B.R. Ambedkar and Navayāna Buddhism: Caste, Liberation, & Engaged Practice

August 30, 2026 | Events

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Presented by Brooklyn Zen Center

🗓️ Sept. 13-10, 2026 @ 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM ET

📍Online

Brooklyn Zen Center welcomes Dr. Santosh Raut (Maitriveer Nagarjuna) alongside guests, Cornel West, Rima Vesely-Flad, and William Edelglass for this six-week online course. Participants will explore the legacy of B.R. Ambedkar, a twentieth-century Buddhist political thinker born into a community then labeled ‘untouchable,’ who devoted his life to dismantling caste and understood dharma as a complete response to oppression, dignity, and freedom. Programmed by Anna Kalyani Sardar.

Together with guest teachers the course offers scholarly, contemplative, and liberatory perspectives on Ambedkar’s vision. Cornel West places B.R. Ambedkar alongside W.E.B. Du Bois as twin figures in a shared tradition, one where no honest reckoning with truth or justice can look away from the suffering of Dalit, Black, and Indigenous communities alike. Rima Vesely-Flad turns to Ambedkar’s Buddhism being a rejection of caste hierarchy and its empowerment of women and the marginalized as a resource for Black Buddhist ethics today. William Edelglass frames Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism as choosing a “religion of principles” over a “religion of rules,” reconstructing the tradition itself as a tool for dignity, solidarity, and facing caste violence honestly.

In Dr. Raut’s words:“What does it mean to take up Buddhist practice as an act of liberation for all beings? Ambedkar’s Navayāna Buddhism calls us to recognize that caste, race, gender, which are all systems of hierarchy and exclusion, are constructions of mind, and that the cultivation of awareness, compassion, and courageous action can dissolve what centuries of convention have made to seem fixed and eternal.”

More from Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad

James Baldwin argued that racism is not a “Black problem” but a white fear-driven delusion that scapegoats Black people and evades interior work. Drawing on Baldwin’s essays and testimony, we discuss his critique of white moral pretentiousness, evasion, and the projection of shame and fear—especially the fear of death—onto Black bodies. We also see how Baldwin’s analysis relates to Buddhist teaching on dependent origination from the Rice Seedling Sutra.

 

In this dharma talk, we investigate the role of Sati—which is translated as knowing, awareness, presence, or mindfulness—in the writings of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, in conversation with early Buddhist writings.
In this dharma talk, we understand the weight of suffering through the eyes of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. We learn how Baldwin gleaned the difference between suffering due to the violence of racism, and suffering that is central to the human experience. We learn about Lorde’s embrace of the idea that pain can teach us something important, but that we need not suffer uselessly.

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