B. R. Ambedkar and Buddhism: The 1956 Conversion

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 27 October 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the Dalit leader born into the Mahar caste who chaired the Drafting Committee of India’s constitution, turned to Buddhism after two decades of looking for a religion that did not sanction caste. On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur he took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from a Burmese monk, then led hundreds of thousands of followers through them and his own 22 vows. His The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957) reread the teaching as a social one, and its reception is still divided.

This page is about his Buddhism. Buddhism in India and Buddhism and social justice have pages of their own, and other modern figures are on famous Buddhist teachers.

Who he was, in brief

In a 1936 speech he recalled that he was born at Mhow, near Indore, where his father was a Subedar in the army, and that the family “belonged to the Mahar caste”, one of the communities then treated as untouchable. He studied at Columbia University, which records his MA (1915), his PhD (1927) and his teacher John Dewey.

In 1932 he signed the Poona Pact for the Depressed Classes, accepting reserved seats under joint electorates in place of the separate electorates Gandhi had fasted against. He chaired the Constituent Assembly’s Drafting Committee. Columbia calls him “the architect” of the constitution, but in his closing speech of 25 November 1949 he said, “The credit that is given to me does not really belong to me,” and named the adviser B. N. Rau and the chief draftsman S. N. Mukherjee. He became independent India’s first Law Minister and resigned by a letter dated 27 September 1951, publicly denying that illness was the reason; he had been pressing the Prime Minister to give the Hindu Code Bill higher priority.

Why he left Hinduism

At Yeola on 13 October 1935, according to the report printed in his collected works, he told a conference of Depressed Classes delegates that he had been born a Hindu untouchable, which he could not help, but “I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu.” The next year he wrote Annihilation of Caste for a Lahore reform society, the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, which called off its conference rather than hear it. He printed it himself. It ends with a farewell to his Hindu audience: “I am sorry, I will not be with you. I have decided to change.”

Gandhi reviewed it in Harijan in July 1936. He called Ambedkar “a challenge to Hinduism” and said his “profound mistake” was to pick texts “of doubtful authenticity” and people who were “no fit specimens” of their faith. Ambedkar reprinted the review, with his reply, in the next edition.

Why Buddhism, and not another religion

At Yeola he named no new religion; he warned his audience to choose carefully. In 1936 he weighed the religions already on offer. At the Sikh Mission’s conference in Amritsar that April he praised the Sikhs’ principles of equality but said he had not yet made up his mind. By June, according to Dhananjay Keer’s biography as quoted in the government volume, he had decided on Sikhism. A statement of his views given to the Hindu Mahasabha’s spokesman, B. S. Moonje, compared Islam, Christianity and Sikhism by their money, social reach and political rights. It judged Sikhism the least attractive of the three for the Depressed Classes but the best for the Hindus and the country, since conversion to Islam or Christianity “will denationalise the Depressed Classes”. He did not follow it through.

In The Untouchables (1948) he put forward, as “one hypothesis”, that the “Broken Men” from whom he traced the Untouchables were Buddhists, held in contempt by the Brahmins. He granted that “We have no direct evidence that the Broken Men were Buddhists”, holding that none was needed when most Hindus had then been Buddhists, and he made beef-eating “the main cause of their Untouchability”. That is his historical theory, not a scholarly consensus.

On 2 May 1950, while still Law Minister, he publicly called on the Scheduled Castes (“70 million Harijans”, in the press report’s words) to embrace Buddhism. That month the Maha Bodhi Society’s journal printed his essay “Buddha and the Future of His Religion”, which compares the Buddha with Jesus, Muhammad and Krishna. The Buddha, he wrote, claimed to be only a margadata, one who shows the way, not a mokshadata, a giver of salvation, and “In place of God there is morality.” Because the teaching rests on reason and experience, he argued, followers were “free to modify or even to abandon any of his teachings” that did not fit their time. He attributes this to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, but it is his paraphrase, not a quotation.

He attended the World Fellowship of Buddhists conference in Ceylon in 1950 and an international Buddhist conference in Rangoon in 1954, and on 4 May 1955 he registered the Buddhist Society of India in Bombay “for propagation of Buddhism”; the handbill for the Nagpur ceremony named him its “Founder and President”. In his speech of 15 October 1956, translated from Marathi in the government edition, he gave his own answer: “I do not want blind followers. Those who wish to embrace Buddhism, they should accept it with comprehension.” Rivers lose their identity when they meet the sea, he said, and “when we join Buddha Sangh, we lose our caste and become equal” (see Sangha).

The 1956 conversion at Nagpur

In a statement of 23 September 1956 he fixed the date and place: Nagpur, on the Dussehra day, 14 October 1956 (Ashoka Vijayadashami). The next day he wrote to Bhikkhu Chandramani at Kushinara (Kushinagar) asking him to officiate: “You being the oldest Buddhist Monk in India we think it would be appropriate to have the ceremony performed by you.” The handbill calls him “Venerable Bhikkhu Chandramani Maha Thera of Burma, now in India”.

The account compiled in the government volume, which cites the Nagpur paper Navyug and the movement’s weekly Prabuddha Bharat, describes the morning at the site now called Deekshabhoomi. Ambedkar and his wife, Dr. Savita Ambedkar (Maisaheb in the account), stood before an image of the Buddha, and Chandramani recited to them in Pali the homage, the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts (see the Three Jewels). Ambedkar then asked those willing “to renounce Hindu religion and embrace Buddhism” to stand and repeat the refuges and precepts after him, and had them recite his 22 vows. Six other bhikkhus are listed as present, one from Ceylon. D. Valisinha, General Secretary of the Maha Bodhi Society, was billed in the printed programme to lecture the evening before, and after the vows he presented a Buddha image to Ambedkar.

How many converted is not settled. That account gives 2 to 2.5 lakh people on the ground by 7 a.m. and “about 5-6 lakh” by 9.30. Valisinha, in his eyewitness account, wrote of “500,000 of his followers”. These are estimates of a crowd, not a register of converts, so this page says “hundreds of thousands”.

Opening his speech the next day, he spoke of the deeksha ceremony “performed yesterday and today morning”. Some said, he noted, that he had chosen Nagpur to embarrass the Hindu nationalist RSS, whose “large platoon” was there: “The reason of the R. S. S. even did not touch my mind.” He chose it, he said, for the Naga people, who in his reading of history had spread Buddhism in India. He also acknowledged that he had been “criticised by many people and newspapers”, some saying he was “misleading my poor Untouchables” and warning converts that they would lose the rights they had won. On 20 November, at the World Fellowship of Buddhists conference in Kathmandu, he spoke on Buddhism and Communism (the government volume heads the speech “Buddha or Karl Marx”, the title of a separate essay of his), warning that unless the young of Buddhist countries saw Buddhism as a better way of life than Communism, “Buddhism is doomed.” He died on 6 December 1956 at 26 Alipur Road, Delhi, now the Dr. Ambedkar National Memorial.

The 22 vows

The vows are Ambedkar’s own, drawn up for this ceremony and recited after the refuges and precepts. In the government edition’s English, the first reads: “I shall have no faith in Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, nor shall I worship them.” In summary, the twenty-two are:

1. No faith in, or worship of, Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh.
2. None in Rama and Krishna.
3. None in Gauri, Ganapati and the other gods and goddesses of Hinduism.
4. No belief in the incarnation of gods.
5. No belief that the Buddha was an incarnation of Vishnu, which the vow calls “mischievous and false propaganda” (see the Buddha absorbed as an avatar).
6. No shraddha rites or pind-dan offerings for the dead.
7. Nothing contrary to the Buddha’s principles and teachings.
8. No ceremony performed through Brahmins.
9. Belief in the equality of humankind.
10. Effort to establish that equality.
11. Following the Noble Eightfold Path.
12. Following the ten paramitas (the ten perfections).
13. Compassion and care for all living beings.
14. Not stealing.
15. Not lying.
16. No sexual misconduct (“carnal sins”).
17. No liquor.
18. Living by pradnya, sheel and karuna: wisdom, character and compassion.
19. Embracing Buddhism and renouncing Hinduism, which the vow says harms humankind and treats people as low.
20. Holding the Buddha’s Dhamma to be the true Dhamma (saddhamma).
21. Entering a new life.
22. Conduct in accordance with the Buddha’s teaching.

Vows 13 to 17 track the Five Precepts, with the first precept, against killing, recast as compassion for all living beings.

The vows are still contested. In October 2022 a Delhi minister, Rajendra Pal Gautam, resigned after the BJP attacked his presence at an event where, in a PTI report, hundreds took a pledge to convert to Buddhism “and not consider Hindu deities as gods”. A later PTI report said “these vows were recited” there. Gautam accused the BJP of spreading “rumours”, apologised to anyone hurt, and said he would follow the ideals of Ambedkar and the Buddha. Union Minister Ramdas Athawale, a BJP ally, criticised Gautam’s party over his presence at the event, then said that as a Buddhist he supported “these 22 vows”.

What The Buddha and His Dhamma kept, dropped and reinterpreted

The book was published after his death, in 1957, by his People’s Education Society in Bombay. Its Introduction sets out four “problems” and invites readers of the Maha Bodhi Society’s journal to answer them. The Government of India PDF leaves that Introduction out, so it is quoted here from Frances Pritchett’s transcription. Our Buddhist books guide covers the editions.

The renunciation

The traditional answer, that the prince left home after seeing an old man, a sick man and a corpse (the first three of the four sights), is “absurd on the face of it”, Ambedkar wrote, since such sights were common and he could not have failed to see them before. In its place the book tells of a quarrel over the waters of the Rohini river: at twenty-eight Siddhartha opposes the Sakya assembly’s vote for war on the Koliyas (“War does not solve any question”), loses, and leaves home.

The story did not begin with Ambedkar. Vasant Moon, who prepared the government edition’s supplement of Pali sources, traces it to K. A. Keluskar’s Marathi life of the Buddha (1898), given to the young Ambedkar in 1907, which mentions the Rohini dispute and Siddhartha’s intervention, and to Dharmanand Kosambi. In a 1940 biography Kosambi argued that the Sakya–Koliya quarrels drove Gautama from home. He drew on the Attadaṇḍa Sutta and on the Kuṇāla Jātaka and the Jātaka commentary, which tell of the Buddha intervening when the two sides gathered at the Rohini to fight, an event Kosambi placed before the enlightenment. Kosambi’s 1949 play Bodhisatwa told the story, and Moon, reading it in 1962, was “surprised to find identical similarity” with Ambedkar’s. Making the quarrel the cause of the renunciation is Kosambi’s reading and Ambedkar’s, not the canon’s; for the canonical accounts, see the Great Renunciation.

The four noble truths: doubted, and left out of his first sermon

His second problem was the four noble truths. “This formula cuts at the root of Buddhism,” he wrote: the truths “deny hope to man” and “make the gospel of the Buddha a gospel of pessimism”. He asked: “Do they form part of the original gospel, or are they a later accretion by the monks?” His version of the first sermon gives the middle path, then says the Buddha’s Dhamma “had nothing to do with God and Soul” and that its centre is “man and the relation of man to man”; the Eightfold Path appears as the “Path of Righteousness”. The first sermon in the Pali canon, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11), is built on all four, from “the noble truth of suffering” to “the noble truth of the practice that leads to the cessation of suffering” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato).

He did not discard the truths everywhere. In Book VI he answers the charge of pessimism, which he traces to the first Aryan Truth: “the Buddha’s second Aryan Truth emphasizes that this Dukkha must be removed.”

Karma and rebirth

He kept rebirth, reinterpreted: “There can be rebirth even though there is no Soul” (see anatta and rebirth versus reincarnation). He held that “The Buddha’s Law of Karma applied only to Karma and its effect on present life.” He rejected what he called the “extended doctrine” of karma, under which a man is born into a poor or a rich family because of his past karma, and went further: “The doctrine of past karma is a purely Brahminic doctrine,” he wrote, and the only purpose he could see for the Hindu doctrine of past karma was “to enable the state or the society to escape responsibility for the condition of the poor and the lowly.”

He leaned on the Devadaha Sutta (MN 101), where the Buddha rejects the Jain view that “Everything this individual person experiences … is because of past deeds” (trans. Sujato). That is a claim about everything, and later in the same discourse the Buddha describes a mendicant whose purified mind sees beings “pass on according to their deeds”. The “present life only” reading is Ambedkar’s, not the canon’s or Theravada’s. He parts from the canon on caste-rank too. The Cūḷakammavibhaṅga Sutta (MN 135) says that someone “obstinate and arrogant” who returns to the human realm is “reborn in a low class family” (trans. Sujato), so the canon does link birth-rank to past deeds, though always to a person’s own conduct, never to their ancestry. Elsewhere the canon rejects birth as the measure of a person’s worth, and it gives no licence to read someone’s misfortune backwards as proof of a past deed (see karma in Buddhism). Ambedkar’s “Brahminic doctrine” charge sets him against MN 135 as well as against Brahmanism.

The monk and the Dhamma

His fourth problem was the bhikkhu: is he meant to be “a perfect man”, or “a social servant”? “If the Bhikkhu is only a perfect man he is of no use to the propagation of Buddhism, because though a perfect man he is a selfish man,” he wrote; as a social servant, the monk “may prove to be the hope of Buddhism.” The book’s answer runs through it: “Dhamma is social. It is fundamentally and essentially so.”

How other Buddhists received it

Moon’s preface records both receptions. Ambedkarite Buddhists took the book up “with great enthusiasm and devotion”, but “the traditional Buddhist world could not readily accept” his interpretation, critics objecting that it gave no scriptural sources. Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan’s Hindi translation of 1961 supplied as many as he could, and the book, Moon writes, “assumed a place of the Gospel among converts”. In 2011 Oxford University Press India published a critical edition that checks his citations and his changes to his sources.

Contact with the Theravada world ran both ways: the Maha Bodhi journal printed his 1950 essay, the Society’s General Secretary presented a Buddha image at the ceremony, and messages from Burma and Ceylon were read out. The scholar Tereza Menšíková wrote in 2025 that his reformulations provoked strong reactions, “particularly from already established Buddhist schools”, which found them, in her summary of Valerian Rodrigues, “radical, provocative, and overly individualistic”. She reports Adele Fiske and Christoph Emmrich’s finding that he excluded “miracles, deities, demons, heaven and hell, even arahantship” and “doctrines related to rebirth” from the Pali texts he drew on, and Pradeep P. Gokhale’s argument that his reinterpretations were “not without precedent” among Buddhist schools. The selection is not total: the book keeps the sage Asita hearing the gods shout “Buddha” at the prince’s birth, and it keeps a rebirth without a soul.

Sangharakshita, who edited the Maha Bodhi for twelve years from 1952, wrote editorials on the conversion and on Ambedkar’s death, and in 1957 protested the withdrawal of the new Buddhists’ Scheduled Caste scholarships and concessions, his trust records (how those protections were later restored is told on Buddhism in India). The order he founded, now Triratna, has an Indian wing that works among Ambedkarite converts. In 1991 Gopal Guru accused it in the Economic and Political Weekly of spiritualising Ambedkar’s legacy, and Dhammachari Lokamitra, one of its senior leaders, published a rebuttal; Menšíková notes that each claimed to be the faithful reader of Ambedkar. The order’s disclosures about its founder’s conduct are noted on our podcasts guide.

Is it “Navayana”?

The movement is often called Navayana, the “new vehicle”, and many Indian Buddhists use the name themselves: in a 2019–20 Pew Research Center survey, 48 per cent of Indian Buddhists said they belong to the Navayana order, which Pew describes as native to India and inspired by Ambedkar’s writings. Scholars use it too, as in the title of a 2022 study, Navayana Buddhism, by Shaileshkumar Darokar and colleagues, and Oxford University Press’s description of its critical edition calls the book “a radical reorientation of Buddhist thought and literature, aptly called navayana”. We have not found Ambedkar using the word in the volumes searched for this page, and the word is older than his movement: J. E. Ellam published a book titled Nāvayāna in 1930.

The movement today

The 2011 census counted about 8.4 million Buddhists in India, roughly three in four of them in Maharashtra. The census does not separate Ambedkarite from other Buddhists; Buddhism in India sets out the numbers and who they are. Menšíková notes that his call for conversion has resonated mainly among people historically identified with the Mahar caste.

The movement had no clearly designated successor, she writes, and it is plural. Summarising the 2022 study by Darokar and colleagues, she reports one strand that relies almost wholly on The Buddha and His Dhamma and avoids ritual and meditation, and another that chants, studies Pali and practises Vipassana; according to that study, the first often criticises the second for drifting from his emancipatory aim. Each year on Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din, kept on Ashoka Vijayadashami, crowds return to Deekshabhoomi; in 2022 the Nagpur daily The Hitavada reported “lakhs of devotees”. His death anniversary, 6 December, is kept as Mahaparinirvan Diwas, from the word for the Buddha’s own final passing (see Parinirvana Day). The government’s Dr. Ambedkar Foundation commemorates it every year, and its release for the 2025 observance at Parliament House describes a floral tribute “with the confluence of Buddhist chants performed by 25 Buddhist Monks”.

The question beneath his project is still argued. Menšíková notes, citing Gail Omvedt, that scholars have no consensus on whether the Buddha rejected the caste order itself or only the brahmins’ claim to supremacy; for Ambedkarite Buddhists, she writes, the issue is “unequivocally resolved”. The canonical texts are set out on Buddhism and social justice. Engaged Buddhism places his movement among the socially engaged currents of modern Buddhism, and the history of Buddhism places the 1956 conversion in the longer story of Buddhism in its homeland.