My childhood memories of a broken Buddha sculpture spawned a bewildering array of questions—long before I came to know about the greatness of the apostle of Ahimsa. We were told that the sculpture, made of coconut pith, was the work of one Yahsan who was close to our family in Vakkom. Yahsan was believed to have gifted it to my father who had a penchant for such things. The broken sculpture of Buddha continued to be a part of our childhood antics. However, one day, our neighbour ustad (Arabic teacher) accidentally saw it in my hands. Then came a naïve stricture from him—it was “un-Islamic to have the Buddha ‘idol’ in a Muslim home.” I couldn’t twig the nuance of his avowal of ‘idol’ and ‘un-Islamic’ then. But the sculpture continued to beget more disturbing doubts and niggles. As we grew up, we learnt that the Buddha was a great philosopher, teacher and spiritual leader that India can always be proud of. Sadly, our ustads and ulama could not appreciate the greatness of such personalities in other faiths and cultural traditions. For me, it was the beginning of an encounter between the social facts of religious norms and the social statics of inter-cultural life-world experiences. The reality is that for some people in India, uttering the name of Buddha became antediluvian—with the encounter and struggles within, and with other ‘fraternal’ religions. Nonetheless, Buddhism remained a cultural rhetoric for generations in India even as it began to flourish as a religion in other countries. The nagging question is, still, if the teachings of Islam and Buddhism could be antagonistic to each other. It is equally a perplexing question why the followers of the Buddha themselves detracted from the path of their great teacher over time, and why the traditions of Hinduism couldn’t recalibrate their cultural strategies to espouse the universal appeal of Buddhism. For the full text see the following link
