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Anagarika Dharmapala was the most important reformer of Buddhism in Sri Lanka in the 19th century. He espoused a Protestant Buddhism that blurred the traditional roles of monk and layman. It advocated right of lay people to engage in the high soteriological religion, and to strive for nirvana. One of his foremost legacies is inventing the role of the Anagarika, the person between the order of monks and the laity.

Anagarika Dharmapala applied his new ideas on Buddhism by attempting to take over Buddhist sites in India, particularly Bodh Gaya. Buddhists had a special historical connection with Eastern India because this was where Buddha reached enlightenment and founded his religion. Dharmapala believed that the identity of Buddhist Sri Lanka was defined by its ties to the symbolic centre of their religion, which lay in the heart of India — the Bodh Gaya. His long struggle to gain control over Bodh Gaya was a struggle to define Buddhist identity for himself and the Sinhalese nation in relation to their symbolic centre.

This chapter shows, with attention to the social, political, and polemical contexts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ways Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers attempted to align Buddhism with scientific rationalism. A discourse of scientific Buddhism emerged in the context of two intertwined crises: the Victorian crisis of faith in the West and the crisis of colonialism and western hegemony in Asia. In Ceylon, Anagarika Dharmapala promoted the image of Buddhism as scientific to counter denigrations of Buddhism by colonialists and missionaries and to assert its superiority to Christianity. Paul Carus, who through science had lost his faith in traditional Christianity, presented Buddhism as a part of a triumphal vision of science that would eventually lead to a universal “religion of science.” Henry Steel Olcott saw Buddhism as representing an “occult science” aligned with Theosophy and spiritualism.

In late 1909, the Sinhalese Buddhist activist Anagarika Dharmapala hosted the Irish Buddhist monk U Dhammaloka on a controversial tour of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). This tour is well-documented from many different perspectives: Dharmapala’s private diaries, his newspaper Sinhala Bauddhaya, the hostile colonial and missionary press, and transcriptions of Dhammaloka’s preaching. This chapter shows backstage tension between Dhammaloka and his hosts as they followed a punishing schedule of events drawing large audiences across Ceylon; conflict with Christians who wrote against the tour, attempted to disrupt it, and sought government intervention; and the actions of police and government. Dhammaloka’s abrupt departure from Ceylon appears as the culmination of these conflicts. The chapter offers a detailed insight into the day-to-day workings of contentious religious politics during the Buddhist revival.

This chapter describes clinicians’ filtering religion approaches to Buddhist traditions. Contemporary psychotherapists often express a prodigious enthusiasm about neuroscientific research purporting to prove the healing potential of Buddhist practices. Here scientific experimentation is seen as filtering away the taint of the religious or as leaving only a religious essence that is compatible with science – a “filtered religion” akin to filtered coffee. The seeds of filtering religion approaches lie in the work of early psychologists of religion like William James and James Bisset Pratt who also sought to filter Buddhist teachings through the high-technology psychologies of their own day in a search for new therapeutic religious forms (epitomized by “mind-cure” and James’ “religion of healthy-mindedness”). Today, experimental research design is applied to Buddhist meditation and Christian petitionary prayer practices alike in order to validate their so-called secular biomedical use. The chapter thus concludes that therapists’ filtering religion approaches to Buddhist traditions destabilize religion/secular binaries even as they submit the religious to the scientific or biomedical.