Search Results

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.

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 examines the practices of Buddhist meditation and Raja yoga in New Thought. Leaders of New Thought were first exposed to Buddhism and Vedanta philosophy through the publications of European Orientalists and the Theosophical Society and, later, though personal contacts with Asian Buddhist and Hindu missionaries. In addition to D. T. Suzuki, who helped to spark American interest in Japanese Zen, other important early missionaries were Anagarika Dharmapāla, a Sri Lankan Buddhist and Theosophist, and Swami Vivekenanda, an Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order who launched the Vedanta Society in North America. New Thought leaders, Theosophists, and Asian missionaries met in person at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and continued to develop relationships for more than a decade, particularly at the Greenacre conferences in Eliot, Maine. This chapter reveals the transnational nature of New Thought, which is typically considered to be an American metaphysical religious movement.

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.

The fourth chapter shares early nineteenth- and twentieth-century interactions between Buddhist and scientific thinkers, situated in the context of European colonialism and focusing on examples from Theravada Buddhism. The writings of nineteenth-century British scholars reveal their positive outlooks on Buddhism and suggestions of harmonies with science and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The story of Anagarika Dharmapala, a famous reviver of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, is shared with focus on his analysis of the harmonies between Buddhism and Darwinian evolution. Another story, focused on Bhikkuni Kusuma, brings forth an underappreciated hero of Buddhist feminism who transitioned from life as a biologist in Indiana to that of a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka. The chapter ends with a personal story about the author as a student in a Tibetan Buddhist college classroom and his discovery of an unexpected connection between Buddhist teachings and the phenomenon of color-blindness.

This chapter provides a synopsis of Dharmapala’s early career. He perceived his mission to be the restoration of Buddhism in its place of birth, India, and the refashioning of its practice in Sri Lanka. His predominant aim was to reclaim for the Buddhists the custody of Buddhagaya. He also had an interest in propagating a modern philosophy and practice of Buddhism and forging links among Buddhists world-wide. Dharmapala was also an early enthusiast of the American theosophists led by Col Olcott who took a keen interest in the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka. However, Dharmapala soon became disillusioned with them and parted company, forming his own organization, the Mahabodhi Society, to spearhead the Buddhagaya campaign. The chapter concludes with a description of the economic and social transformations that took place under the aegis of colonialism around the turn of the twentieth century and the beginning of the Buddhist revival as a reaction to it.

This chapter relates the first involvement of the American theosophists with the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka and subsequent developments. The theosophists, having become aware of the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka, had come there. Col Olcott and his co-theosophists were enthusiastically received and the Buddhist Theosophical Society was formed. Funds were established to finance various Buddhist causes: Buddhist schools were established; a Buddhist press was started; and a Sinhalese newspaper was inaugurated. One important event that occurred around this time was the attack on a Buddhist procession by the Catholics in Kotahena. In the aftermath, as an outcome of the offenders not being prosecuted by the colonial authorities, the Sri Lankan Buddhists took various measures: representations were made to the Colonial Office in London; a Buddhist flag was devised; and an agitation for a new legislation to prevent abuse of Buddhist temporalities was started. One outcome of this was Dharmapala’s falling out with the theosophists and the formation of the Mahabodhi Society.

This chapter examines the traditional relationship between the Sangha and the Buddhist laity and the role of the king as a protector of the Sāsana (the Buddhist order). It briefly traces the vicissitudes of the Buddhist order in Sri Lanka from the fifteenth century. A decline in the status of the Sangha was arrested by the intervention of the monk Welivita Saranankara under royal patronage—the pupils of Saranankara initiated a religious and literary resurgence. A setback occurred when the British, who annexed the Kandyan kingdom in 1815, pledging to uphold the traditional status of Buddhism, went back on their promise at the insistence of Christian missionaries. The Buddhist order lost its traditional state patronage. However, the Saranankara tradition continued through his line of pupils in southern Sri Lanka. Prominent scholar monks of this tradition are identified in this chapter, followed by a brief account of Dharmapala’s career highlighting his role in the Buddhist revival.

This chapter is primarily a recounting of Dharmapala’s early work in India supported by prominent personalities of the nationalist Bengali elite—the Bhadralok. He forged close personal links with these personalities. He was also able to win some support from the press in Bengal. This chapter presents a brief account of the early phase of the Indian national movement centred on Bengal. This is around the time when Dharmapala’s disagreements with the theosophists begin. In the next phase of Dharmapala’a activities, castigating the British colonial administration and Christian missionary activities in Sri Lanka as well as the slavish mentalities of his own compatriots become prominent.

The final chapter of this book talks about the political impact of Dharmapala’s work even after this death by addressing the publication of many of his writings during the 1956 Buddha Jayanti. It lays out a critical examination of Dharmapala and his work at two levels: first is the critique of his thought and action by academics and second is the criticism of his methods of operation by his non-academic contemporaries.

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.