TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: World Renunciation in a Nineteenth-Century World - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0007
[Buddhist reform, Sinhala ethnic identity, Protestant Buddhism, world renunciation, universalism v. Nationalism]
The Introduction begins with Dharmapala’s role today in Sri Lankan public life, moving on to academic treatments of his life project, which emphasize his reforming Buddhism and reinventing Sinhala ethnic identity. It does so by situating his life between rising nationalism and a burst of universalizing movements such as Theosophy and a newly self-conscious Buddhist world. Dharmapala reveals his own self-understanding in his diaries and notebooks, organized around his innerliness, hypercritical temperament, comChicagoment to celibacy, and identification with the Buddha. Seeing him in these terms makes it hard to think of him as a Protestant Buddhist, and renders him more a world renouncer than a pious lay reformer. (pages 1 - 51)
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Chapter 1. Dharmapala as Theosophist - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0001
[affective communities, theosophy, universal brotherhood, transidiomaticity, overcoding, spiritual marriage, Henry Steel Olcott, Helena Blavatsky]
The Theosophical Society was a late 19th century affective community that brought together people who were unlikely to meet under other circumstances. Theosophical branches overcame the centrifugal forces of distance, nationalism, and religion. The allure was spiritual development and universal brotherhood. Blavatsky and Olcott drew on Buddhist concepts to create a transidiomatic world of adepts living high in the Himalayas and their followers. Dharmapala remained committed to those specifically Buddhist adepts throughout his life. His renunciation aside, he even contemplated what Theosophists call “spiritual marriage.” The overcoded relationship of Buddhism and Theosophy generally made it possible for Dharmapala to move easily between them. Spiritual marriage did not. (pages 52 - 115)
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Chapter 2. Buddhists in Japan - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0002
[Meiji Buddhism, sectarianism, Christian missionizing, Chigaku Tanaka, civilizing force, Henry Steel Olcott]
Meiji Buddhists invited Olcott to Japan, and Dharmapala followed after. The Japanese wanted Olcott to show them ways to resist Christian missionizing, and he insisted that the first step was bringing Buddhist sects in Japan into institutional unity. Dharmapala returned to Japan three times, convinced of Japan’s potential as a civilizing force and its financial capacity to support his efforts to reclaim Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha received his Enlightenment. In that cause Dharmapala had to do more than negotiate sectarian differences. He had to convince Japanese Buddhists that India was a real place, not a heavenly one. His meeting with Chigaku Tanaka proved just how unlikely a unified Buddhist world was going to be, revealing how one Nichirenist movement—Kokochukai-—conceptualized the place of India in creating its own united Buddhist world. (pages 116 - 185)
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Chapter 3. Universalists Abroad - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0003
[Okakura’s pan-Asianism, Bengali elite, bhadralok, Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, Japanese Buddha, World’s Parliament of Religions, Bodh Gaya, Indian nationalism]
In his travels Dharmapala encountered many universalizing projects-from Theosophy to Kakuzo Okakura’s pan-Asianism, from the World’s Parliament of Religions to the branding and projection of world religions, from Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, and Annie Besant to Lord Curzon’s affection for an Imperial British Buddhism. In Kolkata the Bengali elite (bhadralok) was drawn to Buddhism for its humanism as well as by their own civilizational pride in Buddhism as an Indian religion. As Dharmapala cultivated those connections, he fought to take Bodh Gaya away from the Hindu renouncer who controlled it, trying to install a Japanese Buddha image in the Bodh Gaya temple. That struggle brought both local and international actors into conflict and made the place a global Buddhist resource on the one side and an emergent instrument for forging the Indian nation on the other. (pages 186 - 240)
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Chapter 4. Dharmapala, the British, and the Bengalis - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0004
[universalism, nationalism, Lord Curzon, British India Association, Hindu nationalism, Buddhism as foreign, partition of Bengal]
Between 1891 when Dharmapala arrived at Bodh Gaya and 1910 when he lost the legal struggle to make Bodh Gaya a Buddhist place, Indian circumstances changed from day to night. The universalizing moment was swept away by an Indian nationalism that was Hindu in spirit. The struggle for Bodh Gaya was shaped not only by Bengali forces such as the British India Association but also by British colonial and international actors from Burma and Sri Lanka to Japan. Dharmapala found the British hugely favourable to Buddhism and the Buddhist claim to Bodh Gaya, as his Bengali friends grew less sympathetic to his cause. The struggle brought local British officials—Lord Curzon supporting one side and Henry and Evan Cotton defending the other—into conflict in a way that reinscribed the notion that Buddhism was foreign to India and Hinduism the heart of the Indian nation. (pages 241 - 303)
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Chapter 5. Dharmapala and the British Empire - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0005
[British Empire, civilizing mission to villagers, Protestant Buddhists, Buddhism in London, cleanliness and hygiene, civilizing mission to Londoners]
The British Empire was another universalizing project, and Dharmapala’s movements around the Empire produced an encounter between competing projects, one Buddhist and moralizing, the other British and legalizing. An overlooked part of Dharmapala’s life was his attempt to civilize village life and enhance its cleanliness and hygiene, not to rationalize village practice or make villagers Protestant Buddhists. Instead those efforts sought to give Sinhala people British recognition and respect. In this context Dharmapala appears as the loyal opponent of imperial rule. His sojourn in London from 1925–27 was an attempt to present the Buddha’s teachings in the metropole. But it was also an attempt to present an alternative form of civilization, Asian and Buddhist. The Empire was an interactive system. Giving Londoners Buddhism was a civilizing mission in the heart of Empire and an attempt to make them more compassionate to India and Sri Lanka. (pages 304 - 375)
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Chapter 6. World Wanderer Returns Home - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0006
[caste, universalism, freedom and slavery, sedition, world wanderer]
When Dharmapala spoke of the social order, he moved between saving all Humanity and thinking locally, as his attitude to caste in Sri Lanka suggests. When he spoke of freedom and slavery, he spoke in registers that were more spiritual than usually recognized and less political. He may not have been seditious, but he was critical of all human beings. His renunciation allowed him to do so. Returning to Colombo at the end of his life, the world wanderer came home. In Colombo he campaigned for support for establishing the first Buddhist mission to the West in London. The unlikeliness of missionizing the metropole put off his Sinhala Buddhist co-religionists, and his contempt for local practices made things worse. Choosing to spend his last years in India and to have his remains kept there made the Anagarika (the homeless one) “homeless” in a way not usually recognized. (pages 376 - 422)
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Afterword - Steven Kemper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199108.003.0008
[South Asian renunciation, disability, civilization and cleanliness, liminality, imitating the Buddha]
Dharmapala lived at a time of rising globalization and emergent uniformities among the nations and religions of the world. That said, Dharmapala was very much a South Asian figure, even if one influenced by Theosophical ideas. As a world renouncer he felt both entitled and obliged to preach to the colonial master in a way that followed the Buddha’s own course. Celibacy was central to his understanding, the burden he carried that allowed him to criticize. A physical disability kept him from fully renouncing as a Buddhist monk, but the role he invented needs to be understood as an attempt not to extend lay piety but to embody as much asceticism as his disability allowed. By occupying a liminal place between layman and cleric, he cut an anomalous figure, and that ambiguity was easy to misunderstand. He thought of his activism as required by his spiritual quest just as was his commitment to civilized standards and cleanliness. What he saw as a life course that imitated the Buddha could easily be seen as lay activism. (pages 423 - 438)
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Appendix 1. The Diaries and Notebooks Explained
Appendix 2. A Chronology of the Life of Anagarika Dharmapala
Bibliography
Index
