Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Reformism in the History of Western Imagery of the Buddhist Monk
Some Roots of the Modernist Monk
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/bsrv.v28i2.203Keywords:
Buddhist Modernism, monasticism, anti-Catholicism, Dharmapala, T.W. Rhys DavidsAbstract
From the late nineteenth century onwards, Asian Buddhist monks have been associated in American thought with science, rationality and anti-colonialism. Though the narrative of nineteenth century ‘Buddhist Modernism’ is routinely invoked to explain this, a more illuminating genealogy of this ‘modernist monasticism’ identifies deeper roots in anti-Catholicism. This paper explores these roots through a genealogy of the Buddhist Modernist Monk. Beginning with the seventeenth century travel journals of Jesuit missionaries, it winds its way through varied British rhetorics to nineteenth century Sri Lanka, and ends in Chicago, at the World’s Parliament of Religion of 1893. There, these intertwined discourses coalesced in the form of the Buddhist Modernist Monk: a figure now familiar and beloved in American culture as an embodiment of compassion and rationality, yet with a history of prejudice and politics that has yet to be meaningfully explored. As we acknowledge anti-Catholicism’s centrality to the history of the Modernist Monk, we are necessarily reminded of the moral ambivalence of the ‘science-religion’ dichotomy that fuels his mystique. At minimum, future analyses must critique the presumption of such supra-historical binaries, and deploy an open framework attentive to the contradictions and relations of reciprocal determination that characterize his genealogy.References
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Blackburn, Anne M. 2010. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai, and Peter van der Veer, eds. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Clarke, J. F. 1871. Ten Great Religions: an Essay in Comparative Theology. JR Osgood.
Clarke, J.J. 1997. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge.
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Desideri, Ippolito. 1937. An Account of Tibet: The Travels of Ippolito Desideri’s Mission of Pistoia, S.J., 1712–1727, edited by Filippo de Filippi. London: George Routledge and Sons.
Dictionary of National Biography 1895. Edited by Sir Sidney Lee. Vol. 44. London: Smith Elder and Co.
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Dreyfus, Georges. 2005. ‘Are We Prisoners of Shangrila? Orientalism, Nationalism, and the Study of Tibet’. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies 1 (1):1–21.
Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: an Introduction. London: Verso.
Findlen, Paula. 2004. Athanasius Kircher: the Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge.
Gibbon, Edward. 1994. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by David Womersley. New York: Penguin Books USA.
Grant, G. M. 1898. The Religions of the World in Relation to Christianity. F.H. Revell.
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Harrison, P. 2006. ‘“Science” and “Religion”: Constructing the Boundaries’. The Journal of Religion 86 (1): 81–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/497085
Haydon, C. 1993. Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-century England, c. 1714–80: a Political and Social Study. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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Hsia, F. 2004. ‘Athanasius Kircher’s China illustrata (1667): An apologia pro sua vita’. In Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen, 383–404. New York: Routledge.
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——— . The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture. 2005. In Religion and Popular Culture in America. Edited by Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey Mahan, 21–43. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnson, Samuel, and Rector of Corringham. 1688. The Absolute Impossibility of Transubstantiation Demonstrated. London.
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Jones, William. 1993. Sir William Jones, a Reader. Edited by Satya Sheel. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press.
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Kircher, Athanasius. 1987. China Illustrata: With Sacred and Secular Monuments, Various Spectacles of Nature and Art and Other Memorabilia, translated by C. D Van Tuyl. Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.
Lesourd, Jean-Alain. 1978. Les Catholiques Dans La Société Anglaise, 1765–1865: Évolution Numérique, Répartition Géographique, Structure Sociale, Pratique Religieuse. Paris: H. Champion.
Lopez, Donald S. 1995. Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
——— . 1998. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
——— . 2002. A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1967. Macaulay: Prose and Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Majeed, J. 1990. ‘James Mill’s “The History of British India” and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform’. Modern Asian Studies 24(2): 209–224. http://dx.doi. org/10.1017/S0026749X00010295
McMahan, David L. 2004. ‘Modernity and the Early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72(4): 897–933. http://dx.doi. org/10.1093/jaarel/lfh083
——— . 2008. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Metcalf, Thomas R. 1994. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mill, John Stuart. 1968. The History of British India. New York: Chelsea House.
Nieuhof, Johannes, English, and Nederlandsche Oost-Indische Compagnie. 1669. An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China. Menston: Scolar Press Limited.
Norman, Edward R. 1968. Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Oddie, Geoffrey A. 2010. ‘Hindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Significance of the term “Hinduism”, c. 1787–1947’. In Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited by Esther Bloch, et al. 41–55. London: Routledge.
Olcott, Henry Steel. 1895. Old Diary Leaves: The True Story of the Theosophical Society. Madras: Proprietors of the Theosophist.
——— . 1908. The Buddhist Catechism. Madras: The Theosophist Office, Adyar.
Pels, Peter and Oscar Salemink. 1999. Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Pennington, Brian K. 2005. Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians and the Colonial Construction of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pomplun, Trent. 2010. Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Eighteenthcentury Tibet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Prothero, Stephen. R. 1996. The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rhys Davids, T. W. 1877. Buddhism: Being a Sketch of the Life and Teachings of Gautama, the Buddha. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York, Pott, Young.
——— . 1882. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Some Points in the History of Indian Buddhism. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Schaffer, Simon. 1986. ‘Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy’. Social Studies of Science 16 (3): 387–420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030631286016003001
Schmidt, L. E. 2005. ‘In the Lab with the Dalai Lama’. Chronicle of Higher Education 52 (17): 2.
Seneviratne, H. L. 1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Snodgrass, Judith. 2003. Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Sweetman, Will. 2003. Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of Indian Religions, 1600– 1776. Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle.
Trevithick, Alan. 2006. The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–1949): Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.
Tumbleson, Raymond D. 1996. ‘“Reason and Religion”: The Science of Anglicanism’. Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1): 131–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3653886
——— . 1998. Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tupper, Martin Farquhar. 1891. The Complete Poetical Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper, edited by William Anderson. New York: Hurst.
Tweed, Thomas. 2000. The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Waterhouse, David M., ed. 2004. The Origins of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Nepal and Darjeeling, 1820–1858. Oxford and New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
Wickremeratne, Ananda. 1985. Genesis of an Orientalist: Thomas William Rhys Davids in Sri Lanka. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books.
Wilson, A. N. 1999. God’s Funeral. New York: W.W. Norton.
Wilson, H. H. 1977. A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus. New Delhi: Cosmo.
——— . 1990. Rediscovering India, Indian Philosophy Library. Vol. 31, A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus. New Delhi: Cosmo.
Wolffe, John. 1991. The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860. New York: Oxford University Press.
Almond, P. C. 1988. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511598210
Anderson, Carol S. 2003. ‘For Those Who are Ignorant: A Study of the Bauddha Ädahilla’. In Constituting Communities: Theravada Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia, edited by John Holt et. al., 171–188. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Barrows, J. H. 1893. The World’s Parliament of Religions: an illustrated and popular story of the World’s First Parliament of Religions, Held in Chicago in Connection with the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Chicago. IL: Parliament Publishing Company.
Barton, R. 1990. ‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X-Club and Royal Society Politics 1864–85’. The British Journal for the History of Science 23(1) 1: 53–81.
Blackburn, Anne M. 2010. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai, and Peter van der Veer, eds. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Carey, Benedict. 2005. ‘Scientists Bridle at Lecture Plan for Dalai Lama’. The New York Times, October 19.
Clarke, J. F. 1871. Ten Great Religions: an Essay in Comparative Theology. JR Osgood.
Clarke, J.J. 1997. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge.
Cunningham, S. A. 1997. The Bhilsa topes: or, Buddhist Monuments of Central India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.
Desideri, Ippolito. 1937. An Account of Tibet: The Travels of Ippolito Desideri’s Mission of Pistoia, S.J., 1712–1727, edited by Filippo de Filippi. London: George Routledge and Sons.
Dictionary of National Biography 1895. Edited by Sir Sidney Lee. Vol. 44. London: Smith Elder and Co.
Draper, J. W. 1998. History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. Project Gutenberg, n.d. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Accessed 16 November, 2011.
Dreyfus, Georges. 2005. ‘Are We Prisoners of Shangrila? Orientalism, Nationalism, and the Study of Tibet’. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies 1 (1):1–21.
Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: an Introduction. London: Verso.
Findlen, Paula. 2004. Athanasius Kircher: the Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge.
Gibbon, Edward. 1994. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by David Womersley. New York: Penguin Books USA.
Grant, G. M. 1898. The Religions of the World in Relation to Christianity. F.H. Revell.
Guruge, A. 1965. Return to Righteousness: a Collection of Speeches, Essays and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala. Colombo: Anagarika Dharmapala Birth Centenary Committee.
Harrison, P. 2006. ‘“Science” and “Religion”: Constructing the Boundaries’. The Journal of Religion 86 (1): 81–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/497085
Haydon, C. 1993. Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-century England, c. 1714–80: a Political and Social Study. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hodgson Brian H., 1991. Essays on the Language, Literature, and Religion of Nepal and Tibet: Together with Further Papers on the Geography, Ethnology, and Commerce of Those Countries. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.
Hsia, F. 2004. ‘Athanasius Kircher’s China illustrata (1667): An apologia pro sua vita’. In Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen, 383–404. New York: Routledge.
Hume, David. 1991. The Natural History of Religion. Edited by James Fieser. New York: Prentice Hall.
Inden, Ronald B. 1994. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell.
Iwamura, Jane Naomi. 2011. Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— . The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture. 2005. In Religion and Popular Culture in America. Edited by Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey Mahan, 21–43. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnson, Samuel, and Rector of Corringham. 1688. The Absolute Impossibility of Transubstantiation Demonstrated. London.
Jones, Sir William. 1824. Discourses Delivered before the Asiatic Society: and Miscellaneous Papers on the Nations of India. Selected and edited by J. Elmes. London: Charles S. Arnold.
Jones, William. 1993. Sir William Jones, a Reader. Edited by Satya Sheel. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press.
Ketelaar, James E. 1991. ‘Strategic Occidentalism: Meiji Buddhists at the World’s Parliament of Religions’. Buddhist-Christian Studies 11(1): 37–56. http://dx.doi. org/10.2307/1390253
Kircher, Athanasius. 1987. China Illustrata: With Sacred and Secular Monuments, Various Spectacles of Nature and Art and Other Memorabilia, translated by C. D Van Tuyl. Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.
Lesourd, Jean-Alain. 1978. Les Catholiques Dans La Société Anglaise, 1765–1865: Évolution Numérique, Répartition Géographique, Structure Sociale, Pratique Religieuse. Paris: H. Champion.
Lopez, Donald S. 1995. Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
——— . 1998. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
——— . 2002. A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1967. Macaulay: Prose and Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Majeed, J. 1990. ‘James Mill’s “The History of British India” and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform’. Modern Asian Studies 24(2): 209–224. http://dx.doi. org/10.1017/S0026749X00010295
McMahan, David L. 2004. ‘Modernity and the Early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72(4): 897–933. http://dx.doi. org/10.1093/jaarel/lfh083
——— . 2008. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Metcalf, Thomas R. 1994. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mill, John Stuart. 1968. The History of British India. New York: Chelsea House.
Nieuhof, Johannes, English, and Nederlandsche Oost-Indische Compagnie. 1669. An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China. Menston: Scolar Press Limited.
Norman, Edward R. 1968. Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Oddie, Geoffrey A. 2010. ‘Hindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Significance of the term “Hinduism”, c. 1787–1947’. In Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited by Esther Bloch, et al. 41–55. London: Routledge.
Olcott, Henry Steel. 1895. Old Diary Leaves: The True Story of the Theosophical Society. Madras: Proprietors of the Theosophist.
——— . 1908. The Buddhist Catechism. Madras: The Theosophist Office, Adyar.
Pels, Peter and Oscar Salemink. 1999. Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Pennington, Brian K. 2005. Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians and the Colonial Construction of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pomplun, Trent. 2010. Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Eighteenthcentury Tibet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Prothero, Stephen. R. 1996. The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rhys Davids, T. W. 1877. Buddhism: Being a Sketch of the Life and Teachings of Gautama, the Buddha. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York, Pott, Young.
——— . 1882. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Some Points in the History of Indian Buddhism. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Schaffer, Simon. 1986. ‘Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy’. Social Studies of Science 16 (3): 387–420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030631286016003001
Schmidt, L. E. 2005. ‘In the Lab with the Dalai Lama’. Chronicle of Higher Education 52 (17): 2.
Seneviratne, H. L. 1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Snodgrass, Judith. 2003. Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Sweetman, Will. 2003. Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of Indian Religions, 1600– 1776. Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle.
Trevithick, Alan. 2006. The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–1949): Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.
Tumbleson, Raymond D. 1996. ‘“Reason and Religion”: The Science of Anglicanism’. Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1): 131–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3653886
——— . 1998. Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tupper, Martin Farquhar. 1891. The Complete Poetical Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper, edited by William Anderson. New York: Hurst.
Tweed, Thomas. 2000. The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Waterhouse, David M., ed. 2004. The Origins of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Nepal and Darjeeling, 1820–1858. Oxford and New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
Wickremeratne, Ananda. 1985. Genesis of an Orientalist: Thomas William Rhys Davids in Sri Lanka. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books.
Wilson, A. N. 1999. God’s Funeral. New York: W.W. Norton.
Wilson, H. H. 1977. A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus. New Delhi: Cosmo.
——— . 1990. Rediscovering India, Indian Philosophy Library. Vol. 31, A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus. New Delhi: Cosmo.
Wolffe, John. 1991. The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860. New York: Oxford University Press.
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2012-01-11
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Harrington, L. (2012). Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Reformism in the History of Western Imagery of the Buddhist Monk: Some Roots of the Modernist Monk. Buddhist Studies Review, 28(2), 203-232. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsrv.v28i2.203
