A man who'd spent years in committee rooms — drafting clauses, hearing amendments, chairing the group that wrote India's constitution, then sitting as law minister in Nehru's first cabinet — went to a field in Nagpur and a low platform instead. This was 1956. An elderly monk gave him the refuges and the precepts; then Ambedkar turned to the crowd and read out twenty-two vows of his own, and they said them back to him. Nobody could count that crowd properly. Hundreds of thousands is as close as anyone got, and the figures still argue with each other.
He died about seven weeks later. The ground has a great white stupa on it now, floodlit after dark, a railed walkway running up to the arch.
Marguerite, the manuscript he was finishing around then was The Buddha and His Dhamma — his own arrangement of the life and the teaching, written for readers coming to it new. It didn't reach print until after his death; the book went out into the world without him.
The elderly monk was Chandramani, Burmese, who'd lived at Kushinagar for decades — he gave the refuges and precepts in Pali and Ambedkar repeated them, and then did the unusual thing of adding twenty-two vows of his own composition. The sources disagree on how many took them that afternoon, and on whether the counting ran over the following days as well.