The 11th to 13th centuries, when Buddhism was on the verge of extinction, also marked the beginning of a harsh period for Hinduism and Jainism. This was because Muslims, who rejected idolatry, went on a mad invasion of India, thoroughly destroying temples, slaughtering countless priests and suppressing all Indian religions.
Their suffering and humiliation while laying low became even more decisive with the establishment of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century, and reached a crescendo with the subsequent ruthless oppression and exploitation of British colonial rule.
Under the reign of powerful rulers who did not share the Chakra ideology at all, the divine authority of the Chakras in India fell to the ground and continued to be thoroughly trampled upon.
But no matter how dark the night, the dawn will always come again. Among the middle class of Indians who were trained by the British East India Company to facilitate colonial rule, a national consciousness that could be called Great Indianism rose to the fore.
It was the exaltation of the ‘idea of Dharma’ as the absolute antithesis to the Adharma of Western civilisation, which thought only of destruction and pillage. Eventually, this enormous energy converged into a single point of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satya Graha ‘Grasping the Truth’ movement who upheld non-violence and disobedience with the Danda in his hand.
Traditionally in India, Satya (truth) = God. According to the previous context, there is an equation of “Danda = God = Satya”. In other words, the figure of Gandhi grasping a danda in his hand can be directly understood as the figure of ‘Satya Graha’, the Grasping of God, itself.
It could have been an anti-Indra (invader) movement repeated after thousands of years. His ideas and movement miraculously brought all of India together, then finally, they won independence from Britain in 1947.
The symbol of the entire independence movement was the ‘Charkha’ or spinning wheel, which was also featured on the flag of the Indian National Congress.
Under British colonial rule, India suffered from double and triple structural exploitation, where domestically produced cotton was bought cheaply, cheap industrial textiles made from it were mass-produced in post-industrial Britain and exported to India, and then India’s indigenous high-quality hand-woven textiles were suppressed and declined.
They countered the structural exploitation by promoting domestic products called swadeshi rather than mass-produced industrial goods imported from Britain. Then the handspun threadwheel ‘Charkha’ was chosen as its symbol.
But was not the spinning wheel at the same time a holy Chakra? The myth says that when Adharma (evil) flourishes and Dharma (righteousness) declines, Lord Vishnu takes on the form of Avatara (incarnation) and comes to the world, to destroy evil and restore law and order in the world by throwing the Sudarshan Chakra, the ultimate weapon against evil.
Couldn’t the spinning wheel “Charkha” have been the Sudarshan Chakra thrown by Mahatma Gandhi, who played himself as the Avatara of Lord Vishnu, against the overwhelming Adharma of British colonial rule, to restore the Dharma?
When Gandhi symbolically turned the charkha, was it not at the same time an implication of his determination to create, support and develop the unprecedented popular movement of India’s liberation by becoming the ‘axle’ of the revolution himself?
As if to symbolise this, Danda, representing the axle, Vishnu, Satya, was firmly held in his hand.
Finally, after a long and bitter struggle, the wheel of dharma he had thrown successfully shattered the overwhelming adharma of British colonial rule, and in the centre of the new flag of independent India, the Dharma Chakra of the Ashoka pillar was proudly raised to replace the charkha.
I don’t know whether the fathers of independence, including Gandhi, had a clear vision of “India, the land of holy chakra” at that time. But as if by historical necessity, the Dharma Chakra was revived for the symbol of Indian national unity.
Unfortunately, wrapping the remains of the assassinated Gandhi, became the first task of the national flag. But his achievements have become a great spiritual pillar, or “Stambha”, of the modern times, and have spawned many successors, including Mandela in South Africa and Martin Luther King in the United States. The Dharma Chakra movement he turned will never cease in the future.
The newly independent Republic of India not only hoisted the Dharma Chakra on the national flag, but also focused on the revival of Buddhism, which was the root of Emperor Ashoka’s Dharma policy. Many Buddhist heritage sites were restored, including the four holiest sites, such as Bodhgaya, where the Buddha attained great enlightenment, Sarnath, the site of the First Sermon, Kushinagara, the site of the Mahaparinirvana, and Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha (now Nepal), as well as Vaishali, the land that Buddha loved the most during his preaching tour, and Rajgir, where the Lotus Sutra was said to have been preached. This, together with the subsequent economic development of Buddhist countries in Asia, led to an explosion in the popularity of pilgrimages to Buddhist sites.
It should be remembered that the Nipponzan Myohoji Temple, which was active in India around the time of independence, played a significant role in this process, along with other Theravada countries such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar, which had long been dedicated to the restoration of Buddhist holy sites.
Now attracting pilgrims from all over the world, including non-Buddhist Westerners, Bodh Gaya is home to nearly 50 temples built by Asian Buddhist states. The Buddha Dharma Chakra of each temple, raised high seems to bless the new Republic of India, looking as if it had restored the glory of the Ashoka period.
It is not just foreigners. King Ashoka’s Dharma Chakra on the national flag and its historical origins have been taught in schools across India, and his ideas and achievements, along with the teachings of Buddha, have become a spiritual asset shared by the entire nation, regardless of religious sect.
And fortunately, the constitution of the new India formally rejects caste discrimination and calls for the creation of a democratic society in which all people can participate equally. Here the former main point of conflict between Buddhism and Hinduism has been resolved, at least in the legal system.
Today, many Hindus, mainly from the urban middle classes, are said to be inspired by Buddha’s teachings and cultivate inner peace through his wisdom. The lost memory of Buddhism in the Indian world has been successfully revived here.
Another revival of the Buddha’s Dharma wheel also took place in a completely different context. It is the mass conversion to the New Buddhism ‘Navayana’ by Dr Ambedkar, who was the first Minister of Law and Justice of the Republic of India and a member of the National Flag Commission.
Born into the harshest discrimination of the untouchable outcaste, his extraordinarily brilliant mind enabled him to gain an education exceptional for his origins, and he eventually became a leader in the anti-discrimination movement. However, the stubborn discriminatory attitudes of the upper castes posed insurmountable obstacles, leading him to abandon Hinduism and convert to Buddhism at last. It is said that hundreds of thousands of his caste fellows, who suffered from the same discrimination, followed his decision and converted at the same time.
This was the moment when Indian Buddhism, which had traditionally been more of a religion for the rich and upper classes, was reborn as a grassroots people’s religion, overcoming a period of decline and destruction.
Today, in cooperation with South Asian Theravada Buddhism, the Ambedkar Buddhists have grown to number in the tens of millions, and Nagpur in central India, the site of mass conversions, has captured the hearts of devotees across India as a new Buddhist holy place with the Dharma Chakra raised high.
I visited Nagpur twice, in 2008 and 2010. I met and spoke with Ven. Shurei Sasai, a Japanese monk who is considered to be one of Dr Ambedkar’s successors. He was originally a Shingon Buddhist monk who travelled to India to seek Dharma and was initially associated with the Nipponzan Myohoji Temple.
His maverick life is a grand drama in itself, and I will refrain from detailing it as there are not enough lines to do so. In the context of this article, my attention was first drawn to the statues of Ambedkar erected here and there in the city.
The chhatra above his head was designed as an exaggerated version of a domed umbrella, and it looked like a stupa itself at first glance.
When I tried asking a young devotee, he proudly said, “It’s cool to make a Stupa into the Chhatra, isn’t it? It’s our original.”
Yes, for them Indians, the superimposition of the stupa dome on the chhatra is a very natural sense. This encounter has made me more confident about the aforementioned ‘stupa=chhatra-dome’ hypothesis.
And when I visited Dikshabhumi, a huge stupa in the same city of Nagpur, my confidence was even closer to certainty.
Diksha Bhumi means ‘Ground of Buddhist Initiation’ and is a monumental holy site where tens of millions of people converted to the new Buddhism. The stupa, with trana gates on all four sides modelled on those at Sanchi, is a symbol of the successful revival of Buddhism in India after it had once perished.
Its structure is a huge dome with a hollow interior, and a Buddha image is enshrined in the centre of its circular hall floor.
At the very centre in the true sense are, like matryoshka dolls, nested small and medium-sized glass dome stupas, and the innermost interior enshrines the ashes of Guru Ambedkar, which is illuminated by lights resembling the Wheel of Dharma on the ceiling.
This is an excellent reproduction of the ancient stupa and chakra thought traditions, where it symbolically shows that for them, Guru Ambedkar is a saint who can also be superimposed on the Buddha himself.
As previously pointed out, the technology to build such huge hollow domes did not exist in ancient times, from the Mauryan to the Satavahana dynasties, when the stupa culture reached its zenith.
Originally, they had ‘wanted to build’ a dome-shaped huge hollow vessel, but gave up because they did not have such a technology. As a result, they built the stupa from a pile of bricks in the best way they could. In this light, the hypothesis presented in an earlier post, ‘bowl-shaped Stupa = chhatra = half of a cosmic egg = the hemispherical dome of heaven’, became more and more probable.
There is one more thing about Buddhism that I’m personally eager to introduce. It is the accomplishments of S.N. Goenka Ji, who died in 2013 after continuing to teach and spread Vipassana meditation throughout the world, which has traditionally been practised in Theravada Buddhism.
I attended Goenkaji’s meditation retreat in June 1995, when I first travelled to India. I had already had some experience with Zen at a temple in Japan, but this was a completely new encounter with ‘Buddha’s meditation practice’.
It’s a long story, so I’ll try to keep it short. My experience at the retreat led me to practice Aikido as a form of ‘dynamic meditation’. It was there that I was first introduced to the stick art (bo-jutsu), which eventually led me to study Indian martial arts back in India, where I fell in love with the rotating stick technique and went on to explore the ‘chakra philosophy’ that may lie behind it. In a sense, if I had not encountered Goenkaji’s Vipassana, I might not be writing this today.
During this period, I had been far away from the practice of Vipassana, but in a corner of my mind I had always secretly wished to return one day to that wondrous space of tranquillity. So, I had also been checking Goenkaji’s activities on the internet from time to time.
Following the words of his direct meditation teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, who urged to ‘Return this Buddha’s Dhamma to its homeland of India’, Goenkaji became an early promoter of Vipassana in India, attracting a large following of spiritual practitioners. By the time this book was first written in 2011, the Global Pagoda, a monument dedicated to the spread of Vipassana in tribute to Sayagyi U Ba Khin’s legacy, had already been completed.
The New Buddhism that is a part of the Ambedkar lineage tends to lean towards a secular nuance with a strong tendency of ‘political movement’, but Goenkaji’s achievement was truly groundbreaking in that they brought the ‘meditation practice’ at the heart of the Buddha’s teachings to the fore and gained so much public support in the Hindu kingdom of India.
The Global Pagoda, located in Mumbai, is a monument that beautifully symbolises the revival of Buddha’s Wheel of Dharma in the true sense of the word, after the destruction of the Vikramashila temple in East India by the Muslim invasion and the virtual total extinction of Buddhism in India.
Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to visit this place, but I would like to introduce here some topics from the internet that is relevant to the context of this article.
When I first heard about the project, I thought it would be a bowl-shaped one like Sanchi if it were an Indian stupa, but its unveiled form was Burmese pagoda style.
It is a token of gratitude to Vipassana meditation, which has been revived in Burma over 2,000 years, and to the Burmese master, Sayaji U Ba Khin, who taught it to Goenkaji.
Its construction is a perfect replica of the Shwedagon Pagoda in the centre of Yangon, the original home of Burma, and boasts a maximum outer diameter of 97.46 m at the base and a spire height of 99.06 m.
On the other hand, my interest was focused on its internal structure, which has been mentioned in the context of this book so far. Was the ‘central axis pillar as the main deity Buddha’ that I had examined reproduced there or not?
As it turned out, the pillar did not exist. The documents available today show that the interior of the pagoda was a three-storey hollow domed structure without pillars, and the fact that such a huge dome structure was possible without any pillars was being promoted as a key feature.
This was personally very disappointing, but on the other hand, there was a pleasant fact that overlapped with my hypothesis. It is said that a foundation stone was placed at the centre of the ceiling of the first dome (or the floor of the second dome), and that is where the Buddha’s relics were enshrined.
And a golden Dharma Chakra was displayed at the centre of the ceiling looking up from inside the first dome. Structurally, the Buddha relics were probably enshrined and buried directly above this Dharma wheel.
The flat, transparent view of the pagoda shows that although it is based on the octagonal shape of the Eightfold Path, it forms a beautiful chakra design as a whole, and Buddha’s relics are enshrined at the centre of it, or the place of the axle in the wheel. This is in accordance with ancient Indian Buddhist tradition.
Although Indian Buddhism had once disappeared, its essential practice of meditation has been fully revived in India, and even today, Pali chanting can be heard in Goenka centres scattered throughout the country. If the Buddha, who is said to have crossed over to the other shore of the world, could witness this scene, his feelings would undoubtedly be profound.
Such mega-projects are, of course, not limited to Buddhism. After steering the country towards economic liberalisation in the early 1990s, India experienced rapid economic development in the 2000s, and its financial resources were quickly channelled also into the field of religion.
In the Vishnu-Krishna sect, the Swaminarayan temple built magnificent, palatial temples throughout India under the name of Akshardham, contributing significantly to the revival and transmission of pan-Indian religious art design.
Like Akshardham, emerging forces such as ISKCON, a Krishna sect that became active, particularly after Independence, have breathed new life into Hinduism while taking over the traditional context.
The Shiva sect is no slouch either. It has an overwhelming presence, mainly by promoting the construction of giant Shiva statues and Shiva Lingam.
Even the goddess sects are doing their best. The Maha Lakshmi temple near Vellore in Tamil Nadu, with its magnificent golden temple at the centre of its huge hexagram-shaped compound, is also becoming a new symbol of Devi worship in South India.
As mentioned in some of the earlier chapters of this book, the Hindu temples in various sects with long traditions are probably now enjoying a period of prosperity unprecedented in their history. Jainism and Sikhism are, of course, no exception.
With economic development and social maturity, Indian indigenous religions, including Buddhism, which carried these Chakra thoughts, are bound to flourish in the future.
As mentioned throughout this book, the Indian sub-continent has been experiencing violent conflicts between the dominant Aryan invaders and the oppressed indigenous peoples since around 1500 BC. Despite these conflicts and contradictions, the two eventually merged harmoniously. It is out of the complex chemistry of this history that the profound philosophy of Chakras and Dharma in India has been deeply nurtured.
In fact, this composition anticipated modern and contemporary human history by 3000 years, in which the Western white Christians conquered and colonized the world after the “Age of Discovery” with discrimination and exploitation towards the “discovered peoples”, resulting in the inevitable fusion of both the dominant and the subordinated thereafter.
In other words, India’s Dharma, which has continued to confront and resolve the suffering of society and people with various contradictions and problems under the rule of the invading Vedic Aryans, is also likely to have universal meaning and value as wisdom to resolve various problems in the world in this age of globalisation led by the Westerners. This is what I believe.
This has already been demonstrated to a large extent by the worldwide spread of yoga and meditation practices that originated in India, but I do not want it to stop there.
As of this English translation being written in April 2023, over a year has passed since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the economic turmoil caused by the conflict is spreading across the world. In Sri Lanka, the mayhem from the default crisis has led to the resignation of the President and a near semi-collapse of society. In Japan, the aftermath of the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in early July last year has thrown the country into chaotic, and the Novel Corona, now in its fourth year, shows no sign of abating.
At a time when society, both in Japan and globally, is threatened by division and violence, and shaken by the turmoil and uncertainty of climate change and pandemics, if there is to be hope anywhere, I think, more than half-seriously, that it must be the Indian word ‘Dharma’ in the very broad sense.
The global economic system of modern civilisation in which we now live has its foundations in the history of the discovery, invasion and destruction of the “New World” and the subsequent harsh colonial rule and thoroughgoing plunder by Western white Christians.
We are living in the present moment, whether we like it or not, as an extension of it. At the core of this civilization lies the gratification of selfish greed by the strong, and its unconditional admiration and promotion, as the saying goes, ‘A leopard can’t change its spots’.
In a sense, it would overlap with the hymn dedicated to “plundering Indra” by the invading white-skinned Aryan peoples.
However, after a long passage of time, the people of ancient India abandoned Indra, the deity of the foreign invader, and eventually chose and worshipped the indigenous Krishna, Buddha, the yogic god Shiva and the earth mother Devi as their supreme beings. At the root of these pan-Indian Dharmas were the renunciation of ego and the restraint of greed, or ‘liberation’ from them, based on non-violent thought.
I believe that modern India, founded on such a Dharma, has been given a mission by God in Heaven to restore balance to the world, as an antithesis or alternative to Western civilisation, which is rooted and motivated by selfish desires leading to confrontation and struggle.
Was Gandhi, who fought against the oppressive rule of the British Empire with his Chakra (spinning wheel) revolt, not a clear forerunner of it?
Then, I fervently hope that in this age to come, the nation of India itself will embody the avatar of Lord Vishnu, and amidst the turbulent waves of international politics, will turn the wheel of Dharma or “Sudarshan Chakra”, with great splendour and magnificence.
When we hear about the social situation in India today, it seems that people are rapidly moving towards a material consumer economy and religious conflicts are escalating day by day, which is exactly the opposite of the Dharma idea of Gandhi’s vision.
In a sense, this may be natural, since the traditional Hindu value system places the Artha (gains in social life) alongside Kama (sexual love). Also, considering the poverty of the long period of low growth, it is quite understandable that people celebrate the heyday of their own (which is also the path that Japan once took). Considering the cruel acts by the non-Hindu in history, I am, as only an outsider, not inclined to condemn them with regard to the feelings of religious antagonism.
But India also has a history of traditionally upholding the values of Dharma and Moksha. There is no doubt that a way of life that transcends the ego and overcomes greed has been extolled as the supreme value.
It has been predicted that in last year’s 2022 census, India will surpass China as the world’s most populous country. However, if such a giant nation were to run full speed ahead on the same path as the Western civilization, which prioritizes conflicts and struggles rooted in selfish desires, the world could collapse sooner or later.
I’m looking at this country now with such a sense of urgency. On the other hand, it is also a sense of great expectation. If such a great nation awakens to the ‘modern value and significance’ of its traditional Dharma and promotes it globally, it could be a major turning point for the chaos of modern civilisation, just as Gandhi saved India.
As in Japan’s past experience, the huge construction projects and other bubbly booms may seem spectacular, but they do not equal to the prosperity of the Dharma. After the bubble economy has settled down, I would like to see more effort put into the most essential part – the promotion of Dharma in people’s hearts and minds.
What exactly is the ‘Dharma’ that India should be promoting in this modern world? I believe that this is the question that is being asked now.
I sincerely hope that the people of India and the nation of India will wake up to their rare originality, which cannot be replaced by others.
~to be continued~
INDIA~The Land of Holy Chakra 
