be apprehended without the willing embrace of suffering.Footnote 37 In his own practice, fasting functioned not as a gesture of despair or coercion but as a disciplined experiment in moral communication—a means of dramatising the inseparability of personal transformation and collective redemption. Whether Gandhi’s valorisation of suffering represents an ascetic regression or a creative moral pedagogy remains a matter of debate. Within a Buddhist framing, the question becomes whether his fasts function more as bodhisattva acts or as karmic penances. Perhaps a qualified analogy, as Venkata Sivasai implies, works best here: Gandhi’s tapasya shares the bodhisattva’s compassionate motivation but not its metaphysical horizon.Footnote 38
Indeed, for Gandhi, suffering was not merely to be endured; it was to be instrumentalised as moral persuasion. This functionalisation of suffering marks a distinct departure from Buddhist psychology, where the goal is cessation rather than conversion. At the same time, Gandhi was keenly aware of the ethical danger of coercion through self-sacrifice. Just as the Buddha did, he did not wish to compel anyone ‘by force’ but instead to awaken the dormant good in others through his own self-purification.Footnote 39 In practice, however, the boundary between awakening and compulsion was perilously thin. Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhi’s fasts during the deliberations over the Poona Pact of 1932 regarding political rights for Indian Dalits illustrated the political costs of such moral appeals: what appeared to Gandhi as a spiritual act appeared to many Dalits as emotional blackmail.Footnote 40 This ethical ambiguity is central to the political theology of Gandhi’s Buddhism: the weaponisation of compassion for political ends. Furthermore, the practice of fasting also illuminates Gandhi’s redefinition of sacrifice mentioned previously. In replacing the ritual victim with the ethical self, he transformed the logic of Vedic sacrifice into a discipline of personal abnegation. This shift from external offering to internal renunciation mirrored the Buddha’s own rejection of animal sacrifice in favour of moral purity. Yet where the Buddha’s critique of ritual was accompanied by a metaphysical analysis of craving and ignorance, Gandhi’s reformulation is largely ethical and sociological. The fast becomes a public drama of purification—a modern soteriology enacted in the arena of colonial politics.
To understand Gandhi’s selective Buddhist appropriation, it is useful to situate it alongside his engagement with sources from other religions—especially Jainism and Christianity. Jainism’s own radical interpretation of ahiṃsā provided another immediate conceptual model for Gandhi’s non-violence, but Buddhism supplied the narrative and psychological depth. Whereas Jain asceticism emphasised restraint and withdrawal—he proclaimed it ‘a most interesting form of faith’ that stressed ‘human workmanship’ and held ‘scrupulous regard for all things that lived’—Buddhism offered instead an ethic of compassion and service compatible with civic engagement.Footnote 41 Gandhi nonetheless synthesised these traditions: from the Jains, he took discipline; from the Buddhists, empathy. The result was an ethic of active renunciation that could operate in the political sphere. Christian influence added a further layer. The Sermon on the Mount’s injunction to ‘resist not evil’ paralleled the Buddha’s call to conquer anger by non-anger, and Gandhi became publicly associated with and valued their resonance for contemporary times.Footnote 42 He read both as expressions of the same moral law, manifesting what he considered the unity of Truth beneath the diversity of the ‘great prophets’ who had come before.Footnote 43 This comparative approach supported his pluralist theology of religions: different traditions were understood as experiments with Truth, each revealing a facet of the same moral reality. Such a reading allowed Gandhi to universalise Buddhist virtues without abandoning his Hindu framework.
Gandhi’s theistic recasting of Buddhist categories is most explicit in his long reflection on nirvāṇa (enlightenment). Responding to interpretations which described nirvāṇa as a negative state of extinction, Gandhi insisted that it signified ‘the living peace, the living happiness of a soul which is conscious of itself and conscious of having found its own abode in the heart of the Eternal’. He added that the Buddha ‘unhesitatingly said that the Law was God Himself’ and that ‘God’s laws are eternal and unalterable and not separable from God Himself’.Footnote 44 This passage also represents one of the most striking instances of Gandhi’s re-theologisation of Buddhism. The impersonal dharma (Dhamma in liturgical Pali) of the Buddha becomes, in Gandhi’s hands, the personal God of moral order. The translation is less exegetical than strategic: it anchors the authority of ethical law in a transcendent source while retaining Buddhism’s emphasis on moral autonomy. Philosophically, this move can be read as a fusion of Advaitic and Buddhist categories. Where the Buddha posits an impersonal dharma as the structure of reality, Advaita conceives Brahman as the non-dual ground of being. Gandhi’s ‘Law as God’ collapses these distinctions into an ethical monism grounded in a single divine order: truth and non-violence become complementary expressions of the same eternal Law. In doing so, he transforms the Buddhist ethic of self-reliance into a theistic ethic of obedience. The enlightened Buddhist realises the Law; the Gandhian satyāgrahi submits to it.
Gier suggests that this re-theologisation constitutes the chief difference between Gandhi’s ‘humanism of non-violence’ and Buddhist compassion—especially through a Mahayana frame.Footnote 45 For Gandhi, the ultimate motive for compassion is faith in a moral order that transcends human will; for the Buddha, it arises from insight into emptiness and the interconnected nature of all existence. Both produce universal love, but the routes diverge. From a comparative theological perspective, Gandhi’s reading illustrates how Buddhist concepts could be absorbed into a Hindu framework without ceasing to function as ethical motifs. The price of such absorption, however, was the loss of Buddhism’s distinct metaphysical scepticism. Gandhi was, however, not unaware of the selectivity of his interpretation. In conversation with Buddhists in 1925, he conceded that his language might sound alien to orthodox ears but maintained the ‘bold’ claim that the Buddha was ‘not an atheist’ and explained that the Buddha’s spirit was the spirit of godliness in action for the masses.Footnote 46 Here again, we see the substitution of ontology with ethics: godliness is not a belief but a practice of truthfulness. In this sense, Gandhi’s language of God is analogous to Buddhism’s own language of dharma: both signify the immanent structure of moral reality. By articulating the Law as God, Gandhi made Buddhism legible to the devotional consciousness of Indian society without wholly betraying its ethical content.
Such theological translation was complemented by Gandhi’s tendency to domesticate Buddhist virtue within the ordinary life of the householder. Indeed, what is striking in Gandhi’s uses of Buddhism is their domesticity. He rarely invoked the Buddha in esoteric contexts; instead, he used Buddhist references to instruct on ordinary virtues—truth-telling, forbearance, dietary restraint, temperance, simplicity. In 1925, he urged Ceylonese Buddhists to abstain from alcohol, declaring that ‘this drink habit is totally against the spirit of the Buddha’.Footnote 47 The year previously, he described to a community of Jains in Maharashtra how Buddhism rightly insisted on ‘internal purity’ and that its appeal ‘went straight to the heart’.Footnote 48 These utterances translated doctrinal precepts into moral common sense, resituating religion within the domain of civic virtue. In so doing, Gandhi reimagined Buddhist practice as a programme of civic ethics suited to the moral discipline required for Indian self-rule. Buddhism’s five precepts—non-killing, non-stealing, sexual restraint, truthfulness, and sobriety—provided for him a template for an Indian civic ethics capable of sustaining self-rule. The discipline of the satyāgrahi mirrored that of the monk, transposed from the monastery to the street. This transposition was crucial to Gandhi’s political innovation: by turning ascetic precepts into public codes of conduct, he furnished the ethical discipline and shared norms that made organised non-violent collective action possible. In this respect, his appropriation of Buddhism was neither purely theological nor merely rhetorical; it was institutional and performative. The ashram further exemplified this domesticated Buddhism. Its valorisation of truth, celibacy, poverty, and non-possession replicated the monastic virtues of the Buddhist monkhood while serving nationalist ends. Gandhi himself stressed in 1946 how the first mantra recited daily at his Sevagram ashram was the Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō—sacred to Nichiren Buddhism—which had been introduced to the ashram by a Japanese monastic before his removal by the colonial government after hostilities with Japan began.Footnote 49 While Gandhi did not explicitly admit as much, his ashram paralleled the Buddhist sangha in its model as a society of seekers aspiring after Truth who lived on the charity of society and returned to it a tradition of service. Nevertheless, for Gandhi, world-withdrawal became transformed into social service. In his thought, the householder and the monk converged: both were bound by discipline, both renounced materialistic possessions, both served the world. The resulting ethic was a civic monasticism—secular in function, spiritual in aspiration.
Furthermore, as Yogendra Pal Anand highlights, Gandhi’s frequent comparison of himself to earlier reformers—including the Buddha—served to embed his political movement within a much longer moral and spiritual genealogy.Footnote 50 Throughout his career, his followers continually referred to him as a ‘modern Buddha’, and he noted how ‘[s]cores of Buddhist friends have taken me for a Buddhist’ and even described his ‘honour’ in being claimed as a ‘Buddhist of Buddhists’.Footnote 51 As he declared in 1923, ‘Buddha fearlessly refused to co-operate with the arrogant priesthood of his day’ and ‘I simply and humbly follow in [his] footsteps’.Footnote 52 Indeed, Gandhi’s opponents often lamented the uphill battle they faced in disassociating him from spiritual and religious pioneers who preceded him. Perplexed as to why so many Indians flocked to Gandhi after learning of his teachings and visions, Ambedkar reminded his readers in 1938 that the Buddha preached the same messages thousands of years before Gandhi. As Ambedkar insisted, ‘[n]o body [sic] except an ignorant fool or congenial idiot would give credit to Gandhi for originality in this matter’.Footnote 53 Nevertheless, Gandhi’s explicit identification with the Buddha served to legitimise non-cooperation as a spiritual rather than merely political act. By invoking the Buddha’s rebellion against sacerdotal authority, Gandhi framed civil disobedience as continuity with India’s ancient moral revolutions. In effect, he converted a tactical programme into a sacred inheritance. Indeed, the historical resonance of this gesture should not be underestimated. At a time when nationalist ideologues sought to ground independence in civilisational antiquity, Gandhi’s portrayal of the Buddha as proto-satyāgrahi offered a narrative of moral rather than military heroism. It enabled a vision of nationalism rooted not in ethnic identity but in ethical universality. The Buddha’s compassion thus became a charter for an Indian modernity based on conscience rather than coercion.
Despite these resonances, Gandhi’s metaphysics remained irreducibly personal. His constant association of the Truth with God presupposed a moral subject who could encounter the divine through conscience. The Buddhist denial of permanent selfhood (anattā) and ultimate reality through śūnyatā, however, conflicted with this premise. Gandhi was aware of the divergence but understood it through a principle of complementarity: although different traditions expressed Truth in ways that appeared contradictory, he did not see them as fundamentally opposed. He insisted in 1939 that Buddhists did ‘believe in the atman [self]’ and did ‘believe in God’ and that their quarrel was ‘only with a particular idea of God’.Footnote 54 Gandhi appeared to regard the doctrine of no-self not as negation but as humility, a practical device for curbing egoism. In this pragmatic reading, anattā becomes the ethical injunction to dissolve pride, not the ontological claim that the self is a fiction. The metaphysical radicalism of Buddhism is thus tamed into moral pedagogy. From a philosophical perspective, this translation is therefore both ingenious and reductive. It permits Gandhi to appropriate Buddhist humility without embracing its metaphysical void. The difference is not trivial. For the Buddha, liberation arises from insight into the non-substantiality of the self; for Gandhi, liberation arises from realisation of the self’s unity with Truth. The first dissolves selfhood; the second universalises it. Yet Gandhi’s strategy of translation allowed him to bridge these opposites in moral discourse. To live as if the self were not absolute—to act without attachment—became, for him, the practical equivalent of realising anattā. The metaphysical distinction receded behind the shared ethical demand for selflessness.
Gandhi’s way of reading religious traditions was thus clearly comparative—an observation that Anand suggests becomes most evident in his speeches to various religious groups during his 1927 tour of Ceylon.Footnote 55 Gandhi read the Bhagavad Gītā, the Sermon on the Mount, and The Light of Asia as complementary articulations of what he considered a single moral truth. Each, he believed, taught renunciation and service. These three works greatly shaped his ethical formation, and the Buddha therefore entered a triadic canon of moral instruction alongside Krishna and Christ. This intertextual reading served Gandhi’s pluralist theology of religion: the great teachers differed in form but converged in spirit. In practical terms, Gandhi’s comparative reading produced a trans-religious ethic of duty and compassion. The Gītā’s doctrine of niṣkāma karma (action without desire) provided the metaphysical base; the Buddha’s compassion supplied the emotional tenor; the Sermon’s injunction to love one’s enemies offered the political application. Together they formed the grammar of his satyāgraha. In this sense, Gandhi’s Buddhism was never isolated; it formed part of a broader synthesis that also drew upon Jain, Muslim, and Sikh sources. His distinctive contribution lay in integrating these traditions into an ethical framework capable of mobilising mass politics. By treating the moral insights of diverse scriptures as variations on an underlying ethical law, Gandhi constructed a theology that was at once ecumenical and activist—one that transcended sectarian boundaries without erasing religious difference. This comparative approach also provided a framework for dialogue in an age of religious tension: by translating distinct spiritual vocabularies into a shared moral language of compassion, truth, and non-attachment, Gandhi turned the interpretation of scripture into a form of political reconciliation, where the practice of reading across faiths mirrored the larger project of living together in mutual respect.
Indeed, central to Gandhi’s interpretation of the Buddha was his rejection of schism as a legitimate form of reform. ‘It is difficult to say who was the greatest among Krishna, Rama, the Buddha, Jesus, etc.’, he noted, but ‘[i]n point of character alone, possibly the Buddha was the greatest’.Footnote 56 Yet Gandhi made sure to also stress that Buddhism represented a ‘mighty reform in Hinduism’ and that it ‘rightly insisted on internal purity’.Footnote 57 This insistence on continuity reveals Gandhi’s discomfort with rupture. In his moral universe, division was a symptom of egoism; Truth could be realised only through unity. Consequently, he interpreted the Buddha’s departure from Vedic orthodoxy as an act of purification rather than rebellion. This reading underwrites his own refusal to sanction conversion as a form of protest: to leave one’s community is to abandon the duty of reforming it. The political implications of this stance are clear. Ambedkar’s decision to formally convert to Buddhism in 1956 was in many ways a direct repudiation of Gandhi’s counsel of reform from within.Footnote 58 For Ambedkar, Hinduism’s caste structure was irredeemable; for Gandhi, it was redeemable through moral purification. The difference reflects contrasting anthropologies: Gandhi believed in the innate moral capacity of all persons to perceive truth through conscience; Ambedkar emphasised the social structures that distort that capacity. Gandhi’s reading of the Buddha as reformer therefore aligned with his faith in human perfectibility, but it also blinded him to the necessity of structural transformation.
Moreover, Gandhi’s conviction that all religions articulate the same moral law led him to universalise Buddhist virtues in a way that erased their doctrinal boundaries. When he referenced how ‘Jainism and Hinduism are not so different as to justify our treating them as distinct religions’ and that ‘the religion named after Gautam Buddha cherishes the same ideals’, he was articulating an ethical universalism grounded in practice rather than belief.Footnote 59 Yet this very universalism can be seen as a form of theological appropriation: Buddhism becomes valuable not for its distinct insights but for confirming what Gandhi already knows. The Buddha is again honoured as a saint of ahiṃsā but deprived of his metaphysical particularity. From a modern interfaith perspective, this raises complex questions about the politics of translation: Does moral universalism necessarily entail doctrinal erasure, or can plurality be preserved within shared ethical horizons? Gandhi himself would likely answer that plurality was intrinsic to Truth and that Truth was many-sided and relative in a world of relativity. But his practice of translation often produced flattening rather than differentiation. By reading all religious doctrines as variations of a single moral law, he neutralised their internal debates and historical contingencies. The Buddha’s rejection of caste and ritual hierarchy, for example, becomes in Gandhi’s retelling a gentle reform rather than a revolutionary rupture. In this sense, Gandhi’s Buddhist universalism mirrors his political strategy of consensus: difference is subsumed into harmony, dissent into dialogue. Nevertheless, Gandhi’s moral and doctrinal reinterpretations did not remain confined to the intellectual sphere. As his political prominence expanded, Gandhi’s ethical reading of Buddhism became instrumentalised within a broader transnational field of anti-colonial politics and inter-Asian solidarity.
Buddhism, politics, and the challenge of Ambedkar
If Gandhi’s ethical and theological readings of the Buddha worked to redefine Indian religion, his political uses of Buddhist ideals served to redefine Asia’s moral geography. Indeed, the transformation of Buddhist exempla into political resources also marked an important—but understudied—aspect of Gandhi’s career. His most consequential remarks about Buddhism emerged during a moment when Buddhism itself was being actively reimagined within Indian political and religious discourse. As Douglas Ober and Gitanjali Surendran highlight, far from being a marginal or ‘extinct’ tradition, Buddhism had become an important site of intellectual and political experimentation in late colonial India, as activists, reformers, and nationalists debated its relevance for modern society and social justice.Footnote 60 Gandhi’s career developed alongside a growing Buddhist revival movement and intensified debates over the relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism, often shaped by broader nationalist and communal politics. Within Hindu nationalist networks, Buddhist traditions were sometimes assimilated into a larger Hindu civilisational framework, with attitudes towards Buddhism ranging from ‘stigma and exclusion to lukewarm adoration and unease’.Footnote 61 At the same time, Buddhist activists increasingly argued that Buddhism could serve as a vehicle for the social uplift of disadvantaged castes and looked to the religion for new ethical foundations for democracy and social equality in India.Footnote 62
Indian nationalism, religious revival, and social activism during this period were, of course, intertwined rather than separate, and Buddhism featured as both a moral framework and mobilising force at their intersection, inspiring reformers to link spiritual renewal with political and social change. By the mid 1930s, the Burmese monastic, nationalist, and social reformer U Ottama served as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, while the Hindu financier J. K. Birla sponsored a Bahujan Vihara—a Buddhist temple for the socially disadvantaged castes—in Bombay, which Gandhi himself also actively supported.Footnote 63 In this charged environment, the boundaries between Hinduism and Buddhism were being actively negotiated, contested, and redefined. Gandhi’s insistence that Buddhism represented a reforming impulse within Hindu civilisation, rather than a separate religion, must therefore be read against this wider backdrop of Buddhist revivalism, nationalist reinterpretation, and social activism. His rhetoric of assimilation, moral continuity, and reform from within reflected not only his theological commitments but also his acute sensitivity to the political stakes of Hindu–Buddhist boundary-making at precisely the moment when Buddhism was being mobilised both as a symbol of India’s civilisational heritage and as a potential vehicle for radical social transformation.
Gandhi’s public addresses in Ceylon and Burma also explicitly linked Buddhist ethics to anti-colonial politics. In these speeches, Gandhi urged Buddhists to reclaim the moral courage of the Buddha and to apply it to contemporary struggles against oppression. Buddhism, often construed as a renunciant path, also became for Gandhi a repertoire for collective resistance grounded in moral discipline. These encounters were staged at a moment when Buddhist revival movements in both regions were redefining religious identity under colonial rule.Footnote 64 For Gandhi, they offered an opportunity to align his ethic of ahiṃsā with the moral prestige of the Theravada Buddhist tradition—dominant in both Burma and Ceylon—and to stress non-violence as a pan-Asian virtue in anti-colonial struggle. Such instrumentalisation of religion was not unique to Buddhism in Gandhi’s thought; he performed similar operations on Hindu, Christian, and Islamic sources. But the Buddha offered a particular advantage: as a historical Indian figure revered across Asia, he provided a trans-regional moral currency that could link India’s freedom movement to broader Asian quests for self-determination. Gandhi’s appropriation of Buddhist symbols thus further anticipated the later instrumentalisation of the religion as a diplomatic tool connecting India to the Buddhist world and the lands that lay to its east.Footnote 65
In Ceylon, temperance became a key theme of Gandhi’s message. He denounced alcohol consumption as fundamentally contrary to Buddhist teaching and urged Buddhist youth to resist ‘that self-destroying but destructive show of Mammon’.Footnote 66 His language combined biblical cadence with Buddhist exemplarity, framing temperance as economic and moral independence. Gandhi’s tour of Burma carried similar aims. Addressing an audience in Mandalay in 1929, he exhorted them to ‘use Buddhism to explore the limitless possibilities of non-violence’.Footnote 67 Here, Gandhi seemingly constructed a regional moral geography: India, the land of the Gītā, Burma, the land of the Dhamma, both bound by the shared discovery of non-violence. In public statements, he praised Burmese monks for their piety but criticised the laity’s tolerance of meat-eating, remarking that ‘the Burmese Buddhists will not kill a single animal, but do not mind others killing the animals for them and dishing the carcasses for them for their food’.Footnote 68 The comment, though moralistic, reveals Gandhi’s ethnographic attentiveness and his tendency to treat moral inconsistency as a pedagogical opportunity. By holding up Buddhist societies as mirrors for India’s own moral struggles, Gandhi also used his observations abroad to refine his domestic message: that the practice of non-violence required not only the rejection of physical harm but also the courage to confront the everyday complicities of desire and consumption. His appeal thus transcended national boundaries, transforming Buddhist virtue into a universal idiom of self-discipline through which colonised peoples across Asia might reclaim their moral and political agency.
Indeed, beyond India’s borders, Gandhi’s image as a moral reformer resonated deeply. Asian intellectuals—from U Ottama in Burma to Nichiren Buddhists in Japan—saw in him a revival of Buddhist ethics as a resource for anti-imperial modernity.Footnote 69 Gandhi’s universalised Buddha supplied a language for inter-Asian solidarity grounded in moral rather than racial identity. He himself often invoked the pan-Asian reach of the Dhamma and emphasised again in 1938 that Buddhism was not meant for India alone but had a message ‘for the whole world’ and needed to be ‘deliver[ed] to the whole world’.Footnote 70 By framing the Dhamma as global service, Gandhi thus situated Indian nationalism within an international ethic of compassion. The ideological utility of this move was profound. It allowed Gandhi to articulate an anti-colonial universalism that countered Western claims to moral supremacy. Through the Buddhist vocabulary of renunciation and non-violence, he also found an idiom for resistance that was simultaneously indigenous and cosmopolitan and so converted a religious ethic into a geopolitical vision—one in which moral regeneration, not industrial power, was to be the measure of civilisational progress. His invocation of the Buddha, therefore, transcended mere homage: it redefined Asia’s role in world history as the custodian of an alternative modernity founded on truth, self-restraint, and compassion.
Nevertheless, in his Buddhist engagements, Gandhi was often forced into a balancing act between moral sympathy and support and institutional caution—a situation perhaps best exemplified by the controversy surrounding the legal ownership of the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya. Believed to be the site where Siddhartha Gautama achieved Buddhahood, Bodh Gaya had been the subject of campaigns since the late nineteenth century to return control over it to Buddhists, as the temple remained under the management of a Hindu mahant (abbot).Footnote 71 In 1925, a delegation of Ceylonese Buddhists approached Gandhi and asked him to intercede in the dispute by convincing Indian Congress leaders to support the restoration of the site to Buddhists. While he admitted that he was ‘already a convert’ to the cause and advocated for the ‘restoration of the temple to the rightful trustees’, he nonetheless conceded, ‘what was I to do?’ as he ‘had no time for anything else beyond what [he] had already undertaken’.Footnote 72 He sympathised but declined formal involvement in Buddhist advocacy for the site, advising instead negotiation and patience. Yet that same year, when attending Buddhist festivities in Calcutta, Gandhi questioned the need for Buddhists to recover the Mahabodhi site. ‘What does it matter whether we go to a little temple and worship [Buddha’s] image’, Gandhi explained, ‘he [the Buddha] made out for himself an imperishable name’.Footnote 73 Gandhi understood religious reform as persuasion rather than litigation. He urged Buddhists to win hearts, not lawsuits. His stance was thus consistent with his interpretation of the Buddha’s method: persuasion through compassion, not confrontation through law.
Anagarika Dharmapala, a Ceylonese Buddhist revivalist, whose activism for Bodh Gaya combined legal petitions with polemic journalism and won him fame across the subcontinent, found Gandhi’s counsel woefully inadequate. Moreover, Dharmapala also took issue with Gandhi’s instrumental use of Buddhism, and his critique demonstrated the limits of Gandhi’s reliance on moral suasion in contexts demanding a more meaningful intervention. Dharmapala, initially, was greatly impressed by Gandhi and praised his commitment to vegetarianism, temperance, non-violence, and indigeneity. Indeed, in 1922, Dharmapala went so far as to ask his own followers whether the Ceylonese, too, could travel down the path that Gandhi had himself taken.Footnote 74 Delighted that Gandhi had been invited to address a Buddhist festival in Bombay in 1924, Dharmapala, however, remarkably campaigned against Gandhi’s invitation to speak at another Buddhist celebration in Calcutta the following year.Footnote 75 Gandhi’s knowledge and descriptions of Buddhism proved decisive in Dharmapala’s change in attitude. Gandhi’s claim that Hindus were more devoted to the Buddha than Buddhists themselves incensed Dharmapala, who further ridiculed him for learning of the religion through the work of a suddhā (white man)—a reference to Gandhi’s knowledge of Buddhism through Arnold’s The Light of Asia.Footnote 76 Gandhi, however, hit back and described Dharmapala’s opposition to his presence at Calcutta as ‘pathetic’ and further rebuked Dharmapala for ‘weeping’ over the fact that his Buddhist appeals in India were falling on deaf ears.Footnote 77 Gandhi himself was willing to admit his lack of a formal education in Buddhist affairs. As he told a Ceylonese audience in 1927, ‘I lay no claim to scholarship in Buddhistic law’. As he also conceded, ‘a fifth-form’ Buddhist schoolboy from the island would likely ‘plough’ him in a Buddhist catechism.Footnote 78 While Dharmapala ultimately acknowledged Gandhi as a ‘saintly’ figure for his wider contributions to Indian society in 1932, shortly before his death, the tensions between the two figures reveal the complex politics of inter-religious solidarity in colonial South Asia, where appeals to shared heritage could both unite and efface difference.Footnote 79
Ambedkar’s opposition to Gandhi proved a further point of contention. If Gandhi made Buddhism a universal ethic of compassion, Ambedkar made it a particular politics of liberation. The contrast between them—one reforming Hinduism from within, the other exiting it through conversion—marks one of the decisive philosophical divides in modern Indian thought. As mentioned, Gandhi’s statements on Buddhism revealed his conviction that the Buddha, as he explained in 1933 to Dharmapala’s successor, Devapriya Valisinha, ‘did not desire to found a separate sect or religion but to rid Hinduism of what appeared to him to be evil’.Footnote 80 For Gandhi, religious reform meant moral purification within continuity. For Ambedkar, whose life under caste discrimination taught him the structural endurance of hierarchy, such continuity was impossible. In his posthumously published The Buddha and His Dhamma, Ambedkar reinterpreted Buddhism as a social contract founded on equality, reason, and fraternity—values he contrasted with Hinduism’s birth-based hierarchy. Rodrigues suggests that Ambedkar’s use of Buddhism was thus deliberately political: to create a counter-public for Dalits that could stand outside Brahminical control.Footnote 81 Where Gandhi spoke of the Buddha as a moral reformer, Ambedkar invoked him as a revolutionary legislator. Their difference was not simply religious but epistemological: Gandhi’s truth was experiential and inward; Ambedkar’s truth was social and structural. Guru sharpens this critique. He implies that Gandhi’s ethics of self-purification—fasting, confession, repentance—presupposes moral agency already available to the privileged; for the oppressed, such agency is constrained by systemic exclusion.Footnote 82 Hence, Ambedkar’s call for conversion was not a rejection of spirituality but a reclamation of subjecthood. To become Buddhist was thus to become human.
Gandhi could not accept this logic. His letters to Buddhist leaders express sympathy for Dalit suffering but reject the politics of separation. Conversion did not represent salvation for Gandhi, and as he explained to Valisinha, ‘it is my conviction that there is no occasion whatsoever for [caste-oppressed] Hindus to change their faith’.Footnote 83 This moral optimism—faith in the reformability of tradition—made Gandhi’s universalism ethically expansive but politically conservative. Ambedkar’s scepticism about reform, by contrast, made his turn to Buddhism historically transformative while grounding it in a more sharply defined religious framework. Their confrontation over the Poona Pact further dramatised these tensions. Gandhi’s fast unto death, a gesture of tapasya intended to preserve Hindu unity, was perceived by Ambedkar as coercion. The resulting compromise on separate electorates resolved the immediate crisis but entrenched their philosophical divide. Ambedkar later remarked that Gandhi and the Indian Congress, ‘sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the Untouchables [Dalits]’.Footnote 84 In Ambedkar’s judgement, we glimpse the enduring ambivalence of Gandhi’s moral politics: its power to inspire empathy and its capacity to enforce conformity. Both Gandhi and Ambedkar claimed the Buddha as a teacher, but they interpreted his message in different ways. For Gandhi, the Buddha’s life illustrated the power of inner transformation; for Ambedkar, his teaching founded a rational social order. The former emphasised conscience, the latter constitution. In Gandhi’s writings, the Buddha appears as a saint; in Ambedkar’s, as a lawgiver. Gandhi grounded politics in inner moral transformation, whereas Ambedkar focused on institutional reform, seeking to reshape society through law and political structures. Each was responding to the colonial predicament of religion under modernity. Gandhi’s inclusionary rhetoric was a response to communal fragmentation; Ambedkar’s separatist conversion was a response to caste oppression. Their disagreement thus reflects two modes of appropriating the Buddha in modern India: one universalising, the other emancipatory.
Conclusion
The preceding analysis has shown that Gandhi’s engagement with Buddhism operated simultaneously at ethical, doctrinal, and political levels. Ethically, Gandhi treated the Buddha primarily as an exemplar whose life illustrated the practice of non-violence, renunciation, and compassion. Doctrinally, he reinterpreted Buddhist ideas within a Hindu theistic framework, translating concepts such as ahiṃsā and dharma into a language consistent with his understanding of satya and the moral order of the universe. Politically, these reinterpretations allowed him to deploy Buddhist symbols and narratives in the service of anti-colonial mobilisation while presenting India’s religious traditions as expressions of a shared ethical heritage. This synthesis had important consequences. Gandhi’s reading of Buddhism helped make non-violence intelligible as a public ethic that could guide collective political action. In this respect his interpretation contributed to later movements that drew upon Buddhist and Gandhian ideas simultaneously, including initiatives such as the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka and various forms of Buddhist-inspired political humanism elsewhere across the world in the twentieth century.Footnote 85 At the same time, Gandhi’s assimilation of Buddhism into a broader Hindu framework limited the extent to which it could function as an independent critique of social hierarchy.
By emphasising continuity between Hinduism and Buddhism and discouraging religious conversion as a strategy of protest, Gandhi framed reform primarily as a process of moral transformation within existing traditions. This position, of course, placed him in direct tension with Ambedkar. Whereas Gandhi interpreted the Buddha as a reformer within a shared Indian moral tradition, Ambedkar treated Buddhism as a distinct religious and political alternative to caste-based Hindu society. Ambedkar’s mass conversions in the 1950s therefore represented not only a religious act but also a rejection of Gandhi’s assumption that social equality could be achieved through internal reform alone. The contrast between the two figures illustrates how the same historical figure—the Buddha—could be mobilised to support very different political strategies in modern India. Taken together, these dynamics clarify the central argument of this article. Gandhi’s references to Buddhism cannot be understood simply as expressions of personal admiration or philosophical borrowing. They formed part of a broader process in which Buddhist ideas were reinterpreted, translated, and incorporated into a political language of non-violent resistance. This process enabled Gandhi to construct an ethical framework that drew upon multiple religious traditions while presenting them as compatible with a shared political project.
At the same time, the analysis demonstrates the limits of this strategy. Gandhi’s effort to reconcile religious traditions within a unified moral framework facilitated inter-religious cooperation but also muted the doctrinal and institutional differences that later reformers, most notably Ambedkar, considered politically significant. Gandhi’s engagement with Buddhism therefore reveals both the possibilities and constraints of religious universalism in the context of colonial and post-colonial politics.
For scholars of religion and political thought, this case illustrates how religious concepts circulate across traditions and are reinterpreted in response to new social and political contexts. Gandhi’s discourse on Buddhism was not merely theological; it was part of a broader effort to articulate an ethical basis for political action in a plural religious society. Understanding this process helps clarify both the appeal of Gandhi’s universalism and the critiques it generated within modern Indian debates about religion, equality, and social transformation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ruth Harris and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions in shaping this article manuscript.
Conflicts of interest
None.
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