• Preacher: Bhikkhu Dhammadana (Seonseon), Abbot of ‘Bulgwangdong-jeol’, Seoul — the World Order of Saddhammādāna
• Occasion: the commemorative dharma assembly for the 70th anniversary of the Great Conversion Day (14 October 1956)
• Place: ‘Bulgwangdong-jeol’ (the dharma hall enshrining the statues of Venerable Sāriputta, Venerable Moggallāna and Dr. Ambedkar)
[Opening the Retreat (立齋) and the Order of the Assembly]
With my head bowed, I pay homage to the Buddhas who abide always throughout the ten directions and three times, to the noble teaching, and to the holy Saṅgha.
Welcome, honoured members of the fourfold assembly gathered in this sacred dharma hall in Eunpyeong-gu, ‘Bulgwangdong-jeol’ — where are enshrined the majestic images of the Buddha’s two chief disciples, Venerable Sāriputta and Venerable Moggallāna, and of Bodhisattva Dr. Ambedkar, who raised Indian Buddhism once again after some eight hundred years of its disappearance from that land.
Today, 14 October, is the most radiant and greatest day of spiritual and social liberation in human history — the seventieth anniversary of the proclamation of the ‘Great Conversion Day’ (Dhamma Dīkṣā).
We have gathered here today not merely to mourn a page of history already turned. We are here to open the true wisdom that frees us from superstition and teaches us to make our own merit; and to revive in our own lives the spirit of the Buddha’s true Dharma (正法, saddhamma) — the spirit of one who looked unflinchingly at the suffering of the world and set about reconstructing it, going far beyond any consolation that soothes only the individual heart.
[Chapter One] 14 October 1956 — the flame of dignity that was lit at Nagpur
Honoured members of the fourfold assembly, picture with your mind’s eye the great scene that unfolded on the morning of 14 October 1956 in Dīkṣābhūmi square, Nagpur, in the Indian state of Maharashtra.
That was the sacred year marking 2,500 years since the Buddha entered Parinibbāna (the great passing). Into that square, half a million people came streaming like an endless cloud, dressed in clean white. These were the outcast multitudes who for thousands of years had been denied the standing of human beings in Indian society — the so-called ‘untouchables’, whose very shadow was said to pollute, who were not even permitted ground on which to spit.
The man who stood before them was Dr. Bhava Saheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (B. R. Ambedkar), chief architect of India’s constitution and a scholar of world standing. He had taken doctorates at Columbia University in the United States and at the London School of Economics in Britain, and became independent India’s first law minister. Yet within the Hindu order of caste he experienced in his own body that even the highest intellect could not escape the shackle of ‘untouchable’.
For more than fifteen years Dr. Ambedkar had fought for reform within Hinduism — campaigns for access to water sources, for the opening of temples. At last he understood: within a caste system that justifies graded inequality as the will of God, true human dignity cannot stand upright. And so in 1935 he made his historic resolve: “I was born a Hindu, but I will never die a Hindu.”
Then, on 14 October 1956, having taken the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts from the Burmese elder U Chandramani Mahāthera, then in his eighties, Dr. Ambedkar recited together with the half-million gathered the ‘Twenty-Two Vows’ he had drafted himself.
“I renounce the old bonds of oppression that obstruct human progress and do harm; I accept the Buddha’s Dhamma as my religion. I believe that today I am born anew!”
This declaration was no mere change of religious membership. It rejected the divine authority that had oppressed them and the humiliating system of status, and proclaimed to the world that one is oneself a dignified human being and a disciple of the awakened Buddha: a Self-Declaration, and a spiritual rebirth.
The Buddha had said long before:
“Just as rivers of many names, once they reach the ocean, become one salt water and all distinction disappears, so too, when one enters my Saṅgha, whether one was a royal, a brahmin, a barber or a sweeper, all alike become equal and pure disciples of the Buddha.”
Dr. Ambedkar revived this teaching of the Buddha’s equality in modern society and led half a million people from humiliation to dignity, from darkness to light.
[Chapter Two] The Dhamma that reconstructs the world: Ambedkar’s Navayāna
Honoured members of the fourfold assembly, the Buddhism Dr. Ambedkar advocated we call ‘Navayāna’ — the ‘New Vehicle’ (新乘佛敎) — or ‘Engaged Buddhism’.
So what is the heart of Navayāna Buddhism?
First, Dr. Ambedkar did not confine the meaning of ‘suffering’ (dukkha) taught by the Buddha to a devotional or metaphysical notion. He faced squarely the fact that a great share of the suffering human beings undergo arises from social inequality, structural contradiction, and the injustice of human beings discriminating against human beings. The Buddha’s Dhamma, therefore, is not a means of praying for comfort in the next life or of escaping from this one; it must be, as he insisted, “a social morality for setting the world right — to reconstruct the world”.
Second, Dr. Ambedkar stressed independent reason and the courage to enlighten oneself. In a 1956 speech in Delhi he urged the people:
“Do not accept any custom or teaching blindly. Human beings are by nature free. Therefore become fearless citizens who think for themselves and judge by reason!”
The Buddha never told us to worship him as an absolute god. He was simply ‘the one who points the way’ (maggadātā), who diagnosed the cause of suffering and showed the path that ends it.
In his closing speech to India’s Constituent Assembly in 1949, Dr. Ambedkar warned that “if political democracy does not extend into social democracy, and if liberty, equality and fraternity — the life lived together — are torn apart, then that democracy is a castle built on sand.” And he stressed that it is the Buddha’s loving-kindness (maitrī) that is the true moral foundation sustaining the brotherhood and fraternity of democracy.
[Chapter Three] The vow of Bulgwangdong-jeol: Bap Halmeoni’s dāna and the practice of engaged Buddhism
Compassionate Buddhists, the spirit of this noble Navayāna is not something far away in India alone. This very place where we pray and practise together today — ‘Bulgwangdong-jeol’ in Eunpyeong-gu — is the centre of that practice.
I was the first Korean monk to receive formal bhikkhu ordination in India, the homeland of Buddhism. I have visited the sacred site of Dīkṣābhūmi in Nagpur and taken deep into my heart the tears and the vows shed there by Dr. Ambedkar and half a million people. And so, in the dharma hall of Bulgwangdong-jeol, alongside the Buddha’s chief disciples Venerable Sāriputta and Venerable Moggallāna, we have enshrined an image of Dr. Ambedkar — the only such enshrinement in Korea.
Our temple is also the only temple in Korea that enshrines the memorial tablet of ‘Bap Halmeoni’ — the woman militia commander who, some 430 years ago during the Imjin War, led the Skirt Brigade at the Battle of Haengju, piled rice straw on Nojeokbong of Bukhansan, and scattered fish-flour into the Changneung stream so that the Japanese siege was broken.
Bap Halmeoni emptied her entire fortune to give food to the poor and hungry among her neighbours, and in a national crisis of life and death she saved the nation and its people through wisdom, dāna and harmony.
The free meal hall ‘Bap Halmeoni’s Refactory’ run by our Bulgwangdong-jeol is exactly that sacred place where Bap Halmeoni’s sublime spirit of dāna and Dr. Ambedkar’s spirit of engaged Buddhism meet as one.
In a 1954 speech Dr. Ambedkar defined true dāna (보시) in this way:
“True dāna is not one-sided pity or charity that humiliates the poor. The help that creates in a downtrodden person the strength and the dignity to one day stand on their own two feet — that is real dāna.”
Indeed! Without giving, wisdom does not arise either. My own dharma name as abbot, Dhammadana (Dhamma-Dāna), means precisely “to give the Dhamma (法) to the world”. Not a one-off sympathy that leaves a person begging, but a warm bowl of rice that holds a neighbour’s wounds and helps them become the master of their own life — this is the true dāna we practise at Bulgwangdong-jeol, and the role of a propagation centre of the true Dharma.
[Chapter Four] The bell of the true Dharma rung for modern people and the young
Let us look at our society today. Countless young people and others cry out in loneliness and pain amid endless competition, anxiety about work, inequality and egoism. That interest in temple stays, meditation and Buddhist culture has been growing among the younger generation is truly a welcome thing.
Yet at the same time many ask:
“Doesn’t modern Buddhism offer the young only personal consolation and healing of the mind, while remaining limited when it comes to the actual suffering of our lives and the solving of social problems?”
On this Great Conversion Day we must humbly look into ourselves before that question.
The Buddha’s teaching never remains a sweet comfort that merely settles the individual mind in a quiet corner.
First, we must find the courage to enlighten ourselves, to step out of the ignorance and unknowing (無知無明, avijjā) in which we live. To believe foolishly and blindly is blind faith; to believe deluded things as if they could bring us fortune is superstition. To step free of our preconceptions, of habits that have soaked into us, and of the view that inequality is only natural — to open our eyes and look at the world with a new attitude: that is precisely where Buddhism begins.
Second, we should say not “May you receive much blessing in the new year” but “Let us all make much blessing in the new year”. Blessing does not simply fall from the sky; it comes only when I give and do good. Before holding out our hands to beg for blessing, we need the practice of first reaching a warm hand toward a neighbour in difficulty and making blessing ourselves.
Third, we must set upright the law of cause and effect (因果法, the law of kamma), which is the root of morality and ethics in our society. The law of cause and effect is the solemn order of the universe: because there is a cause, a result follows. There is a saying among us: “If tears fall from another’s eyes, tears of blood will fall from mine.”
The violence, discrimination and indifference I have dealt to others inevitably return to me, and the warm understanding and compassion I have given to the world surely bear fruit as peace. If we realise this law of cause and effect deeply and put it into practice, the reason to fight with or resent others disappears, and only then will justice and peace take root in this society.
[Dedication (廻向) and Aspiration]
Compassionate members of the fourfold assembly,
The flame of dignity that Dr. Ambedkar shot upward together with half a million people has not cooled in the seventy years since: it is still burning.
The Twenty-Two Vows he left, the spirit of Navayāna, and the spirit of dāna and wisdom of Bap Halmeoni that Bulgwangdong-jeol has inherited — all of these ring a deep bell in the hearts of people today, steeped as they are in materialism and egoism.
On this Conversion Day, let us all shatter the dark, deluded ignorance within us, and carry out the courageous conversion that walks the path of the Buddha’s wisdom and compassion!
When I change, my family changes; when we act, this world will be reconstructed as a village of light, of compassion and peace.
I earnestly aspire that the immeasurable merit of today’s assembly be dedicated to every living being throughout the world groaning under war, famine, discrimination and suffering, so that all beings may quickly be freed from suffering and enjoy true freedom and dignity.
“May all beings be happy; may all beings be at peace; may all beings be freed from ignorance and attain a life of dignity…” — Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu. Jai Bhim.
