Class
B.R. Ambedkar and Navayāna Buddhism: Caste, Liberation, & Engaged Practice —9/13–10/25
Recurrent
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Location
Online
Recurrent
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
“What does it mean to take up Buddhist practice as an act of liberation for all beings?
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.”
Dates — Sundays – Sept 13, 20, 27, Oct 4, 11, and 25 (no class on Oct 18)
Time — 10:00 AM–11:30 AM ET
Location — Online via Zoom (link will be provided to registrants before the first class.)
Registration deadline — September 10, 11:59 PM ET
Financial assistance deadline — September 3, 11:59 PM ET
Fee — $225-$360
Questions? If you have any questions or concerns about registration, please contact us at info@brooklynzen.org.
Santosh Raut, PhD (also known as Maitriveer-Nagarjuna) hails from Maharashtra, the heartland of the Ambedkarite Buddhist movement. Both a Dhamma teacher and a scholar of Buddhist Aesthetics and Philosophy, he has long been a thought leader and organizer within broader Asian networks of Engaged Buddhism. Following his doctoral studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Maitriveer joined the EFL University in Hyderabad as an Assistant Professor.
He combines this work with his role as the Deputy-Chairman of Nagarjuna Training Institute and the co-founder of The Babasaheb Ambedkar Philosophical Society at Nagaloka in Nagpur. Founded in 1994 near the site where Dr. Ambedkar formally converted to Buddhism in 1956 along with hundreds of thousands of followers, Nagaloka is a major Ambedkarite hub connected to the Triratna Bauddha Mahāsaṅgha (TBM). Maitriveer also co-founded the National Network of Buddhist Youth. For a number of years he has actively supported the Ambedkarite Buddhist movement in Hungary among the Roma, about which a documentary was made. More recently, he has been involved in the design of the Buddhavanam project in Nagarjunasagar, a very large Buddhist Heritage site park. Currently, Maitriveer is a Research Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. He was recently interviewed about Buddhism and Social Justice by the scholar Jon Keune at Michigan State University.
Cornel West, PhD, is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music.
Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.
Rima Vesely-Flad, PhD, is the Founding Director of the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. She is the author of three books: The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (North Atlantic Books, 2026); Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (NYU Press, 2022); and Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Fortress Press, 2017).
Dr. Vesely-Flad has twice been awarded a Department of State Fulbright Fellowship, as a post-graduate student in South Africa and as a faculty member in Ghana. She is also the recipient of grants from the Fetzer Institute, the Henry J. Luce Foundation, the Frederick Lenz Foundation, and the Crossroads Program. For several years, she taught college-level courses at Sing Sing Prison, Sarah Lawrence College, and Warren Wilson College, as well as graduate classes at Union Theological Seminary. You can follow her work at www.blackbuddhiststudies.org and on Instagram @blackbuddhiststudies.
William Edelglass, Ph.D., is Director of Studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and Professor Emeritus, Emerson College, Boston, MA. Previously, he was Professor of Philosophy at Marlboro College in Vermont. William has also taught at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics (Dharamsala, India), the Central University for Higher Tibetan Studies (Sarnath, India), and the Indian Institute of Technology—Bombay.
William has a broad background as a scholar and a practitioner. He has practiced in Zen, Tibetan, and Theravāda traditions. As a scholar, William’s work engages Buddhist studies, environmental humanities, and philosophy. His recent publications have addressed Śāntideva’s approach to mindfulness and ethics; Buddhism, happiness, and the social science of meditation; phenomenology, climate change, and the ethics of difference; the role of Buddhism in B. R. Ambedkar’s political thought; B. R. Ambedkar’s Buddhist approach to violence, nonviolence, and antiviolence; Buddhism and the environment; the role of faith in Indian Buddhist literature on the path; and Buddhist practice and the limits of language.
Banner image: Illustration of B.R. Ambedkar at a loom, On the occasion of World Buddhist Flag Day, 2025 @bakeryprasad
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