Gandhi’s Buddhism: assimilation, theologisation, and politicisation by a ‘modern Buddha’

Abstract This article examines Mahatma Gandhi’s lifelong engagement with Buddhism as a process of assimilation, theologisation, and politicisation that recast the Buddha from a historical teacher of renunciation into a modern moral archetype. Drawing on Gandhi’s extensive corpus of writings and speeches, it shows how Buddhist concepts were reinterpreted within a theistic, sanātana Hindu moral framework to serve his ethical and political aims. Gandhi’s Buddhism appears as ‘exemplarist’ rather than doctrinal: the Buddha functioned primarily as a model of moral conduct and civil self-discipline, while Buddhist ideas were translated into theistic idioms of ‘Truth’ and ‘moral government’. This translation rendered Buddhism intelligible to devotional Hindu audiences but muted its anti-theistic and anti-caste radicalism. Situating this hermeneutic within colonial modernity, the article traces Gandhi’s encounter with Buddhism from Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia in Victorian London to its deployment in nationalist politics and pan-Asian diplomacy. It also examines critiques by figures such as Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and Anagarika Dharmapala, who viewed Gandhi’s approach as a distortion that contained Buddhism’s emancipatory potential. Reassessing Gandhi’s ethical borrowings, doctrinal translations, and political uses of Buddhism, the article re-evaluates his image as a ‘modern Buddha’ who simultaneously moralised politics and spiritualised reform.