Burning Refuge: Spiritual and Political Liberation in the Navayana Buddhist Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses how the Theravada Buddhist scriptures in the Pali Canon support B. R. Ambedkar’s Navayana Buddhist movement in their struggle to eradicate caste and gender-based discrimination in the social, political, and legal spheres. Among these teachings are passages that record the stories of low caste and female disciples who free themselves from all fetters, spiritual and political. This paper focuses on the verses of Awakening by early Buddhist nun Puņņikā Therī in the Therī Apadāna and Therīgāthā, recognized for having realized full enlightenment on par with males. An ancestor of Navayana Buddhists, she was born low caste and female and is an inspiration for this movement’s advocacy for the equality of all people in the contemporary context. From the onset, women have actively advocated in this regard for themselves and their communities. Their socially engaged grassroots Buddhist approach emphasizes the inseparable link between spiritual and political liberation on individual and communal levels. The Buddha’s simile in AN 10.51 aptly expresses the impetus for this movement: a wholesome desire for liberation from suffering as a burning fire consuming all obstacles and a refuge, both temporal and ultimate.[1] [1] This article is based on a talk given at the March 2024 Conference: Burning Refuge: Social and Political Liberation, Harvard University, US.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".