Buddhists

After spending most of 1879 establishing the Theosophical society in India, Blavatsky and Olcott arrived in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) on May 17, 1880.

Ceylon had been a stronghold of Theravada Buddhism since the Emperor Ashoka sent missionaries there in the third century. But by the late nineteenth century, it had been repressed by European colonists for almost five centuries.

Things weren't as bad under the British as they were when Portuguese missionaries slaughtered Buddhist natives, burned the sutras, and wrecked the temples. Still, under the British only Christian marriages were recognized by the government, Bible study was mandatory in the schools, and Christian missionaries waged a continual campaign to try to discredit Buddhism. The ground was ripe for a cultural and religious revival, and the Sinhalese natives were overjoyed to see white people treating Buddhism with respect.

A few days after their arrival, on May 25, Blavatsky and Olcott performed the ceremony of pansil , vowing to uphold the five precepts for Buddhist lay practitioners. In so doing they apparently became the first Americans to formally enter the Buddhist fold. (Blavatsky had become a naturalized American citizen the year before.)

To be sure, their Buddhism was somewhat idiosyncratic. The Theosophists claimed that their Masters practiced a sort of "pre-Vedic" Buddhism, supposedly identical to the "Wisdom Religion of the Aryan Upanishads" -- in other words, they papered over some significant differences between their own interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, the Sinhalese practice of Buddhism, and Vedanta (the Hindu philosophy of the Upanishads). But neither side cared to argue fine points, and they readily accepted each other as allies.

Blavatsky had been briefly exposed to Tibetan Buddhism as a child and had identified herself as a Buddhist as early as 1875; however, in an 1887 letter to her sister she revealed that deep in her heart, she always remained a Russian Orthodox Christian.

But Olcott seems to have taken firmly and wholly to Buddhism. Along with Sumangala Nayaka Maha Thera, a Sinhalese high priest and scholar, he helped developed a "Buddhist Catechism" to help educate the Sinhalese about their native religion. This work was eventually translated and published in Japan and India.

Based on his efforts in reviving Sinhalese Buddhism, Olcott was invited to Japan in 1888. Buddhism there had been on the defensive since the Meiji restoration, which made a perverted form of Shinto the state religion and elevated the Emperor to the status of a living god.

It is remarkable that just three decades after America pried Japan open to the world, Japanese Buddhists asked an American to help revive their religion.

Olcott was accompanied on his trip by a young man named Anagarika Dharmapala (born David Hewavitarne), who had joined Olcott and Blavatsky's circle in Ceylon shortly after their arrival. Blavatsky became a sort of mentor to him, and Dharmapala became a great promoter of the Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society. (Dharmapala was a great admirer of Shelly and Keats. At one point he wanted to find their reincarnations so that he could introduce them to the Buddhist teachings they'd never had a chance to hear.)

Olcott carried to the Japanese Buddhists a letter from Sumangala -- probably the first official communication between the Mahayana and Theravada branches of Buddhism in several centuries. On his three month visit he gave 75 lectures, attended by 187,000 people; after which he returned to Ceylon with three Japanese priests who intended to study Pali and Theravada Buddhism.

While Olcott's visit may have been the renewal of official contact between Northern and Southren Buddhism, unofficially there were already currents converging. In 1887 the Japanese Rinzai Zen monk Soyen Shaku came to Ceylon to study how Theravada monks lived and practiced. After three years in Ceylon he returned to Japan, and shortly thereafter, in 1891, became the master of the Engakuji temple.

It was also in 1891 that Dharmapala made a pilgrimage to India to visit Bodh-Gaya, the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. His visit was prompted by an article by Edwin Arnold -- the author of The Light of Asia, the first popular account of the life of the Buddha to be published in the West -- decrying the decay of the site, and suggesting that it should be returned to Buddhist ownership.

The effort to accomplish that became the center of a movement that united the Buddhist world, and also the center of Dharmapala's life. The goal would not be achieved until 1949, sixteen years after Dharmapala's death, when a newly independent India turned the site over to Buddhists.

His work on Bodh-Gaya and his connection with Olcott and Blavatsky -- along with a healthy portion of his own natural charm -- got Dharmapala noticed. He was invited to the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, as the representative of the Buddhists of Ceylon.

The Parliament was part of the Colombian Exhibition held in Chicago. Its chairman, John Henry Barrows, saw the opening of the East as a new opportunity to spread Christianity, and may have invited the Asian delegates with the goal of introducing them to Western faith. But the Parliament seems to have done more to introduce Asian religions to the West than to introduce Christianity to the heathen Orient.

In many ways, the Parliament was the formal introduction of Buddhism to the West. Representatives included Buddhists from the Zen, Jodo Shinshu, Nichiren, Tendai, and Esoteric schools; also represented were Hinuds, Parsis, Sikhs, Jains, and a Confucian. They came from Japan, India, China, Siam, and Ceylon.

The Zen Buddhist representative was Soyen Shaku, the Japanese master who had studied the ways of bhikkus in Ceylon just a few years before. His lectures were read by Barrows from an English translation provided by Shaku's student Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki -- better known by his initials, D.T. Suzuki.

Shaku's appearance at the Parliament led to a return visit to the U.S. in 1905. He spent nine months traveling and teaching, cementing his place in history as the first Zen master to teach in the United States.

And D.T. Suzuki's translation of Skaku's address ended up getting him invited to the U.S. for a few years to work for Paul Carus at Open Court press. This began Suzuki's career as a key popularizer of Buddhism to the West. After returning to Japan for several decades, after World War II Suzuki settled in New York, where his work inspired the Zen boom of the late 1950s.

But all that came later. The immediate result of the Parliament was to induce enough fascination with Buddhism -- especially the Buddhism of the charismatic Sinhalese representative Dharmapala -- that within a few years some Westerners were heading to Ceylon to learn more. One of these was Allan Bennett, who eventually became the second Briton to become an ordained Theravada bhikku. He is also known to history by his Buddhist name, Ananda Metteyya.

Another Briton who went to Ceylon to study was Bennett's old roommate, the famed occultist and magician described by one writer as "the wickedest man in the world": Aleister Crowley.