Comparative Liturgy: A Study of New Congregations in Liberation Theology and Dalit Buddhism

This essay will study the relationship of religion and politics in the context of two specific liturgical practices. These practices originate in the historical congregations formed during the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America and in the context of the neo-Buddhist Ambedkarite movements in India. The idea of the congregation will be articulated with the liturgical logic of “public service” in so far as the Greek word(s) for liturgy refers both to the physical assembly of citizens and the structural capacity for creating a space for the “common.” Coupling congregation with the collective sharing of a “common feeling” (Ambedkar) provides the essential material for a political analysis of two historical societies of the global South. In the case of Chile, from the time of the reign of Pinochet, political resistance came from several quarters, including that of the Christian religion, not as practiced by the Church but as a subversive challenge posed by Liberation Theology. The Ambedkarite conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism in 1956 created a strange conjuncture, wherein conversion both signified liberation from the erstwhile religious oppression of the Hindus and the entry into a new form of communitarian thought. But the future of such an act of conversion could only be realized in history if the forms of thought of a new Buddhism were to be actualized in real ethical-political practices of a people called Dalits, which means being oppressed. This paper will confront the precarious task of a comparative analysis of incommensurable situations and affirm the political universalism of a world-historical tradition of the oppressed/Dalit.