FIFTEEN DAYS before his death on December 6, 1956, Dr. Ambedkar delivered what would become his final major lecture. He was frail. The State gallery hall in Kathmandu was full. And his subject - a comparison between the Buddha and Karl Marx - was, by his own admission, likely to "sound odd."
He opened with characteristic directness: "A comparison between Karl Marx and Buddha may be regarded as a joke." He acknowledged that Marxists would find it absurd to place their modern, scientific revolutionary alongside an ancient religious teacher - "Marx so modern and Buddha so ancient!" - and then refused to be deterred.
His challenge was simple: "If the Marxists keep back their prejudices and study the Buddha and understand what he stood for I feel sure that they will change their attitude."
In an intellectual climate where Buddhism was seen as otherworldly quietism and Marxism as the only serious theory of liberation, Ambedkar refused both caricatures. What followed was one of the most original works of political philosophy produced in twentieth-century India. It remains, seventy years later, among his most under-explored writings.
A common end, but divergent means
Ambedkar's method was to strip both systems down to their surviving essentials. Much of the original Marxian structure, for instance, he argued, had been "demolished both by logic as well as by experience." The inevitability of socialism had not materialized. The progressive immiseration of the proletariat had not occurred. What survived was a residue of four propositions: that philosophy must reconstruct the world, not merely explain it; that class conflict exists; that private property concentrates power in one class while generating misery in another; and that this sorrow must be removed.
In an intellectual climate where Buddhism was seen as otherworldly quietism and Marxism as the only serious theory of liberation, Ambedkar refused both caricatures.
He then demonstrated, through careful quotation from the Tripitaka, that the Buddha had arrived at precisely the same conclusions through an entirely different path. Citing the Buddha's dialogue with Ananda on possession and avarice, Ambedkar observed: "If for misery one reads exploitation, Buddha is not away from Marx." The rules of the Bhikshu Sangha – forbidding monks from owning gold, silver, or property beyond eight articles of daily use – were, he noted pointedly, “far more rigorous than are to be found in communism in Russia.”
While there was a common end goal, there was a divergence over the means to get there. The Communist means, Ambedkar stated plainly, were "violence and dictatorship of the proletariat." He did not pretend these were unreasonable on their own terms. He even acknowledged that "a Russian Dictatorship would be good for all backward countries." But he also asked: what comes after? "When will it wither away? What will take the place of the State when it withers away?" To both questions, he found no satisfactory answer.
The structural flaw at the heart of the Marxist project, as he identified it, was that it had no theory of what holds people together once the gun is put down. And the Communists, in their blanket hostility to religion, had carried "their hatred of Christianity to Buddhism without waiting to examine the difference between the two." The Buddha's method was the inverse. "His method was to change the mind of man: to alter his disposition: so that whatever man does, he does it voluntarily without the use of force or compulsion."
This was not passivity - the Pancha Sila and the Noble Eightfold Path were active, demanding disciplines. But what distinguished them was their insistence on consistency between means and ends. If the means involve the systematic destruction of human lives and the suspension of liberty, then the society that emerges will carry that violence within it.
Ambedkar illustrated this through Ashoka - the Mauryan emperor who conquered Kalinga through massacre and then, horrified, renounced violence and embraced the Dhamma. Even granting an interim dictatorship, he asked, what would follow it? History suggested no regime dissolves itself voluntarily. Ashoka himself could not sustain an empire through force. It was only through the transformation of individual moral consciousness — Dharmashok replacing Chandashok — that his legacy endured.
Ambedkar also drew on the Buddha's own life as constitutional evidence. "He was born a democrat and he died a democrat." When a robe was gifted to the Buddha personally, he refused it unless extended to all monks. When asked twice to appoint a successor, he refused both times - "the Dhamma is the Supreme Commander of the Sangh." The Bhikshu Sangha had achieved, in Ambedkar's words, "communism without dictatorship - a miracle which Lenin failed to do."
"It seems that the three [liberty, equality and fraternity] can coexist only if one follows the way of the Buddha. Communism can give one but not all."
‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity not possible without Buddha’
Ambedkar concluded with a sentence that should be read as a challenge: "It seems that the three [liberty, equality and fraternity] can coexist only if one follows the way of the Buddha. Communism can give one but not all." Equality without fraternity and liberty is not liberation – it is a reorganization of domination. The only framework capable of holding all three together was one grounded in the voluntary transformation of individual moral consciousness, not in externally imposed structural change.
Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, what the essay demonstrates is a quality of mind that is rare in any tradition: the willingness to take two systems seriously on their own terms, to identify what is genuinely valuable in each, and to reach an honest judgment — not from a safe scholarly distance, but as someone with everything at stake in the answer.
Ambedkar had spent his life fighting the caste system that the Indian state he helped build a constitution for had not yet abolished. He converted to Buddhism fifteen days before delivering this lecture. The question of which path leads to genuine liberation was not, for him, an academic one. It still isn't.