Video: Celebrating Dhamma Chakra Day: Buddhism as Emancipation

November 07, 2024

This special HDS Buddhist Ministry Initiative event commemorated Dhamma Chakra Day, the anniversary of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism along with 500,000 of his followers. Dr. Ambedkar’s peaceful, egalitarian, and grassroots movement of social liberation left an indelible mark on Indian society, embracing Buddhism as a powerful method for marginalized people to denounce the caste system and to gain true equality and dignity.

Moderated by Buddhist Ministry Initiative Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Santosh Raut, this program included a presentation by Professor Charles Hallisey and a panel discussion on Dr. Ambedkar’s legacy as it resonates with Isabel Wilkerson’s "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," featuring Dean Melissa Bartholomew and Professor Stephanie Sears.

This event took place on November 7, 2024.

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Celebrating Dhamma Chakra Day, Buddhism as Emancipation. November 7, 2024.

DR. SANTOSH RAUT: So good evening, everyone. And I wholeheartedly welcome you in this beautiful evening where we are going to celebrate a very special day in the history of modern India and probably history in Buddhism, in contemporary Buddhism.

Today is the day when historically, it was October 14, 1956. Dr. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism with 400,000 people on that day and evoke a spirit of liberation from all forms of hierarchies and injustices that were prevailing in India for thousands of years. So we'll discuss more on that.

But to begin with, they celebrate this as a Liberation Day, or they call Dhamma Chakra day, where Dr. Ambedkar said to [INAUDIBLE] on revolving again, where India has lost its own beautiful civilizational or historical memories. So I wish you a very happy Liberation Day too.

So to begin with, we'll just sit for a few moments in silence to just gather ourselves. Just being aware of ourselves. And we are sitting in an interesting time in the world. As this day was celebrated as a Liberation Day, we can think of whatever object that transcends us, makes us broader, selfless, inclusive.

And collectively, we can make a change.

Thank you.

Before I introduce the event briefly, we have wonderful, wonderful, wonderful speakers this evening who are experienced and care for values, care for world, and have a concern for humanity. So I would like to invite on the dais and my teacher, Professor Charles [? Hallisey, ?] please. And, Professor Melissa, please do come on the dais, and Stephanie [INAUDIBLE] and be my assistant dean, Monica, Monica Sanford. You are last in there? Yeah, after.

So Monica Sanford is a dean for-- assistant dean for multi-religious ministry, and she is a trained Buddhist chaplain. She comes to SDS from Rochester Institute of Technology, where she became one of-- or rather only Buddhist, only two Buddhists in the North America to lead multireligious life department at a college or university.

She has written a wonderful book called Kalyanamitra, a Buddhist Model for Spiritual Care, which published in 2021. I would like to invite her to say a few words and words of greeting to all of us on the day.

[APPLAUSE]

MONICA SANFORD: Welcome, everyone. I'm so delighted you're here to celebrate Liberation Day with us and the life and work of Dr. Ambedkar and his followers in India, returning Buddhism to India. So I have the great privilege of facilitating the work of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative at Harvard Divinity School.

If you haven't heard of that group before, this is an initiative that puts in place resources and hope and builds the scholarly field of Buddhist ministry for the benefit of our students who are attending here at Harvard Divinity School and all of the places that they will go on to work throughout the world.

One of the things we're very happy to do is bring wonderful scholars and leaders, like Dr. Santosh Raut, as one of the first ever in the world that we know of, Buddhist Ministry Post-doctoral Fellows to Harvard Divinity School. And then to facilitate his vision to talk about Dr. Ambedkar's fight for social justice and liberation in India, to teach a course in the spring titled Buddhism and Social Justice. So I see students in the room. Please look for that course on My Harvard. It's going to be a good one.

And to develop his vision, which is to create a school, a graduate level training program in India for leaders in the Ambedkarite community going forward, so to continue this legacy of Dr. Ambedkar. When I was studying to become a Buddhist chaplain and a Buddhist minister, I'm happy to say that we did learn about Dr. Ambedkar. But I'm sad to say that it was a very brief, a very brief overview of who he was and the work that he did.

So I'm delighted to be here today to learn more about his important work and to bring that to the faculty, the staff, the students, the alums, the friends of Harvard Divinity School. We have some wonderful professors and scholars who are going to share their insights with you. So I won't bore you about that.

But please feel free to get up at any time and get more chi, get more food, make yourselves comfortable, and enjoy tonight's program. Thank you so much, Dr. Raut.

[APPLAUSE]

DR. SANTOSH RAUT: Before I introduce our-- give a very brief preface to the event, I would like to play a clip just for two minutes. It was a clip when Dr. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism in 1956. Of course, it's a original clip, which All India Radio preserved.

But I notice in this clip, if you watch end of the clip, that was the first time ever Dr. Ambedkar brought before something, that was the Buddha. He never brought before someone in his life, in front of any object. It was the first time we have noticed. I gathered that information by reading his memoirs of his close associate called Nanak Chand Rattu. So let's watch the movie of the day, clip on the day.

[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC]

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

So over 68 years, this Buddhist movement or Buddhist revival is one of the most optimistic and dynamic movement in India and now spreading message across the world. There are more than 230 million scheduled caste people in India and hundred million scheduled tribe, who are looking Dr. Ambedkar as their hero, as their emancipator and more inclined to turn towards Buddhism because of Dr. Ambedkar's thought.

And in the midst of everyday atrocities, lynching, rape on lower caste women and men, insults and dehumanizing them, they are looking Dr. Ambedkar and Buddha as a source of dignity, source of confidence, a source to new life with assertion as a human personality and for liberation. I think it's one of the fastest growing, socially engaged Buddhist movement in India.

In fact, much before venerable master Thich Nhat Hanh started using socially engaged Buddhism, this movement in '50s and '60s were showing path how to get rid of the forms of inequalities and hierarchies by the teachings of the Buddha.

I worked for years among a Roma Gypsy people in Hungary, and I think they encountered Dr. Ambedkar's thought through the book called Silent Revolution by Christopher Jaffrelot. He is a French scholar who is at Oxford, and they discovered Dr. Ambedkar. And when they interacted with me in India, they participated some of the Buddhist retreats and the workshops, how Dr. Ambedkar presented the Buddha and the Dhamma and the Sangha in contemporary time the challenges that India is facing.

And now they are inspired by this thought and started three, four Ambedkar iskola, means Ambedkar high school in Hungary. Unbelievable situation. My documentary is available on YouTube. On the work of Dr. Ambedkar and Hungary is much, much worse condition the way I have seen, but the confidence and the song of liberation they sing in the schools are heart touching.

So it's pretty clear that Dr. Ambedkar, when he gave introduction to interview to All India Radio, he says that, the religion I believe must promote the liberty, equality, fraternity, justice, and dignity. Slavery is antithesis to religion, and let no one understand that I borrowed this trinity, liberty, equality, and fraternity from French Revolution because it shedded blood.

He said, I borrowed from my master, the Buddha. And he was trying to connect the discourse of public life, civil society, everything he did through labor movement, constitution writing, and so on and so forth. But then he thought that's not enough. Law cannot govern the society. It can control the minority of criminals or injustices or crimes.

And, therefore, he very clearly saw the connection between democracy and the Buddhism. And he said that when he gave interview to Voice of America, he said that it's an attitude of mind. It's a associated living where one citizen's respect for another citizen. And he said that, that's not my vision of democracy. Democracy is not a equip word. I have to borrow a word from the dictionary of the Buddha, and then he uses and connects that democracy with the [INAUDIBLE]. And we are witnessing that processes in our times because liberal democracy is gullible and weak.

Before the forces of fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, and the authoritarian populist nationalist forces, because it is not anchored in higher values, and Dr. Ambedkar very clearly saw that. Therefore, he was linking the connection that it has to anchor something deep values and form a new society. And I'm stopping here, and I will soon invite the distinguished speakers.

When he presented Constitution to India in 1950, where India became a Republic, he said that an experience of democracy is not new to Indian civilization. It was very much existed in Buddha Sangha, but somehow India forgotten that and the clouds of caste has covered the great sun.

And when he converted to Buddhism, he said that, now I am introducing a new light. In that light, you would see India's history with new eyes. The greatest thing that Buddha taught, you cannot reform the world unless you reform your mind. So I am reading this poem by Dalit poet who defines Dr. Ambedkar's Buddha before we now begin the panel.

"I never see you sitting." The title of poem is Buddha. "I never see you sitting in Jeta's garden, sitting with eyes closed in meditation, in the lotus position, or in the caves of Ajanta and Ellora, with stone lips sewn shut. Sleeping in the last slip of your life, you can't.

I see you walking, talking, softly healing on the sorrow of the poor, the weak going from hot to hot in the life destroying darkness. Torch in hand, giving the sorrow that drains the blood like a contagious disease a new meaning." That's how Dr. Ambedkar's movement now inspired by various art forms and poetries and literature.

So to take discourse ahead with this preface, again, I would like to invite our guests to come back and take their seat. Just a few words. I need not to introduce Professor [? Hallisey ?] at HDS and in any Buddhist world. I learned a great deal of insights and wisdom from him, and I don't miss his classes. Though he gives me a lot of conditions to write a book in each class, which I already failed.

And then we have Melissa with us. She is Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. She has a passion for racial and social justice, was cultivated at Harvard University, where she received her undergraduate and law degree. She is an attorney with nearby decades experience in public interest law through her experience in her Seattle practicing law at Assistant Attorney General as a legal aid attorney with the Northwest Justice Project and working as a mediator in King County Superior Court.

It is because clear-- it was clear to Melissa that the law could not facilitate the heart changing required to eradicate racism and oppression from individuals and the system. So she is very inspiring and committed life. She is sort of presenting before us, which is great.

And then we have Stephanie Sears. She's a practitioner and theorist of Decolonial Spiritual Care, whose research centers on the religion of African women through the critical lenses of womanist and Black feminist thought. She was recently the recipient of a Mellon Foundation Just Futures award. She serves as a interfaith America liason, and her professional association includes the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, the Association for the Study of African-American life and history, and the Americas Academy of Religion.

She was previously associate professor of Africana Women's Studies and Religion at Clark Atlanta University, where she taught since 2014. So give a big round of applause to our great panelists tonight, and very much looking forward for their presentation and insights on the day.

PROF. CHARLES HALLISEY: As you're all aware, today is not the actual date of Dhamma Chakra Day. That was in October. We had some challenges in terms of finding a day in terms of scheduling rooms and our availabilities and some of us, not to name my name, not answering emails but we had some problem finding a day.

So Dhamma Chakra day was in October, October 14. Something fortuitous about that we've made it a bit later because now it is-- our gathering today is closer to December 6, which is the anniversary of the death of Dr. Ambedkar.

And so we just saw the clip of the remarkable public conversion that Dr. Ambedkar made on October 14, 1956, in which we could say that he fulfilled his aspiration that he had made decades earlier, to say, I will not die a Hindu. And so that he died just a few short months after Dhamma Chakra Day.

Thinking about this day in connection not only to Dhamma Chakra Day but also to the anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar's death, made me remember that after the Buddha himself died, his followers, when they gathered and spoke about remembering what he had taught and trying to collect together everything that he had taught so that others in the future could remember it as well, that their leader, Mahakasyapa said, if we do so, he will not be a teacher in the past tense.

And so in some sense, what our gathering here today is to remind us that Dr. Ambedkar is also not a teacher in the past tense, but that is someone who still has things, new things to teach us. And, thus, it's particularly fortuitous. Even if we might say we didn't anticipate it, we knew that this gathering would be after the American election, but we didn't know what the mood would be in this room in our city and our nation after the election.

And so what we can see is that in this context in which we find ourselves here, that Dr. Ambedkar has things to say to us, and that he's not only a teacher to the movements of marginalized, untouchable or Dalit people in India of the navayana. He's not only a teacher for people who are Buddhists, but he is a teacher for everyone who is concerned about the future of our planet and particularly the social lives that we will have together.

Part of what is fortuitous about commemorating, remembering Dr. Ambedkar today is that it helps us to see that part of what he is helping us to learn about and to reckon with his concern about the inequality in Indian society in the 20th century, that what he was talking about was not only India but something about the global history of inequality, exclusion, and oppression. And so that is a strong message that Dr. Ambedkar has to teach us today about that. We also are participating in that global history of inequality, exclusion, and oppression.

We just were able to see Dr. Ambedkar, but we couldn't hear him. And so I just want to just take 3.5 minutes to listen to him speak in which he is speaking to an assembly a decade before the conversion in 1956. That is the preparation for the Indian independence. And he's also speaking as someone who will go ahead and be one of the major authors of the Indian Constitution.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DR. BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR: So far, as the ultimate goal is concerned, I think none of us need have any apprehensions. None of us need have any doubt. But my fear, which I must express clearly, is this. Our difficulty, as I said, is not about the ultimate future. Our difficulty is how to make the heterogeneous mass that we have today take a decision in common and merge in a cooperative way on that road, which is bound to lead us to unity.

Our difficulty is not with regard to the ultimate. Our difficulties with regard to the beginning. Mr. Chairman, therefore, I should have thought that in order to make a start, in order to induce every party, every section in this country, it would be the act of greatest statesmanship for the majority party, even to make a concession to the prejudices of people who are not prepared to march together.

And it is for that that I propose to make this appeal. Let us leave aside slogans. Let us leave aside words which frighten people. Let us even make concession to the prejudices of our opponents. Bring them in so that they may willingly join with us on marching upon that road which, as I said, if we walk long enough, must necessarily lead us to unity.

PROF. CHARLES HALLISEY: Let me just underscore two points that Dr. Ambedkar was making in that short portion of his speech to the constituent assembly. One was, our difficulty is not with our ultimate goal. Our difficulty is with our beginning. That is also what we face now. Our difficulty is with our beginning.

And then a very striking sentence on his part that he said, oh, I would have thought it would have been an act of statesmanship, to which he spoke about making a concession to the prejudices of our opponents, out of a conviction that we don't have a problem with the ultimate goal, that making this concession in some way can in some ways help us to make a beginning.

Now under commemoration of Dhamma Chakra Day, we can't help but think about Dr. Ambedkar as a Buddhist. But in terms of thinking about him as a Buddhist, what we may find out is that he challenges us to think about Buddhism differently than we're used to.

So in thinking about how he thought about Buddhism, we might also find out that there's a different Buddhism that is possible than we're used to and familiar with, and perhaps also a different Ambedkar that has become slightly familiar to those people who are interested in Buddhism. Because his interest in Buddhism began perhaps long before he began to refer to the Buddha or anything about Buddhism but when he began to speak about anticipating the independence of India and the kind of society that he was hoping for.

So one of the striking things that I think is that Dr. Ambedkar did not see that Buddhism's kind of close neighbors were things like Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism. Its close neighbors were things like democracy, fascism, communism, that it was that Buddhism was not only something about a personal commitment. It was a way of living together.

Ambedkar's Buddhism, I think, provides a vision of governance for human social relations that encompasses individuals, society, and the state. And that all of that is part of what he means by Buddhism. I want to just read a few passages from one of Dr. Ambedkar's more notorious or famous writings, a speech that he wasn't allowed to give even though he was invited to give it, which he then published as a pamphlet, which then provoked or inspired a furious reaction from Gandhi. The book, Annihilation of Caste.

He says in it, "I realized that the world is a very imperfect world, and anyone who wants to live in it must bear with its imperfections. But while I am prepared to bear with the imperfection and shortcomings of the society in which I may be destined to labor, I feel I should not consent to live in a society which cherishes wrong ideals or a society which, having right ideals, will not consent to bring its social life in conformity with those ideals.

If I am disgusted with Hindus and Hinduism, it is because I am convinced that they cherish wrong ideals and live a wrong social life. My quarrel with Hindus and Hinduism is not over the imperfections in their social conduct. It is much more fundamental. It is over their ideals."

This is what Dr. Raut referred to as values. I think the language that Dr. Ambedkar constantly referred to was ideals. And in Annihilation of Caste, he goes on to say, "I would not be surprised if some of you have grown weary listening to this tiresome tale of the sad effects which caste has produced. There is nothing new in it.

I will, therefore, turn to the constructive side of the problem. What is your ideal society if you do not want caste, which is a question that is bound to be asked of you? If you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on liberty, equality, and fraternity."

There was no doubt that when he published Annihilation of Caste, what he had in mind of this phrase, liberty, equality, and fraternity, was something about that came that he attributed to France. As it went on, he began to think of this as something that the Buddha was teaching. And that by approaching what the Buddha taught with ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, that we understood what the Buddha had to offer the world in a different way.

In a certain way, fraternity stands out quite a lot. Fraternity for Dr. Ambedkar is democracy. And when we can go further and say democracy is Buddhism, but at the heart of it is fraternity is a key thing. He goes on to say, "Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow people," towards one's fellows.

In another publication, Gandhi and Jinnah, different leaders of the movement towards independence in colonial India, Dr. Ambedkar wrote about democracy. "A democratic form of government presupposes a democratic form of society. The formal framework of democracy of no value and would indeed be a misfit if there were no social democracy.

The politicals never realized that democracy was not a form of government. It was essentially a form of society. It may not be necessary for us democratic society to be marked by unity, community, of purpose, by loyalty to public ends, and by mutuality of sympathy. But it does unmistakably involve two things. The first is an attitude of mind, an attitude of respect and equality towards their fellows. The second is a social organization free from rigid social barriers.

Democracy is incompatible and inconsistent with isolation and exclusiveness, resulting in the distinction between the privileged and the unprivileged." That idea that democracy is a form of society, and it involves an attitude of mind, goes directly for Dr. Ambedkar to the teachings of the Buddha.

He says in the book that those of us, like me, focus on when we're studying Dr. Ambedkar as a Buddhist thinker, his book that published just before he died, The Buddha and His Dhamma. He says, "The first distinguishing feature of the Buddha's teaching lay in the recognition of the mind as the center of everything.

The first thing to attend to is the culture of the mind. The second distinguishing feature is that the mind is the font of all the good and evil that arises within and befalls us from without. Whatsoever there is of evil connected with evil, belonging to evil, that issues from the mind. Whatsoever there is of good, connected with good, belonging to good, all issues from the mind."

But this is where Dr. Ambedkar, as a lawyer, writer of the Constitution, kind of steps forward in a very distinctive way he's understanding. The cultivation of the mind that is necessary for social democracy doesn't only depend on the personal practices of individuals. It depends on the state. The state has a responsibility to guide its citizens to the future that is defined by the ideals that are being held together by the society, by liberty, fraternity, and equality.

When I read Dr. Ambedkar talking in this way, what I realize or what I remember is scenes from my own childhood growing up in the northern cities where there's court ordered desegregation of the primary school that I was going to in which going into the school and seeing on the walls of the school large posters that said to us, say, first grader, you have to be taught to be racist. Which what we can see in the school as an institution of the state was saying, don't listen to your parents.

You have to be taught to be racist, and that the state was taking a responsibility towards me, to not let me suffer what perhaps my parents or my neighbors or the people who voted in elections would have ultimately wanted to happen.

Dr. Ambedkar had a great deal of confidence in the state. He was an advocate of a strong state. He did not think that the democracy, that the state was to represent the will of the people alone. It was an instrument of the transformation of the people towards the ideals of a society to bring us closer to those ideals.

But the state includes persons, and we need to have something of what governs the state. And this is where the Constitution becomes particularly important, that it is one of the remarkable achievements of Dr. Ambedkar that he wrote or one of the key authors of the Indian Constitution. I'll just say, as a Buddhist, he is a writer of the Indian Constitution that his being a Buddhist is not separate from his political activities or his legal activities, what he did.

So the Constitution is to provide the governance to the state. But what will provide the governance to the Constitution? Buddhism. Buddhism then is something like a meta government, a meta governance, that it provides the ideals that guide how people will interpret the Constitution that will guide how the state operates, to guide its people to a closer realization of the ideals that it offers, all the while recognizing this is an imperfect world.

So what we see in this is that vision of Dr. Ambedkar, that the state should move society and individuals in the direction of the ideal society governed by Buddhist principles. This is where Buddhism is not like Christianity or Islam or Judaism. It is like fascism, authoritarianism, communism. It is a political vision, which historically in India, it had been as well.

So to just say lastly that Dr. Ambedkar reinterpreted Buddhism. There's no doubt. People like me like to point out. He imported things like liberty, fraternity and equality into Buddhist teachings. He snuck those French things in, and we judge him for that. But he also reinterpreted democracy. And the way that he reinterpreted both is of such global significance that we can say that he is not only a teacher for Buddhists in India. He is not only a teacher for marginalized people in India. He is a teacher for all of us today, particularly on this day.

Let me just remind ourselves of what is key to that democracy. And one of the things about where Dr. Ambedkar in the speech to the constituent assembly, he said, our problem is not with the ultimate goal. Our problem is with the beginning, with our beginnings.

So we say, oh, he told us about that in a very significant way when he was reinterpreting democracy. Democracy for Dr. Ambedkar is fundamentally how people interact with each other. It is an attitude of mind. It is an attitude of respect and equality towards our fellows even when our fellows are opponents.

And so that language of, where do we begin? We may have lost, have less confidence in what the state can do right now. But Dr. Ambedkar's vision of a social democracy is that possibility of beginning is always before us as soon as I look to my side, and I see the people who will speak next.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: It's still not--

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: There it is.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: Is that-- OK. There we go. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Jonathan, as well. Thank you, Dr. Sanders, Monica. It's a privilege to be here. We are charged with saying something about caste and how Isabella Wilkerson treats caste. And I first learned about Dr. Ambedkar through Caste when I watched the movie.

And I just want to-- we have been grounded already. We, Stephanie and I, as we talked about the difficult themes of this text, recognize that as we transition to talking about this text, we needed to have another grounding.

So I just want to invite us to just take a moment to center ourselves again. And the invitation is to focus on your breath. We have already taken in so much that is metabolizing, and we are preparing now to shift the conversation a little bit to go even deeper into some difficult history.

So we want to continue to prepare our hearts and our minds for this conversation. And I invite us to breathe with intention and to focus on our breath and to lean into our open heart space as we breathe.

Thank you. I'm going to continue to try to be mindful of my voice. I'll also offer as a way of continuing to create the container because we'll talk a little bit, and then we're going to open it up for conversation. If you're part of the HDS community, you know we offer touchstones. And so I'll offer just one that we borrowed from educator Parker Palmer, which is when the going gets rough, turn to wonder.

So if there's anything that comes up in our conversation that maybe rubs you the wrong way, or that you just feel a little sensitive to, just turn it in toward yourself and be curious about what has come up and why, and be curious about what the other person said.

I'm going to start us off with a brief overview of Wilkerson and a little bit about the text. And then Stephanie and I have some prompts that we'll engage with. Caste was published in 2020. It's a nonfiction book written by Isabel Wilkerson, a journalist who is African-American.

Wilkerson is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, which chronicles the Great Migration, the movement of African-American refugees escaping the terrors of the South, heading to the Midwest and other parts of the nation.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for that work, and in Caste, Wilkerson continues her chronicling of racial violence in this country and expands the conversation through the framework of Caste, drawing parallels between the experiences of racial terror in America and the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

Now, in the interest of transparency and of our well-being, you can see how thick this book is.

[LAUGHTER]

And anyone that knows us and any professors and administrators at HDS, you know how full our plates are, and it takes time to get through a text like this. So we did not finish this entire text. And it was not only because of the lack of time, but also because of the nature of the text.

She does not spare details. This text is replete with horrors that are breathtaking, and it would have been violence for us to try to move through all of it quickly because it is pain and trauma that is lived and that we are still living through.

So I want to just put that out there to let you know that this is not an interrogation of this entire text. But we have absorbed enough of it to have a conversation about the theme of Caste and what it teaches us and what it offers us today.

I'm going to start with Wilkerson's definition of caste. She says, "America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists, that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.

Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of humanity, of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country's X-ray up to the light.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry, and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract, but are ascribed life and death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.

A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary, boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another, and in their assigned places." And she outlines and structures the book around eight pillars.

I'm going to pause there and turn to Stephanie, Dr. Sears, and invite her to begin by saying a little bit more about what I alluded to earlier, which was the emotional challenge of navigating caste.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: Thank you, Melissa. So Wilkerson takes us through history and present lived reality in this kind of back and forth dance. And she provides us intimate details viscerally so of the horrors, the traumas, the suffering, and the pain of human experience.

And what makes it so provocative and thought provoking is also what makes it so heart wrenching and emotionally exhausting. And I think that was part of the genius of her book, that she makes it so confronting that it requires us to really come to terms with it in such a way that we cannot look away. And she provides such a profound realization of the inescapability of this caste system.

But as you're reading it, you also feel really pulled in and it becomes an inescapable witness for you as well. And I think for me, that was the difficult part of having sustained engagement with the text because it wasn't just history. It was the lived reality that I myself have lived through.

So it activated my own memories of trauma and pain. And so, yes, I do believe this is a very emotionally rich text but a gripping one at that. What was emotionally challenging for you?

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: I agree with what you-- all that you shared and particularly describing how it's an activation. And that's the challenge in general with those of us who-- for whom this is our life and lived experience and our scholarship and our area of focus as we're reading material like this and trying to digest and make meaning. We are dealing also with the physical reality of vicarious trauma that comes through the stories.

It's replete with stories, like I mentioned, and the story, one story that sticks out, that really just amplifies the breadth of the role of racism in helping to build the caste, because it highlights the complexities and the depth of the psychological deterioration.

And it's when she talks about lynching in America and the sport that it was made to be and the lynching postcards that were sent, pictures of people who were lynched, and she describes in detail what happens to those people, the barbecues that [INAUDIBLE]. And because they featured people being burned, I mean, the details.

So and it goes-- she gives example after example. And the one story I'm thinking about in particular was a story in Omaha, Nebraska, and a man named Will Brown. I think it was his name. And he was-- a mob lynched him because of an allegation that he had molested a woman, a white woman, and there was no evidence, no investigation or anything.

And one thing in particular that stood out and really helped connect us today, to today is that she mentions that he was a refugee from the South. And there was resentment about people who had migrated from another area. So this resentment is what helped to animate this mob. So it just reminds us of what is happening today and the resentment around people who are fleeing other parts of the world.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: That's right.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: Are here for refuge. So there are so many layers in the text that make it challenging to absorb and to process.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: Yes. One of the stories that sticks out is the stories of children and the one about the little boy who was part of the winning team. And although the organizers, the coach, the teammates could see this little boy's humanity, the society couldn't.

And there was a grand celebration. They wanted to go to the public municipal pool, and this little boy was excluded and made to look. But what is really gripping about that narrative is that when the coach advocated for this little boy, they allowed him for one lap around the municipal pool to get on a rubber, a rubber floater after all of the White people left the pool.

And they were watching this little boy whose instruction was, don't you dare touch that water, because they didn't want his being to pollute the water. And as a mother of Black boys reading that, the one thing that I couldn't help but to be struck by was that she noted that a part of him died that day in that humiliation.

And so just to think about this kind of insidious nature of these normative and endorsed patterns of the caste system and the ways in which it's internalized, and the damage that's done for both the receivers of the harshness, but also the ones who enforce the harshness, and that we're locked in this systemic rehearsal of an ancient performance that entraps us all. And that's just sits with me as a kind of awareness that she's bringing to the surface for us to really engage with.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: That story also struck me as a mother of a boy, a Black boy. And the pain-- and also we both saw the movie and she depicts that in the film, too, and it's so hard. It's so hard to watch and to read particularly thinking about the impact of that boy. [INAUDIBLE] he could not touch the water. That's right. And she said he was never the same.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: He was never the same. That's right.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: So I think about the story that Charlie shared about going into the school building and what this taught the members of his team, because she says that, like you said, they were-- it was a winning team. And the coach was going to take them all back home, and the little boy was like, no, I'm not getting in the van. I'm going to walk home--

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: He walked home.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: --with my trophy by myself. And she didn't get a chance to interview him for the book because he had died shortly after she discovered this story. But what must his story have been? What his life must have been like after that, that impression--

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: That's right.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: --of inferiority. And the children that watched that, the children that watched him being taken around on that float.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: That's right.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: Man. While everybody else was out and he was just like--

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: That's right.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: --don't touch the water. So that stood out for me. What else stood out for you?

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: So, yeah, I don't want to just sit only in the pain. I would love to read a section of, I think, the whole-- I think part of what Wilkerson is doing is to animate us to action.

And in her last chapter, she claims the heart is the last frontier. So I want to read an excerpt from that and then talk about the aspirational impact of sitting with Caste. And so I will jump around a little bit and then fill in the gaps.

So she dates this opening of the chapter December 2016, one month after the election. "He smelled of beer and tobacco. He was wearing a cap like the men at the rallies who wanted to make America great again, the people who had prevailed in the election the month before.

His belly extended over his belt buckle. The years had carved lines into his face and stubble was poking through his chins and cheeks. He let out a phlegmmy cough. I had called the plumbing company because I had discovered water in the basement, and he was the one they sent.

He was standing at the threshold of my front door and seemed not to have expected someone who looked like me to answer. It's a predominantly white neighborhood with joggers and cyclists and purposeful moms in yoga sweats pushing baby strollers, ponytails bouncing, maybe a labradoodle trotting behind. Landscapers, trucks, and housekeeping crews squeezed past each other on every side street. I was used to that reaction."

So Wilkerson goes on to describe how, in this point in her life, she's come to rely on service people. Her husband had passed away. She had lost her mother, and she herself was in the throes of grief.

And so she described a scene where the man was resistant to opening up. He was standing at the threshold. He was quite indifferent to her questions. She's got a leak in the basement. He's not moved to really help her, and he really wanted to discard her and just write her an estimate to replace the new one, to just get a new one.

And she begins to move boxes and lift things and to do the type of overfunctioning she and her African-American femaleness was used to do and was growing really resentful. Like, why do I have to struggle? He's standing there looking at me as if I'm not a person without even trying to help me?

And so ultimately, she decided to try another tack. And that's the point at which I really was enlightened by her approach. So she writes, "I was steaming now. All he was doing was standing there watching me sweep as women who look like me have done for centuries and not fixing anything.

He had come up with no answers, shown no interest, and now it appeared I was going to have to pay him for doing nothing. Since he wasn't helping, I felt I had nothing to lose. Something came over me and I threw a Hail Mary at his humanity.

My mother just died last week, I told him. Is your mother still alive? He looked down at the wet floor. No, no, she isn't. Somehow I had sensed that already, which is why I brought it up. She died in 1991, he said. She was 52 years old.

That's not old at all, I said. No, she wasn't. My father is still alive. He's 78. He's in a home South of here. My sister lives nearby to him. You're lucky to still have your father, I said. While he's mean as they come, I contemplated the significance of that. What might his father have exposed him to when it comes to people who look like me? But I kept it to the present.

You miss them when they're gone, no matter what they were like, I said. How about your mother? He wanted to know. How old was she? She was way older than yours, so I can't complain about that. But she was sick a long time, and you never get over it.

I have an aunt in her 80s who still smokes and will ask you for a taste of beer, he said, and let a slip a laugh. She's on my daddy's side. I smiled and tried to look at the positive. So your father's side is long lived, I said. Yeah, I guess they are.

His face brightened and he went over to the sump pump, bent down, and reached into it. A minute or two later he stood up. OK, some pumps cleared out. He turned to the area where the drain was likely to be. It's probably under this coffee table, he said. If you get one in, we can move it and see where it is.

Together, we moved the table. And sure enough, there was the drain. Drain's not clocked. So that's not the problem, he said. Let me go get my flashlight out of the truck." And then she describes how this encounter opened him up to exploration. He became curious about her, and then he began to care about her problem, and then he fixed it. He found that it was the water heater, and so now she was really getting the help that she wanted.

I love this story as the closing of the texts, the heart is the last frontier. And Wilkerson conceptualizes that it's radical empathy that will move us out of our contrived performances that are required of the caste system into the recognition of each other, so that we can experience a shared humanity. And that is very hopeful.

I think what she's also offering us is a spin on this idea. We have this idea that we are more similar than we are dissimilar. And at the bottom of that thought is usually like our strengths, our hopes, our aspirations, our goals, what we want for ourselves, our loved ones, our families. We have that in common.

But I also think what she's saying is that it is through recognition of our shared struggles that offers up us the opportunity for the deepest type of empathy that is animating, and that will motivate us to care for one another. And so I think that is the gift that she offers us for going through all of this painful history by sitting with it. We're able to locate that inner human suffering should be a motivation for the alleviation of that suffering.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: I love that story as well and have the same takeaway, and it resonates with what I told my class yesterday and then what we just heard. Charlie talk about Dr. Ambedkar and his qualities of for democracy and what's required to change the world. Like, I love the fact--

I was not familiar with Ambedkar until I saw the movie and then read the book. But like him, I believe that the law is not enough. So his belief that the attitudes-- we have to respect our fellows even when they're our opponents, highlights that story because what she showed so simply like, this man clearly came in with a preconceived notion of her position in the caste. She knew that, had heard it before, seen it before.

Rather than stay in that and stay in her own grief and anger, it's like I'm going to try and wonder. I'm going to be curious. I'm going to touch his humanity.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: Let me reach in.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: Reach in and see if there's a point of connection even though he's clearly an opponent.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: That's right.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: Someone who does not value my humanity. And just that little bit of connection drew him in. As I read that, I thought about what we're trained as chaplains when I went through my chaplaincy training when I was in this program at HDS and my CPE. It's all about the ways in which we can make simple connections to perfect strangers just through our presence, whether it's verbal or nonverbal.

And what I appreciate about what was highlighted from Dr. Ambedkar today was going back to what I shared with my class. I teach a class on Harriet Jacobs, exploring racial justice and healing through the life of Harriet Jacobs. And having it fall the day after the election, the night before as I'm preparing for class, reading her text, reading her narrative, and watching the results, and seeing where things were headed, I was grounded in what we've been studying and what she's been teaching us, which is what Wilkerson's teaching us, which is what Ambedkar highlights, which is Ubuntu. A person is a person through other people.

We, regardless of our-- what other people do, whether someone denies our humanity or not, we're still connected. So what I said to my class was Harriet's been preparing us for this. What is Harriet's epistemology teach us about this moment? And her epistemology is Ambedkar's epistemology, is Wilkerson's epistemology.

Regardless of what someone else has done or said or denied your humanity, it does not sever the ties of our connection.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: That's right.

DR. MELISSA BARTHOLOMEW: But it takes work. It takes a discipline, spiritual discipline, to stay rooted in your own humanity so that, like she demonstrated, she could then reach out to that opponent's quote unquote, "humanity".

So I also-- I love the fact that she brings, she highlights this practice of humanity through this simple conversation that was literally transformative.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: Literally transformative, yeah.

PROF. CHARLES HALLISEY: Now, I'm aware, out of respect for my fellows, particularly my fellows at Harvard Divinity School, who are always looking at the clock up there, that this doesn't have to be recorded.

But we might just give a chance where people have to go to go and people want to continue conversation to do that. But just to-- listening to both Dr. Sears and Dr. Bartholomew, I was remembering that line of Dr. Ambedkar in the clip from, that our problem is not with the ultimate goal.

Our problem is with the beginning and the beginning is always right at hand and in front of us, and that's what Wilkerson like-- the story that was lifted up from Wilkerson's book kind shows us. And it reminds us that Dr. Ambedkar is indeed a teacher to us here today. So thanks to the two of you.

DR. STEPHANIE SEARS: Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

AUDIENCE: Bravo.

DR. SANTOSH RAUT: Thank you. Thank you very much for that very touching conversation and the insights that you highlighted. Go straight to the matter active and invites us to also and transform us.

It also gives me, what kind of world we are going to inherit, where we are blind to each other, where whites are blind to Black, where upper castes are blind to lower caste, where rich are blind to poor, and so on and so forth.

That's where she's trying to invite or Dr. Ambedkar wanted to invite us. Professor Hallisey very rightly says, giving even concession to the opponents to march on the road of cooperation that would lead us to unity. I think world needs to hear this message urgently than ever before.

As Dr. Ambedkar said in Kathmandu immediately after conversion, the modern world is in need of Dhamma than ever before. And I personally submit my big thank to the great panel.

[APPLAUSE]

JONATHAN MAKRANSKY: I'll just stand out here. A very, very quick, traditional dedication of merit to dedicate the merit of this discussion to the well-being and liberation of all sentient beings. So it goes, may all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. May all beings have the boundless joy that is free of suffering. May all beings come to rest in the great equanimity beyond detachment and aversion to friends, enemies, and strangers.

SPEAKER 1: Sponsor Buddhist Ministry Initiative at Harvard Divinity School.