Out of the Ghetto: Church History as Global History, Part I

Peter J. Leithart, December 02, 2004

This is the first draft (sans footnotes) of a paper I will deliver in January. The remainder of this draft will be posted on this site.

To this day, schoolchildren in Sri Lanka learn about Buddhist �doctrine�Efrom a Buddhist Catechism first published in English and Sinhalese in 1881. Described by its author as an �antidote to Christianity�Eand as a bulwark against Christian missionaries invading the East, the Catechism includes such questions and answers as:

Q. Was the Buddha God?
A. No. Buddha Dharma teaches no �divine�Eincarnation.
Q. Do Buddhists accept the theory that everything has been formed out of nothing by a Creator?
A. We do not believe in miracles; hence we deny creation, and cannot conceive of a creation of something out of nothing.

Elsewhere, the catechism discusses the merit of good works, insisting that �there is no great merit in any merely outward act; all depends upon the inward motive that provokes the deed.�EQuestions 179-182 raised the issue of idol worship. Though it was admitted that Buddhist monks �make reverence before the statue to the Buddha, his relics, and the monuments enshrining them,�Ethis was distinguished from both crass pagan idolatry and refined idolatry. Instead, the �Buddhist reverences the Buddha�s statue and the other things . . . only as mementos of the greatest, wisest, most benevolent and compassionate man in this world-period.�EAs for �the worship of gods, demons, trees, etc.�Ethis was �condemned by the Buddha�Eas a mere �external worship�Ethat binds the worshiper like a �fetter that one has to break if he is to advance higher.�ELikewise, question 184 claims that Buddha �condemned the observance of ceremonies and other external practices, which only tend to increase our spiritual blindness and our clinging to mere lifeless forms.�E

If, in both its catechetical form and its anti-ritual content, this sounds suspiciously like a Protestant polemic against the excesses of Rome, that is not far off the mark. The Catechism and the flag represented one small portion of a large-scale revival of Sinhalese Buddhism, a revival that helped to shape the form and thrust of modern Buddhism, and one, curiously enough, to which two Americans made significant contributions. The Americans were a Russian �migr�E Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Henry Steel Olcott, who had co-founded and directed the Theosophical Society from November 1875. Blavatsky is the better known of the two figures, but Olcott, who came to be known as �The White Buddhist,�Eis, for my purposes, the more intriguing character.

By the time he received a royal welcome during his first visit to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1880, Olcott had already led a varied and curious life. Born into a Presbyterian family in Orange, New Jersey in 1832, Olcott had moved to Ohio in 1851 to live with some uncles on their farm after his father�s business failed. There, he developed an interest in spiritualism, as well as in scientific agricultural reform, and these twin interests continued to guide his thought for the remainder of his life. He returned to the East Coast several years later, and had a hand in founding the Model Farm for Scientific Agriculture in Newark, New Jersey, as well as a similar school in Mount Vernon, New York. He wrote agricultural columns for several newspapers, which led to a second career in journalism. When Virginia authorities excluded Northern journalists from the hanging of John Brown in 1860, Olcott donned a disguise and witnessed the execution, writing a report for the New York Tribune. He served as a signal corpsman in the Union Army during the Civil War, and rose to become a Special Commissioner of the War Department, responsible for cleaning out the corruption in the New York Mustering and Disbursement Office. Later, he served in a similar capacity at the Navy Yards in Washington, D.C., and he was one of three men on the commission to investigate the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. After the war, he attended law school, and worked as an attorney in New York. All the while, he was involved in radical causes of various kinds, �including antislavery, agricultural reform, women�s rights, cremation, and temperance.�E

The turning point in Olcott�s life, however, came in 1874, when he first met Blavatsky while Olcott was investigating reports of spiritualist phenomena at the Eddy Farmstead in Vermont for the New York Daily Graphic. Theosophy was an effort to formulate a scientific religion compatible both with developments in post-Darwinian science and with esoteric religions of antiquity. Blavatsky had formed the Theosophical Society �to diffuse among men a knowledge of the laws inherent in the universe; the promulgate the knowledge of the essential unity of all that is, and to determine that this unity is fundamental in nature; to form an active brotherhood among men; to study ancient and modern religion, science, and philosophy; and to investigate the powers innate in man.�EOlcott and Blavatsky quickly became friends and co-laborers, founding the Theosophical Society in 1875 with Olcott as President and Blavatsky as Corresponding Secretary.

Inspired by an account of an 1873 debate between Reverend David de Silva and a learned Buddhist monk named Miggettuwatte Gunananda, Olcott and Blavatsky determined that they should visit Ceylon to pursue the perceived links between Theosophy, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and to assist the Ceylonese Buddhists in their battle against Christian missionaries. They arrived in Bombay in 1879 claiming to be Hindus, and soon moved the Society headquarters to India. The following year they made their first visit to Ceylon. According to Olcott�s biographer, Stephen Prothero, shortly after their arrival �on May 25, at the Wijananda Monastery in Galle, Olcott and Blavatsky each knelt before a huge image of the Buddha and �took pansil�Eby reciting in broken Pali the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts of Theravada Buddhism, thus becoming the first European-Americans to publicly and formally become lay Buddhists.�E

Before Olcott arrived in Ceylon, a number of reforming monks had embarked on an effort to curb the influence of Christian missionaries by reviving Buddhism. Gunananda, who gained notoriety from the debate with de Silva, has been described as a �fiery orator, pamphleteer and a fighter who led the challenge to Christianity and the missionaries.�EIn 1862, he had founded the �Society for the Propagation of Buddhism�Eand had been printing anti-Christian pamphlets. The �true founding father�Eof what has been called �Protestant Buddhism,�Efurthermore, was a prot�g�e of Olcott�s, known as Anagarika Dharmapala. His Maha Bodhi Society, founded in 1891 to recover the sight of Buddha�s enlightenment for Buddhists, still sponsors all Sinhala Buddhist monasteries outside Sri Lanka.

Yet, Olcott�s influence was decisive. Though Olcott had purportedly gone to the East to learn more about Buddhism and other Eastern religions, he quickly determined that the Ceylonese were appallingly ignorant of what he believed was their true religious heritage, and he realized that this ignorance made them vulnerable to the appeals of Christian missionaries. He embarked on a program of shoring up Sri Lankan Buddhism as a way of fending off the efforts of what he considered intolerant and ignorant Christian missionaries. Olcott�s contribution to the rise of modern Buddhism can be seen in three areas.
First, he provided instruction and inspiration for Dharmapala, the �Homeless Protector of the Dharma.�EAs Gombrich and Obeyesekere write, Dharmapala met Olcott and Blavatsky in 1880,

When he was only sixteen, and when the returned to Sri Lanka in 1884 he persuaded Olcott to initiate him into the Theosophical Society. Despite paternal objections he went with Olcott and Madame Blavatsky to the Theosophist headquarters in Adyar near Madras. Here he wanted to study occultism with Madame Blavatsky, but she persuaded him instead to study Buddhism and to learn Pali, the classical language of its scriptures. Returning the same year to Sri Lanka, he became manager of the Buddhist Theosophical Society and worked for it, with some interruptions, till 1890. He also edited and produced the society�s newspaper, Sandarasa. By then Madame Blavatsky had died, and he and Olcott were drifting apart; they finally separated in the early 1900s, when Olcott claimed that the tooth relic in Kandy was an animal bone. . . . Olcott�s rationalistic (Protestant) view of relics was too much for Dharmapala�s Sinhala Buddhist sentiment.

Between 1889 and 1906, Dharmapala traveled to Japan, India, Berma, Thailand, Europe and the United States, representing Buddhism with great panache in Chicago in 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions. Through these travels and activities, Dharmapala not only consolidated Buddhism in Sri Lanka, but has been called �the founder of international Buddhism, both in the sense of making Buddhists in different Asian countries aware of each other and in starting propaganda for Buddhism.�E

Second, Olcott came to Ceylon with the organizational skills to unify Ceylonese Buddhism and ensure its transmission to future generations. According to one summary of his contributions:

Some of Olcott�s innovations, though influential for a time, had a chiefly symbolic value: he invented a Buddhist flag (that in due course became the emblem of the international Buddhist movement), formulated a Buddhist catechism in terms to which he felt (wrongly) all Buddhists could assent, persuaded the government to declare Vesak a public holiday, and encouraged Buddhists to celebrate it with songs modeled on Christmas carols �Ewhence further developed the custom of sending Vesak cards on the analogy of Christmas cards. But besides imparting a Christian style to Buddhist civil religion, he founded institutions that had a more solid impact. Probably the most important function of the Buddhist Theosophical society was that it founded and ran Buddhist schools to emulate those founded by Christian missions. It was clearly Olcott�s inspiration that led to the founding of the Young Men�s and Young Women�s Buddhist Associations and the Buddhist Sunday schools, which came to be held in almost every village and were supplied with textbooks and an examination structure by the Young Men�s Buddhist Association.

Olcott was sometimes quite open about combating Christian missions with their own weapons: �As the Christians have their Society for the diffusion of Christian knowledge, so this should be a society for the diffusion of Buddhist knowledge.�EAnd if there are Christian schools, Sunday schools, YMCAs and YWCAs, so there should be comparable institutions for the promotion of Buddhism. According to Lopez, Olcott was �the first to try to unite the various Asian forms of Buddhism into a single organization, an effort that bore fruit long after his death when the first world Buddhist organization, the World Fellowship of Buddhists, was founded in 1950.�E

Not only organizationally, but also conceptually, Olcott�s work was less a revival of Buddhism than a reshaping of traditional Buddhism in a liberal Protestant direction. According to University of Michigan Buddhist scholar, Donald S. Lopez, Olcott attacked the Buddhist practice of veneration, and claimed that the essence of Buddhism did not lie in the rituals of the Buddhist monks but in the philosophy and texts of Buddhism, in a kind of �sacred Scripture.�EOlcott, in Lopez�Ewords, �allowed modern Buddhism generally to dismiss the rituals of consecration, purification, expiation and exorcism so common throughout Asia as extraneous elements that had crept into the tradition.�ELopez suggests that Olcott�s Buddhism included only those elements that were �most compatible with the ideals of the European Enlightenment, ideals such as reason, empiricism, science, universalism, individualism, tolerance, freedom, and the rejection of religious orthodoxy, precisely those notions that have appealed so much to Western converts.�E

Prothero agrees:

Olcott�s ostensibly non-Christian Buddhism sounded like liberal Protestantism. More than an antidote to Christianity, Olcott�s Catechism was a homeopathic cure, treating the scourge of Christianity with a dose of the same. His critique of Christianity shared many elements with liberal Protestants�Ecritique of Christian orthodoxy, including a distrust of miracles, an emphasis on reason and experience, a tendency toward self-reliance, and a disdain for hell. Like their Jesus, his Buddha was a quintessential Christian gentleman: sweet and convincing, the very personification of �self-culture and universal love.�E/blockquote>

Olcott�s Protestantism showed through too in his hostility to or marginalization of the monkish brand of Buddhism, his emphasis on the compatibility between Buddhism and modern science, his attacks on Buddhist ritualism, superstition, and sacerdotalism. No one before Olcott had conceived of summarizing all of Buddhism in a single volume, much less in a set of propositions, but the lapsed Presbyterian Olcott not only produced the Buddhist Catechism but also a list of what he called �Fundamental Buddhistic Beliefs�Eby which he hoped to unify all Buddhist teaching.

Though he adhered to a more traditional form of Buddhism, Dharmapala�s �Protestant Buddhism�Ebetrays Olcott�s Protestant influence. Buddhist sacred writings provide strict and wide-ranging principles of conduct for monks, but little moral instruction to laity. In 1898, Dharmapala set out to correct that defect, publishing the Gihi Vinaya, �The Daily Code for the Laity,�Ewhich gave 200 rules to guide lay Buddhists on such topics as �Wearing clean clothes,�E�How to use the lavatory,�E�how to behave in public gatherings,�Eand �how to behave in buses and trains.�EThe �hallmark of Protestant Buddhism�Eis in this extension of religious life beyond the sangha (assembly) of enlightened monks and nuns to all laymen, and the extension of religion from the monastery to daily life. It is no exaggeration to say that Dharmapala�s Buddhism was inspired by the very Protestant vision of the �priesthood of all believers.�E

Olcott and his disciples thus made a critical contribution to the formation of modern Buddhism, and to the development of Buddhism as a world religion. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the �essence�Eof Buddhism was distilled from its regional and local particularities, �to create something simply called Buddhism.�EThrough this process, Buddhism came to see itself, and to be seen, as a universal religion.

Much more could be say about the ways that Protestant Christianity, particularly of a liberal variety, helped to shape modern Buddhism. But we must move on, for the purpose of this paper is to develop a larger historiographic point. This extended illustration was intended to suggest how world history might be told as church history. The rise of Sri Lankan Buddhism and some of the developments in modern Hinduism can be told as an episode in the global spread of Christian missions or the global spread of liberal, Enlightened Protestantism. I submit that the time is propitious for such an effort.