What are the twenty-two vows, and why do some Buddhists object to them?
When Ambedkar converted to Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, he did not stop at the traditional refuges and precepts. He administered to the crowd twenty-two additional vows of his own composition, and it is these that make the Nagpur conversion distinctive. Taken together they do two things at once: they affirm the Buddhist path, and they draw a hard line under Hinduism.
The line is drawn explicitly. Several of the vows renounce the Hindu gods by name and reject their worship; others forswear the rituals, the priesthood and the doctrines that mark a Hindu life, including the claim that the Buddha was an incarnation of a Hindu deity. Where an ordinary account of Buddhist conversion might simply add a new faith, these vows require the convert to state, item by item, what he is leaving. The break, not merely the arrival, is the point.