The Journey to Liberation

In the early years of the twentieth century, in a time of great political and social upheaval, Dharmanand Kosambi’s (1876–1947) search for the essence of the Buddha’s teaching took him from the backwaters of Portuguese Goa to Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Britain, America and Russia. While his popular expositions of the ethical teachings of the Buddha and his scholarly translations of Buddhist texts from Pali to Marathi are well known, his radical reconstruction of Buddhism in response to the cataclysmic transformations of the twentieth century has not received sufficient attention. His last work, Bodhisattva: Natak, is the culmination of his many tellings of the Buddha’s exemplary life and its meaning for the world today, a meaning arrived at through Kosambi’s own personal and political struggles, influenced not just by Gandhi but also by Parsvanatha, Marx and Tolstoy.