Dhammachakra Pravartan Din The Wheel Set in Motion Again: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Conversion of 14 October 1956 and the Rebirth of Dhamma in Modern India Dr. Rahul Sadshiv Kharat Associate Professor and Head, Department of Commerce and Research Centre M. S. Kakade College, Someshwarnagar, Baramati, Pune, Maharashtra Abstract Dhammachakra Pravartan Din, observed every year on Ashoka Vijayadashami, commemorates the mass conversion to Buddhism led by Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at Nagpur on 14 October 1956. The name deliberately recalls the Buddha's first sermon at Isipatana, when the wheel of Dhamma was first set rolling. This article examines the day as a historical event, a religious act, an intellectual project and a living public memory. It traces the antecedents of the event from the Buddha's first discourse and Ashoka's ethical polity through the eclipse of Buddhism in India; reconstructs Ambedkar's long passage from the Mahad satyagraha and the Yeol...
The Rise and Fall of the Tang Dynasty (618–907)_State, Society and Empire in Medieval China_By Dr. Rahul S. Kharat
The Rise and Fall of the Tang Dynasty (618–907)_State, Society and Empire in Medieval China_By Dr. Rahul S. Kharat Abstract The Tang dynasty (618–907) was among the most durable, cosmopolitan and culturally creative regimes in the history of China and of Eurasia. This article offers an integrated account of its trajectory, from the collapse of the Sui and the founding of the dynasty by Li Yuan and Li Shimin, through the institutional consolidation of the seventh century, the unique reign of the Empress Wu Zetian, and the brilliant “High Tang” of Emperor Xuanzong, to the catastrophe of the An Lushan Rebellion and the long, uneven decline that ended with the abdication of Emperor Ai in 907. It argues that the dynasty’s greatest strengths, namely its fusion of northern and southern traditions, its openness to the steppe and to the Silk Road, and its flexible administrative machinery, also generated the pressures that eventually undid it: the militarisation of the frontiers, the fisc...