Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala, by Steven Kem

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

Re: Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala, by Steven

Postby admin » Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:30 am

Part 4 of 5

UNIVERSALISMS

Blavatsky was more of a universalist than Olcott. She wanted discussion of all religions, Christianity included. Responding to a question regarding advertisements that would be accepted by the Tbeosophist --are advertisements for freethinking literature acceptable, and what about anti-Christian advertisements? -- she wrote,

I, as an Editor, will never permit Christ to be attacked personally, no more than Buddha. But I must insist upon being allowed to remain entirely impartial in the dissection as in the praise of all and every religion the world over, without pandering to people's personal emotional prejudices. This will never do in a Universal Brotherhood [emphasis in original].104


The commitment to gathering together all human beings in the Theosophical Society was essential to Blavatsky, but the vocabulary itself was inchoate. Olcott was more focused on creating a brotherhood of all human beings than bringing Christian doctrine into the Theosophical fold. Sojourning in India meant dealing with others who were "racially" different. Settled in Bombay, they began to develop the notion of universal brotherhood -- "wherein all good and pure men of every race shall recognize each other as the equal effects (upon this planet) of the one Un-create, universal, Infinite and Everlasting Cause.'105

They found India unprepared for their message. They tried to join forces "with the Arya Samaj, oblivious to the fact that Dayananda Saraswati was not the universalist they were. Nor was the Indian elite ready:

When the founders of the Society landed at Bombay in 1879, they did not find even half a dozen Indians ready to receive their idea of an Universal Brotherhood, and not even the idea of an Indian Brotherhood .... The Theosophists were not only to be brothers among themselves, but also brothers to all men with whom the world brought them in contact. Theosophists in India, therefore, began to look about them to see if they could not ameliorate the lot of their fellows. 106


The founders soldiered on, continuing" studying occult science" as the society's chief aim, but now addressing two new objectives. One was a formula", Hon of universal brotherhood and the other the study of Oriental literature and philosophy. 107

The society's motto said nothing about Buddhism or the Asian religions furnished most of its ideology. It read, "There is no religion higher Truth," and because truth can be found in all religions, the society's was to draw together people of all religions in its investigation of the esoteric truths accessible in those religions, even if now obscure. The message of inclusion and equality appealed to South Asians accustomed to the condescension, hierarchy, and racist attitudes of the British Raj, on the rise after the events of 1857, when Indian troops rebelled against British officers, raising the prospect of a oncoming struggle for independence. That appeal transcended the ideological charms of Theosophy itself. Olcott had no anti-imperial motives in his work in India and regarded the Theosophical Society as nonpolitical. The founders brought two other people with them to India, a Mr. Wimbergh and a Miss Bates, and Blavatsky innocently thought that because they were "respectable" English people, their presence would reduce government suspicion about their motives as non-Britons working in India. 108 Olcott was more than apolitical, and, his feelings about brotherhood aside, he was hesitant to pursue social change in India. He was even unwilling to see panchama (Dalit) Indians gathered into the Buddhist fold until doctrinal evidence -- the first-century CE Buddhist poet Asvaghosh came to the rescue -- could be produced to show that they were not converting to a new religion but reverting to their ancient faith, Buddhism.109

Even a short time in India led Olcott to recognize the invidious attitudes of British officials:

To us who know the Hindus, it is hardly credible how little is known of this side of their character (i.e., their intelligence) by their official superiors.... How could they possibly expect to be on terms of good understanding with high-caste men (i.e. gentlemen) whom they treat in official intercourse with unconcealed disdain, commonly classifying them as "niggers," without caring at all whether it comes to the insulted gentlemen's ears or not? It is inexpressibly sad to me to see this awful waste of good opportunity to bind the Indian empire to the British throne with silken bands of love.110


The equation of gentlemanly behavior with high caste reveals Olcott's own prejudice -- he preached equality while treating his servants with something less -- but to his credit, he became more committed to the idea of brotherhood as he spent more time in India.111 By 1898 he was arguing that it was the first objective of the society.112

In 1897 a Thai monk living in Colombo wrote to Olcott urging him to concern himself with the disorder and corruption that had befallen the local monkhood. A member of the royal family with considerable knowledge of the world, Jinavaravamsa was no ordinary monk. He attributed Lankan disarray to the British government's giving control over substantial amounts of monastic lands to the incumbents of temples. The incumbents of the two Kandyan orders of the Siyam Nikaya said the same thing, complaining to Olcott of the disobedience of their own subordinates. Without a proper Buddhist king, monks who controlled sources of wealth were able to defy monastic authority, leading to what Olcott called "an atmosphere of personal bickering, childish sectarian squabbles, ignorance of the world about them, and incapacity to fit themselves to the ideals which the Lord Buddha had depicted for the government of his Sangha."113 Jinavaravamsa proposed addressing the corruption problem as it had been handled in traditional times, first unifying the monkhood, then reforming it by royal decree.114 But the Prince priest had a transnational vision that no one ever dreamed of -- first unify the Sinhala sangha, join it to the Burmese sangha, and then ally both the Thai sangha under the authority of the Thai king. The last Buddhist king would surely welcome that mandate.

On his way to Europe, King Chulalongkorn stopped in the island, and Jinavaravamsa and Olcott used his visit as an occasion to solicit his support. Things went terribly wrong in Kandy when the king was denied the right to hold the tooth relic. Although others had been given that privilege in the recent past -- including Christians -- a Kandyan aristocrat denied the king access, who went away in a huff. He agreed to consider the union of the monkhoods, which Anne Blackburn calls "the Lankan proposal," linking it to Hikkaduve. The proposal had a lot to do with Olcott and Jinavaravamsa.115 Later Jinavaravamsa attended the annual meetings in Adyar. He asked not to speak because of his status as a samanera, giving Olcott a letter to read to the group:

If Theosophy is the medium through which negotiation for the peace between all men proceeds ... I am heart and soul with it .... If Theosophy would undertake, in addition to the work of bringing men together into one Universal Brotherhood, the duty of leading men by example and practice ... so that they might be either true Christians or Hindus, or Buddhists, etc, whatever be their religion, and not hypocrites as they now appear to be, it would be conferring the greatest of all boons of the century .... Personally ... I think that all the elements necessary for the basis of a Universal religion are found in Buddhism.116


The careful language suggests the monk's earlier life as a diplomat -- he . saw the advantage of working with the Theosophists, but he would not join their movement.

Once the proposal for union reached Bangkok, the Council of Elders of the Thai monkhood discussed the issue for some three hours, rejecting the proposal on the grounds that Sri Lanka "is a separate country and the various Lanka people and factions were hostile to one another."117 One Thai prince noted another problem: the island was a British colony. Jinavaravamsa and Olcott kept at it, sailing to Burma in 1899 with Annie Besant; In Rangoon Besant and Olcott gave a number of lectures before' Olcott and Jinavaravamsa traveled upriver to Mandalay to meet the ranking Buddhist monks of Burma on the topic of education and "the union of the Buddhists of Burma, Ceylon, and Siam in one great religious fraternity under the patronage of H.M. the King of Siam."118 In view of Jinavaravarnsa's initiating the proposal, his recruiting Olcott to the cause, and their carrying on with the project after the idea lapsed in Lanka, I would give the Prince Priest majority ownership of the proposal -- whatever the interest of high-ranking Sinhala monks -- and note the transnational character of the Theosophical Society's involvement and the connection to unity. At the very least, there was a Theosophical subtext in this case.

Olcott's efforts to unify the monkhood make an instructive contrast with Dharmapala's disinterest in unifying either monks or laypeople. The diaries do not speak of his motivations, but several circumstances constrained him. One was his caste. His father was Goyigama and his mother Durava, but what brought them together was their social class, their origins in the Southern Province, the timber business, and their piety.119 His complicated origins could have been a motive for seeking unity among monks of different castes, but it could equally well have furnished reason to avoid the caste issue altogether. He mentioned caste sporadically in the diaries, and he had his own prejudices, but he never mentioned his mother's caste. His disinterest in caste reform might also have derived from his being considerably more knowledgeable of Sinhala society than Olcott, and thus more realistic. Since Dharmapala's time, the monkhood has grown to more than thirty communities. A final motivation, needless to say, was his assumption that recovering Bodh Gaya was more important than monastic reform.

Universal brotherhood came to Olcott in both Theosophical and Buddhist form. He wrote that the visit of the master to Blavatsky in 1881 had· a bearing on bringing the idea to the fore in the Theosophical Society. 120 Doing so had structural implications for the society, for as soon as brotherhood became more prominent, Olcott decided to create an Esoteric Section as the highest level of membership in the society. He directed his own energies toward worldly projects, and the initiatives often had a Buddhist purpose -- the Buddhist Catechism and the Buddhist flag were vehicles for exoteric ends, most important, establishing Buddhist doctrine common to all Buddhist countries so that there might be more social unity. Dharmapala pursued his share of worldly projects in the Buddhist cause. His 1892 trip to meet the chief lama of Sikkim was prompted by a desire to bring Buddhists together-at least for the sake of recovering Bodh Gaya -- and at this early point in his career Dharmapala wrote glowingly of opening the way for brotherly intercourse.121 His trips to Burma and Japan can be read in the same light. Late in his life Dharmapala gave a talk arguing that "Buddhism is not racial or national, but international" (Diary, December 8, 1925). He urged Buddhists to forgive Gandhi because Theosophy teaches the equality of all religions.122 He also took pleasure in knowing that the Vidyodaya pirivena, which his family had established, educated monks of all Nikayas and served laypeople of castes other than the dominated Goyigama.123

Dharmapala did not make much of the universal brotherhood idea that lay at the center of Olcott's plans. It is true that he called his publication the Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society and the United Buddhist World. l14 The last message Olcott received from the mahatmas, and the only one he received directly (as opposed to receiving their messages via Blavatsky), called for the Society to work for unity:

Cease from such turmoil and strife, and from causing such disturbance in the Unity of Brotherhood, and thus weakening its strength; but instead work together in harmony, to fit yourselves to be useful instruments to aid us, instead of impeding our work .... Hold together in brotherly love, since you are part of the Great Universal Self.125


Dharmapala understood the "United Buddhist World" not as an end in itself ' but as a constituency that would enable him to make Bodh Gaya Buddhist " once again. After many trips around the Buddhist world, he left behind no " bureaucratic structure to sustain whatever unity he had created, and in contrast with Olcott's interest in human solidarity and equality, he was satisfied with "brotherly intercourse."

The Theosophical practice that interested Dharmapala centered on the mahatmas, and Koot Hoomi in particular authorized a set of associated practices -- dhyana meditation, celibacy, vegetarianism, and what he calls variously lokottara (otherworldly) culture, uttari manussa dhamma (the, morality of the higher man), and parama vijnana (highest insight). Following practices associated with Koot Hoomi gave him the moral authority to separate himself from all the important communities in his life. It allowed him to critique Western scholars (who he thought could not understand Dhamma because they did not practice asceticism), Sinhala monks (whose lack of discipline and commitment drew his fire), and the local elite, including his own family (who he thought were Europeanized "elephants"). Koot Hoomi provided him with a paradigm for his own isolation because, even as he complained that others had abandoned him -- and he did so with great frequency-their indifference to him allowed him to see his life as a matter of suffering. Koot Hoomi gave him a cause, serving humanity, and pursuing it gave meaning to both his wandering and his solitude.

In his own understanding, Dharmapala lived alone. He chose the name Anagarika (homeless) for a reason: "The world was my home .... The Buddhists were all against me" (Diary, April 10, 1926). Yet despite the universalism implied by saying that the world was his home, he spent forty years in Calcutta, and he owned a number of residences there. He owned at least a share of several homes in Sri Lanka, most important his family's home on Aloe Avenue and the house he purchased in Kandy to use as a seminary for training missionary monks, but the homelessness and solitude of his own self-understanding trumped everyday reality. He employed servants. On an average day, he saw visitors and acquaintances who joined him for breakfast, took a stroll with him or went for a ride at the end of the day, and frequently he had people living with him. In Calcutta Devapriya lived with him for several decades. 126 Failing to make the trek to the Himalayas, Dharroapala found solitude among others, and that solitude was the foundation of his identity: "Buddha has no friends in India. Neither do I," he wrote, and "Helpless, neglected, abandoned by all, I am struggling on" (Diaries, April 1 and September 30, 1918, from Sarnath Notebook no. 27, "Diaries 1915-1919"). The practical source of his isolation was of his own doing. He was hypercritical. He understood criticism as both a public responsibility and privilege he had earned by way of his asceticism and philanthropy:

Bro. Wickramaratna has gone to the High Priest to find fault against me for using the work [sic] "Anagarika." All this opposition agst me simply because I want to maintain the sublimity of the Dharma. Everywhere opposition. The Dharma will protect me. My father writes a letter which is enough to drive a fool mad; in the same tone did King Suddhodhana utter of [sic] words of reprobation to the Supreme Buddha (Diary March 10, 1898).


The life of the arhat, fully realized, makes one enlightened. The life of the Bodhisat makes one a Buddha. Dharmapala had his gaze fixed on the latter.

RENOUNCER IN THE WORLD

Dharmapala described himself variously as a chela, a brahmacarya of the bodhisattva path, and an anagarika, all of these roles entailing celibacy. Renunciation required discipline in several contexts, but celibacy posed the great challenge. 127 His commitment to celibacy was regularly tested abroad , especially on his trips to Japan, where he was in close contact with hotel personnel, and the United States, where relations between men and women were considerably more casual than in Sri Lanka. Throughout his adult life he wrote of being troubled by lustful thoughts (referring to them as kama chanda nivarana and kama bahu dukkha, "nighttime aberrations" and "physical weakness"). In Colombo he had a tempestuous relationship with Madame Marie de Souza Canavarro. She appeared in Colombo to work at the Sanghamitta Convent after a ceremony in New York City by which Dharmapala made her an upasika (pious Buddhist laywoman).128 The diary reveals Canavarro pressed Dharmapala for a closer relationship:

"Better to embrace a red-hot iron ball than embrace a woman." I will remain pure. The Upasika wrote a loving letter offering me the "highest sacrifice." I read it thrice, then burnt it; and to my surprise I found a bit of a remnant left. In it were the words "1 cannot permit ... the act. It will pass away," this was strange. I will be burnt to death; I prefer, but let me remain pure. "Oh, let all go, only O Lord let me save that blessed life." Buddha saved me. May I become Buddha. I showed my power to the Upasika. I will shake the foundation of the world. I had a rainwater bath. (Diary, November 23, 1898; emphasis in original)


Receiving no encouragement from him, Canavarro stormed off to Calcutta.129

Once Dharmapala thought he had broken his brahmacarya vow, and he returned to the incident from time to time. It is not clear exactly what occurred, but it involved a Japanese woman who gave him a massage in a Japanese hotel.130 Summing up his life, he returned to the incident:

In 1886 March made the Renunciation. Lead [sic] a purifying life of spirituality till 1902 May. Since 1902 May the Brahmachari life was made impure. I allowed women to touch my body. Since 1902 May sensualizing tendencies began to "influence me. Impure associations in 1903 -- at San Francisco, Green Acre, Boston, and New York. In 1904 the effects of 1903 were visible. (Diary, September 17, 1904)


He said he formed "an attachment to a woman in the USA," remembering events that occurred twenty years earlier (Diary, October 8, 1925). The woman was Gudrun Friis Holm, a Danish American Theosophist he met at a chautauqua while on tour in 1904. She worked as a physician in the United States, and she too gave him a massage. The treatment had made him feel better, but it "awakened sensations which go to show the truth of the Great Law of Dependent Origination .... How easy to go under the clutches of Mara .... In the evening Miss Holm treated me and put me to sleep. She is very kind" (Diary, August 6, 1903).

It is hard to know what to make of a celibate renouncer contemplating a life with a woman while pursuing the bodhisat life. His first reference to the idea followed something Honganji officials suggested when he was considering staying on in Japan and working as a missionary. If he planned to stay for ten years, his hosts advised him, he should take a companion. He wrote that he had the perfect candidate, a Miss Otake, who had been kind to him and wanted to work for Buddhism (Diary, June 27, 1902). He vowed to "keep her in the place of my younger sister," which is to say he planned to pursue religious work with her and live platonically. Whatever one makes of his even contemplating female companionship needs to begin with one certitude -- that his diaries show no signs that he ever imagined breaking his commitment to celibacy. He mentioned Miss Otake twice in the diaries, but Holm was a more serious matter. With her he remained in contact for more than twenty years, and as late as 1908 he held onto hopes that she would join him in India. They corresponded as late as 1926 (Diary, November 10, 1926). When he convalesced in Switzerland that summer, he made plans to visit her in Denmark.

[x]
[i]3. Dharmapala on world tour, Eliot, Maine, 1901. Seated on chair, Sarah Farmer, his hostess at Green Acre. Standing, left, Mirza Abu'l Fadl.

Chautauquas were nondenominational camps committed to lectures, study, and companionship in the cause of promoting human growth, and they often had their own universalizing programs. Dharmapala spent time at several, including one at Green Acre in Eliot, Maine, as did Swami Vivekananda, Jacob Riis, Annie Besant, Clarence Darrow, Booker T. Washington, Paul Carus, Countess Canavarro, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mirza Abu'l Fadl.131 The spirit was cosmopolitan and high minded, devoted to religious argument, although there was a lot more Theosophy in the air than Buddhism. The founder of Green Acre was Sarah Farmer, who had attended the World's Parliament of Religions, and Farmer's frequent visitor there was Sara Bull, who entertained Dharmapala in Cambridge and provided much of Vivekananda's support in the United States. In.a letter of 1902 Vivekananda told Sara Bull his views of marriage:

A race must first cultivate a great respect for motherhood, through the sanctification and inviolability of marriage, before it can attain to the ideal of perfect chastity. The Roman Catholic and the Hindus, holding marriage sacred and inviolate, have produced great chaste men and women of great power .... As you have come to see that the glory of life is chastity, so my eyes also have been opened to the necessity of great sanctification for the vast majority in order that a few lifelong chaste powers may be produced.132


Theosophy shared Vivekananda's ideas about "spiritual marriage" as the formula that would allow both human growth and traditional companionship.

Shortly after Vivekananda's letter to Sara Bull, Dharmapala met Holm at Green Acre, although his diaries are not forthcoming about what transpired between them. He spoke of her as his "spiritual companion," who would work with him in India. The textual context comes from the stream of articles that appeared in the Theosophist of the time, raising questions about traditional marriage and imagining alternatives such as spiritual marriage. When Dharmapala reached the US West Coast after his visit to Japan in 1902, he had an invitation to stay at the home of Josephine Holmes in Los Angeles. That visit exposed him directly to a spiritual marriage:133

Miss Josephine Holmes of Los Angeles is now the spiritual wife of Arthur Steele. How hard it is for man and woman to live together for any length of time in a pure condition. Contact produces sensation. Sensation produce selfish desires. Self-desires-clinging, produces existence of sex desires etc. (Diary, January 21, 1904)


Keeping company with well-to-do Americans with surprising ideas about marriage spoke to Dharmapala's commitment to celibacy, providing a transidiomatic rationale for what he knew all along, that spiritual development requires sexual restraint; a "man and woman living together" required more restraint and produced more progress.

There are some thirty references to Holm in the diaries, most of them referring to her as "Amara." She first presented herself to Dharmapala in a way that put him in mind of Mara, the women who tempted the Buddha just before enlightenment. "When' Amara' offered me her body," he wrote, "I told her that I shall not bring shame on her, but asked her to be my eternal companion" (Diary, March 7, 1904).134 The articles that appeared over the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Theosophist address the tension between animal passions and spiritual growth in the context of marriage, reconfiguring the relationship between husband and Wife. Several of the articles considered abstinence in marriage in the context of the historical moment. G.N. Chakravarti's article reflected on the example of Rukhmabai, the Hindu wife who refused to live with her husband, and praised her abstinence in a time when "marriage has degenerated into a contract for physical happiness."135

Another article made the argument for the married person's having higher spiritual power than a world renouncer, as long as his marriage is "spiritual":

A celibate [renouncer] who has no temptation and who has no one to care for but himself, has undoubtedly superior advantages for meditation and study .... A [married] man who is surrounded by [temptations] is every day and every hour under the necessity of exercising his willpower to resist their surging violence .... When he rises up to a higher state in his next incarnation, his will-power will be more developed, and he will be in the possession of the password, which is CONTINENCE.136


When he was a volunteer for the Theosophical Society, Dharmapala saw those articles, and he later heard similar talk at chautauquas about the power of spiritual marriage. Sexual restraint in marriage has a Hindu warrant, but he came to it under Theosophical auspices.

Dharmapala's struggles with sexual urges continued into old age. He thought about sexuality in ways that moved un-self-consciously between mahatmas and Mara. In Buddhist logic, self-abnegation was its own reward and moved him along the path that led to bodhisat status and nirvana. But Theosophy offered a chela something more. In return for a life of celibacy, dietary discipline, and indifference to luxury, he could expect the mahatmas' assistance in pursuing humanitarian projects. He was a member of a brotherhood that included advanced human beings in service to humankind, but only if they disciplined their sexual instincts:

When mother in 1902 March used unmotherly language, I kept cool and left the place. Conscientiously and with strenuous energy I exerted to be pure. Since the affections began with Amara these sudden Kama impulses come to me. In August last we pledged ourselves to each other to be eternal companions. May I keep myself pure and teach her purity as well? In FebYl894 when I was talking to Prince Bhanuransi in his own palace in Bangkok I heard the voice say "My son, in your purity lies your strength" -- that was ten years ago. In the secrecy of my chamber I have tried to be pure. Practicing the Paramitas, as an Anagarika since 1886 I have lived the Bodhisat life. Wealth, worldly decoration, sense pleasures and amusements I have not had since my 19th year. Having sacrificed everything I gave up my life to the Mahatmas as they were followers of the Buddha. When Mrs. Besant began to preach of Krishna the Mahatma idea underwent change (Diary, March 23, 1904)


The "pure" life that he wanted to pursue had its own transidiomatic sources.

His thinking that he could live as renouncer while accompanied by a spiritual companion was not his own innovation. Nor was it a way for him to devote his life as a layman to the Buddhist cause. Marriage as a spiritual discipline had Theosophical sources, but it reminded the society's South Asian members of the spiritual greatness of their ancient ancestors.137 Dharmapala had enough affection for Gudrun Holm to envision her coming to India to work with him: "I told Gudrun that I shall expect her later on. She said she will come. She is good and generous, and I will treat her as my sister" (Diary, January 13, 1904). He imagined something on the order the relationship between Maud Gonne and W. B. Yeats.138 As had Canavarro, Holm initiated the relationship: "I told her that it is wrong for me to give pain to another & treated her as a sister," Dharmapala wrote (Diary, March 7, 1904). The pain harks back to his mother's pain when she lost an infant daughter and the vow he made when he was seventeen: "I shall not be the cause of giving pain to a woman." In the United States Holm was involved in medical studies, moved from coast to coast, and after serving as the Maha Bodhi Society representative in San Francisco until the 1920s, eventually returned to Denmark to practice holistic medicine. Although they corresponded for several years, she never joined him in India, and he never visited her in Denmark.

My intuition is that his involvement with Otake, Holm, and, much later, Vera Wickremasinghe needs to be seen in that light -- the imaginings of a man who considered several life courses, rejected most of them, and soldiered on, looking for ways to achieve spiritual growth in Japan, the United States, and England, where he was freer than he would have been at home. His encounter with "spiritual marriage" takes the same form as his contemplating staying in Japan and working as a Shinshu missionary. Whatever conclusion one reaches, Dharmapala's interest in spiritual companionship complicates his role as either a brahmacarya or a Protestant Buddhist. But it fits nicely with the turn-of-the-century world he inhabited.

When he was troubled by the contradictions of renunciation and life in this world, he called on the mahatmas for guidance. 139 They provided him with a link between his life as a Buddhist and Theosophist, and Koot Hoomi was central to that linkage. That seamlessness marks much of his writing -- he begins with the Buddha and then without benefit of a logical transition moves on, writing suddenly about the mahatmas. Before he realized that the mahant was not going to sell the Maha Bodhi temple, Dharmapala invoked the Buddha's blessing on the mahant:

The divine Lord conquered the world by the fulfillment of the Paramitas ten and for the last five days I invoked his powerful Name that I should succeed in His work. I invoked his blessings on the Mahant more than .a thousand times so that he may give the plot of land and that his heart may be changed. How true the words of the blessed Master, H.P.B.'s Gun -- "You have still to learn that so long as there are Three Men worthy of our Lords blessing in the Theosophical Society -- it can never be destroyed." Ah! How difficult to realize even for those who are trying to lead the Life the truth of the utterances of the Masters. The devoted followers of Gautama Buddha ... This is the 17th day since I put my foot on Gaya. Great works require time for their accomplishment. Self sacrifice is the secret of success. The divine Teacher, Bhagavan was the embodiment of absolute self sacrifice, we his humble and devoted followers, if we are to succeed in His work, should lovingly and faithfully imitate His Great Example. Brother Bhikhari and I went to meet the Mahant. The land was at last given .... The Voice speaks in solitude. (Diary, August 17, 1891; emphasis in original)


Throughout the last full decade of his life and the terminus of his diary keeping, Dharmapala was as much a Theosophist as ever, but he was also as much a Buddhist. His life had been marked by the patronage of Theosophical women -- Blavatsky, Besant, and Foster, Countess Wachmeister, Canavarro, Holmes, Sara Bull, Alma Senda, Mabel Eaton, Iona Davey, and Alice Cleather. In the 1920s only a few remained. He could not mistake Besant for a Buddhist, but his relationship with Mary Foster was another thing altogether. He framed that relationship in a Buddhist way:

"Brahmachari of the Bodhisatva Path" -- That shall be my future appellation. There is none other except the Dharma to look up to. Strict adherence to Dharma has been my principle. The Dharma protects me. The Dharma brought me in contact with Mrs. Foster. (Diary, December 13, 1917)


Foster was a Theosophist when she went down to Honolulu harbor to meet him upon returning home from the World's Parliament of Religions.140 And in spite of the predominance of his role as a representative of Buddhism on that occasion, days earlier he had spoken as a Theosophist at the Theosophical preliminary conference he attended. 141 Late in life he came to understand that Foster had also given financial support to at least two Hindu gurus.142

The mahatmas stood behind several of Dharmapala's projects, but most of all they called him to India, where Koot Hoomi wanted him to reestablish the sasana:

Got up at 5. The Sinnett letters from KH brought me in touch with the Himalayan Brother-hood. In 1884 I was absorbed in KH. In 1924 I am again thinking of the Masters. The two Adepts are trying to revive the Sasana. How they love each other. M says of KH. "My brother, the light of my soul." In this life I have not succeeded, but in the next life I hope to be born physically strong to climb the Himalayas and to study the sacred science. (Diary, May 9, 1924)


He had recognized this mandate decades earlier. "The two Masters wished the Religion of the Lord Buddha to be reestablished in India," he wrote. "Subba Row and his clique conspired against the scheme" (Diary, September 24, 1930). The problem was the chelas: "The Mahatmas Letters are full of inspiration, and yet everyone who became a Chela went wrong. The TS under Mrs. Besant is a Christianized necromancy" (Diary, August 14, 1924). At the end of his diary keeping, he was still fixed on the decline of his fellow chelas:

Out of the millions upon millions born in India only the two Adepts M & KH are followers of the Lord Buddha. All their disciples who became Buddhist at first later on became Apostates .... Damodar, Babajee, Paddhah, Bhavani Shanker, Ananda, Nivaran, Balai Ch. Malik, Leadbeater, Hartmann, Brown were known as "Chelas & lay Chelas." They all went wrong. (Diary, November 17, 1930)


In the 1920s he purchased new copies of the Mahatma Letters and The Light of Asia and reread the Secret Doctrine and Mahatma Letters, making diary entries as his reading proceeded (Diary, April 17, 1924, and March 12, 1926 ). "The two Brothers," he said at one point, "tried to help the Western world and failed" (Diary, August 20, 1924). Reading the letters again reminded him of his long struggle with celibacy: "Today an evil thought came to my mind, 'When shall I leave this place,' 'Be reasonable' were the words I heard. That was 41 years ago and am still struggling to be passionless" (Diary, August 12, 1925). An earlier entry summarized his high aspirations:

Reading "Mahatma Letters." They are very interesting. This incarnated body of mine to reach the summit of Samadhi failed for certain reasons .... I built a Vihara, a Dharmasala, and so on but failed to acquire the transcedent [sic] powers. The abhijynas, due to want of a Kalyana Mitra. (Diary, June 10, 1924; emphasis in original)


He does not say just who might have served as his kalyana mitra (friend who leads one on the right path). Gudrun Holm's name comes to mind, and it if was her, Dharmapala reveals his rationale for spiritual marriage. It helps man achieve "transcendent powers."

Dharmapala's engagement with the masters was more than interior monologue. He gave a public lecture entitled "Mahatmas and Buddhism" in 1924 (Diary, August 15, 1924).143 When he lectured at Town Hall in New York City in 1925, he characterized his talk as his attempt to deliver "the Message as it is the result of 40 years' experimental studies," and the reference to experimental studies is a reference to Theosophy.144 Preparing to give that lecture, he met a Miss Chamberlain, who pressed a ten-dollar bill on him. Not wanting to take her money, he bought her a copy of the Mahatma Letters with the money (Diary, December 10, 1925). Most of all he used the Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society to engage publicly with the Some of the articles were not written by Dharmapala, but he remained managing editor through 1925, and many of the articles reflect not broad Buddhist interests but his own distinctive concerns. And they all follow the same logic, arguing that the Theosophical Society forgot its values when Blavatsky left:

It is evident that the T.S. no longer represents H. P. Blavatsky's work, and that the Masters have long since abandoned it to its fate .... There are still clean-minded altruistic people in the T.S. who desire that the pure Trans-Himalayan teachings should be revived. But it would seem as if no real scholars and mystics are left in it, but only dabblers in psychism who mislead many.145


The problem lay not in Theosophy, but the anti-Buddhist turn the movement had taken.

After Dharmapala gave up his membership in the Theosophical Society in 1905, the Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society ignored Theosophy for a time. When he published articles in the journal, they were accounts of the Maha Bodhi temple or Sarnath, denunciations of Buddhist apathy, or calls· for monks and brahmacaryas to propagate Buddhism in non-Buddhist countries. l46 As the years passed, there appeared articles under his name that suggest more Theosophy than Buddhism. In I9I4 he argued that Buddhism had an esoteric aspect, and in 1925 he made the same argument in another form.147 In the first article he wrote that the Buddha laid out the teaching in two parts, the uttari manussa dhamma for monks and the manussa dhamma for laypeople. The line between the two moralities is hard and fast. A monk will be dismissed from the monkhood should he even exhibit his phenomenal powers (iddhi) to laypeople. But acquiring those powers is what the monk seeks. Likewise the Buddha preached two kinds of truth, one kind for monks and the other for laypeople. By the end of the article he shifted his attention to his own life course: "This is the Uttari manussa dhamma which is supra-normal and only confined to the Brahmacharis, who have renounced the fetters of lay life."148 In the later article he describes the brahmacarya's path, keyed this time not to the ten iddhi but jhanic states as Buddhaghosa explicated them in the Visuddhimagga. In the Buddhist tradition, the expression "brahmachari" represents "the spiritual or holy life that monks follow." He uses it to represent the life course of a renouncer who observes the uttari manussa dhamma.

Although Dharmapala does not speak of the mahatmas in these two articles, he struggled with the Theosophical side of his worldview. Using the expression "brahmachari" allowed him to explain his own religious course, because he was not a bhikkhu but a brahmacarya, living out his commitment to the uttari manussa dhamma.149 Another set of articles appeared in the 1920S, and they spoke directly to Theosophy, Blavatsky, and the mahatmas. Some appeared without attribution, some were written by Theosophists such as Basil Crump and S. Haldar of the Blavatsky party. One continuing article on "The Bodhi-Dharma or Wisdom Religion" began with its author, Alice Leighton Cleather, saying that Dharmapala had asked her to contribute the series. 150 All of these articles convey his understandings even absent his name.151 They reach much the same conclusion:

Theosophy has become a misnomer, for the word was originally Greek for Divine Wisdom. But the Sanskrit name for the Wisdom-Religion is Bodhidharma which is understood throughout the East. It is that archaic doctrine, Esoteric Buddhism, of which the Trans-Himalayan Masters are the custodians for the human race.152


That the Adyar Theosophical Society had lost its way did not diminish the virtues of the Himalayan Brotherhood and their chelas, still working for the good of humanity because of their love for the Lord Buddha.

In the early I920S, a flurry of articles appeared in the Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society concerned with issues of peculiar interest to Dharmapala -- the life of an artagarika. Only one appeared under his name, and it made reference to Theosophy.153 I suspect he wrote several of these articles and encouraged articles from supporters about issues of particular interest to a man who by then had been an anagarika for some forty years. Devapriya was a fledging anagarika, Harischandra Valisinha assumed the role, and other men -- Anagarika Govinda and a latter-day Anagarika Dhammapala -- followed suit in subsequent years. But practically speaking, Dharmapala was the sole token of the type. Decades after his public falling out with the Buddhist Theosophical Society, and Besant, the pages of the Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society show so many of his cognitive interests -- in the uttari manussa dhamma, esoteric Buddhism, the brahmacarya life -- that it is plain that he was exercising editorial control when not writing the articles.

A pair of articles that appeared in 1922 will make the point. 154 The begins by saying, "The sacred science of transcendentalism in Buddhism is called 'Uttarimanussa dhamma"' and adds that the Buddha intended this pathway to arhatship for brahmacaryas and bhikkhus, but that the brahmacarya must become a bhikkhu "to lead the holy life in completeness." The writer gives a summary history of the Theosophical Society, quotes a message from the Maha Chohan (the mahatma who was the guru of Koot Hoomi), saying that the Theosophical Society should perish before restricting the occult life to the few while ignoring the many. He urges Westerners to take up the study of Abhidhamma. A Burmese U Kyaw Dun responded to this article by critiquing it as a Buddhist. The monastic law prohibits monks from showing laypeople the powers they have acquired by following the uttari manussa dhamma, but the higher form of the Buddha's teaching is open to laypeople to follow.155 It is thus a monkly privilege in the end and requires the layperson who pursues it to eventually join the monkhood for the realization of that knowledge. Against this backdrop Dharmapala's own life course -- following the uttari manussa dhamma as a brahmacarya for most of his days and ending his life as a monk -- acquires new meaning as his growing spiritual accomplishments moved him from one role to another.

Dharmapala did not need to redefine terms or locate new ones becase the language that Theosophy and Buddhism shared was already transidiomatic -- he needed only to reidentify himself. The world renouncer who claimed both identities emphasized the Buddhist part of his identity in public contexts but spoke in his diaries of his regard for Blavatsky, Master Koot Hoomi, and the uttari manussa dhamma. He had every reason to discard his membership in the Theosophical Society -- his alienation from Olcott, his growing suspicion of Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom the Theosophical Society began to promote as a messiah figure, and the practice of Theosophists in India claiming to be arhats, as well as his troubles with Theosophists in Colombo. In urging the Colombo Theosophists to drop "Buddhist" from their group's name, Dharmapala tried to redescribe others against their will. By contrast it was easy to discard his own Theosophical identity -- his rejoining the Society in 1914 aside -- and to hold onto his old vocabulary, its Buddhist meanings now foregrounded. Those expressions were, after all, ones Blavatsky had taken from Buddhism in the first place.

The irony was that the one Theosophical notion that he cared most about was furnished by the mahatmas, and the Himalayan adept notion was simply not transidiomatic with Buddhism. That expression did not derive from Buddhist texts or tradition, and it makes little sense introduced into a Buddhist context. He never ceased to admire Blavatsky, even after he reread the Secret Doctrine and suspected her of plagiarism. He never ceased to talk about his regard for Koot Hoomi, calling himself long after 1905 a "chela of the Masters." I doubt that he spoke of the masters before Sinhala audiences, but he wrote about the uttari manussa dhamma for English readers, whether Sinhala, Asian, or Western. In his diaries he steered away from the expression "mahatma," preferring the equivalent but less markedly Theosophical and Hindu "Masters." But it was his continuing regard for them, the uttari manussa dhamma, and the brahmacarya life that made his Buddhism more complicated than Theravada and anything but Protestant.
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Re: Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala, by Steven

Postby admin » Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:30 am

Part 5 of 5

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Notes:

1. “My Impressions in Europe and America,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 34 (1926): 266-78, at 278.

2. Jayawardana, Mage Jivita Kathava, 29.

3. Like Olcott, Ppowell was a Civil War veteran who came to Colombo in 1889 as a volunteer for Buddhist work. He died shortly thereafter. Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, ed., The Golden Book of the Theosophical Society: A Brief History of the Society’s Growth from 1875-1925 (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1925), 95.

4. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 24-5.

5. “Burma Revisited,” Theosophist 12 (1891): 323-32, at 323.

6. “Annual Report,” Theosophist 13 (1892): 1-34, at 18.

7. Srinivas Aravamudan, Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6-10.

8. Aravamudan, Guru English, 6.

9. Howard Murphet, When Daylight Comes: A Biography of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975), 31.

10. Aravamudan, Guru English, 107.

11. Buddhism Transformed, 222.

12. The relevant circuits of influence were more complicated than the overcoding arguming allows. In Dharmapala’s time some Western scholars called Buddhism a philosophy, treating it as something less than a religion. Lacking a god, it failed to qualify as a religion. Dharmapala took the absence of a god figure as a virtue that made Buddhism appropriate for a world in which science reigned.

Before we conclude our comparison between Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, we have to examine some popular labels that are applied to these religions. Christianity is clearly monotheistic, but Tibetan Buddhists like to claim that their religion is “non-theistic,” a term originated by Chogyam Trungpa. The Shambhala cult, that Bercholz helps to administer, even pretends that it is not a religion at all, and is a new thing called “secular spirituality.” We can thank Bercholz for clearing this up by giving us A Guided Tour of Hell, because whatever someone might imagine secular spirituality to be, it’s safe to assume that hell would not be part of it.

-- Against Hell: A Refutation of the Buddhist Hell Realms, Based on Their Historic Origins, Political Purpose, Psychological Destructiveness, Irrationality, and Demonstrable Inconsistency With the Original Buddhist Teachings, Framed as A Searching Review of Sam Bercholz’s After-Death Memoir, "A Guided Tour of Hell", by Charles Carreon


13. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. 6 (London: Theosophical Publishers, 1971), 475.

14. See Katerine Mullin, “Typhoid Turnips and Crooked Cucumbers,” Modernism/Modernity 8 (2001)): 77-97; and Christopher M. Hutton and John E. Joseph, “Back to Blavatsky: The Impact of Theosophy on Modern Linguistics,’ Language and Communication 18 (1998): 181-204.

15. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 186-8.

16. “Intellectuals, Theosophy, and Failed Narratives of the Nation in Late Colonial Java,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (London: Blackwell, 2000), 333-57.

17. “Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy’s New Age,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 3 (1997): 409-33).

18. Obeyesekere’s first formulation of Dharmapala’s role in creating a “protestant” Buddhism came in “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon,” Modern Ceylon Studies 1, (1970): 43-63, and was reprinted in Obeyesekere, Frank Reynolds, and Bardwell L. Smith, The Two Wheels of Dhamma: Essay on the Theravada Tradition in India and Ceylon (Chambersburg, PA: American Academy of Religion, 1972), 58-78.

19. Olcott, “An United Buddhist World,” Theosophist 13 (1892): 239-43, at 239.

20. “Theosophy and Buddhism,” in A Collection of Lectures on Theosophy and Archaic Religions, Delivered in India and Ceylon (Madras: A. Theyaga Rajier, 1883), 27.

21. Affective Communities, 27.

22. His uncle S.P.D. Gunawardana “had wealth… influence, and was most social…. My uncle was a redoubtable person fearless, daring and a leader of men, and I bathed in his magnetism.” “My Early Associations,” Sarnath Notebook no. 4.

23. Dharmapala, “Reminiscences of My Early Life.”

24. At some point around 1907 the family began using “Hewavitarne” in place of “Hewavitarana” as their surname, and I will follow the later spelling.

25. Don Carolis was a close friend of C. Don Bastian, who produced several plays of Shakespeare and edited the first Sinhala language newspaper. “My father had great faith in him,” Dharmapala noted, “and whatever advice he gave, my father promptly carried out. He advised my father to put me in the Notarial line, and I was articled as a clerk under Proctor & Notary Mr. W.P. Ranasinha. After a few months he suggested that I should be trained for Govt. Service and accordingly I was apprenticed as a clerk in the Department of Public Instruction” (“C. Don Bastian,” Sarnath Notebook no. 4). Brekke argues that his father attempted to keep Dharmapala from making his first trip to Adyar because of “the young man’s lack of interest in worldly affairs” (Makers of Modern Indian Religion, 72). The opposite is the case. Don Carolis guided Dharmapala toward a life of renunciation and service, in part because he thought the boy had no head for business. Dharmapala writes, “I don’t know why he did not put me into business. He employed a clerk to help him in his furniture business” (Sarnath Notebook no. 23).

26. Sri Chandra Sen, “The Ven’ble Sri Devamitta Dhammapala,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 41 (1933): 330.

27. Jayawardana, Mage Jivita Kathava, 28.

28. “To the Beloved Mahatmas Who Loved Our Lord,” October 4, 1919, Sarnath Notebook no. 50. This is one of a handful of entries in the Sarnath notebooks that is titled and signed, in this case by “Thine obedient Lanoo, Dharmapala Hevavitarana.” Some of these entries, such as “My Early Associations” “My Persecution,” summarize one particular aspect of Dharmapala’s life. This entry is framed as part of a conversation that began with his first letter to the mahatmas in 1884. The expression “Lanoo” served as a textual salutation, which Blavatsky used to address a chela.

29. “To the Beloved Mahatmas Who Loved Our Lord.”

30. Consider the theme of family abandonment in contrast to the kindness of a distant stranger, Mary Foster, the patron he met in Honolulu in 1893. He refers to her as his “Foster” mother decades before his own mother died, but here she plays the part of his “Foster” father. “My beloved father supported me and left me a legacy for my maintenance. Mary Foster has taken the place of my beloved father. I owe my life since my father’s death to her absolutely. I was the eldest in the family of 4 brothers and one sister. The legacy left to me by my father, my younger brothers [had] not yet been given to me. Two brothers are dead and gone. My surviving youngest brother is absolutely indifferent to my welfare. They have done me great injustice and have committed a sin in not paying the legacy left by my father for doing meritorious deeds.” “My Early Associations,” Sarnath Notebook no. 4

In… School I was fearless, daring, and had a kind of aristocratic hauteur, and did not care anybody [sic]. At home I had the same spirit, and what I wanted I got. I was stubborn [crossed out] resolute, and could not bear any kind of intolerance. I had no love for worldly things. I loved simplicity, solitude, and any form of helping the poor, even to the extent of giving everything I had …. [My mother] used to preach to me the doctrine of impermanency weekly, and my father exhorted me to practice humility. He used to tell me “do not depend on worldly wealth.” Well then if everything is to end in change I thought I shall not want this worldly wealth. From my 10th year the ethic of “other-worldliness” and the beauty of saintliness became impregnated in my mind. (Sarnath Notebook no. 4)…..

While clerking in the Department of Public Instruction from 1884 to 1886, Dharmapala got more involved with the Theosophical Society. When he passed the government clerical examination, his father again asked him – also via letter – to take the job offered in the Department of Public Instruction, saying that he would match the salary to underwrite works of charity. Dharmapala declined the job and his father’s support for charity: “I loved Humanity more and to be a servant of another servant to me meant degradation. My friends thought I did a foolish act in rejecting Govt. service, but to me it meant freedom.”38

-- Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World, by Steven Kemper


31. Gombrich and Obeyesekere suggest that there was a South Asian paradigm in the life of a naisthika brahmacharin, a Hindu boy who forsakes the householder stage of life to remain celibate and devoted to study. Buddhism Transformed, 217. The point is plausible, but there are no signs that Dharmapala made that connection. There was a Theosophical paradigm that he both understood and embodied. He would become a chela, the rejiggered category Blavatsky invented for a young Theosophical devotee who apprentices himself to a guru. Dharmapala had a real life example to follow, Damodar Mavalankar, who came to Sri Lanka with Blavatsky and Olcott in 1880. Mavalankar also served as an inspiration for Dharmapala’s wanting to visit Tibet and find the mahatmas.

32. Jayawardana, Mage Jivita Kathava, 27, tells the story with more emphasis on Dharmapala’s displeasure at his mother’s coming undone with grief.

33. “A Letter of Venerable Dhammapala,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 41 (1933): 388-90, at 388.

34. R.F. Young and G.P.V. Somaratna, Vain Debates: The Buddhist-Christian Controversies of Nineteenth-Century Ceylon (Vienna: Sammlung De Nobili, 1996).

35. Ria Kloppenberg, “A Buddhist-Christian Encounter in Sri Lanka: The Panadura Vada,” in Religion: Empirical Studies, ed. Steven J. Sutcliffe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 179-91.

36. Between 1882 and 1892 Dharmapala began to read more Buddhist texts: “Dharmapradipaka, Visuddhi Magga, Mahavamsa, Attanagaluvamsa, Mihinda prasna, Meyyartha [obscure] dipaniya, Sumanta Kuta vannane, Satipathana Sutta, Light of Asia, Theosophist, Occult World, Esoteric Buddhism, Isis Revealed [Unveiled], Buddhist Suttas, Col. Olcott’s Lectures, Voice of the Silence, Grimalot’s Sept [six] Suttas Path” (Sarnath Notebook no. 51).

37. Jayawardana, Mage Jivita Kathava, 29 and 32. The Theosophist published a journal or a pamphlet also titled Parama Vijnana Vadaya. By the end of his life Dharmapala came to recognize the heterodoxy of this particular overcoding: “’Parama Vignana’ is not in the Pali Doctrine. To say that Vigana is Parama is against the paticca samuppada doctrine” (Diary, June 19, 1930).

38. “To the Beloved Mahatmas Who Loved Our Lord.”

39. Agarwal, The Buddhist and Theosophical Movements, 35-6. Theosophy offered only the possibility. A fledging Theosophical Society in Boulder, Colorado “very soon dissolved because it had been organized by individuals under a misapprehension, they supposing that becoming members of the Society was the next step to becoming adepts. “Annual Report,” Theosophist 13 (1892): 1-34, at 18.

40. The disparity between the low expectations of most Buddhist bhikkhus and the hopes of lay Buddhists to achieve “Nirvana Now” lived on past Dharmapala’s death. See Steven Kemper, “Buddhism without Bhikkhus: The Sri Lanka Vinaya Vardana Society,” in Religion and the Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka, ed. Bardwell Smith (Chambersburg, PA: Anima, 1974), 212-35.

41. “The Theosophical Society and Its Aims,” in A Collection of Lectures on Theosophy and Archaic Religions (Madras: Theyaga Rajier, 1883), 3.

42. Olcott, “The Theosophical Society and Its Aims,” 8.

43. Olcott, “The Theosophical Society and Its Aims,” 10-11.

44. Dharmapala took the phrase about peace from Philippians 4:7, his Christian education furnishing another source for his transidiomatic diction.

45. Another expression of the theme of abandonment and solitude that I suggested earlier came at the end of Dharmapala’s life when he felt his struggles in India had received no support from other Buddhists, blurring the distinction between the long silence from Koot Hoomi and the absence of Buddhist support: “The Master took compassion on him [?] in 1884 & 1886. Since 40 years there is no sign of recognition. Is there no one in any Buddhist country who could come to help me?” , (Diary, May 8, 1927).

46. Boris De Zirkoff, ed., H.P. Blavatsky: Collected Writings, 1883 (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1950), xii.

47. A.P. Sinnett, Occult World (London: Trubner, 1881), 143-4.

48. “Precipitation,” Theosophist 5 (1883-4): 64.

49. Ellawala Nandiswara, “The Life & Times of a National Hero,” Ceylon Daily News, September 17, 1965.

50. Dharmapala never gave up on the idea that Blavatsky served as intermediary for Koot Hoomi. “How wonderful that she should have met the Master in flesh,” he marveled in his diary (April 23, 1924).

51. Basil Crump, “A Theosophical Criticism of Mrs. Cleather’s Books,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 31, no. 12 (1923): 480. Crump adds that the mahatmas referred to Blavatsky as “Our Brother,” and “Our direct agent,” two expressions borrowed from other registers.

52. Old Diary Leaves, 2:212.

53. Old Diary Leaves, 2:292. Olcott remembered that Damodar identified so thoroughly with the Theosophists that he became a Buddhist himself and drove other members of his family out of the Theosophical Society and provoked them to attack Olcott back in Bombay.[???!!!]

54. Old Diary Leaves, 3:15.

55. Old Diary Leaves, 3:30.

56. Old Diary Leaves, 3:142.

57. Old Diary Leaves, 3:208. As Olcott says, “Almost alone among the monks, he believed in the Masters, and his strongest desire was to go to Tibet in search of them” (208). Had he not died young, Hukwatte would likely have played a larger role in Dharmapala’s life. I take Olcott’s remark that Hukwatte was “almost alone among the monks” in believing in the masters as an indication of how little influence Theosophical belief had on most Sinhala Buddhist monks.

58. "The Mahatma Quest," Theosophist 16 (1894): 173-80, at 173 and 180. Olcott never mentions any Theosophist who made the trek other than Damodar.

59. Guruge, Dharmapala Lipi, 358.

60. Restoring the sasana to India looks to be a perfectly Buddhist motivation, depending on whether Buddhism traditionally was a missionary religion in a form that resembles the modern practice.

61. Anagarika Dharmapala, “European Explorers of TIbet," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 7 (1899): 115. [1897] Lord Reay [Donald Mackay, 11th Lord Reay], Sir Alfred Lyall, and Sir Charles [Alfred] Elliot were in the audience, and Elliot promised to write the commissioner of Darjeeling [Richard T. Greer, Deputy Commissioner, Darjeeling, Aug. 6, 1897] to afford Dharmapala facilities for the trip. :lol:

62. Rhys Davids called that translation The Yogavachara's Manual (London, 1896). It was later published by the Pali Text Society as Manual of a Mystic (London: Pali Text Society, 1916).

63. Both Rhys Davids and Max Muller warned Dharmapala away from Theosophy, Muller insisting, "If you want your work to be successful, you must make it quite clear that you have nothing in common with the Mahatmas." "Words of Advice," 'ourna1 of the Maha Bodhi Society 4 (1895), 18.

64. That influence did not lapse: "For 39 years I have lived the life directed by HPB," Dharmapala later observed ("Birthday Musings," Sarnath Notebook no. 53). In the last days of his life, he continued to make notes on her Secret Doctrines (“Tit Bits," Sarnath Notebook no. 32). The Coulombs were Blavatsky’s live-in assistants who accused her of faking the delivery of astral messages.

65 . Dharmapala claims that he once saved Leadbeater's life: "In 1889 there was a scandal. (Leadbeater) kidnapped Jinarajadasa and had the boy concealed. Jinarajadasa's father came rushing upstairs with a loaded revolver to shoot Leadbeater. It was about 7 pm. I was just coming out of the Shrine room, and I asked him what is the matter. He said, 'I am come to shoot Leadbeater for having robbed my boy.' I reasoned and calmed him" (Diary, February 17, 1919)

66. Karunaratne, Anagarika Dharmapala, 50.

67. "General Report of the Sixteenth Convention and Anniversary of the Theosophical Society," Theosophist 13 (1892): I-56, at 2, and supplement, Theosophist (1892), lviii. Olcott visited Lanka almost regularly. L. A. Wickremeratne, "Annie Besant, Theosophism and Buddhist Nationalism in Sri Lanka," Ceylon Journal of the Historical and Social Sciences 6 (1976): 63. In the chronology at the end of Howard Murphet's biography of Olcott, Hammer on the Mountain: The Life of Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972), 328-36, I count thirty-four visits, some of them brief.

69. The expression comes from an account of his work in “The Maha Bodhi Society Appeals for Help in the Indian Famine,” Open Court 2 (1897): 490.

69. Theosophist 11 (1890): lxxiii-lxxix. Olcott avoided meat for medical reasons (to combat gout), not ascetic ones, and he had “no sympathy for undiscriminating fanatics” with regard to diet. Old Diary Leaves, 2:439-40.

70. The tooth looks quite a lot like a large animal's incisor, leading Blavatsky to say that, of course, it was the Buddha's tooth, simply one that came from one of the Buddha's previous lives when he was incarnated as a tiger. Old Diary Leaves, 2:186-7. It is easy to see why others were charmed by Blavatsky's mythopoetic virtues.

71. During Dharmapala's stay in Kandy, the tooth relic was placed in the outer hall of the Temple of the Tooth to receive adoration. Dharmapala had a thoroughly un-Protestant response to the prospect: "My karma does not allow me to approach the Relic. On the 7th day I shall try to approach the Holy Presence" (Diary, January 1, 1925).

72. "High Priest Sumangala and the Theosophical Society," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society. 14 (1906): 57-8, at 58.

73. Olcott, "The Buddhist Revival," Theosophist 13 (1892): 576.

74. Elsewhere Dharmapala writes that Olcott "loved me like a father. But a change came after my appearance at the Parl. of Religions. He was displeased as he did not find his name mentioned." "Visits to America," Sarnath Notebook no. 101.

75. Old Diary Leaves, 5:32-3.

76. Old Diary Leaves, 5:7-11.

77. Guruge, Dharmapala Lipi, 57.

78. Sarath Amunugama, "A Sinhalese Buddhist 'Babu': Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and the Bengal Connection," Social Science Information 30, no. 3 (1991): 567.

79. Old Diary Leaves, 6:16.

80. In the wake of the success of The Buddhist Catechism, which had gone through some forty editions by this time, Olcott published a Shinshu catechism, welcomed a Vashisthvaitha catechism, and envisioned a Zoroastrian catechism and a Muslim catechism. At the same time a Tamil Hindu produced" A Catechism of the Arya Dhamma of Gotama Buddha," Theosophist 13(1892): 55-68.

81. "The 'Wail' of Dharmapala," supplement, Theosophist 20, no. 7(1899): xxviii-xxx, at xxviii-xxix.

82. "The 'Wail' of Dharmapala," xxix-xxx. Olcott had not been present in the courtroom.

83. Olcott to Leadbeater, November 9, 1902, Olcott correspondence, Theosophical Society Archives, Adyar, India, quoted in Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 217n30.

84. Nandadeva Wijesekera, Sir D. B. Jayatilaka (Colombo: n.p., 1973), 29-30

85. One does not become a Buddhist by self-declaration, and Olcott and Blavatsky were doing something unprecedented. Dharmapala took his own liberties with Buddhist tradition. Because he was not a bhikkhu, he had no authority to convert, but he did so in the case of Charles Strauss in 1893 and Marie Canavarro in 1897.

86. Bhikshu Sangharakshita, "Anagarika Dharmapala: A Biographical Sketch," in Maha Bodhi Society of India Diamond Jubilee Souvenir, 1891-1951, 18-20.

87. Old Diary Leaves, 2:159-60. Blavatsky is mentioned in Migettuvatte's testimony on phenomenalism in the second edition of Isis Unveiled.

88. Asia, September 1927, reprinted in Guruge, Return to Righteousness, 675-96 at 687.

89. Occult World 11,881; repr., London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1984), 119-20.

90. Old Diary Leaves, 2:374, 378, 381, 429, and 436-9. Olcott started to do mesmeric healing on that trip inadvertently, but he also had a strategic motive, having heard that local Roman. Catholics were establishing a healing shrine near Kelaniya. He regarded his command of siddhi (extraordinary abilities) as a matter of science. He came to see mesmeric healing as an act of compassion, performing numerous acts of healing in India, including at the home of Sir Jotendro Nath Tagore. Murphet, Hammer on the Mountain, 157-65.

91. Old Diary Leaves, 4:1887-92, 520; Olcott, "The Buddha Rays at Badulla," Theosophist II, no. 125 (1890): ci-cii.

92. Old Diary Leaves, 3:188 and 4:492.

93. Old Diary Leaves, 4:520; Olcott, "The Buddha Rays at Badulla," ci-cii.

94. Old Diary Leaves, 2:167-8.

95. Old Diary Leaves, 2:168-9.

96. As Murphet writes, "Apart from the lectures, there were long discussions with priests on Buddhist metaphysics, in some of which H.P.B. was allowed to play a part, despite the handicap of being a woman. She often illustrated her points, and enlivened the proceedings, with flashes of her psychic powers," Hammer on the Mountain, 137.

97. Ananda Guruge, From the Living Foundations of Buddhism: Sri Lankan Support to Pioneering Western Orientalists (Colombo: Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1984), 338-44, at 340.

98. From the Living Fountains, 343. In a later letter to Ven. Piyaratana, Olcott declared that Piyaratana was wrong in addressing him as a medical doctor. He was only" an ignorant student of the occult sciences in which [he] include[d] Mesmerism or Animal Magnetism" (347).

99. Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon (New York: Schocken Books, 1993), 34-5. Manu's assistant is Master Moriya, who was Blavatsky's original visitor. He had been incarnated as a Rajput prince and lives in a secluded Tibetan valley. Maitreya's assistant is Master Koot Hoomi, a Kashmiri Brahman with blue eyes, and as Washington says, "Having attended the University of Leipzig, he spends much time meditating and is well qualified to look after the vast occult Museum in underground chambers near his home, which is located in the same valley as Master Moriya's." Washington, Blavatsky's Baboon, 35.

100. Old Diary Leaves, 6:136, and "The Buddhist Apostle in England," Indian Mirror, October 12, 1899.

101. The following passage imbricates both Buddhism and Theosophy, but Theosophy dominates (and Buddhist arhats do not make utterances): "The train started at 9.30. Had good sleep. In the train I had a curious dream. An Arhat struggling and uttered the word ... Sudahat. The letters were the initials of a sentence. Many interpreted it differently; but Priest Devananda, who is noted as a clever priest, interpreted it as a Arhat who crys [sic] to save Humanity-or in the words of the Voice of Silence 'Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? ... I cry to save the world'" (Diary, November 17-18, 1891).

102. Asia, September 1927.

103. "Can a Buddhist Be a Member of the Theosophical Society," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 14 (1906): 42-4; and "The Parting of the Ways," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 14 (1906): 117-24. The first article carries Dharmapaia's byline.

104. "H.P.B. and Freethought," in De Zirkoff, H. P. Blavatsky: Collected Writings, 1883, 122-25, at 123.

105. Murphet, Hammer on the Mountain, 96-7.

106. Indian Mirror, November 21, 1889.

107. Murphet, Hammer on the Mountain, 96-7.

108. Old Diary Leaves, 2:109-10. Olcott writes that he and Blavatsky were suspected of being Russian agents. Old Diary Leaves, 2:228-31 and 245-8.

109. Old Diary Leaves, 6:345-7 and 397.

110. Old Diary Leaves, 4:260.

111. Alan Trevithick points out the class complications of everyday life for Olcott and Blavatsky once they set up house in India. Their concern for universal brotherhood and equality did not prevent them from hiring Indian servants. "The Theosophical Society and Its Subaltern Acolytes (1880-1986)," Marburg Journal of Religion 13 (2008). http://www.uni-marburg.de /fbo3/ivk/mjr/pdfs/2008/articles/trevithick2008.pdf.

112. Indian Mirror, October 12, 1889.

113. Old Diary Leaves, 6:154-5.

114. See S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

115. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism, 167-86

116. "An Open Letter," Theosophist 19 (1898): 291-4, at 291-2. Jinavaravamsa called the Theosophical Society by a name that suggests his own interests, "The Universal Brotherhood Working Samagama" (Diary, March 1, 1906).

117. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism, 184.

118. "The Burmese Visit of Mrs. Besant and the President," Theosophist 20 (1899): xxi.

119. Michael Roberts, "Himself and Project. A Serial Autobiography. Our Journey with a Zealot, Anagarika Dharmapala," Social Analysis 44, no. I (2000): 116.

120. Old Diary Leaves, 2:294. "Keeping the occultism more in the background" changed the very nature of the society.

121. "Dharmapala's Work," supplement, Theosophist 13 (1892): lxxxviii-lxxxix, at Ixxxix.

122. Sinhala Bauddhaya, May 23, 1925, quoted in Guruge, Dharmapala Lipi, 302. In that same month Gandhi had made comments at the Dharmarajika vihara in Calcutta -- drawing no distinction between Buddhist and Hindu teachings and asserting that the Buddha was not an atheist-which must have given Buddhists pause. "Mahatma Gandhi on Buddhism," Bengalee, June 1925, excerpted in Wipulasara, Maha Bodhi Centenary Volume, 222-4.

123. Guruge, Dharmapala Lipi, 66.

124. Olcott, "An United Buddhist World," 239-40, and "Correspondence," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 13 (1892): 513.

125. "A Recent Conversation with the Mahatmas," Theosophist 18 (1907): 388.

126. Dharmapala's mother brought the young boy to Calcutta with the idea that Dharmapala would educate him there and that the boy would take over the Maha Bodhi Society after his death. He did so, serving as general manager of the Maha Bodhi Society until 1968.

127. The diaries show Dharmapala on occasion eating chicken, eggs, fish, and mutton. I suspect that he understood vegetarianism to mean eating no beef whatsoever and avoiding other animal products as much as possible. I think that his relative laxness with regard to diet derived from thinking that celibacy alone was decisive to spiritual progress and a South Asian sense that meat eating meant beef eating in particular.

128. As a Theosophist, and a friend of Marquis, the leader of the Hawaiian Society, Canavarro might have been one of the party that met Dharmapala shipboard in Honolulu. Frank Karpiel, "Theosophy, Culture, and Politics in Honolulu, 1890-1920," Hawaiian Journal of History 30 (1996): 183.

129. Canavarro later contracted a "spiritual" marriage with another Theosophist, Myron Phelps.

130. "In Japan May 1902 -- the two months I spent in Tokio was bad for me. Kama thoughts sprang up but I submitted. In New York in Deer 1903 -- Kama thoughts came but I vanquished them. Although I was asked by women to submit to their passions yet I did not yield to them. Nevertheless just as a pure white cloth is stained with dirt, I too became stained with Kama thoughts. Association is everything: Good and saintly people purify your company. Women drag you down [underscoring in original]. Avoid the contact of women and you are so far safe" (Diary, November 20, 1907).

131. Anne Gordon Perry et al, Green Acre on the Piscataquis (Wilmette, IL: Baha'i Publishing Trust, 2005),121-32.

132. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, (Calcutta: Advaita Asmama, 1977), 5:180.

133. Blavatsky herself provided Dharmapala an earlier real-life example. He believed that "HPB had three husbands, yet she was sexually a virgin" (Diary, June 3, 1926).

134. At one point he says that he had "saved Amara from Mara," (Diary, January 13, 1904). The privative A denies the force of the morpheme that follows, Mara (evil, in this case, evil in the form of sexual desire).

135. Gyanendra N. Chakravarti, "Hindu Marriage," Theosophist 10 (1888): 53-8 at S6. See Paul B. Courtright, "Sati, Sacrifice, and Marriage: The Modernity of Tradition," in From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion, and Culture, ed. Lindsey Harlan and Courtright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 184-203.

136. An American Buddhist, "Chastity," Theosophist 5 (1884): 161-2.

137. Gyanendra N. Chakravarti, letter to the editor, Theosophist 10 (1889): 510-1, at 510.

138. Long after the relationship with Gudrun Holm had lapsed, Dharmapala looked to a letter to explicate spiritual marriage: "Letter 19 is strangely applicable in the present Know that where a truly spiritual love seeks to consolidate itself doubly by a pure union of the two, in its earthly sense, it commits no sin, no crime. On such a union may well smile. It is beautifully expressed; but is it sound? Since 29th April, physical weakness is expressing itself in my mind. I hope it will soon vanish. Where there is phasso there is Vedana & Vedana is Dukkha" (Diary, June 3, 1929). Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne four times, and she refused him each time. Eventually she consented to a "spiritual marriage." See Susan Johnston Graf, W. B. Yeats, Twentieth·Century Magus (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 2000).

139. The mahatmas struggled with the incongruity between karma and their own intervention in human affairs. "Since every one of us is the creator and producer of the causes that lead to such or some other results, we have to reap what we have sown. Our chelas are helped but when they are innocent of the causes that lead them into trouble; when such causes are generated by foreign, outside influences." A. T. Barker, trans. and ed., The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett from the Mahatmas M. K.H. (Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1926), 310.

140. Mary Foster's last letter to Dharmapala closes with "May it please the Great All that may meet again." Nalinaksha Dutt, "The Maha Bodhi Society, Its History and Influence," Maha Bodhi Society of India Diamond Jubilee Souvenir 1891-1951, ed. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, (Calcutta: Maha Bodhi Society, 1951), 133.

141. Dharmapala spoke at the Congress of Theosophists before the parliament, and that address is even less noticed than Annie Besant's solicitous behavior toward Dharmapala in London, and their crossing the Atlantic together had a Theosophical motivation. At the congress he spoke of "Theosophy as the underlying truth of all the world's scriptures." "Congress of Theosophists," in Houghton, Neely's History, 926-8, at 926.

142. Namely, Yogananda and Abhedananda Swami (Diary, November 23 and December 9, 1925).

143. I believe that this talk was a lecture he gave at the Dharmarajika Vihara, Calcutta.

144. Diary, November 28,1925. The next sentence in that day's entry reads "Got copy of Mahatma Letters from Bro. Wadia."

145. "Buddhism and Theosophy," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 30 (1922): 209-15, at 214.

146. See, for instance, "The Spread of the Buddha's Arya Dhamma in Western Lands," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 17 (1909): I-4; "Propagation of the Religion of Righteousness in other Lands," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 24 (1916): 233-7; "The Apathy of Modern Buddhists," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 27 (1919): 105-9; and "The Duty of Bhikkhus and Laymen," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 27 (1919): 115-7.

147. "Buddhism in Relation to the Supra-Normal," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 22 (1914): 211-5; and "The Mystic Element in Buddha Dhamma," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 33 (1925): 641-4.

148. "Buddhism in Relation to the Supra-Normal," 215.

149. "Animal Slaughter in Buddhism," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 6 (1897): 52. The focus on vegetarianism aside, Dharmapala concluded by writing that he wanted to restore the "Uttari Manussa Dhamma, the divine science of Mind." "Divine science" is Blavatsky's expression. Isis Unveiled: Collected Writings, I877, rev. and corr. ed., 2 vols. (Wheaton, 11: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972), I:25. I suspect that Dharrnapala got the idea of there being two Buddhisms -- one popular and the other secret philosophy-from Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 2:587-640, especially p. 607.

150. "Buddhism and Theosophy," 30 (1922): 209-I5; Alice Leighton Cleather, "The Bodhi-Dharrna or Wisdom Religion," 30 (1922): 215-23,30 (1922): 244-68, 30 (1922): 291-99, 30 (1922): 322-34, 30 (1922): 387-95, 30 (1922): 402-5, and 30 (1922): 462-72; "An Abominable Falsehood," 31 (1923): 42-44; Basil Crump, "A Theosophical Criticism of Mrs. Cleather's Books," 41 (1923): 474-81; Basil Crump, "The Trans-Himalayan Masters on the Buddha," 32 (1924): 195-203, 32 (1924): 234-9, and 32 (1924): 300-7; "Notes and News," 32 (1924): 419-24; Iona Davey, "The Blavatsky Association," 32 (1924): 464-67; "Theosophy and Buddhism," 33 (1925): 619-21.

151. Basil Crump says that Cleather wrote "The Bodhi-Dharrna or Wisdom Religion" for Dharmapala, adding that Dharmapala also asked her to "found a branch of the Esoteric School [of Theosophy] at Sarnath." "What the Founders of the Theosophical Society Did for Buddhism," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 50 (1942): 83-7, at 86.

152. "Buddhism and Theosophy," 214-5.

153. "The Mystic Element in Buddha Dhamma," Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society, 33 (1925): 641-4.

154. "The Esoteric Doctrine in Buddhism,' Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society, 30: (1922): 195-200; and U Kyaw Dun, "'The Esoteric Doctrine in Buddhism,''' 30 (1922): 409-14. The 1922 table of contents attributes both articles to U Kyaw Dun K.S.M. It seems unlikely he wrote the first piece because he critiques it in the second.

155. Peter Masefield argues that during the Nikaya period the criterion for spiritual accomplishment was whether one were a savaka -- that is, someone who had entered the path, beginning with sotapanna status -- never whether one was a monk or a layperson. Laymen could become savakas. Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism, chapter I.
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Re: Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala, by Steven

Postby admin » Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:41 am

Part 1 of 4

Chapter Two: Buddhists in Japan

Without Japan, Asia is a funeral house.1

-- Anagarika Dharmapala


At the beginning of his career Dharmapala made a number of trips overseas in rapid succession. He traveled to Japan with Olcott in 1889 and to India with two Japanese in 1891, and in 1893 he sailed to the World’s Parliament of Religions, returning home by way of Japan and Southeast Asia. It is tempting to begin with the 1893 trip and take up his public life with an extraordinary moment in the nineteenth-century encounter of universalism and the world’s religions. The World’s Parliament of Religions represented more than a spectacle – although it was that – bringing together religious leaders who ranged from Japanese Buddhists, Swami Vivekananda, and Confucianists to Protestant ministers and patriarchs of the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches all dressed in clerical clothes. It gave participants a platform to present their universalizing programs and a common register that put all of those programs on a par. The 1889 trip had its own epic moments, but Olcott was the hero and Dharmapala his acolyte.2 The trip belonged to Olcott, he was the Buddhist reformer the Japanese sought, and the younger man’s presence was ignored in newspaper accounts of Olcott’s activities.3 What made Dharmapala entirely invisible was being hospitalized for the first half of their four-month visit. Once recovered, he tried himself out in preparation for the serious work to follow. In the bargain, he came to appreciate the Buddhist world as it had developed across Asia, the great variety of Buddhisms, and Japan’s success in fending off colonial powers and developing itself.

The first of Dharmapala’s four visits to Japan was the one campaign that Olcott and Dharmapala waged together to unify what they took to be the dominant traditions of Buddhist thought and practice – The Northern school represented by Japan and the Southern tradition centered in Sri Lanka.4 Some Japanese had knowledge of India at the time of Dharmapala’s first three trips (1889, 1893, and 1902), and some of those viewed it as a promised land, tied to Japan by Buddhism and Bodh Gaya. For Dharmapala Japan was a Buddhist nation that could serve as a model of Asian civilization preserved and development achieved. In time his optimism faded, and the Japanese changed as well, coming to regard India by the time of his last visit in 1913 less as sacred land and more as a society oppressed by colonial power.5 Before visiting Japan, Olcott and Dharmapala knew that including Japan in an united Buddhist world was going to require first creating some sort of unity among the eight sects that dominated Japanese Buddhism. They arrived at a favorable moment, but the moment soon passed. When Dharmapala returned to Japan in 1893 and 1902, he encountered a Japan that had changed, with little interest in India, the Maha Bodhi Society, or Olcott’s plans for a united Buddhist world. Dharmapala scaled back his plans to gain Japanese support for reclaiming Bodh Gaya.

If the first trip had Dharmapala serving as Olcott’s assistant or lying flat on his back in the hospital with rheumatism, the second had him arriving with newly acquired powers. He returned to Japan immediately after his appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions, where he had held his own. Commentators said that he and Swami Vivekananda were the stars of the occasion. Dharmapala edited a journal with readers scattered around the world, he had sympathizers in Lanka, Calcutta, and the United States, and he brought direct experience of conditions at Bodh Gaya to Japan. When he reached Tokyo with Professor Tanaka, he was met at the station by a few laymen and one hundred young priests (Diary, October 31, 1893). He had not yet taken on the ochre robes of full renunciation, which he adopted two years later.6 He had begun his practice of rising at 2 a.m. to practice meditation in 1891.7 He had contemplated trying to live on one meal a day (Diary, August 12, 1891). Above all he had concluded that his chances of recovering Bodh Gaya would depend on his “purity of mind,” which is to say, his celibacy. In that regard Japan was going to present challenges.

Dharmapala came to raise funds for his struggle at Bodh Gaya, moving around Japan by train, meeting people and giving lectures along the way. His considerable respect for Japan aside, many practices challenged him – he was invested in the trope of Japanese civilization, but he could not reconcile sake drinking with civilized behavior. By his second trip he felt self-assured enough to rebuke a Buddhist monk who drank liquor, telling him he was a bad example of the pure life and showing him the relic he carried only under protest (Diary, November 3, 1893). He fretted over the way the Japanese practiced Buddhism: “They have made Buddhism to suit their own taste and convenience” (Diary, November 16, 1893). At the same time, he began to experience disheartening results. He gave a talk on Bodh Gaya and India, appealing to his audience to restore the sacred site, but no support followed. A few days later he displayed the Buddha image from Bodh Gaya that he carried on his travels to a minister of the imperial household, concluding that the crown prince would be the savior of India (Diary, November 22, 1893). Before he left Japan, he discovered that his supporters were trying to make money by making casts of the image he brought with him. What they saw as resourcefulness, he saw as simony.

For many Japanese, India was a mythical place, and when Dharmapala recounted the present-day destitution of Bodh Gaya – as he did at home and in the West – he had an additional task, making his Japanese listeners appreciate that India was both a real place and a land that deserved to be treated by all Buddhists as sacred (Diary, November 22, 1893). He took advantage of his own association with India and indirectly with the figure of the historical Sakyamuni. Richard Jaffe has shown how the travels of Japanese monks to India and Lanka – even before Dharmapala reached Japan – contributed to local interest in the Buddha as a historical figure and India as the place where Buddhism began.8 Dharmapala was often taken as an Indian, and in Japan he regularly spoke for India and assumed the subject position of an Indian.9 Recovering Bodh Gaya was of course an Indian issue, and it must have been hard for the Japanese to make a distinction between India and Lanka. Dharmapala failed to raise any substantial amount of support of this trip, but at the Tentokuji temple in Tokyo he was given a wooden image of the Buddha that he would use to establish a foothold for Buddhism at Bodh Gaya. Until 1910 the image also served as a placeholder for Japan’s interest in the place.

[x]
4. Japanese Buddha Image at Bodh Gaya.

His 1889 visit to Japan had given Dharmapala firsthand experience of Japan’s economic development. He knew the Japanese had means to support the Bodh Gaya cause at a level impossible to imagine for Sinhalas, Thais, or Burmese, not to mention his supporters in India, England, and the United States, who were well off but few and far between. More to the point, Japan was an Asian country that had developed economically without losing its traditional way of life. Although the Japanese occupied the farthest reach of the Buddhist world, they showed signs of being interested in giving help to other Asians. After all, Toki Horyu had spoken at the parliament of the work the Maha Bodhi Society was doing at Bodh Gaya and indicated his hope to combine Northern and Southern Buddhism.10 Dharmapala first came to Bodh Gaya in 1891 in the company of two Japanese who had been studying in Colombo.11 From the time he reached Bodh Gaya, Dharmapala brought a lot of Japanese support with him. He had the help of Sir Edwin Arnold, who made two tours of Japan in 1889 and 1892 trying to raise support for Dharmapala’s project, and Dharmapala corresponded regularly with his Japanese supporters, apprising them of the state of the struggle at Bodh Gaya. His third visit to Japan began in May 1902 on his way to a longer visit (August 1902-December 1904) to the United States, raising funds for educational projects he was trying to get moving in India. He gave speeches emphasizing Japan’s obligations to India, giving the Japanese more reason to assume he was Indian.

He wanted Japanese businessmen to make India prosperous, and he envisioned doing business himself in Japan:

Wrote to father about the work I intend doing in Japan; viz to open trade communications with Japan and to export Japanese goods to Ceylon … What I wish to do is to earn money by legitimate commercial dealings and to spend all that money on religion, to propagate the Dhamma. My father has spent for me all these 16 years and now I must earn and show him that I am also concerned in his welfare. (Diary, May 13, 1902)


His visits made him aware of the sophistication of Japanese manufacturing, but seeing that the Japanese were not going to simply throw in with the Maha Bodhi Society made him contemplate earning the money the Japanese would not be contributing to his cause. When the Hewavitarne family went into the matchbox business, they made use of his connections to the Japanese match industry. Although making furniture was its main business, the family firm began to import rickshaws from Japan. By 1906 Dharmapala had set up a program to send Sinhala men to Tokyo to be trained in Japanese industrial practices. The first of those students, U.B. Dolapilla, returned in 1911 and began teaching at the weaving school Dharmapala had established near Colombo. On his 1913 trip he added a new element to his hopes for a Lanka-Japan trading company. He contemplated sending a Japanese carpenter, mason, lacquer man, and landscape gardener to Colombo to demonstrate Japanese skills and teach them to Sinhala youths (Diary, June 4, 1913).

The first two visits to Japan did not test Dharmapala’s renunciation. When he took a room at Nishimura’s Hotel in Kobe on his third visit, everthing changed:

A public hotel is not the place for a Brahmachari life. From 5 A.M. till later after midnight it is all sensual, women exhibiting their natural weaknesses. At 11 P.M. accidentally I happened to go to the privy and there was a woman! When I think of the many pitfalls that surround me I am afraid. Already the degenerating signs of passions I begin to see. They must be crushed; but they cannot be crushed if I am to live around women …. Today’s experiences began at 6 A.M. The maid came seven times when I was alone between 6 & 11 A.M. Another came at 12 A.M. bringing milk; and she showed me her breasts. They touched my body. Naturally the passions were aroused … Thinking of the Higher Life and trying to calm the excitement, but the constant association with young women these few days is killing me. With them no man is safe [emphasis in original]. (Diary, May 5, 1902)


Amid the swirl of temptations, he held on to the South Asian strategy for leading the pure life:

In 1898 No. a woman touched my body when I fell ill. The sensations were terrific, the whole body was excited, and it was a revolution; but I kept my thoughts concentrated on the Holy One. There was no cure of the neuralgia; but only experienced a sensual change. No passionate thoughts arose; because the mind was attuned to a higher idea. But the sensation is injurious to spiritual progress.

According to the Vinaya Rules, I am debarred from entering the Upasampada order; but I can be a samanera. At times sensual thoughts trouble me; and Mara is suggesting evil ideas. After keeping myself pure for so many years, is it proper that I should degenerate? …. But there is the Dhamma and there is Nirvana. May the Dhamma protect me and lead me to discover the Path to Nirvana for the good of the World! (Diary, May 4, 1902)


Without ordination he could still aim for nirvana, as long as he maintained his celibacy. Being celibate removed him from the social order and allowed him to act for the good of all, ignoring gender and nationality as well as religion. Rejecting a woman’s advanced, he pointed to a universalizing moral: “A sudden impulse seized me and tears began flowing from my eye. Pledged my life for Humanity” (Diary, September 14, 1891).

The third trip was the occasion for Dharmapala’s encounter with Tanaka Chigaku, the founder of a Nichirenist movement that eventually came to be known as Kokuchukai.12 His fourth visit was in fact two visits, laying over in Japan on his way to and from Honolulu where he went to felicitate Mary Foster. If some Japanese were willing to entertain the notion that their Buddhism should move in a universalizing directing when he arrived in 1889, by 1913 the moment had given way to national feeling. Early on he followed Olcott’s program. “The future work of union between Southern & Northern Buddhism is full of consequences, and the future spread of Buddhism rests upon that,” he observed (November 7, 1893). By the third visit he had asked Noguchi Zenshiro “whether it was expedient for me to join the W[estern] Honganji” (Diary, May 3, 1902). Noguchi told him that it was good to get their sympathy but that he (Dharmapala) “should not become a Sectarian.”13

As he abandoned hopes for recruiting Japanese for the Maha Bodhi Society, he tried to save something of the relationship. He looked at Japan’s militarization with quaint innocence:

At Yokosika. Mr. Sato and others were rather inclined that I should see the Dockyard … What a unique sight it will be if the battle ships when not engaged in wars, should be used as ships of peace in spreading the Wisdom of the Tathagato? (Diary, June 23, 1902)


When he left Japan after that third visit, he wrote that the Buddhist Young Men’s Association, Educational Society, Economical Society, and Tokyo Chamber of Commerce had given dinners for him, but “the Buddhist priests were indifferent” (Diary, July 1, 1902). On the fourth trip new forces arose. The Japanese government complied with a British request and put him under surveillance.14 He met the Indian revolutionary Mohammed Barakatullah several times on that trip – unaware of his revolutionary activities in Japan –

While in England he [Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah] came in close contact with Lala Hardayal and Raja Mahendra Pratap, son of the Raja of Hathras. He became a friend of Afghan Emir and the editor of the Kabul newspaper Sirejul-ul-Akber'. He was one of the founders of the Ghadar Party in 1913 at San Francisco. Later he became the first prime minister of the Provisional Government of India established on 1 December 1915 in Kabul with Raja Mahendra Pratap as its president. Barkatullah went to several countries of the world with a mission to rouse politically the Indian community and to seek support for the freedom of India from the famous leaders of the time in those countries. Prominent amongst those were Kaiser Wilhelm II, Amir Habibullah Khan, Mohammed Resched, Ghazi Pasha, Lenin, and Hitler.

In England, in 1897, Barakatullah was seen attending meetings of the Muslim Patriotic League. Here, he came across other revolutionary compatriots around Shyamji Krishnavarma. After about a year spent in America, in February 1904 he left for Japan, where he was appointed Professor of Hindustani at the University of Tokyo. In the autumn of 1906, at 1 West 34th Street in New York City, a Pan-Aryan Association was formed by Barakatullah and Samuel Lucas Joshi, a Maratha Christian, son of the late Reverend Lucas Maloba Joshi; it was supported by the Irish revolutionaries of the Clan-na-Gael, the anti-British lawyer Myron H. Phelps ….

Miranda de Souza Canavarro (1849-1933) was notable as the first woman to convert to Buddhism on American soil (in 1897) and later a Buddhist nun in Ceylon. She became known as Sister Sanghamitta, while in America she was often known as Marie. She was the wife of the Portuguese ambassador to Sandwich Islands, who began a secret "spiritual marriage" to New York attorney and Buddhist sympathizer Myron Henry Phelps.[1] She converted to Buddhism in 1897 under the discipleship of Anagarika Dharmapala, then moved to Ceylon as Sister Sanghamitta.

-- Miranda de Souza Canavarro, by Wikipedia


and of the equally anti-British Swami Abhedananda who continued the work of Swami Vivekananda.

-- Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah, by Wikipedia


and dined with Daetetsu Suzuki and other Buddhist scholars, advising them that a society “should be organized to Japanise the Europeans who visit Japan” (Diary, July 11, 1913).15

Three years earlier in Calcutta Dharmapala had met Count Otani, who controlled Higashi Honganji. Otani told him that if Indians wished to make progress, they must follow the Buddha. But he gave no sign of support. The Maha Bodhi’s account of that meeting announced Dharmapala’s plans to send Indian Buddhist missionaries to Japan, but it also provided an accounting of where his project stood twenty years after his first trip:

The Count in his talk with the Anagarika made it very clear that the Japanese Buddhists had no idea of Indian Buddhism, and there is very little hope of the Japanese ever helping the Indian propaganda. The first thing to be done is to educate the Japanese Buddhists about India, for the majority of them believe that India is in heaven. The only way to educate the people of Japan is by means of lectures delivered by an Indian Buddhist Missionary.16


The count had visited many of the Buddhist sites in Northern India on his 1910 trip, but seeing Bodh Gaya produced no interest in throwing in with Dharmapala or helping the Maha Bodhi Society.

Dharmapala was approached by Japanese to make overtly anti-Western comments on that final trip to Japan, and he was an old hand at that. Now he would do so for the sake of specifically Japanese interests. In Osaka he gave a talk sponsored by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, making the case for Japan’s obligations to other Asians on the basis of their common origins:

The Aryans of India, whose representative I am, are glad that their ancient Aryan civilization had been preserved by the sons of the thrice favored land. To the great Aryanised family, whose home is India, numbering about 800 millions, belong the Japanese, Koreans, Mongolians, Chinese, Siamese, Cambodians, Burmese, Tibetans, Sinhalese. This great Asiatic brotherhood under the leadership of Japan can again regain their lost place in the world’s history.17


Those were sentiments that the Japanese were certain to like, and on his way home from Japan – touring parts of China and Korea under Japanese control – Dharmapala gave a talk in Dairen that must have also pleased. He told audiences in East Asia that the threat to the world was not yellow peril but white, and that the Japanese were a unique people because they had never been subjected to colonial domination.

The Japanese managed Dharmapala’s travels in Korea and China, and he saw what his hosts wanted him to see and met people they wanted him to meet. In the days before he left, he visited the secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Diary, August 10, 1913), and when his steamer arrived at Pusan, he was met by priests of the various sects – which presumably were Japanese – and the editor of the newspaper Shozen Jiho (Diary, August 18, 1913). He visited a Korean village, saying to himself that he was glad the Japanese had taken Korea and recalling his wish of 1889 “that Japan should civilize Korea … My wish is fulfilled …. I hope they will civilize the whole world by [their] superior morality” (Diary, August 19, 1913). He gave a public lecture and went to visit the oldest Japanese resident of Korea, who had arrived in Pusan forty-six years earlier (Diary, August 19, 1913). He took the train to Seoul, where he was greeted by Japanese and Korean priests. When he visited a Buddhist temple outside the city, he learned that the Korean emperor some three hundred years earlier had discovered the great influence of Buddhism and forbade priests from entering Seoul in order to suppress the religion. “Buddhism declined,” he concluded, “and Korean civilization went down” (Diary, August 21, 1913).

He had a similar experience in China because his onward ticket left him only a few days to visit. Again he stayed at Japanese hotels, seeing a Chinese temple and meeting a Chinese newspaper editor with interpretation provided by a Mr. Yokoyama (Diary, August 24, 1913). In China he made more public appearances than in Korea, lecturing at Dairen at the Mantetsu Reading Club, directing his remarks to a Japanese audience and invoking Japan’s obligations to stem the tide of Western influence, by going “all over Asia and propagate[ing] the gospel of Man. You are each a kind of Missionary.”18 In Shanghai he met American missionaries, who asked him to give a lecture, although they were concerned enough to ask him to submit his remarks to them before he spoke (Diary, September 16, 1913). He explained the principles of Buddhism to an audience that was likely full of Christians, forgoing comments about white peril and Christianity. The title of his talk notwithstanding, it emphasized a life of self-discipline and civilized behavior, not social activism.

Mind is the chief factor in human progress…. Let the mind be so trained in the gospel of selfless activity that it will be master of the senses, of evil passions and selfish desires. This is the Gospel of Buddha.19


[x]
5. Dharmapala (front right) with local Buddhist monks, China, 1913.

What he thought the Japanese were doing, civilizing the less developed parts of Asia, is what he thought he could do – bring civilization to Sinhala villages and India.

On one occasion he spoke of beginning a long-term project in Japan and becoming a naturalized Japanese citizen (Diary, July 11, 1913). It is easy to see the attraction. Japan was not Britain. It was Buddhist, industrialized, and civilized. What could be wrong with Japan’s “promoting the prosperity of the Koreans” (Diary, August 21, 1913) or bringing progress to Manchuria (Diary, August 24, 1913)? Japanese economic expansionism had a religious side, and Dharmapala was as committed as the Japanese to venture capitalism, industrialization, and foreign trade. Honganji was building temples overseas in areas under Japanese control or in Japanese communities, and he took their efforts as compatible with his. The polite guest, he criticized the Japanese in only one regard. Besides the Japanese monk he chided (Diary, November 3, 1893), he criticized laymen at a meeting to discuss Buddhist problems where sake was served.20 What he did not attempt in Japan was [to] propagate Theravada Buddhism or Theosophy or reform Japanese institutions. He made no plans for finding ways for the Buddhist sects to act in unison. He spoke at first of “purifying” Japanese Buddhism, but soon gave up that idea. His goal, narrowly conceived, was to gather Japanese support for his campaign to recover Bodh Gaya, more broadly, he wanted to drag the Japanese onto the world stage, urging them to spread civilization across Asia.

Buddhism as Dharmapala Found It In Japan

Japanese Buddhists had good reason for seeking out Olcott. They had been motivated by external pressures on the religion and its officiants since long before the Meiji Restoration in 1868. For some 250 years Buddhist temples had maintained the social order of the Tokugawa authorities, conducting rituals – usually associated with death – that upheld the proper order between family, community, and government. In a period of cultural and economic isolation Buddhism’s universalizing potential gave way to its potential for supporting that political order. The position of Buddhism during the time has been characterized as privileged but defensive, comfortable but regulated. That privilege was itself a target. Rejecting Buddhism, Martin Collcutt writes, ran throughout the Tokugawa intellectual history. He adds that it is arguable whether the regulated comfort Buddhist monks enjoyed led to “clerical laxity and spiritual torpor.”21 But such were the charges raised against Buddhism, and even before Meiji, temples had been razed or amalgamated with Shinto shrines and monks defrocked.

In the late Tokugawa period the threat to Buddhism came from Japanese intellectuals who wanted to suppress both Confucianism and Buddhism in favor of Shinto, kami worship, and “national learning.” Hirata Atsutane, to cite an extreme case, condemned the contamination of Shinto by Buddhism and made contempt for India a central part of his nativist program. He made outrageous arguments about Indians, calling them “vulgar” and “yellow-black” or dirt colored. Indians followed repulsive practices such as spreading cow dung on floors and anointing themselves with oils because “in the stifling heat all the people of this nation naturally stink.”22 He abused the Buddha – who he said Indians believed had been born from the right side of his mother’s belly – observing that “he probably was, like the viper he is.” The parables of the Buddha were simply fanciful stories, as was the idea that there is a Pure Land, that is, India in heavenly form, where the Lord Buddha had resided. Atsutane concluded that there was no place where such a “country” is found. If there is a paradise on earth, it is Japan, and certainly not India. The one thing that he could say for Indians is that they had the good sense to abandon Buddhism. The sects Atsutane found most offensive were Jodo Shinshu and Nichiren, and those were the two sects that became involved with Dharmapala’s activities in Japan.

Buddhism in Japan suffered further blows after the coming of Westerners, and it suffered from Western knowledge itself. Christian missionaries insisted that Buddhism was “unscientific” and “anti-modern.” The monks were indolent and unlearned. They took advantage of laypeople and kept Japan from realizing its potential as a modern country. By the late 1860s a movement to suppress Buddhism began to inflict renewed devastation on monks and temples – temples were burned, statues destroyed, and lands appropriated. The severity of the suppression can be seen in the number of temples razed in prefectures where local officials took government policy – itself ambiguous and open to interpretation – most seriously. In Satsume some forty-five temples and halls were eliminated.23 In Toyama prefecture, of 1,639 temples 7 survived.24 The first Japanese census measured the decline more generally, estimating that there were 465,049 Buddhist temples in Japan in 1871. By 1876 that number had been reduced to 71,962.25 The Buddhist temples and monks who survived continued to provide rituals linked to death, grave sites, and ancestors, but they could hardly ignore anti-Buddhist feeling.

The promulgating of a new ceremonial structure, the Unity of Rite and Rule (saisei itchi), in early Meiji had its own influence on Buddhism. It served as

an ideological took to create, articulate, and manifest an “alliance” extending from the myriad deities through the figure of the Emperor and the mediation of his ministers “even unto the least persons under heaven.” … It served, in other words to insert the Emperor into the political realm and simultaneously to elevate “the people” as full participants in the drama of nation-building.26


Putting the emperor at the center of this ceremonial structure made it possible in turn to construct the people of the place as coparceners in the nation. The Meiji Restoration separated Shinto and Buddhism, keeping each in a distinct space, and constrained both by tying the two religious systems to government. These two government initiatives, shimbutsu bunri (the separation of Shinto deities, kami, and Buddhas) and haibutsu kishaku (eradication of Buddhism) meant that Buddhism faced a crisis of more than transition.27 The issue was not so much whether Buddhism was a national institution or a universal one but whether Buddhism deserved to continue to remain a Japanese institution whatever form it took.

For Buddhism the imposition of Government control and the appropriation of land had effects that depended on how each sect made its living. Older monasteries that had held large amounts of land under the Tokugawa system were threatened. Temples such as Rinzai Zen temples that depended on feudal lords (daimyo) as their patrons suffered. Sects that engaged in esoteric rituals (kito) – Tendai, Shingon, and Soto Zen – were undone. The sect that suffered least was Jodo Shinshu. It quickly recovered its losses during the first decades of Meiji rule. Its livelihood came from popular support, and that support kept coming.28 Higashi (Eastern) and Nishi (Western) Honganji, the headquarters temples of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, were wealthy, powerful institutions, legitimating their independence by lending money to the Meiji government, an act that represented more than a gesture when the government was nearly destitute. Honganji took reverence for the emperor as a principle as fundamental as respect for kami (spirits) and the propagation of heavenly reason.29 But the very division of Jodo Shin Buddhism into these two branches had been a Tokugawa strategy to counterbalance the massive strength of Honganji.30 The division lingered on even as Honganji rebuilt its strength.

After early Meiji suppression, Buddhists fought back by trying to put their own house in order and drawing closer to the state. While closing ranks with the state, Buddhists tried the opposite approach to the state, invoking the notion of freedom of religion. Buddhist sects sought to achieve a degree of unity that institutional Buddhism had not known. On his way to Japan Dharmapala learned from his companion Noguchi’s reading of a Japanese newspaper that the chief abbots of the Buddhist sects were joining forces to establish a Buddhist university (Diary, February 7-8, 1889). This attempt at unification went back to the Tokugawa period when Buddhist intellectuals sought to make sense of the proliferation of sects and subsects. The two Honganjis took the lead in trying to create unity among the sects. The monks who later participated in the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 – Shimaji Mokurai, Ashitsu Jitsunen, Shaku Soen, and toki Horyu – tried to find doctrinal unity by compiling their five-volume Essentials of the Buddhist Sects.31 Buddhists, usually affiliated with Honganji, also began to bring Western scholarly skills to the study of their own religion, thinking that philological and historical knowledge would enable them to compete with Christian missionaries. And a small number of monks – including Shaku Unsho, who was motivated by deep feeling for both the Theravada tradition and the historical Buddha – initiated a movement to institute Vinaya (the monastic law).32 Well before Dharmapala initiated his career as a world reformer, Shaku Unsho had sent his student Kozen to Colombo to study Pali with Hikkaduve Sumangala.

Since the medieval period, the monkhood had been divided into eight sects – a number fixed by the state – with substantial differences of belief and practice. The state acted to preserve these divisions, keeping the Buddhist establishment weak by prohibiting transectarian organizations. A person who supported one temple was obliged to continue to do so, and shifting allegiances did not happen. From the early Meiji period onward, Buddhists turned their minds toward rationalizing sectarianism or arguing for new arrangements that would unify their cause. Buddhist modernizers seeking to concoct a new understanding of Buddhism looked back to Gyonen (1240-1322), who had written about the same problem and argued that the sects of his time were not evidence of degeneration but particularization.33 By 1868 the two branches of Jodo Shin Buddhism took the unprecedented step of trying to forge a common Buddhism by establishing the Alliance of United Sects for Ethical Standards (Shoshu Dotoku Kaimei) and seeking to create the unity of the Law of the Sovereign and the Law of the Buddha, an initiative reflecting the hegemony of the two Honganjis.

Olcott’s first visit happened to coincide with Christian missionaries conducting their own debate about sectarianism.34 By early 1889, an argument developed between “Sigma” and a Dr. Eby in the correspondence section of the leading English-language paper of the day.35 Sigma pointed out that Eby’s contention that all Christians, even if divided into sects, are “spiritually” united in Christ “is true neither in theory or practice.” Sigma commiserated with Japanese Christians pondering the meaning of biblical verses such as “That they may be one, even as we” when the proliferation of Christian missions in Japan made it hard for the Japanese to locate that oneness. Sigma denounced sectarianism as a perversion of Christianity. By early march he wrote of the Protestant missionaries’ failed efforts to create unity: “Again, I ask, what keeps the Methodists out of the Union Church in Japan?”36 Sectarianism, whether Christian or Buddhist, functioned in the moment as an obstacle to true belief, each religion critiquing the other for lacking unity. From the Buddhist perspective, Christian missionary efforts – even if the Christians were disunited – were threatening because of their own sense of disunity.

Olcott had fought the centripetal effects of caste politics in Lanka among Buddhist monks who would not cooperate with one another. He came to Japan with hopes not to much for the unification of the Buddhist sects as a unified movement for overseas work emerging from the sects. He could not move toward a united Buddhist world without first forging some solidarity among the Japanese sects. Doing so required haranguing the very people he needed:

[Olcott has publicly warned them on several recent occasions [that revival of our national religion] will depend entirely upon the coming forward of a number of earnest, unselfish, persevering, and courageous men, to unite, without distinction of sect, for the vigorous promotion of the pure religion taught by Sakya Muni.37


By 1894 the Buddhist periodical Tsuzoku began to argue for a universal Buddhism, and it aimed to present this universal Buddhism in language that ordinary people could understand, making it universalist in a second way.

Of the Japanese Buddhists who spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions, it was Noguchi Zenshiro – the emissary who had come to Colombo to fetch Olcott – who took on the sectarian issue most directly. By its nature the occasion invited comments that found the universal in the particular, and Noguchi framed his remarks in inclusive terms: “Each sect and religion,” he said, “as its ultimate object aims to attain truth.” The only hope for reducing the profusion resided in the fact that truth is one, and the passing of time would bring not only convergence among religions but between “faith and reason, religion and science.” Noguchi’s vision of convergence as not simply sentimental, inclusive, or eventualist. It rested on self-interest, for convergence required that the leading role in achieving it be played by Japanese Buddhists. He argued: “If the thousands of religions do continue to develop and reach the state of full development there will be no more any distinction between them” concluding, “This is the end at which we aim and to which we believe that we know the shortest way.”38 The “we” in this conclusion are Japanese Buddhists such as himself, willing to transcend Buddhist sectarianism and seek truth in a new Buddhism (shin bukkyo).

As the Japanese delegation steamed home from the parliament, Christians on board found a real-life example of what they thought was Buddhist hypocrisy, with its own connection to sectarianism. Put off by the way Japanese Buddhists had made much of the “brotherhood of man” at the parliament, Christians seized on the death of a Japanese traveler to undermine their presumption. The Revered B.C. Haworth provided this account of the man’s last hours:

One of the Japanese passengers in the steerage was sick unto death. When the ship’s surgeon found that the end was near … he sent for the Rev. Shaku Soyen, requesting his presence at the bed of death …. He had many questions to ask in regard to the name, circumstances, and so on of the patient. Among these questions was one to this effect: -- “Do you think he belongs to the laboring class?” The surgeon replied that as nearly as he could judge from appearances he was a laboring man …. Through the interpreter, the reverend gentleman sent back the reply that he did not think it worth while to go.


The account speaks of class, not sectarianism, but that was the problem. Each was tied to the other. The interpreter who asked Shaku Soen to come to the dying man’s bedside reported that he gave another reason for not attending his countryman: “There are so many religions in Japan, and he did not know to which religion the patient belonged!”39

Whether Shaku Soen’s concerns were class, doctrine, or sectarianism, the Japanese found themselves in a world where divisions that separated some people and united others were beginning to matter in new ways. In the context of the reformative moment, sectarianism was a small part of what had to be addressed. From a Japanese point of view, drawing the sects together cleared the way for a stronger Buddhism at home. The World’s Parliament of Religions represented for them a different effort to spread a cosmopolitan Buddhism that hardly existed in Japan.40 Olcott had the same thing in mind, hoping that he could return Buddhists to the “pure religion taught by Sakya Muni.” But unifying Japanese sects came first, just as it had in Lanka. When he left for Japan, the Theosophist put it this way: “As he began his Ceylon work by convening …. Priests of the Siam and Amarapura sects, so he hopes to call a similar one of the forty sects into which Japanese Buddhism is said to be divided.”41

After Dharmapala’s convalescence Olcott and Dharmapala were taken to the parade ground of a Buddhist school affiliated with Honganji. Dharmapala was surprised to see the exercises of a group of military cadets. They had come for the sake of building a united Buddhist world, and he found the pairing of religious and constitutional reform a “curious coincidence” (Diary, February 11-12, 1889). Of course the timing was not coincidental, and he overlooked the larger coincidence – they had been asked to visit Japan at the moment when the relationship between Buddhism and the state was being formalized and tightened, perhaps the least promising moment for the visitors to move Buddhism in an universalizing direction. What else Olcott and Dharmapala knew about the troubled history of Buddhism during the Tokugawa and early Meiji eras is not clear. Olcott says simply that before he met Noguchi he “had none of his present familiarity with his nation.”42 He recognized the rising force of Christian missionizing in Japan, and Olcott had heard Noguchi suggest in his address to the Theosophical conference in Adyar that the first step in reforming Buddhism was “the unification of all Buddhists, no matter what sect they are, nor of what country.”43 As they approached Kobe harbor, what they knew of Buddhist sectarianism in Japan and the shifting relationship between the state and Buddhist was what they had learned from Noguchi.

Olcott in Japan

The Japanese were drawn to Olcott because of his fame as a Westerner who had reformed Buddhist life in a faraway part of Asia. They sent Noguchi to fetch Olcott, and he appeared unannounced – as the story has it – at the Colombo office of the Theosophical Society in 1888. Having lodged with the Hewavitarne family in Colombo during his stay, Noguchi asked Dharmapala to join Olcott on the trip. Those encounters duly noted, the inaugural moment in the construction of a Buddhist world was preceded by considerable correspondence between South Asian Buddhists and Japan that Dharmapala initiated. Noguchi had written to Olcott several times before meeting Olcott at the Theosophical Society convention in November 1888. Behind Noguchi stood Hirai Kanezo (or Kinzo), the headmaster of an English-language school in Kyoto, and Sano Masamichi, a Jodo Shinshu priest. They established an organization in Kyoto, collected funds to bring Olcott to Japan, and sent several letters of invitation. When no reply appeared, they sent Noguchi to deliver the invitation in person.44

Before Noguchi reached Colombo, Dharmapala had begun to correspond with other Japanese Buddhists. He first got the idea of visiting Japan by reading an article in the Fortnightly Review in 1887.45 That account of Japan led him to write Akamatsu at Honganji, having come across Akamatsu’s and Sano Masamichi’s names in the article.46 Both were scholarly monks with some knowledge of English. He had also sent Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism to Japan, and that small booklet led to further correspondence with Noguchi prior to his arrival in Colombo. Another series of letters put him in touch with the students of Nishi Honganji, who in 1886 had established a society for temperance and monastic reform (Hanseikai) that published the journal Hansei zasshi in the same cause. Before Dharmapala visited Japan, he began publishing articles in Hansei zasshi (and Chuo koron, the newspaper that replaced it).47 By 1894 he had shared his views with Japanese readers on issues ranging from temperance, the recently designed Buddhist flag, Christianized names such as his birth name, and Olcott’s upcoming visit.

Those letters voice concerns that Dharmapala knew the members of Hanseikai shared. He began with two examples of the behavior that abusing alcohol produced.48 The first was the ancient Indian king Ajatasatru, who killed his father in a drunken rage; the second was another drunken king who ordered his son killed to provide meat for the dinner table. “These are all results from drinking ‘crazy water,’” he wrote. “Once a human being drinks alcohol, he loses his mind…. Ah, brothers and sisters, have you ever heard of any person who is drunk and does good things at the same time?” He concluded with the connection between alcohol and Christianity.


I respect the Buddha’s prohibitions and teach them to other people. In places where these rules are enforced, it is rare to see people who commit crimes, the society is healthy, and people live in peace…. In New York there are more than nine thousand liquor stores. In London, there are infinite numbers…. Christians are not ashamed of their drinking habit – in one hand, they have a bible, in the other hand, they hold a bottle of brandy. Fellow Buddhist brothers and sisters, please do not be deceived by Christians …. Please be proud of your land, your art, and your highly intelligent people.


Before he reached Japan, he had a constituency who shared his values. The problem was that they were young and few in number and lacked resources.49

Dharmapala told Hansei zasshi of the work of the Japanese monk Kozen Gunaratana, then studying Pali in Colombo. 50 He had been sent by his teacher Shaku Unsho Danyo, himself a Shingon priest. Another Japanese priest, Shaku Soen – with whom Dharmapala had a continuing relationship in Lanka, India, Japan, and the United States – was a prominent Zen monk, which is to say that Japanese interest in South Asia transcended Jodo Shinshu. But Noguchi came to Colombo as a representative of people affiliated with Honganji, and in Japan Dharmapala spent most of his time in Honganji contexts. Doing so did not keep him from interacting with monks of other sects, both in Japan and South Asia. But those connections were personal and episodic, unlike the steady connection to Honganji that overshadowed his personal connections to monks of other sects.51 He did not speak of Honganji hegemony as a problem, but he must have recognized limits on his actions.

Hirai Kanezo – who later went with Noguchi to translate for the Japanese priests at the Parliament of Religions – sent Noguchi to Colombo to invite Olcott to visit Japan in 1889.52 A leading member of the Young Men’s Buddhist Committee, Hirai made a living as the headmaster of Oriental Hall in Kyoto.53 After his letters to Olcott brought no response, he began to feel pressure from the organization to make his visit happen. His fellow members had given funds to Hirai, and they were impatient with the delay. Hirai’s earlier recommendation had gotten Noguchi a teaching job at a local school, and when Hirai asked Noguchi to make the trip by steamer, he also asked Noguchi to pay his own way. When he finally reached Theosophical Society headquarters in Colombo, Noguchi learned from Dharmapala that Olcott had left the island and was pursuing the Theosophical cause in London. Until he returned to Adyar – where the Theosophical Society in India had moved its headquarters from Bombay – Dharmapala provided Noguchi with a room at his parents’ house, and Noguchi toured the island, meeting Shaku Kozen and a Jodo Shinshu priest, Kichiren Norihiko, who was studying Sanskrit with Pandit Batuwantudawe.

Noguchi caught up with Olcott at the Theosophical meetings in Adyar, where he addressed the delegates as a humble petitioner:


We, Japanese Buddhists, now ask you to lend us this worker of social miracles, this defender of religion, this teacher of tolerance, for a little time, so that he may do for the religion of my country what he and his colleagues have done for the religion of India.54


After giving an account of the Japanese Buddhist sects, their beliefs, and their demoralized condition, Noguchi laid out plans for reform:

The first important step we must make is the unification of all Buddhists, no matter what sect they are, nor of what country …. The second step is to make every priest and layman educated …. The third step is to reconvert the Japanese to Buddhism. The fourth step is to encourage the Japanese to take all that is good from Europe, and to reject all the bad (85).


Hirai and Sano had organized a branch of the Theosophical Society in Kyoto, evidence that reforming Japanese religion was compatible with the interests of Theosophy. He concluded by urging the delegates – most of whom were not Buddhists but Hindus and Zoroastrians – to work “mutually for the advancement of our ancient religions” (86).
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Re: Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala, by Steven

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Part 2 of 4

Olcott accepted the invitation late in December 1888, and by Frebruary 1889 the party had arrived in Kobe.55 Aboard ship Dharmapala had come down with a painful case of rheumatism that continued for two months. Just after arriving, Olcott was taken to Kyoto, where he addressed a crowd of six hundred Japanese priests at the Chion-in temple. If Olcott’s Theosophical Buddhism had a doctrinal ally in Japan, it was Shingon Buddhism, the Tantric-influenced Buddhism that is often glossed in English as “Esoteric Buddhism,” a phrase that must have struck Olcott’s eye.56 But the preeminence of Honganji was apparent from the moment Olcott reached Kyoto. His first appearance before priests and laypeople occurred at Honganji’s Chion-in temple, followed by a cursory call on the chief priest of the Shingon sect and another lecture to two thousand people, again at the Chion-in temple. The following day he was given a reception at Western Honganji and a day later at Eastern Honganji. On February 15 he lodged at a Nichiren temple before he gave two lectures at Jodo Shinshu temples on February 16 and held a meeting for unity back at Chion-in.57 When he spoke in public, in other words, he did so under Honganji auspices, and that connection was natural because Honganji had taken the lead in unifying the Buddhist sects and making contact with Buddhists in other parts of Asia.

As he spoke to audiences of priests in the following days, Olcott struck one chord: Buddhists must reach agreement on some doctrinal fundamentals and find some organizational unity to defend their interests. When he addressed the high priests of the eight sects in the Empress Room at the Chion-in temple, he found them seated “according to age about a long table, each with a brass fire-pot before him for warming his hands.” He read salutations from Hikkaduve, the most respected monk in Lanka at the time, and explained his own position:


I have no special, private word to speak to any of you, but one word for all. My mission is not to propagate the peculiar doctrines of any sect, but to unite you all in one sacred undertaking. Each of you I recognize as a Buddhist and a brother …. Listen to the words of the learned Chinese pilgrim and scholar Hiouen Thsang: “The schools of philosophy are always in conflict, and the noise of their passionate discussions rises like the waves of the sea. Heretics of the different sects attach themselves to particular teachers, and by different routes walk to the same goal” [emphasis in original].58


He argued that reuniting Northern and Southern Buddhists meant coming to know what one another believed; doing so would require scholars comparing the sacred books of each tradition. The results needed to be published in all Buddhist countries, a task that might require “another Great Council at some sacred place, such as Buddha Gaya or Anuradhapura.”59 His words were innocent enough, but both proposed venues must have left his audience feeling that his universalism hid a predisposition toward South Asia and the Southern tradition.60.

Olcott confronted other obstacles on the path to a united Buddhist world, which were local and organizational. By February 15, he had discovered that the young men of Hanseikai had no money to finance the tour and planned to charge admission to his lectures.61 Olcott would not have that, and the directors of Honganji came forward with an offer to sponsor the tour, provided that the original committee was dismantled and they were put in charge. Instead Olcott suggested establishing a General Committee of Buddhist Affairs, requiring support from each of the eight sects. Without that agreement, he added, he would be taking the next steamer home.62 A nonsectarian committee was established (Indo-Busseki-Kofuku-Kai), and it arranged his tour across Japan, which kept him fully occupied, preaching seventy-six times in the next four months.63 However often he repeated the message of unity, he found little of it. Toward the end of his visit he established a branch of the Theosophical Society, but the officeholders were Honganji officials, another expression of the “spirit of sectarianism so rife that they [representatives of other sects] could never consent to come into an organization where, of necessity, some must be officers and the others simple members.”64

When Olcott returned to Japan in 1891, he addressed the unity issue by way of The Buddhist Catechism. He intended the questions and answers as a teaching tool for young Buddhists, and it was already serving that purpose in fifteen different languages. To add Japanese to the list, he sent a copy to Ninkai Mizutani, who had the booklet translated and retitled Buddhism, Questions and Answers.65 The subtitle was A Buddhist Catechism According to the Canon of the Southern Church, the title page indicating that it had been approved by Hikkaduve. Just before his second trip to Japan, he had organized a meeting of two Japanese, two Burmese, Dharmapala, and another Sinhala at Adyar. When the group had considered “all points of belief in the Northern and Southern Schools of Buddhists … [Olcott] drafted a platform, embracing fourteen clauses, upon which all Buddhist sects could agree if disposed to promote brotherly feeling and mutual sympathy between themselves.”66

In late January Olcott sailed to Burma with the two Burmese he had called to Adyar, and after two nights of heated discussion, he secured “the approval of the leading priests of Burma for [his] compromise platform.”67 After taking the train north to Mandalay, he met the ranking monks of the sangha. During the meeting, he noticed copies of the Burmese translation of The Buddhist Catechism in the hands of several of the people present, prompting him to begin with the uses to which The Buddhist Catechism was being put elsewhere and to conclude with the work he was contemplating in Japan with the Buddhist sects. He stressed the universalist theme, asking the monks whether they were not obliged to act on “the loving principles of universal human brotherhood and universal loving kindness …. to make an effort to knit together the Buddhists of all nations and sects in a common relation of reciprocal good-will and tolerance.” His translator read directly from the Burmese translation of “Fundamental Buddhistic Ideas.” The assembled monks declared each of the fourteen points orthodox, after which the sangharaja (chief monk) and the twenty-three other monks affixed their signatures to the document.

To that point the compromise platform had secured the approval of senior Burmese Buddhist monks and six ranking Sinhala monks. The appearance of a special delegate from Chittagong added the support of the Maghs (the Bangla expression for Rakhine people of the Arakan coast).68 The frenetic Olcott did not reach Japan until late October 1891, having sailed back to Colombo and on to Australia, then back to Colombo and on to Europe, where he carried on propaganda work in England, France, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Osnabruck.69 This time he made his way to Japan by crossing the Atlantic, taking the train across the United States, and sailing from San Francisco. As soon as he reached Yokohama, he discovered that the region had been struck by an earthquake that morning, destroying eighty thousand houses and hundreds of temples.70 He changed his route but not his objective. With the Kyoto train tracks destroyed by the quake, he sailed to Kobe and made his way overland to Kyoto. His first act was to inform the two Honganjis and the general committee – “which [he] had induced them to form on the occasion of [his] former visit” – of his arrival. Despite the earthquake and what he called “a lot of polite humbugging going on about signing my Platform -– idle excuses of all sorts,” Olcott won over the priesthood in seven days.71

The Japanese clerics added their agreement to the “Fundamental Buddhistic Principles” already agreed on by the leading monks of Burma, Lanka, and Chittagong:

1. Buddhists are taught to show the same tolerance, forbearance, and brotherly love to all men, without distinction; and an unswerving kindness towards the members of the animal kingdom.

2. The universe was evolved, not created; and its functions according to law, not according to the caprice of any God.

3. The truths upon which Buddhism is founded are natural… taught in successive kalpas, or world-periods, by certain illuminated beings called BUDDHAS….

4. The fourth Teacher in the present kalpa was Sākya Muni, or Gautama Buddha…. He is an historical personage ….

5. Sākya Muni taught that ignorance produces desire, unsatisfied desire is the cause of rebirth, and rebirth, the cause of sorrow.

6. Ignorance fosters the belief that rebirth is a necessary thing….

7. The dispersion of all this ignorance can be attained by the persevering practice of an all-embracing altruism in conduct, development of intelligence, wisdom in thought, and destruction of desire ….

8. The desire to live being the cause of rebirth, when that is extinguished rebirths cease and the perfected individual attains by meditation … Nirvāna.

9. Sākya Muni taught that ignorance can be dispelled and sorrow removed by the knowledge of the four Noble Truths….

10. Right Meditation leads to spiritual enlightenment…

11. The essence of Buddhism, as summed up by the Buddha himself is –

To cease from all sin,
To get virtue,
To purify the heart.

12. The universe is subject to a natural causation known as "Karma"….

13. The obstacles to the attainment of good karma may be removed by the observance of …. the moral code of Buddhism, namely, (1) Kill not; (2) Steal not; (3) Indulge in no forbidden sexual pleasure; (4) Lie not; (5) Take no intoxication or stupefying drug or liquor….

14. Buddhism discourages superstitious credulity….

Reduced to propositional form, Olcott’s universal Buddhism likely struck the Japanese as alien, if not unrecognizable in parts.

Olcott was thrilled: “I have been able for the first time in history …. to secure the adhesion of both the Northern and Southern Schools …. to certain fundamental principles.” There were still problems:

Between what the Chinese and Japanese call Mahayana and Hinayana – distinctions repudiated by Southern Buddhists – there are immense differences. The Northern Buddhism of some of the sects is probably the teaching of Sakya Muni plus metaphysical efflorescences, and Southern Buddhism is more or less tainted with nature-worship and a cult of elementals. This is nothing new to me; I did not set myself to finding out the points of dispute, but the points of agreement. What I thought the Western world, at least, would profit by was a very plain and succinct compilation of a certain number of general principles of belief universally recognized by the entire Buddhist world.73


The last sentence reveals another contradiction in the project. In this context Olcott wanted agreement not to create unity among Buddhists in Asia or to give them a tool to propagate their religion but to present the authentic teachings to a Western audience.

However modest the agreement over a universal Buddhism, it came with qualifications. The signatures of two Japanese Buddhist monks came from students who had been sent to study in Lanka and naturally felt some sympathy for the so-called Southern School. The way the document is organized, not to mention the very idea that distinctions between traditions are inappropriate, reflect the Southern School. The way the text was compiled embodied it more directly. Because he could not give up his belief in a subjective entity that reached nirvana, Olcott wanted to include a note that there is a difference between the Northern and Southern schools in this regard.74 Conferring with Hikkaduve and his assistant principal, Heyiyantuduve, Olcott found the monks insisting on there being no such entity reaching Nirvana. To make his argument for doctrinal difference convincing, Olcott told them about the beliefs of the Tibetans, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, “and even of a Sinhalese school of which the late Polgahawatte was leader.”75 They all entertained the notion of an entity in some form reaching nirvana. Hikkaduve was unpersuaded and threatened to withdraw his endorsement, followed by Olcott’s capitulating. Inadvertently he became a spokesperson for more orthodoxy than he wanted.

The orthodoxy compromise met other problems in Japan that derived from the local understanding of Buddhism. The priests had agreed that the fourteen propositions were properly Buddhist but acceptable only as “included within the body of Northern Buddhism.”76 The key word was “within.” Those propositions could not capture the breadth and depth of Buddhism in its Japanese form.

Out of the eight Buddhist sects of Japan, the only one whose adhesion I could not secure is the Shin-shu. It was not that they denied any one of my fourteen propositions …. but they think these represent so very small a proportion of the whole body of Mahayana, that they did not care to have this platform put forth in so fragmentary a state.77


In other words, the sect that provided an overwhelming amount of the support – both financial and human – that Olcott and Dharmapala received on this visit to Japan (and that Dharmapala received on later visits) would not endorse Olcott’s platform.78

Since February, 1920, Hitler reigned supreme as head of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Under his direction, it grew from a handful of patriotic workers to 3,000 dues-paying members of all classes. When Drexler suggested that the party form a coalition with other volkisch parties, Hitler obstinately refused. He wanted to annex the competition under his rule, not dissolve into it….

Having the respect of both factions, Eckart convened a meeting on Friday, July 29th. Hitler delivered a brief speech before 544 members. He wanted full authority. Why should a party which rejected democracy govern itself along democratic lines? All talk of mergers with other parties must cease forthwith. Munich would remain the base of National Socialism. Only he had the power to alter the sacrosanct twenty-six point program. Any "heretics" who didn't like it should quit immediately. Hitler's charisma again won them over. They voted to make him undisputed leader by a margin of 543 to 1. Librarian Rudolf Posch cast the only dissenting vote.


-- Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Milieu, by Joseph Howard Tyson


In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders.

-- Useful Idiot, by Wikipedia


Sectarianism and Unity

It is easy to overplay Olcott’s identity as a Buddhist and underplay his being a Theosophist, whether he was working in Lanka or Japan. Of the “Fourteen Buddhistic Principles” that appear at the end of The Buddhist Catechism, he made a claim that must have bewildered Buddhists: “With slight changes of names, this platform may be styled a synthesis of certain fundamental Hindu beliefs.”79 His expansiveness aside, the Theosophy he brought to Japan was not so much ideological as administrative. He made establishing Theosophical Society branches a regular part of his lecture tours: he would arrive in a town, give a lecture, and locate some willing Japanese to establish a branch. On later visits, Dharmapala followed the same practice, construing his efforts in Japan as being carried out for the good of the Theosophical Society (Diary, April 18 and May 12, 1889). Olcott’s plan, as he described it to his Japanese hosts, was not to spread Theosophy but to use its branch offices to spread Buddhism. Before the gathering of the chief monks of the eight sects, he put it this way:

Our great Brotherhood [the Theosophical Society, Buddhist Division] comprises already 174 Branches, distributed over the World as follows: India, Ceylon, Burma 129; Europe 13; America 25; Africa 1; Australasia 2; West Indies 2; Japan 1; Singapore 1. Total, 174 Branches of our Society, all under one general management. When I first visited Ceylon (in the year 1880) and formed several Branches, I organized a Buddhist Division of our Society, to include all Buddhist Branches in Ceylon, Burma and Singapore, in the “Buddhist Division”; so that you may all be working together for the common object of promoting the interests of Buddhism. This will be an easy thing to do. You have already many such Societies, each trying to do something, but none able to effect as much as you could by uniting your forces with each other and your sister Societies in foreign countries. It would cost you a great deal of money and years of labour to establish foreign agencies like ours, but I offer you the chance of having these agencies readymade …. The people of Ceylon are too poor and too few in number …. to undertake any such large scheme as I propose, but you and they together could do it successfully.


Asking priests to accept the words of “your ignorant yet sincere American co-religionist,” he urged them to “be up and doing.” There were many Christian schools and churches in Japan, “but is there a Japanese Buddhist school or temple in London or Paris, or Vienna, or New York?”80

Olcott did not mention the Hindu branches of the Theosophical Societies or the fact that a missionary temple in London would not be a strictly Japanese affair preaching a strictly Japanese Buddhism. Nor did he say anything about Theosophy itself, other than that the society would serve as an honest broker for Buddhism. To that extent, he saw Theosophy as he saw himself, an impartial outsider, able to do for the Japanese what they could not do for themselves. As he was leaving Japan, he mentioned that he had started a local Branch of the Society, admitting that he could hardly say “formed.” He had gone through the “ceremony of forming” a local branch, fully aware that all the officers of the Theosophical Society branch were Honganji officials. The branch was a useful fiction, creating a measure of solidarity against the force of sectarianism. “Only a white man,” Olcott added, putting modesty behind him, “a foreigner outside all their sects and social groups, could carry on such a Society successfully.”81


Olcott’s interest in unity had a practical motive, enabling Buddhists to stand up to the force of Christian missionary efforts in Japan. But that interest had ideological purposes as well, and it is in this regard that Olcott’s being a Theosophist is pertinent. Theosophy was a religion of universal brotherhood and Olcott a man who believed in equality. He looked fondly on his trip aboard the French mail steamer Djemnah on his first trip to Japan;

”Travelling second class … from motives of economy,” Olcott remembered, “I found that the whole deck was free to us to occupy day and night; we mixed on terms of equality with the saloon passengers, and were not made to feel as if we were social pariahs, as one is aboard the British liners.”82


In 1898 Olcott was approached in South India by a delegation of panchamas who wanted to convert to Buddhism (Diary, June 4, 1898). Dharmapala expressed his support, and a month later Olcott brought a panchama delegation to Colombo. Dharmapala described Olcott’s attitude to their conversion as “very passionate” (Diary, July 3, 1898).

The thrust of Olcott’s work was neither enjoying momentary equality with Europeans who had booked a superior class of travel nor uplifting people at the bottom of the South Asian social hierarchy. Olcott had his gaze fixed on Buddhists – whether ethnic Buddhists or what people nowadays call “practice” Buddhists – and “Asians,” whether Buddhist or not. The primary metric of difference and inclusion was nationality, not class or gender. He wanted unity among Buddhists of the various Asian countries. The majority of people he encountered directly were educated and well-to-do. Many of them were English-speaking, although that was seldom the case in Japan. What linked him to those Asians was the same solidarity that linked a number of Westerners and Asians, brought together by common interests in spiritualism, vegetarianism, animal welfare, or aestheticism, and motivated by a “politics of friendship” with anti-imperial potential.83 What distinguished him from the majority of those Westerners was his engagement with both a specifically Asian religion and a movement that functioned as a tool for creating brotherhood (as opposed to promoting a practice such as vegetarianism).

The Buddhist flag was one expression of that unity, and it was fully transidiomatic. Constructing a flag for Buddhism – Hikkaduve designed it, and Olcott reset its proportions – produced a flag for all Buddhists, representing Buddhism universalized. Olcott assumed that Buddhists were already familiar with the six-color rainbow emanating from the Buddha.84 He believed that the human body produced an “aura” and understood those rays of color as the Buddha’s aura, encircling his body while in deep meditation. It was that aura that mesmeric healing put to work. Such a flag, he thought, “avoided all possible causes of dispute among Buddhists, as all, without distinction, accept the same tradition as to the Buddha’s personal appearance and that of his aura; moreover, the flag would have no political meaning whatever.” When he reached Kyoto in 1889, he was received by officials and students of the Western Honganji. The temple was fitted out with the Japanese flag and the Buddhist flag.85 That same “charming courtesy” he found repeated throughout his tour of Japan, the two flags grouped together at every hotel, railway station, and temple. He said nothing to indicate that he understood that the two flags bespoke the agonistic relationship between universalism and Japanese nationalism that was to grow stronger as the years went by.

Overcoming Japanese sectarianism involved more than amassing numbers and more than a political strategy. It was a suitably Buddhist value as well as a Theosophical one. Olcott had fought against sectarianism in Lanka. When the Kandyan monks resisted meeting with their low country peers in a common space, they did so for reasons of caste, not Buddhist doctrine. Divisions based on status differences he found even more off-putting than sectarianism. size=110]The Buddhist Catechism, the “Fundamental Buddhistic Principles,” and the Buddhist flag were vehicles for creating equality because solidarity entailed it. Another strategy was haranguing Japanese Buddhists who clung to sectarian interests. Having lectured to crowds of four thousand people at each of the two Honganji temples, Olcott moved on to Gifu, where he repeated his remarks to a group of people who were unwilling to come to the Honganji lecture. He “upbraided them for frivolous quarrels with co-religionists when all ought to be united to promote the interests of our religion” and reminded them that he had come five thousand miles to see them and that they had paid him a poor compliment by compelling him, “ill as [he] was that morning, to give them a special lecture.”86[/size]

Olcott’s presumption – an outsider telling the Japanese how to reform their practices, overcome their divisions, and then spread their religion – had sources beyond his self-confidence and managerial competence. One was his own status advantage. He was not simply a Westerner but a Westerner invited to Japan by the Japanese. He was received in Japan with the same acclaim he had received in Lanka as Buddhism’s white champion. He told the Japanese that Theosophy was not a sect, merely an organizational tool, “a Brotherhood spread all over the globe, composed of men and women of many races, nationalities and faith.”

The Brotherhood which binds the Society is really a consciousness of a truth that embraces all mankind, nay all lives. The members of the Society do not profess to create this Brotherhood, but only recognize it as a fact in nature.87


The one qualification that made him capable of even imagining this higher order of unity was the illusion that he could unite people in ways that transcended not only difference but also politics.88 His experience in Japan made him recognize that he did not control how his remarks, apolitical or otherwise, were interpreted. The fundamental problem, he knew, was the disparity between what he had said in English and what his audience heard translated into Japanese. After one occasion lecturing to a large gathering of priests at the Higashi Honganji temple, he learned from the bilingual Captain Brinckley that his remarks had been translated in a way that gave his words a political meaning, “which, of course, was farthest from [his] thoughts.”89 Olcott remained oblivious to the fact that the Japanese had made his visit political from top to bottom, unaware that the mistranslation of his words was a small part of the backwash created by Japan’s encounter with the world.

Dharmapala, Japanese Sectarianism, and Honganji

When Dharmapala returned to Japan in 1893, he was acquainted with the sectarian landscape of Buddhism in Japan. He had participated in the World’s Parliament of Religions with the four Japanese monks – Toki Horyu, Yatsubuchi Banryu, Shaku Soen, and Ashitsu Jitsuzen – and their translators, Hirai Kanezo and Noguchi Zenshiro; the priests were less well known to Dharmapala although Shaku Soen had spent three years in Lanka before the parliament.90 He had heard the various Japanese presentations on that occasion. And over the last months of his first visit – when his health returned – he could not have avoided the conclusion that Japanese Buddhism was hugely different from anything he had seen before. He had witnessed in 1889 “a gorgeous pageant in the Higashi Honganji Temple, the Master, Otani San, typifying Sakya Muni himself,” a liberty one would not take with the Buddha in Sri Lanka.91 Priests of all sects received him at Nagoya, and he hoisted the Buddhist flag (Diary, December 7, 1893). He began to see that the Buddhist sects had ideological as well as sociological differences, and they were not going to cooperate, much less converge, Noguchi’s hopes notwithstanding.

[x]
6. Japanese delegation at World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893. Standing on right: Zenshiro Noguchi.

After the parliament Dharmapala had traveled by train across the United States before he steamed across the Pacific. The Oceanic stopped in Honolulu, where he met Mary Foster, the Theosophist who years later became his chief patron. His ticket home was a gift from the parliament’s organizer, J. H. Barrows, who thought that he could profit from visiting his co-religionists in Japan rather than retracing his trip across the Atlantic. When Dharmapala discovered that Noguchi had no money for his return, he asked Barrows to pay for his travel too (Diary, May 1, 1902). The Japanese priests and laypeople returned to Japan together, and Dharmapala sailed on a different ship. Once they returned, Yatsubuchi, Shaku Soen, Noguchi, and Horiuchi (who was a Honganji official and a representative of both the Theosophical and Maha Bodhi societies) began to appear together at Buddhist meetings to discuss the parliament.92 Plans for making common cause aside, the clerics and Hirai had minimal contact with him in the days that followed, although Noguchi, Horiuchi, and Soen remained longtime associates. Even the practice of referring to the priests after their return from the West as chanpionra (champions) suggests that forging a Buddhist world would require accommodating Japan’s own interests.

Noguchi was the exception in several ways. At the parliament he described himself as “simply a layman, … not belong[ing] to any sect of Buddhism at all. So I present to you four Buddhist sorios [priests].” His humility duly noted, Noguchi had a vision of Buddhist greatness – sharing Dharmapala’s understanding of Buddhism as a missionary religion that could play a role in unifying the people of the world:

It is to be hoped that the number of religions in the world will be increased by thousands more? No. Why? If such were our hope we ought to finally bring the number of religions to as great a figure as that of the population of the world …. In that case [priests of the various religions] should rather say: “Don’t believe whatever we preach, get away from the church, and make your own sect as we do.” Is it right for the priest to say so? No.

Then, is there hope of decreasing the number of religions? Yes. How far? To one. Why? Because the truth is only one.93


If religions were allowed to achieve their full development, he argued, there would be no more distinction among them. He added that such was the end at which they should aim, not mentioning Buddhism at all in this regard, but adding that the Japanese “know the shortest way” to a future where all religions would be one.

The Myth of Origin and Destiny

Chapter 1: Historicism and the Myth of Destiny


It is widely believed that a truly scientific or philosophical attitude towards politics, and a deeper understanding of social life in general, must be based upon a contemplation and interpretation of human history. While the ordinary man takes the setting of his life and the importance of his personal experiences and petty struggles for granted, it is said that the social scientist or philosopher has to survey things from a higher plane. He sees the individual as a pawn, as a somewhat insignificant instrument in the general development of mankind. And he finds that the really important actors on the Stage of History are either the Great Nations and their Great Leaders, or perhaps the Great Classes, or the Great Ideas. However this may be, he will try to understand the meaning of the play which is performed on the Historical Stage; he will try to understand the laws of historical development. If he succeeds in this, he will, of course, be able to predict future developments. He might then put politics upon a solid basis, and give us practical advice by telling us which political actions are likely to succeed or likely to fail.

This is a brief description of an attitude which I call historicism. It is an old idea, or rather, a loosely connected set of ideas which have become, unfortunately, so much a part of our spiritual atmosphere that they are usually taken for granted, and hardly ever questioned.

I have tried elsewhere to show that the historicist approach to the social sciences gives poor results. I have also tried to outline a method which, I believe, would yield better results.

But if historicism is a faulty method that produces worthless results, then it may be useful to see how it originated, and how it succeeded in entrenching itself so successfully. An historical sketch undertaken with this aim can, at the same time, serve to analyse the variety of ideas which have gradually accumulated around the central historicist doctrine — the doctrine that history is controlled by specific historical or evolutionary laws whose discovery would enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.

Historicism, which I have so far characterized only in a rather abstract way, can be well illustrated by one of the simplest and oldest of its forms, the doctrine of the chosen people. This doctrine is one of the attempts to make history understandable by a theistic interpretation, i.e. by recognizing God as the author of the play performed on the Historical Stage. The theory of the chosen people, more specifically, assumes that God has chosen one people to function as the selected instrument of His will, and that this people will inherit the earth.

In this doctrine, the law of historical development is laid down by the Will of God. This is the specific difference which distinguishes the theistic form from other forms of historicism. A naturalistic historicism, for instance, might treat the developmental law as a law of nature; a spiritual historicism would treat it as a law of spiritual development; an economic historicism, again, as a law of economic development. Theistic historicism shares with these other forms the doctrine that there are specific historical laws which can be discovered, and upon which predictions regarding the future of mankind can be based.

There is no doubt that the doctrine of the chosen people grew out of the tribal form of social life. Tribalism, i.e. the emphasis on the supreme importance of the tribe without which the individual is nothing at all, is an element which we shall find in many forms of historicist theories. Other forms which are no longer tribalist may still retain an element of collectivism [1]; they may still emphasize the significance of some group or collective — for example, a class — without which the individual is nothing at all. Another aspect of the doctrine of the chosen people is the remoteness of what it proffers as the end of history. For although it may describe this end with some degree of definiteness, we have to go a long way before we reach it. And the way is not only long, but winding, leading up and down, right and left. Accordingly, it will be possible to bring every conceivable historical event well within the scheme of the interpretation. No conceivable experience can refute it. [2] But to those who believe in it, it gives certainty regarding the ultimate outcome of human history.

A criticism of the theistic interpretation of history will be attempted in the last chapter of this book, where it will also be shown that some of the greatest Christian thinkers have repudiated this theory as idolatry. An attack upon this form of historicism should therefore not be interpreted as an attack upon religion. In the present chapter, the doctrine of the chosen people serves only as an illustration. Its value as such can be seen from the fact that its chief characteristics [3] are shared by the two most important modern versions of historicism, whose analysis will form the major part of this book — the historical philosophy of racialism or fascism on the one (the right) hand and the Marxian historical philosophy on the other (the left). For the chosen people racialism substitutes the chosen race (of Gobineau's choice), selected as the instrument of destiny, ultimately to inherit the earth. Marx's historical philosophy substitutes for it the chosen class, the instrument for the creation of the classless society, and at the same time, the class destined to inherit the earth. Both theories base their historical forecasts on an interpretation of history which leads to the discovery of a law of its development. In the case of racialism, this is thought of as a kind of natural law; the biological superiority of the blood of the chosen race explains the course of history, past, present, and future; it is nothing but the struggle of races for mastery. In the case of Marx's philosophy of history, the law is economic; all history has to be interpreted as a struggle of classes for economic supremacy.
The historicist character of these two movements makes our investigation topical. We shall return to them in later parts of this book. Each of them goes back directly to the philosophy of Hegel. We must, therefore, deal with that philosophy as well. And since Hegel [4] in the main follows certain ancient philosophers, it will be necessary to discuss the theories of Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, before returning to the more modern forms of historicism.

-- The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl R. Popper


Olcott had found himself pulled into the force field that surrounded the two Honganjis. Dharmapala followed behind because he was young, and those gravitational effects weighed on him on every visit that followed. He had corresponded with Honganji students before he reached Japan. They came to his bedside when he was hospitalized in Japan, one spelling another through day and night, seeing to his needs and massaging his rheumatic feet. Honganji paid for his hospital stay and by way of the general committee paid for his travel around Japan when he regained his health (Diary, February 23, 1889). He went with Olcott to the Nishi Honganji temple on April 12, and when they visited the parade grounds, they saw Honganji students performing marching exercises (Diary, April 29, 1889). In early May he visited branch temples of the two Honganjis (Diary, May 7, 1889), returning to Kyoto for the completion of the Higashi Honganji temple (Diary, May 9, 1889). On May 10 he went to see a dramatic performance there. On May 11 he interviewed the chief abbot of Nishi Honganji, on May 12 he visited Honganji colleges; then on May 13 he left for Osaka, where he visited a girls’ school of Nishi Honganji and a branch temple of Higashi Honganji. He was accompanied to his steamer by Honganji officials (Diary, May 14, 1889). On the 1893 visit Dharmapala continued to talk about unity, and Honganji continued to resist any unity it did not itself control. Taking the train to Nagoya, he thought his mission had wide support:

Auspicious signs met on the way. Received by all Sects at the station. Yamashita Priest, Horiuchi & Ito followed bringing the Image. Lectured at the Honganji about Buddha Gaya Temple. Hoisted the Maha Bodhi Society’s Flag for the first time. Great enthusiasm prevailed. (Diary, December 7, 1893)


He was delighted to see a full complement of priests. He could count on the support of the young students of Nishi Honganji who had nursed him on his first visit. They wanted to missionize Buddhism overseas and support the cause by giving up alcohol themselves.94

Honganji’s preeminence shaped Dharmapala’s visits in 1902 and 1913, although he encountered priests and officials from other sects as he moved around Japan. He was especially fond of several priests. But the headquarters of the Maha Bodhi Society was located at Honganji, and the general committee was dominated by its officials. That predominance made getting support from other sects more difficult. One priest made his discomfort explicit:

Revd: Mokusen Hioki of the Soto Sect, a pleasant noble looking Priest called to see me. He invited me to a place tomorrow. He told me that the Hd: Quarters of the Japanese Maha Bodhi Society are at Higashi Honganji and that the Committee are quarreling, and that therefore it is hard for him to do anything in the interest of the Maha Bodhi Society! Since 1894 I have been doing everything to bring Japan before the Indian public, and that in all his writings in the Indian Mirror, Norendro Babu (Norendronath Sen, the paper’s editor and Dharmapala’s supporter), has helped me to unite the two countries. Japan so far has not done anything for India. The present opportunity on a/c of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is splendid for further work in India. I hope the Japanese will expand their trade in India. (Diary, May 19, 1902)


There were several motivations behind Honganji’s interest in Dharmapala’s work in Japan. The most basic was its dominant role in Japanese Buddhism relative to other sects. Honganji was prosperous enough to lend money to the state and was the sect to which the Meiji government spoke words of encouragement, reassuring Honganji officials that Buddhism need not fear persecution during the haibutsu kishaku movement of 1868 (despite the contrary signs Buddhists were seeing around them). Among the Buddhist sects, Honganji was at least the first among equals; at most, it presumed to represent Buddhism as such. It published its own journal, Bijou of Asia, which implicitly made the same claim.95 Olcott and Dharmapala were distinguished visitors, and Olcott had been invited to Japan at the behest of a Honganji priest, Sano Masamichi.96 Honganji saw the need to represent Buddhism to the outside world. It did so even in the face of his call for unity and resisted the unity envisioned by the transectarian movement. At the World’s Parliament of Religions, Honganji was not represented.97

At the time of Olcott and Dharmapala’s visit, Jiji Shimpo [Jiji Shinpo “Current Events”, Fukuzawa’s newspaper], a newspaper committed to Japan’s modernization, looked forward to a time when human beings would have less need for religion. In the face of missionary threat – and the prospect of life without religion relegated to the future – the paper argued that for now Jodo Shinshu should become the state religion:

Its preachers are skilful; the tact of its propagandists is remarkable; its temples, instead of being hidden away in sequestered spots like the strongholds of feudal barons, are built in populous and accessible places, and despite the license enjoyed by its priests in respect of marriage and flesh-eating, its influence spreads and alone among all the Sects, its prosperity remains unimpaired.98


The Christian editors of the Japan Weekly Mail reached the opposite conclusion: these qualities made it the least praiseworthy of Buddhist sects.

Honganji also had an interest in reform, and sectarian behavior figured in the way Honganji scholars thought about making Buddhism modern. Faced with the fear that sectarianism was intellectually indefensible, Inoue Enryo rationalized the proliferation of Buddhist sects by arguing that each met the needs of believers in a distinctive way. Although an ordained Shinshu priest, Inoue Enryo gave up that status because of his low opinion of his colleagues and set his mind to remaking Japanese Buddhism. His initiative had a nationalistic motivation: “I want to reform our nation’s Buddhism to repay some small part of the tremendous debt I owe my country.”99 The felt need for reform also made Honganji the most outward looking of the sects. Its concern for learning from, and interacting with, the larger world was motivated by an event both poignant and instructive. Traveling in Europe on a tour designed to modernize Japanese institutions, two Honganji priests, Otani Koei and Ishikawa Shundai, came across a Buddhist text they found impenetrable because it was written in Sanskrit. After attempts to learn the language that would decode the text, the pair realized the difficulty of the task and participated in selecting the two Honganji priests, Kasahara Kenju and Nanjo Bun’yu, to be sent to study Sanskrit and Buddhology with Max Muller.100

In 1873 Honganji sent a priest to China as part of an effort to demonstrate Buddhism’s usefulness to the nation.101 Later Honganji became involved in more far-flung missionary efforts, sending out priests to establish Honganji communities in Hawaii, Singapore, and Brazil (Diary, August 2, 1897). Like the Maha Bodhi, the Honganji journal was published in English and intended for worldwide consumption. These efforts were tied to both the nation and the Japanese people in a way that Dharmapala misunderstood. He thought they were signs of Japanese Buddhism’s vitality and assumed they were equivalent to his own efforts to bring the Buddha’s teachings to non-Buddhists. Honganji wanted to establish temples in areas where there was a Japanese community not yet gathered into the Honganji fold. Its resources were limited but well used. Headquarters had sent an official, T. Kawakami, to Colombo to study Sanskrit and later to Calcutta (where he fell out with Dharmapala). Later he was posted to Los Angeles, where he managed the Nanka Buddhist Mission (Diary, November 21, 1913).

Honganji had some interest in India, and Horiuchi gave Dharmapala to believe after his first visit to Japan that there was a lot of it. Hongaji would be willing to spend lavishly on the propagation of Buddhism in India.102 If that prospect ever existed, it soon waned, but Dharmapala did everything he could to make a connection to Japan. He flew the Japanese flag next to the Buddhist flag at the international conference he convened at Bodh Gaya, later noting that he had sent a letter to the lord chamberlain of Japan to bring about a union between Japan and India. “May it have effect for the good of Buddhism,” he wrote (Diary, December 30, 1895).103 He contacted Count Okuma about the upcoming Buddha Jayanti and its importance for all Buddhists (Diary, May 25, 1908). He talked to Sakurai Gicho about establishing a Japanese museum in Colombo (Diary, May 1, 1913) and an Indo-Japanese exhibition in Calcutta (Diary, May 4, 1913). He hoped that he would be reborn in Japan to save India (Diary, July 14, 1913). Japan was on his mind.

Dharmapala looked at uniting Buddhists in Japan and India and doing business in Japan as perfectly compatible. Other members of the Hewavitarne family thought similarly; his brother Edmund visited Japan to establish business connections (Diary, April 15, 1903). Dharmapala looked forward to the family firm’s importing matchboxes from Japan, each emblazoned with the Maha Bodhi Society seal (Memorandum of Understanding, 1894 Diary). Traveling in Japan and the United States, he had seen educational institutions that taught practical skills, having encountered in both places an alternative to the British model of classical learning. Some of his economic activities were philanthropic. In 1906 he used family money to send a Sinhala youth to Japan to study weaving, and when the young man returned, Dharmapala established a school at Rajagiriya to educate young men as weavers.104 He sent a second young man to Japan to learn pottery making. Speaking in Tokyo, he invited Japanese business people to start new businesses in Calcutta (Diary, May 2, 1913). He envisioned the same for Lanka, writing in his diary of the need for a Ceylon Japan Trading Company in Colombo (Diary, June 4, 1913). As he put it elsewhere, the Japanese had gotten rich and now had obligations to the rest of the world: “The Japanese Buddhists should tell the world that the secret of their success is the Dharma of Buddha” (Diary, September 14, 1904).

On one occasion Dharmapala proposed a scheme that followed on his hope that Japanese Buddhists would soon want to make pilgrimage to India. The Maha Bodhi Society in Colombo began to function as a travel agency for local Buddhists wanting to visit the holy sites in North India. In Japan his plans involved his version of a rotating credit association:

His purpose is to arrange for a yearly pilgrimage of 50 Japanese to Buddhagaya in India and the method of procedure is to form a company called the Buddhagaya Sankei-ko, consisting of 500 members, 50 of whom will be chosen by lot to make the journey. Membership is not limited to religious folk. Special arrangements as to passage are said to have been made with the Nippon Yusen Kaisha. It is altogether a novel programme, and as each member will not have to put up more than 10 yen annually, the thing will probably work well.105


The article indicated that he had enlisted the aid of the president of the Nisshu Seimei Hoken Kaisha (Nichiren Life Insurance Company), noting that the reader would be surprised by the commercial novelty of the name of a Buddhist sect attached to an insurance business, although Honganji had already lent its name to an insurance company established to do business with its own supporters.

Nichiren (1222-82) had understood Japan as the altar (kaidan) from which the truth of the Lotus Sutra would spread over the world, and subsequent generations of his followers thought that they too lived in times as degenerate (mappo) as the one that drove Nichiren to take desperate measures to reform Buddhism. When Dharmapala visited Tokyo in 1902, he met the director of the Nichiren Insurance Company, Hojiro Kawai (with whom he set up the revolving credit association), and Kawai told him that Nichiren had said, “From Japan to India Buddhism will go,” a prophesy a man trying to recover Bodh Gaya could not ignore.106 Nor was it a prophesy that a steamship company could ignore. At the end of his two months in Japan, Sakurai Gicho, the director of the Indo-Busseki and a Honganji official, took Dharmapala to meet the directors of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, the steamship company that had paid for his trip to Japan (Sarnath Notebook No. 101). He convinced the directors to make Calcutta a port of call and give Japanese pilgrims a 20 percent travel discount (Diary, June 24, 1902). The modern age was about to fulfill Nichiren’s prediction, and he would play a part by arranging for both a steamship line’s calling at Bodh Gaya’s nearest port and a discount for pilgrims.

There were moments when Dharmapala considered joining one of the Japanese sects. That the reformer who came in the cause of unity would throw off either the advantages of being an outsider on his identity as a Sinhala Buddhis is more than puzzling. His diary indicates his wanting to become a student of Shaku Unsho – although it says nothing about his motives. He simply writes, “Then called upon Vajo. Had a long talk and he will accept me as his pupil” (Diary, November 29, 1893).107 It is easy enough to find reasons for Dharmapala’s affinity for him. He was Kozen’s teacher and had instructed him to recover Bodh Gaya for the Buddhists.108 He was famous for his celibacy and ascetic practice – eating only three rice crackers and tea at 7 a.m. and nothing but vegetables for lunch – and Dharmapala had been put off by Japanese monks having wives, drinking sake, and making merry. Unsho Vajo was renowned for his discipline. One Westerner said there were only two monks in Japan, Shaku Unsho was one, an ascetic monk in Kyushu represented another half, and all other monks made up the remainder.109

Dharmapala also contemplated becoming a member of Honganji, and here here was more forthcoming about his thinking. After arriving at Kobe, he took the train to Kyoto to visit the Nishi Honganji “high priest,” who was confined to his room and could not meet him; he remarked that a Mr. Maeda also excused himself from talking with him (Diary, May 3, 1902). A day later Dharmapala asked Noguchi to visit him and asked him “whether it was expedient for me to join W. Honganji. He said it was good to get their sympathy, but I should not become a Sectarian.” By May 27 he had moved on to Tokyo, where Sakurai called on him, and Dharmapala “made him understand that I should like to work as a Shinshu Missionary.” In spite of the high priest and Maeda’s avoiding him, officials began to look for a residence for Dharmapala in Japan, and they guided his activities for the rest of the visit. Days before he sailed to the United States, he spoke of wanting to extend his stay in Japan and work for a “purified” Buddhism.

The third visit forced Dharmapala to face several choices – to fight for Buddhist unity or make a sectarian affiliation, to maintain his solitary course or try to arrange for a companion in the person of Miss Otake, to pursue his commercial activities to support his missionary work or stick to the missionary work (and rely on others’ philanthropy), and whether to stay in Japan or return to India.110 He negotiated the latter two contradictions but could not advance the cause that Olcott and he had begun in 1889, finding a way to bring Buddhists together. The best he could do was to formulate a rationale for the ideological affinity of various Buddhisms, and again his focus fell on Jodo Shinshu and Nichiren.

The Shinshu Sect & the Jodo who base their belief in Amida Buddha have the authority of the Pali texts to accentuate their faith. In the Samyutta Nikaya, Devata Samyutta, the gods showed their faith on [sic] Buddha and repeated the gatha “Ye keci Buddham saranam gatase” etc. The Nichiren Sect has their faith based on the Dhamma; and Pali Buddhism concurs with them. Dharma is supreme. I have written to Edmund [his brother] about my plans in Japan and to consult father about opening a branch firm in Tokio. (Diary, May 11, 1902)111


After his encounter with Tanaka Chigaku a month later, Dharmapala would have a hard time making the assertion that the Nichiren sect – and certainly not Tanaka’s Nichirenist movement – had much in common with his own Buddhism.
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Re: Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala, by Steven

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Part 3 of 4

Dharmapala, Tanaka, and Nichirenism

Dharmapala met Tanaka Chigaku on his 1902 visit. By that point Tanaka had established several Nichirenist lay movements, the final iteration and best-known of which was Kokuchukai.112 Tanaka’s father had told him as a boy that if he wished to serve Buddhism, he should do so by not becoming a monk because “miso that smells like miso is not good miso.”113 Ignoring the advice, Tanaka joined the monkhood, defrocked himself, married, and moved on to a career his father could support, establishing and leading lay Buddhist organizations. His new religion followed a Nichirenist course, preserving the central place held by both Nichiren Shonin and the Lotus Sutra as the realization of Buddhism, while setting itself in opposition to other Nichiren groups because of their lapsed standards. When he studied for the Nichiren priesthood, Tanaka rejected the Nichiren orthodoxy of the time, which had come to emphasize the accomodationist first half of the Lotus Sutra while ignoring the second half.114 Nichiren himself had emphasized that second half with its insisten on shakubuku – the face-to-face critique of other forms of Buddhism. Kokuchukai followed suit, rejecting all forms of moderation. The Meiji policy of religious freedom made a return to shakubuku practical, for now Buddhists could change their sectarian identities, and aggressive preaching became a took for Tanaka and his followers both to convert others and act out their commitment to Nichiren and the Lotus Sutra.

Tanaka had equally strong feelings about the emperor. From roughly the 1880s onward he had concentrated on restoring Nichiren’s true teachings, but by the time Dharmapala met him in 1902, he was pushing his movement in a political direction, working out a theory of the body politic (Nihon kokutai gaku). Jacqueline Stone says that Tanaka “may have been the first Lotus Sutra devotee to formulate a modern reading of the ‘this-worldly’ Buddha land.”115 When he spoke of the unification of humankind through the Lotus Sutra, he understood unification in terms of both religion and politics. Emperor worship functioned in both contexts, acquiring new motivations in an age of aggressive Western powers. The emperor represented transcendence as well as unity. The Lotus Sutra functioned in this connection as a metonym of the nation: “The nation is the sutra, which is the Buddha, who is incarnated in the emperor, who embodies the nation.”116 For Tanaka, venerating the emperor entailed acting just as aggressively in his cause as one should act in the cause of Nichiren. Little wonder that his followers included Japanese militarists such as Inoue Nissho, who founded a terrorist organization, and Ishiwara Kanji, who led the invasion of northeastern China.

Dharmapala and Tanaka shared several projects – a commitment to missionizing, a sense that reform was urgent, and a willingness to criticize others in the process. They both lived on the margins of the monastic tradition – Tanaka, the former monk, leading a lay organization and Dharmapala, the would-be monk, managing another lay organization. Both were reformers with reputations for confronting others aggressively. Both edited Buddhist magazines and wanted to missionize Buddhism. Beyond these similarities it is hard to imagine two figures with less in common. As Jaffe points out, Tanaka denounced world abnegation and laid out a plan for Buddhism to engage the domestic order.117 Dharmapala understood himself as an anagarika brahmacarya, regarding asceticism as the only way by which a man who was not a monk could devote himself to spiritual progress as well as social reform. Tanaka ripped Buddhism out of the hands of the Buddhist monkhood, arguing that there were no monks left in Japan. Dharmapala wanted only to energize the monkhood and engage monks in missionary work. Their meeting left a trail of ironies and misunderstandings. Dharmapala told Tanaka that there was no Buddhism left in India, and Tanaka concurred, already knowing that to be the case. But where Dharmapala was making the general claim that Buddhists had disappeared from India, Tanaka thought Buddhism – whether there were Buddhists in India or not – disappeared from India when the Mahayana tradition moved away from India to reach full realization in Japan.118 On the Nichiren understanding Buddhism had come to Japan from India, and it was destined to return. But that Buddhism would be Tanaka’s interpretation of Nichiren Buddhism, not Dharmapal’s or anyone else’s.

Tanaka saw one virtue in Dharmapala’s variety of Buddhism: he was attracted to the cakravartin ideal that played a central role in the formation of early states – usually as much Hindu as Buddhist – in India and Southeast Asia.119 For well over a millennium the notion served as a template for center-oriented states from Angkhor to Pagan and Sukhothai. The idea that the king was a righteous king of universal power joined Buddhism as doctrine, symbolic formation, and monastic institution to the political process. As the religion spread, cakravartin kingship served to legitimate new states. In the South Asian tradition the first such king was the Buddha himself, able to turn the wheel of power as well as the wheel of righteousness.120 Asoka was the historical paradigm, the architecture and courtly practices of Asoka’s rule replicated by later kings across the region. A successful king commanded the wheel of power but chose to rule by turning the wheel of righteousness.

The Buddha was born into a noble family.... His father was king Suddhodana, leader of the Shakya clan in what was the growing state of Kosala, and his mother was queen Maya Devi....A prophecy indicated that if the child stayed at home he was destined to become a world ruler. If the child left home, however, he would become a universal spiritual leader. To make sure the boy would be a great king and world ruler, his father isolated him in his palace.... Separated from the world, he later married Yashodhara (Yaśodhara was the daughter of King Suppabuddha and Amita), and together they had one child, a son, Rāhula....

At the age of 29, Siddhartha left his palace to meet his subjects. Despite his father's efforts to hide from him the sick, aged and suffering, Siddhartha was said to have seen an old man. When his charioteer Channa explained to him that all people grew old, the prince went on further trips beyond the palace. On these he encountered a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and an ascetic. These depressed him, and he initially strove to overcome ageing, sickness, and death by living the life of an ascetic.

Accompanied by Channa and riding his horse Kanthaka, Gautama quit his palace for the life of a mendicant. It's said that "the horse's hooves were muffled by the gods" to prevent guards from knowing of his departure.

Gautama initially went to Rajagaha and began his ascetic life by begging for alms in the street. After King Bimbisara's men recognised Siddhartha and the king learned of his quest, Bimbisara offered Siddhartha the throne. Siddhartha rejected the offer but promised to visit his kingdom of Magadha first, upon attaining enlightenment.

-- Family of Gautama Buddha, by Wikipedia


The notion of the wheel-turning universal monarch (as well as the West-East-West trajectory of Buddhism, the absence of dhamma in India, and Japan’s peripheral, but synoptic place in Buddhist cosmology) played a part in the Nichiren tradition121 In 1904 Tanaka published a pamphlet, “Heavenly Deed of Unifying the World” (sekai toitsu no tengyo), that reiterated the connections between India and Japan, declaring that the emperor’s lineage could be traced to India.122

Nichiren had preached his doctrine “to the universe and to mankind,” and to that extent, proselytizing was entailed. Unlike Honganji’s pursuing its missionizing endeavor outside of Japan but largely in Japanese communities, Tanaka had a vision of world unity.123 He argued that the whole world would become Buddhist fifty years after his 1902 meeting with Dharmapala, with closure achieved when Wellington, New Zealand, accepted his views. His vision was Japan-centric – the world would be converted to a specifically Japanese expression of Buddhism, namely Nichirenism under Tanaka’s interpretation, and military expansion would make it happen. When he drew up a list of pilgrimage places, all five were located in Japan and associated with emperors – from Jimmu to Meiji – and Nichiren.124 His attraction to the cakravartin notion came by way of its resonance with a parallel formulation in a Japanese chronicle that was itself center-oriented and inclusive.125 The Japanese empire should be extended to embrace all cardinal points and “the eight cords covered to form a roof.” That the wheel-turning emperor had an Indian origin supplied another historical narrative, which had to reach Japan to achieve completion.126 The Asian reference did not entail Tanaka’s having any interest in recovering Bodh Gaya, whatever its place – symbolically, politically, practically – in a Buddhist world.

Dharmapala took the train to Kamakura and spent the day with Tanaka and his supporters. On Tanaka’s account, Dharmapala asked for the meeting, and Tanaka responded by renting a banquet room and serving “alcohol and lots of food.”127 Their time together was largely a matter of his lecturing Dharmapala on the virtues of Nichiren Buddhism and Japanese spirit. Throughout the conversation Tanaka’s disdain for Dharmapala’s simplistic Buddhism was palpable. He called it yamadashi Bukkyo (Indian bumpkin Buddhism).128 His self-confidence outstripped the idea that Japanese Buddhism was Buddhism fully matured or that Nichiren preached real Buddhism, although other Japanese Buddhists claimed the former and Tanaka the latter. When he told Dharmapala that Buddhism is not myohorengekyo’s house, but myohorengekyo (the chanted phrase at the heart of Nichiren practice) is Buddhism’s house, he made a claim about priority and transcendence: that Nichirenism transcends its Buddhist origins.

Tanaka’s exchange with Dharmapala is so asymmetrical that it makes one suspect that the transcript is a fiction that used Dharmapala as a foil for Tanaka’s views. Dharmapala’s diary shows no sign that he thought he was exploited:

Arrived at Kawakura [sic]. Went to see Mr. Chigaku Tankaka, the Editor of the Sun was there. Mr. Tanaka’s honorific name is Yoshio Minamoto. He took me to the spot where Nichiren first preached. I laid a bouquet of flowers at the spot, and expressed to Mr. Sanaka [sic] that I hope the great Dharma will spread all over India. He photographed at the spot. Then he took me to the Kado Sho Hotel, whose proprietor is Mr. Tomita Seizo. Who traces his descent to 58 generations back. His first ancestor was a Shinto. We had a pleasant time. There was European & Jap: food; and there was a geisha girl. She showed her under clothing which was made of silk. Visited the Daibutsu, the great statue of Buddha. Inside the statue is a temple. Mr. Tanaka presented me with several copies of the Photo of the Daibutsu. Rev: Nichika Yaziwara, the Nichiren priest is in charge of the Temple built in honour of Nichiren. (Diary, June 23, 1902)


Given the length and intensity of the conversation, it is hard to believe that Dharmapala did not have more of a reaction to a man who had given him a doctrinal drubbing. Even the title of Tanaka’s account refers to the conversation as Tanaka’s “preaching” to Dharmapala, a man who also described himself as a “Buddhist preacher.” But his representations in Tanaka’s text sound very much like Dharmapala, framing his indictment of British imperialism and struggle for Buddhism in terms he used elsewhere. Even his willingness to preach Nichirenism does not seem strange given his contemplating becoming a student of Shaku Unsho or joining Honganji.

Tanaka met Dharmapala at the train station and brought him to the publishing house affiliated with Kokuchukai, where they greeted each other by bowing and drinking green tea. Dr. Takayama and Sejiro Washizuka joined the party for a visit to Kamakura, a place sacred to Nichiren Shonin. The conversation was translated and transcribed by another Tanaka follower, Kuwabara, who was also his biographer. Kuwabara presents the conversation in several parts, marking the pauses when the group ate or visited sites.129 The encounter is more than a full-bodied example of Dharmapala’s works and days in Japan. It represents the meeting of two Buddhists with a common vision of Buddhism’s being spread far from their birthplaces at the antipodes of the Buddhist world of the early twentieth century. The occasion lacked the considerable fanfare of Dharmapala’s 1893 visit. There are signs in the conversation that Japanese visits to India had revealed to the Japanese public that Dharmapala’s operations were less than the grand enterprise it had originally been thought to be. To that extent, Tanaka’s aggressiveness was aggravated by the recognition that Dharmapala’s star had fallen. The following is a transcript of the encounter as it appears in the published text, omitting passages that are less pertinent to the construction of a united Buddhist world:130

[quote]Dharmapala: I’m so glad to meet Prof. Takayama and Tanaka sensei [teacher] who is the head of Rissho Ankokukai.131 I have deep hopes for Japanese Buddhism. In order to carry this message overseas I need to be careful. And I am eager to hear your opinions, which will be beneficial to Buddhism.

Tanaka: I agree. I hope that too. How many times have you come to Japan?

Dharmapala: This is my third time. With each trip to this country, the country’s situation improves. I really hope that the Buddhists in this country wake up and work hard and try to reach the Buddha’s message to the world in a way that parallels the country’s improvement.

Tanaka: I agree. The Japanese Buddhists who have met you before did not talk about our Japanese Buddhism that deeply.

Dharmapala: Yes. I unfortunately have never heard the deep story that is necessary for the Buddhist teachings.

Tanaka: Usually when we talk about Japanese Buddhism generally it is under the influence of India and China. In Japan each school has its own teachings, but we Japanese still have the big teaching [dai kyoho]. Westerners have not discovered this yet, and people from India know nothing of it. I guess that Japanese people you have met before did not have any knowledge of these deep teachings. Therefore I will teach you the special doctrine that was invented in Japan, and I would like to talk about Nichiren Shonin who is the great person in the world after the death of the Buddha.

Dharmapala: I have great interest in you, but my opinion is that I want to teach the Westerners how to understand Buddhism as a whole.

Tanaka: Buddhism as a whole, I think, is too vague, and from my point of view as Nichiren Shonin said, it is not the real Buddhism. As I said before, the special teaching is the one that we should propagate to the world from now on.

Dharmapala: Then how are you going to teach this Japanese special Buddhism and how are you going to spread it? I want to know the details.

Tanaka: Okay [dakui]. But it is close to noon. I would like to discuss this point some other time such as after lunch. But before then I want to take you to Nichiren Shonin’s spiritual place that is the place on the street that Nichiren preached. That teaching is called komachi-tsuji-zeppo [small town, little street preaching]. Nichiren Shonin was exiled and died because he was given punishment by sword, wooden stick, and stone. He was exiled to Izu island [south of Tokyo]. After he returned from exile, he did not change his methods and was exiled to northern Japan on the island of Sado. He returned in 1274 to Kamakura and builds a temple on a mountain named Minobeyama [in Kamakura]. Let’s go to that spiritual place and then we will eat lunch.

Dharmapala: I am more than happy to visit the spiritual place. I would like to have a flower with a good smell and to offer it there.

[x]
7. Dharmapala (in white robes) and Chigaku Tanaka (at immediate left) visiting Nichiren shrine, Kamakura, Japan, 1902.

From this point Chien Nozaki went to the garden and picked one branch of a lily plant and gave it to Dharmapala, who offered it to the marker there. After that he and Tanaka sensei Professor Takayama, Kuwabara, Kudo, Washizuka, and Nozaki visited the spiritual home of komachi-tsuji-zeppo by car. The conversation continued:

Dharmapala: Today I came to the spiritual place where Nichiren Shonin had a difficult time because of his Buddhist preaching, and I am thinking back to his old-time preaching. I am so glad [pointing at the lily in his left hand] that I can offer a branch of sweet-smelling flowers as a commemoration of Nichiren’s life. When I look at this stalk with two blooming lilies, one is opening and the other is still closed. This closed bud is the symbol of Nichiren’s Great Doctrine, which is the hope that should bring light to the world. I believe it is so and I am more and more happy.

Tanaka: Exactly. The doctrine of Nichiren Shonin will unite the world in the future. Shonin said “As the moon comes from West to East, the Buddha’s teaching came to Japan. As the sun goes East to West, the Japanese teaching goes back to the moon.” I don’t consider your visit to this spiritual place as the simple visit of you, but I think of you as the representative of the Indian people.132 I would like to consider this opportunity as the very first time a person who came from India, which is the motherland of Buddhism bowed in front of our great saint [Nichiren].

As Yamakawa walked out, “the gate was opened by Washizuka. Dharmapala offered respectfully, putting the lily in front of the offering stone. Looking at the offering stone, he bowed. Tanaka said, “From the live body to the dead body … nammyohorengekyo” three times. After he finished he looked at Dharmapala and said, “This sentence comes from the great teaching.” All of them took the car and went to Taikaku-kan [Taikaku hall]…. There are more than 10,000 old and unique utensils in this hall. At that time the cafeteria was in the hall right next to it, and at the gate there were flags crossed [Japan’s and India’s] welcoming the guest. In the room there were unique old art objects lined up …. Before the meal came from the kitchen, the beneficial conversation began.”

Tanaka: I heard you went to Nara, which is the oldest capital in Japan.

Dharmapala: I heard Nara has famous big Buddha statues, and I wanted to visit there at least once. I haven’t had a chance, and I regret that I haven’t been there yet.

Tanaka: The temple that has the big Buddha is called Todai-ji. It was built by Emperor Shomu more than a thousand years ago. When they celebrated the eye-opening ceremony. The Emperor was fond of India, the homeland of Buddhism. He invited the highest monk from India even though it was the time of unimaginably difficult travel. Because of this, we can imagine how deep the Buddhist teaching was.

Dharmapala: I would like to hear the beneficial teaching of Nichiren Shonin.

Tanaka: Nichiren Shonin’s teaching was completely different from the generality of Buddhists. In his teaching he considered myohorengekyo the core of Buddhism. Generally many Buddhists consider this myohorengekyo as just one sutra among many. This is wrong. If there is no myohorengekyo in any Buddhist teaching, the teaching has no spirit. It is the skeleton/core that provides the spirit. Therefore Shonin’s doctrine was to unite all Buddhist teachings with myhorengekyo. Buddhism is not myohorengekyo’s house and myohorengekyo is Buddhism’s house.

Dharmapala: When did Nichiren live and where did he preach his doctrine?

Tanaka: Nichiren was born 681 years ago and he passed away 620 years ago. He preached his doctrine in Kamakura, Sado, and Miobe, and some other places. Among those places, the place he stayed the longest was Kamakura. Therefore the spiritual place where we went and where he preached komachi-tsuji-zeppo was the respectable ruins of his preaching career during his 22 years in Kamakura.

Dharmapala: What was he preaching at the beginning?

Tanaka: From the beginning he preached myohorengekyo. Shonin preached that if we neglect myohorengekyo and teach other doctrines, that is the cause of evil ways.

Dharmapala: What is the root of the doctrine of myhorengekyo?

Tanaka: In order to understand myohorengekyo usually other Buddhists think of it in terms of the Buddhist doctrine, however Nichiren’s doctrine was based on the Buddha’s notion of skillfuol meanszx or Buddha’s thinking.

Dharmapala: Nichiren Shonin’s teaching is based on Chinese translated version of myohorengekyo. Is this Chinese translation of myohorengekyo also translated into English?

Tanaka: Not yet.

Dharmapala: I think that Carus’ English translation of myohorengekyo is not well translated. Therefore, I strongly hope that the Chinese text will be translated into English and spread to the world immediately.

Tanaka: Nichiren Shonin’s interpretation of “skillful means” was Nichiren’s own idea, but that study of the Buddha’s skillful means was derived from the great Chinse monk Chigi of the Tendai sect. This great Tendai monk had had a Buddhist text called Makashikan, which is the gateway to the Buddhist teachings. For example, at that time India scholars heard this teaching of the Tendai school, and they determined that it was just the Buddha’s long-cherished plan. Later there was a great monk of Myoraku whose name was Taizen or Tainen. He heard that Indian scholars had agreed, and he said that if we lose Chinese law, there is no need to go back to shii [ the four directions – northeast, southwest, northwest, southeast – or the four virtues necessary to preserve the nation, embarrassment, lack of greed and cleanliness, appreciation, and justice. By hearing this, Nichiren Shonin concluded that there is no Buddhist teaching in India. Shonin thought that there was a very interesting idea that in the Tendai teaching which has not been made public. That idea can be released by myohorengekyo’s skillful means.

Dharmapala: Indian Buddhism was destroyed completely more than 700 years ago. The Buddhism that remains in India is just the wreckage of the original.

Tanaka: No, it’s not just 700 years. It’s more than several thousand years ago. In the time of the great teacher of Tendai there was no true, deep understanding of Buddhism in India. Nichiren Shonin had never been to that place. He knew that Buddhism had vanished in India, and so it comes back to Japanese Buddhist teaching.

Dharmapala: It is a noteworthy fact that in Japan Nichiren Shonin [knew without having visited India] that Buddhism would be destroyed in India 700 years ago. Buddhism in India has lost its fruit because of Hinduism. In Japan the seed of Buddhism was transported early enough so that its beautiful flower is now blooming.

Tanaka: The ideal of the students of Nichiren Shonin the saint is to develop the thinking of China and India with the teachings of Nichiren by using myohorengekyo, in other words, it is the special doctrine that is developed by Nichiren. After that the Nichiren doctrine should be spread voluntarily to the Western countries in hopes of united the world around the preaching.

Dharmapala: Shakyamuni preached myohorengekyo, and he changed our heart to the lotus flower. Some say the lotus flower of Buddhist tradition is half open, and some others say it is not open at all. Just as the lotus flower opens because of the sunshine, which is the same things as the people such as us who have lost their way open their minds with the Buddha’s tender love and knowledge.

Tanaka: That’s right. The great teacher Tendai interpreted the lotus flower metaphorically in six ways. He goes on to say that the lotus flower implies our heart and the material world, in other words the situation of the whole Buddhist world. He called this Buddhist teaching to-tai renge noho-mon, “the Buddhist teaching of the lotus flower.” When he explained this, he said that the lotus flower resembles Buddhist teaching. The ideal of hokekyo (myohorengekyo) is like the way the lotus blooms because of receiving sunshine; Nichiren Shonin named himself after this notion, sunshine and lotus flower. This is a noteworthy thing.

Dharmapala: Who gave him that auspicious name?

Tanaka: He gave it to himself. When he was 32, he advocated the special doctrine of hokekyo, skillful means for the first time. Shonin for the first time proclaimed himself Nichiren Shonin when he first stood as the great Buddhist teacher and at the time he was preaching, the bodhisattva teachings that appeared in hokekyo sutra [that is, the same thing as myohorengekyo].

Dharmapala: I know about Nichiren Shonin’s teachings by reading Arthur Lloyd’s English translation. I highly respect him, and I would like to research Shonin’s aims. I think a lot of foreigners still don’t know the true value of Shonin. And I came to know that we should research deeply Shonin’s teachings from today’s conversation. What I strongly hope is to have a complete biography of Shonin in English. I’m looking forward to see this great man introduced to the world.

Tanaka: Not only foreigners, but also Japanese misunderstand Shonin. Some people give him a bad name. People who appreciate him include Mohammed, Savonarola, and Luther.133 It’s surprising. In the future I would like Shonin’s actual facts to be revealed in foreign languages.

At this point Dharmapala began speaking directly with Professor Takayama:

Takayama: The article on Shonin’s biography by Mr. Lloyd appeared in a journal in the past. This short article explains Shonin’s history briefly. As Mr. Dharmapala said, it is a very honorable project for Japanese to introduce Shonin to the world. In my opinion Shonin is not simply a great man in Japan but also a great mind for the world. By using Luther or Savanarola or Mohammed to compare Shonin loses his value. They should be compared with other Christians.

Dharmapala: I think Nichiren Shonin was a man more important than Christ himself. The reason needs no great explanation. Christ was killed by others’ hands, even though his preaching spread and became very popular. The person who is killed by others is not the greatest saint. Being killed by others was not holy, sacred or smart. It was not a great achievement. Without looking at Nichiren Shonin’s case, we cannot understand the effects of the sword of persecution. With the power and enthusiasm of Nichiren Shonin, it is easier to preach to the world nowadays.

Takayama: Nichiren Shonin left an order for us to preach to the world with an ideal of Itten-shikai-kaiki-myouhou “one sky, four seas, everyone comes back Buddhist teaching.” Therefore there were six great disciples of Shonin. One of them is called Himouchi Shonin or Jitsuji Shonin. He crossed the ocean and proceeded to the north when foreign circumstances were not known. That was 600 years ago when transportation was inconvenient. There was evidence that he went to preach from Siberia to northern Asia. By this fact you can see the accomplishment of Nichiren Shonin.

Dharmapala: How old was Nichiren Shonin when he passed away?

Tanaka: He was 61 years old.

Dharmapala: What kind of religion do the Emperor and Empress practice?

Tanaka: As a religion they don’t believe anything. However, the founding spirit of the country comes together in the true Buddhist teaching. It is noteworthy that the Japanese imperial family does not believe in any particular Buddhist sect nowadays. Buddha’s true doctrine must be just one thing. There are lots of different sects and groups nowadays, but this is not the Buddha’s intention. Therefore there is no doubt that the time when Buddhism will be united will come in the future. The reason why the royal family does not believe in any sect of Buddhism is because they are waiting for the time when Buddhism will be united in the future.

Dharmapala looked impressed with the reference to the imperial family, according to Yamakawa, and he commented several times on the divinity of the Japanese emperor.

Tanaka: I heard that you are furious about British tyranny for people in India, and you attacked this tyranny at the World’s Parliament of Religions. I assume it is a very serious racial problem that prompts British cruelty on the Indian people. I heard that the way that English people govern India is truly avaricious and unjust.

Takayama: Those white people don’t think other races are human.

Tanaka: That is because Christian doctrine is narrow-minded. In other words, their love cannot love anyone who is different from them.

Takayama: Christ himself wasn’t that way [i.e., he loved everyone]. Later in history when Jewish taste intersected with Christianity, this change happened.

Tanaka: No, it wasn’t just Christ. The basic ideology of Christianity depends on the love for human beings but not animals. His love did not extend to animals. The teaching says that you can kill the lower level animals and use them as the stuff we eat. This is their notion of love. I am furious to hear that they tax all the salt in India. Seventeen or eighteen years ago I gave a lecture with the title “Public love and Personal Love” at Tokyo Kosei Hall.

Dharmapala: I am very upset with the English government’s tyranny over the Indian people. Their government does not educate Indian people and leads to their corruption. They don’t lead people to civilization but to savagery. In the past 14 years there were more than 34 million people who were cruelly murdered under this tyranny. This number is close to the population of France. To think of this fact makes me grieve, and I cannot express my sadness for the Indian people.

Tanaka: That is because Indian civilization is frail and weak, and it does not have deep ideals, which is like British civilization also.

Dharmapala: Exactly. In fact their government [British] is an evil one and cruel.

Tanaka: The way the British govern is despotic, but does not derive from Christian teaching. Christianity is their national religion. And people there do not question the tyranny in India, and this is not because of Christianity. This is because in Christian teaching it says do not question errors.

Takayama: I think the Christian doctrine is not the basis of European civilization. It is rather Greek and Roman civilization.

Yamakawa: There are good politicians such as Gladstone. I heard that he is a faithful Christian. He never advocated tyranny towards India. I think that except for Tolstoy today in general Christianity includes narrow-minded self-regard as its basis. That cannot be denied.

Tanaka: I would like to go to India to unite Indian people by using Buddhist teachings and to drive away the British government and establish an Indian empire.

Dharmapala: The British government is lazy and they ill-treat the people, making it their government policy. I think the British are devils. The poor Indian people are under the control of these devils, and their blood and sweat are sucked by those devils.

Tanaka: That’s exactly the case. Japanese people are furious over such cruel tyranny, and we are a nation with that characteristic. Nichiren Shonin’s teaching shows especially this great national characteristic.

Dharmapala: According to teacher Tanaka, I am led to believe Nichiren Shonin’s prediction that Japanese Buddhism will return to India does not imply there will be an Indian empire founded on the Buddha’s teachings.

Tanaka: Whether it is a big empire or small empire, Shonin’s intention was to develop the nation based on myohorengekyo. To accomplish this we cannot avoid having a war or fighting. To pursue this policy requires being willing to fight and conquer difficulties. Japanese people have not been aware of this warning voice, and that is unfortunate. Indian people should be made aware of this warning as soon as possible, and [knowledge of the warning] should lead to their revival.

Dharmapala: I heard Nichiren Shonin appeared in Japan and myohorengekyo is the great law of the universe. He preached that by this doctrine the world should be united. As we mentioned the lotus flower of myoho is the reality of our spirit. People’s spirit is like the universe. People who don’t understand the reality of myohorengekyo don’t know not to worry about their own smallness [i.e., once you understand “myo” you don’t worry about that smallness]. Shonin’s warning voice eventually becomes the Buddha’s warning voice.

Tanaka: Exactly. Do you know the monk of the Nichiren school, the teacher Asahinae?

Dharmapala: In the Nichiren school I only know Mr. Hojiro Kawai.134 I have seen one old monk who came from Japan. He brought a bronze image and said nammyohorengekyo, and he wanted to place it inside Bodh Gaya. I happened to encounter this incident. Kawai is very devoted to the religion. On this trip I’m going to visit him. Tokyo is the center of Japan. Nihonbashi is the center of Tokyo. An insurance company is at the center of Nihonbashi. Nammyoho releases its light and I heard that this light is flourishing.

Tanaka: I heard that there are people who have hostile feelings towards Mr. Dharmapala and who criticize him. I would like to investigate these feelings and work hard on correcting their misunderstandings. If it is true [that Dharmapala is a fraud], I would like to give you a lecture and admonish you.135 I assume that without understanding the situation [Japanese people] treat the stranger from faraway with coldness. That is not Japanese people’s nature.

Kudo Keitatsu jumped into the conversation, confronting Dharmapala with the growing Japanese suspicion that his chances for success in India were negligible.

Kudo: I heard about it [this misunderstanding] from one person. I have had a chance to read general Buddhism [tsuzoku bukkyo]. Mr. Tokuno Oda and teacher Asahinae and teacher Koujyun Omiya and Mr. Sasaki are saying that there are misunderstandings. Because Mr. Dharmapala, the head of the Maha Bodhi Society, goes to many countries, Japanese imagine that this is a great thing. And then when the Japanese go to those countries [India or Sri Lanka], they see that his work is unexpectedly small. They see that it [his staff] consists of two Englishmen who rent the second floor. We go to India, thinking Mr. Dharmapala has a great power in that country, but our expectation is not met. Can you deny that you are a fraud?

Dharmapala: For a long time in India Hinduism has been dominant and there has been no Buddhism. Whenever I have business in India, I use the head office. Therefore the Maha Bodhi Society office is in Calcutta. However Christianity, Hinduism, and other religions are practiced in Calcutta. The Buddhist community is small. I am trying to revive Bodh Gaya by fighting against our enemies and by bearing up under several persecutions. The sacred place where Buddha broke through and saw the truth [was awakened] is under control of a Hindu who is a heathen. Because of that fact, Buddhists cannot go and worship freely at that sacred place. As a disciple of the Buddha, I am deeply grieved by this fact. I have been fighting over this place for more than ten years, and for a brief time we were able to gain the right to come into the temple and worship freely. In fact people of other religions look at me and hate me. Whenever I’m in Calcutta, I’m a lonely warrior who is surrounded by the enemy. Therefore I cannot provide sufficient hospitality to ever visitor. In Colombo Buddhism is flourishing. I can provide adequate accommodations and means for visitors there. Because of this situation in India and because of the language difficulty, there is misunderstanding in both directions, I believe.

Tanaka: The monkly disciples of Nichiren Shonin have the great teaching, which is the basis of the doctrine itself as well as compassion and humility, and they have an attitude of gentleness and patience about things that happen in public. Even if one is treated badly, one should be obsequious and not respond in kind. Japan is a country that will respond with virtue. People who believe in myoho have a character that leads to conquering their enemies as well as the capacity of a heart as big as the ocean. I don’t have a grudge towards Dharmapala. The reason I say a lot of things to you is as disciples of Nichiren Shonin we want to be courteous to the Indian people who should be reformed by the doctrine of Nichiren Shonin. I have read in a magazine Myoshu teacher Asahinae talking about his trip to India. From Nichiren Shonin’s point of view there is no Buddhism in India. Therefore there is no need for us to ask them for something. If we are not going to India to spread Buddhism, there is no need to go there at all except to visit the sacred places and venerate [the deceased]. It is totally against Nichiren’s doctrine when a male or female disciple brings their hair as an offering and goes to a place where there is no Buddhism. This cannot be allowed. There are some monks who are very upset with Dharmapala because he claims Japanese monks are not active, I heard. But I have been speaking publicly about the lethargy of Japanese monks for 20 years. When we hear Dharmapala’s criticism coming from a country fallen to ruin [i.e., India, a land without Buddhism], Japanese monks feel shame. Even though the Maha Bodhi Society is small, there is no reason to call you a swindler right off. There are very few people who always act justly. The student who follows the right law is as scarce as the soil on the fingernail. The evil person is as common as the soil that spreads in all directions.

Dharmapala: I receive only 65 yen as a salary/month. With that salary I spend 25 yen to rent space. Whenever monks come from Japan or Siam, I would like to give them preferential treatment as much as possible. There was an old monk from Japan who came to my place through Benares but said nothing, and he brought a bronze pagoda that has nammyohorengekyo written on it. He wanted to erect it in Bodh Gaya. I agreed with his plan and placed it inside. I don’t even know his name.

Tanaka: I think because of the language difficulty, there was miscommunication in both directions. That’s where the rumor started. This is a small thing. Not many people are thinking badly of Dharmapala, but I will tell them that you are not a bad person. Buddhists in general consider Amida and Dainichi as the absolute Buddha, but Nichiren Shonin never accepted this understanding. Myohorengekyo teaches that these figures are just temporary Buddhas. The true Buddha is Sakyamuni himself who lived in India. Almost 2200 years after Sakyamuni died, nobody has preached this fact [that Sakyamuni is the true Buddha] yet. Shonin’s doctrine considers the historical Sakyamuni as the only Buddha. People in India should remember Shonin’s doctrine well.

Dharmapala: When I first read Nichiren Shonin’s biography, I came to know that Shonin said that the true Buddha is Sakyamuni, the true law is novo. I was glad that Shonin’s teaching captured the true situation of the Buddha. However, Shonin’s teaching is buried in one corner of Japan. It hasn’t risen and made the jump to the world. Today the Honganji temple is the most active. They have a temple, a magazine, missionaries in America and india and other foreign countries. Therefore disciples of Nichiren Shonin have not achieved the same level as Honganji. Why is that?

Tanaka: My face sweats a lot over this situation. Our disciples have weak minds and actions, fighting among themselves. After the teacher has gone for a while, we lost our ambition/energy, and it’s like we have been sleeping until now. We cannot get to the same level as Honganji, our cousin sect. We are in the state of clenching our teeth and crossing our arms and feeling regret over our situation. 300-400 years ago our sect had the power to take possession of half of Japan, but we colluded with the government. Heavy restrictions were placed on us, and the monks at the time mistakenly made a makeshift law, and now we are in this state. Like Buddhism was conquered by Hinduism, and like Buddhism collapsed while Hinduism became powerful, we have had our ups and downs, but the problem does not lie in the doctrine itself. The reason for our downfall was human frailty and politics.

Dharmapala: I think even though the sect has very sophisticated and deep principles, without the action it is like holding a treasure bowl and not showing it to the world. The first teaching has collapsed, and the second teaching [Honganji] has come into being. In order to replace that first teaching, one acts unjustly. It is pitiful when someone acts improperly in order to overcome the first teaching.136 The things that Honganji does today is something that a disciple of Nichiren Shonin has to do.

Tanaka: It is true that Nichiren’s disciples are inactive nowadays. I deeply regret this, and I have been fighting to change this for 20 years. I wrote a book about that called Shumon-no-ishin [The sect and its reformation], the text is written in Japanese, but please study it.

Dharmapala: I am greatly impressed that the ideal of Nichiren Shonin’s teachings is to unite the world and that his teaching preaches that Japanese Buddhism which is built by Nichiren Shonin has to go back to India. I would like Shonin’s disciples to work for that goal and make it come true as soon as possible.

Tanaka: I agree, however we have to first reform Japanese Buddhism, which has decayed and to purify the Japanese nation. Later on it should influence other countries.

Dharmapala: I know that you need to reform modern Buddhism in Japan, but I think the reason why Japan achieved the highest status in the world was because Japan has shown warrior spirit [bu, or bushido]. Especially the rare Nichiren’s Buddhism should show this to foreign countries as fast as it can.

Tanaka. Exactly. When we introduce our doctrine, we are not forgetting to teach the pure content.

Dharmapala: At that time you both benefit from that. The biography of Shonin and his doctrine, which is pure Buddhism should be shown to foreign countries immediately. They are waiting for it. It is urgent business. I really hope that you Mr. Tanaka work hard.

Tanaka: I understand. I will work on it in the near future. I would like to ask you what is the name of the magazine you publish?

Dharmapala: It’s called The Maha Bodhi, which is published once a month in hopes of uniting the world’s Buddhists.

Tanaka: I would like to exchange it with my publication, Myoshu. I would like to submit an article. How does that sound?

Dharmapala: Yes. That is what I most hope for. My magazine allows writers to submit an article that is less than three pages. But it can run over 6 or 7 issues. My magazine is read by Buddhists all over the world, including America, Burma, Siam. It publishes 700 copies. I have to provide 30 yen each month for publication. Even though I may starve, once I started publishing this magazine I will continue to do so. I would like to submit my article to your magazine Myoshu. Please publish it.

Tanaka: It is such a difficult thing to continue publishing a magazine that contains your own doctrine. My magazine myoshu suffers a loss of 150-60 yen every month, but we are still publishing it. I greatly sympathize with your situation. I would like Mr. Takayama to submit an article occasionally for the Maha Bodhi magazine.

Takayalma: Sure. I don’t mind submitting articles on Nichiren Shonin or other religious matters occasionally.

Dharmapala: I would be greatly honored to receive an article from Professor Takayama in my magazine. I would like to hear your sophisticated opinions about things related to Buddhism or Nichiren or religion, philosophy or art.

At this time lunch arrived, and Yamakawa left. While he was gone, Dharmapala, Takayama, and Tanaka continued their discussion. Takayama took over as interpreter.

Dharmapala: My country is the island of Sri Lanka. We have a close relationship between Buddhism and the royal family just as in Japan. Both help each other. Our ancestors liked to make war, and we have been fighting against foreign countries. We started a war more than 2000 years ago, and we have been fighting up to the last Sri Lankan king. This royal family descends from a long family line like Japan. The highest and most respected royal family in the world is the Japanese royal family. I think the next one in rank is our royal family, however a lot of people consider Sri Lanka and India as the same country, and take me for an Indian. There are lots of people who think Sri Lanka is part of India, a dependency of India. I really don’t like that. It’s like the relationship between Japan and China. Sri Lanka and India are similar to that geographically. In Japan people expelled the Ainu people, and my ancestors expelled the natives of India and established an independent country. Sri Lanka is like Japan in having only one island. It has the beautiful scenery of mountains and water, and that is similar to Japan. There is one small location that is surrounded by blue mountains in all four directions like Kamakura. Our king resides there. our people are all Buddhists.

The group went to see several old Buddhist artifacts displayed in the Taikaku hall. Dharmapala’s face was filled with joy as he listened to the explanation of each item, and later that day they left to visit Takiguchi, the spiritual land of the saints of Nichiren Buddhism. After they returned form seeing the big Buddha, rain began to fall. The group arrived at Takiguchi Dera, and first they visited the Shikikawa do [hall]. They visited the place where evil Japanese people tried to break the pillar of Japan. Dharmapala looked moved. Then they went to see the headmaster there. He provided tea and sweets. Tanaka pointed to the picture of Seiso-takiguchi-hounan-zu (the scroll picture of the saint ancestor, the Buddha Takiguchi).137

Dharmapala: After looking at this picture, I think about how much brave Shonin has suffered. I received a boundless lesson and power by looking at this drawing of challenges and obstacles, which says that any servant of Buddha cannot go wrong. I would like this picture to be copied and sent to foreign countries.

Tanaka: Later on I would like to send this picture with the complete biography of Nichiren Shonin to you.

Dharmapala: I think that the words that came from a great person’s mouth should be realized in real life. I came to know that Nichiren Shonin had a great ideal of uniting the world by spreading Japanese Buddhism to the West. However this great ideal, cannot be reached in real life. It is urgent business for the disciples of Nichiren Shonin to spread the doctrine in foreign countries.

Kuwabara, here speaking for the first time: Do you believe this mystery that changes in the weather or the sky as portrayed in the picture known as Takiguchi honanzu [picture] protected Nichiren Shonin?

Dharmapala: I firmly believe in that mysterious fact because of the virtue of myoho and the virtue of Shonin.

Fujiwara, the headmaster of the temple: In India there is only Hinayana thinking nowadays.

Dharmapala: Exactly. I’m the only one who is familiar with Mahayana. I have been persecuted by Hinduism, Christianity, other religions, the HInayana religion, and the British government. I have been advocating the arguments of Mahayana Buddhism. The mayor of Calcutta told me that I should be gentle. So I said to the mayor, Buddha has been always active. He said that we should preach myohorengekyo in any situation. Whatever happens I follow this idea that I don’t change my behavior. Therefore my nature is to be persecuted, and I think it is funny to find my god-given job has this characteristic. My father said that I was like fireworks.

Fujiwara: Are you an upsaka or a bhikkhu?

Dharmapala: I am neither bhikkhu or upsaka. I think bhikkhus who have mercy, knowledge, law, and virtue have not vanished even today after the Buddha the Great has gone. Upasakas [lay devotees] have wives and children. I am not a bhikkhu, but I don’t have a wife or children so I am not an upsaka. I created a category by myself and called myself Dharma pracharaka [preacher of Dharma]. Therefore Dharma is the shortened form of satsudharma, and the meaning of that phrase is “the person who preaches and spreads the myoho doctrine.” Therefore, I have been practicing the ten haramitsu [virtues].

Tanaka: By practicing ten haramitsu and claiming that you are practicing myoho denies Nichiren Shonin’s teachings.

Dharmapala: Practicing ten haramitsu is the practicing of myoho in other words; using this I want to get the truth of myoho. What do you think?

Tanaka: That’s not it. Even though you try to understand the basic teaching of myoho and you proceed to practice the three different practices, six haramitsu, and ten haramitsu and try to bring those practices together with the truth that is like building a palace on sand. Or if you try to understand the basic teachings of myoho and practice the ten haramitsu alone, that is like building a palace on sand. Therefore we must believe the basics of our teaching of myoho and then later on we should discuss the details. That is Nichiren Shonin’s argument.
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Re: Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala, by Steven

Postby admin » Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:57 am

Part 4 of 4

Dharmapala: When you practice myoho for yourself that is not good. The right method is to follow Nichiren Shonin’s practices when we teach myoho to disciples. Am I right?

Tanaka: That’s it exactly. For both cases – teaching yourself or teaching others – there are two sides of Nichiren Shonin’s myoho practices. One is “believing and acting.” The other is “doctrine and acting.” Believing and acting is to believe the truth of myoho and to devote your life to the Buddhist teaching by practicing. Doctrine and acting is to practice ten haramitsu and others. Nichiren Shonin preached that believing and acting is the basis of the training, doctrine and acting becomes the support of the person who is training.

Dharmapala: The chief property of myoho is the ten haramitsu.138 For example, as a human has four extremities/limbs and one head and they make up the human body we can reach the truth of myoho by practicing the ten haramitsu as a single body.

Tanaka: That is the way to discuss the secondary factors. It is Sanjo’s teaching, and not the Buddha’s teaching, that one tries to prioritize the secondary attributes and leave the doctrine behind. We cannot discuss this argument in one day. It needs a deep understanding of this teaching. I would like to discuss this point further when you become familiar with understanding the Japanese Big Vehicle [Mahayana] teaching. I would like to show you the English translation of Nichiren Shonin later on.

COP: In any case, Father, you'll never convince me that the body of Christ can be contained in a piece of bread.

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PRIEST: Be careful about what you're saying. The body of Christ is not CONTAINED in the bread. In the sacrament of Communion, the host BECOMES the body of Christ. No matter what we say, transubstantiation does exist.

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COP: I'd like to believe you. I'll admit, I just don't understand. It's beyond me.

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PRIEST: The host is the body of Christ. That's it! Don't believe it's a mere representation, a symbol, as it were, of the body of our Lord.

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The Albigensians believed that. And, of course, so did the Calvinists, among others. And that is a serious mistake!

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INNKEEPER: I always say that the body of Christ in the host is just like the rabbit in this pate.

PRIEST: What?

INNKEEPER: I mean that it's rabbit, and at the same time it's pate.

PRIEST: You don't understand! You speak like those 16th Century heretics that were called, as a matter of fact, Pate-liars! Don't talk like that! You must take the words of Christ literally!

COP: Sorry, but it just doesn't make any sense to me.

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PRIEST: All the more reason to believe! Religion without mystery is no religion at all! In other words, any heresy that attacks a mystery can easily seduce ignorant and superficial people. But heresies will never be able to hide the truth.

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OLD BUM: Father, I'd like to ask you: what happens to the body of Christ inside your stomach?

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PRIEST: How strange.

COP: What's that?

PRIEST: It suddenly occurred to me the Pate-liars were right. It's a revelation! I FEEL that the body of Christ is in the host, like rabbit in that pate. I'm absolutely sure of it!

COP: But you just said the opposite.

PRIEST: I said the opposite? Who, me?

COP: Yes, you.

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PRIEST: [Spills his coffee on the Cop] [And throws some in his face]

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MEDIC 1: So, Father, out for a little walk again? Now, you promised you'd behave yourself. We're going to have to lock you up.

-- The Milky Way, directed by Luis Bunel


Dharmapala: It is like the way science breaks reality into parts in order to observe more clearly an din addition to extract the one set of terms [e.g., neutrons and protons] from the system to interpret reality more generally. Myoho likewise becomes the ten haramitsu when we break it down. When we synthesize the components, it should become myoho.

Tanaka: There are many Buddhists who come to understand that analysis and forget the basis which is myoho. The ten haramitsu which does not anticipate the butsujochi [knowledge of Mayahana]. It is the doctrine of a life buoy. Let me put the ten haramitsu into the proper context – Nichiren Shonin devoted his life to preaching and spreading the butsujochi or the myoho.

Dharmapala: It has been almost 700 years since Nichiren Shonin died. It will be nice to have a great person like Nichiren preaching and spreading the teaching now, but at the level of our preaching and spreading we cannot avoid breaking things down. Nichiren Shonin was a mysterious, great person, and even though he did not break down the myoho to preach, Shonin’s superiority was the explanation. There were a lot of people who recognized the greatness in Shonin himself and they believed everything he said as it was as he said it. But we are not this now. Therefore there is no way for us to preach and spread with the same height [at the same level of sophistication]. In other words, we should train and replace mysterious greatness by practicing the ten haramitsu.

Tanaka: In Nichiren Shonin’s teaching to his disciples there are lots of gates/steps along the path to enter Buddhism, but we proceed from the gate of faith. That belief requires devoting one’s life to the Buddha. It is like the way Shonin and Sakyamuni subordinated themselves completely to preach and spread the doctrine. This means that from the beginning we disciples did not set ourselves up as a standard/paradigm. We should make myoho or Sakyamuni who was a vigorous person or Nichiren Shonin the standard. If we follow this ideal, we can attain myoho, Sakyamuni, and Shonin’s virtue. Especially today it is obvious that Nichiren Shonin is an example of the one who obtained myoho by devoting his life to the Buddha. The gate of the Buddha’s teachings of belief and action in myoho can be shown vividly in fact. We have to follow the path of our training to attain the myoho nowadays.

Dharmapala: As you said, it is important that you believe. Of course if I go to America now and suddenly shout “practice the myohorengekyo,” that is not going to be effective. We have to preach what the myoho is by breaking it down. But if we preach what the myoho is, they will get it.

Tanaka: Exactly. The thing that I’m saying now is the basis of the doctrine. The things that you say are the methods of preaching myoho. When the doctrine is being established and propagated, we need good disciples of Nichiren Shonin and good disciples have a belief in devoting one’s life to Buddhism as the basis and to have the knowledge and the ability to take action, as well as to have body, mouth, and strong mind. The basis of our teaching is the faith that is true and deep in its roots, we shouldn’t forget this.

Dharmapala: I agree. In Japan there already was a Buddhism before Nichiren Shonin lived, and there was a favorite convenient way of teaching the highest doctrine for oth the preachers’ side and the listeners’ side, but it is hard to approach people in a place like America nowadays who have no background in Buddhism.

Tanaka: That’s true, but there is a gate to Buddhist teaching which can be opened in myohrengekyo. This Buddhist teaching is the one that blends any kind of ideal with the ideal of myohrengekyo. Therefore there is a way to bring people who have other doctrines to myoho.

Dharmapala: In that case what method of preaching and spreading should we take?

Tanaka: In that case we look at the person’s thinking in terms of their personality, their country, and the historical moment with the eye of hokekyo [alternate form of myoho]. We will break that evil thought [ideals people believed before myoho] and suppress it. We will capture their good thoughts by teaching that myoho is the highest truth, and we will teach them the truth that is the source of the big, united method.

Dharmapala: I have exactly the same opinion as you do. Myoho means the true law, and in other words it is the law of truth. I have been acting for this law that is the absolute truth of Buddha. Therefore, I don’t have any plans except for preaching and spreading this myoho. My pleasure lies here.

Tanaka: Myohrengekyo is the big truth for approaching Buddha. Preaching this to the world is a merciful act of bhagavat [blessing].139 It is our job as children of Buddha to preach this merciful truth completely which is the same as devoting our lives to the Buddha. Nichiren Shonin is the one and only example of this preaching and propagating person of myoho, and he is a man of infinite mercy. There is no other way but to follow Shonin’s thinking.

Dharmapala: I am truly delighted that I could hear so much discussion of Nichiren Shonin. If there is anything translated into English about Shonin, please send it to me. For example, if there is a five-hundred page publication, I will bring it to America and try to advocate for the contents. After this visit, I’m going to be in America for at least a year, and I’m thinking of moving about all of the states.

Tanaka: Could you give me an address in America where I could reach you? If circumstances permit, I would like to send you the work translated.

Dharmapala: The biography of Nichiren by Mr. Lloyd was well-done. That book is very good. Right now so many people are waiting to listen to myoho. It should be translated immediately and spread to the world. I am eager to be one of the people who teaches and spreads Nichiren Shonin’s doctrine. Japan is in fact the country of great hope for preaching and spreading the myoho. I hope the day will come soon that the doctrine of Nichiren Shonin which is the big light of the world and flower of the country will spread across the whole planet together with the culture of Japan.

Yamakawa announced that the conversation had ended. The group urged Dharmapala to have dinner with them, but he said it was raining and he had a prior engagement making it difficult to stay overnight. He said he appreciated the good wishes of his hosts and asked to be excused. At this time the headmaster respectfully gave him money. Everyone moved to Fujisawa and went into the restaurant called Toukatei [Peach Flower restaurant]. At the table the group had another conversation.

Dharmapala: Today I felt pleasure that I haven’t had recently. Not only did we visit the spiritual trace of the great respectful person, but also I was able to hear the gospel of Nichiren. I am delighted. There are no words to express my thankfulness for Tanaka sensei’s deep and kind company.

fulsome

From Middle English fulsum, equivalent to ful- +‎ -some. The meaning has evolved from an original positive connotation "abundant" to a neutral "plump" to a negative "overfed". In modern usage, it can take on any of these inflections. See usage note.
The negative sense "offensive, gross; disgusting, sickening" developed secondarily after the 13th century and was influenced by Middle English foul (“foul”).[1] In the 18th century, the word was sometimes even spelled foulsome.[2]
Adjective
1. Offensive to good taste, tactless, overzealous, excessive.
2. Excessively flattering (connoting insincerity).
3. Marked by fullness; abundant, copious.
The fulsome thanks of the war-torn nation lifted our weary spirits.
4. Fully developed; mature.
Her fulsome timbre resonated throughout the hall.
Usage notes
• Common usage tends toward the negative connotation, and using fulsome in the sense of abundant, copious, or mature may lead to confusion without contextual prompts.
Synonyms
• (offensive): gross
• (abundant, copious): profuse
• (excessively flattering): effusive, unctuous

-- fulsome, by wiktionary.org


Tanaka: I am satisfied with the deep path that I could respectfully introduce you, a person from the motherland of Buddhism and a representative of the people of your country, to the spiritual marks of the great teacher who lived and preached in the mappo era [the period after the Buddha had died] and I could also tell you about one drop of doctrine. I am satisfied.

Dharmapala: I very much love Japan, especially when I recall Nichiren Shonin. My sympathy becomes very deep and more and more I respect his virtue.

Tanaka: Mr. Dharmapala, if you have any chance to come to Japan later, I would like to take you to other spiritual places like Minobu-san (Mount Minobu). I want to live in Japan until the end of my life. I expect that my hope can be achieved later in life.

Because you are an Indian person, people try to invite you for lunch or to give a lecture as a curiosity or amusement. I don’t like that. I would like to introduce foreigners to great or interesting places in this country as much as possible. That is not just for me but it is for them. When we speak of “interesting” places in our country we mean the Emperor’s quarters and Nichiren Shonin which cannot be seen in other countries. These two well-known figures have been honored not only by this country alone but also they should provide salvation for the future of the whole world. In other words they are like “the father of a future not yet born.” Nichiren Shonin’s one tiny sound leaves the whole world in his debt, and those wise philosophers who brought civilization to Europe and America should pay back that debt. The poor Westerners are infatuated with material civilization, while the civilization of the spirit has proceeded to the highest level in Japan but those Westerners don’t recognize the true value of Japanese Buddhism.

Dharmapala: In fact foreigners are trying to find peace of mind in incomplete religions such as Christianity. Whenever I see them, I can’t prevent myself from giving them a punch. In the past days I have visited Miss Pease at the Japanese Women’s College. She had an arrogant attitude as if talking to an Indian person in their country. I think that British people are in fact insensitive, stupid people. It’s better to hit them with a wooden stick, and give them a surprise. Someone asks. Is there any heaven in Buddhism like in Christianity? I say that is a stupid question. The heaven in Christianity or other religions is in fact the hell in Buddhism. The man who asked the question is surprised and asks, then what is Buddha? I say that question again is silly. If you would like to avoid stupidity, you should study the Buddha, I answered. In order to answer the question from this stupid person, I have to keep providing stupid answers. I really hate these stupid answers.

There is a skilled metaphor to express the moral delusion of the society. In ancient times there was a big group of lions. One of the big lions had so many offspring. There was one lion cub who was raised by a group of dogs, and he thought he was himself a dog. When the parent lion called this lion cub, he didn’t come, and he became afraid of the parent lion. The parent lion chased after the cub furiously. The lion cub was surprised and cried out, running away. When he was roared without being aware, he heard a lion’s voice [his own]. He came to know that he was a lion in fact after hearing his voice and went back to his parent’s group. I think all people understand the Buddha’s teaching but don’t recognize it, and that this fact is exactly like this story. Surely I think Buddhism is constructive optimism and Christianity is destructive optimism, and the pessimism of brahmana teaching goes astray and is silly, and so on.

[x]
8. Chigaku Tanaka in regalia.

Yamakawa provided this account of Dharmapala’s departure: We forgot, according to Yamakawa, that time was passing during the conversation. The last train leaves at 10:00 p.m. and it will leave soon. So we promised to see each other again and we parted. Tanaka didn’t request anything, he simply took Dharmapala from another line of Buddhism to the spiritual traces [places sacred to Shonin]. Tanaka was able to make a connection between Dharmapala and the law of truth. He corrected Dharmapala’s misunderstanding of Buddhism. And he was able to let Dharmapala know that the core of the great Buddha belongs to Nichiren Shonin’s doctrine, and he spared no effort – in time and cost – and he was willing to do the trip called “after Shonin passed away, the Indian came to the spiritual place for the first time and prayed.” The pure Buddhist event in which the doctrine and the Japanese spirit [kien] were taught [literally, the seed as planted, which is the title of the second section of this article] to the visitor came to end. Dharmapala was satisfied/gratified with Tanaka sensei, and he was very impressed with the Japanese people’s kindness. Mr. Dharmapala’s face was filled with deep emotion because he wanted to make Tanaka sensei his older brother in this teaching. Mr. Dharmapala looked as if he thought Tanaka sensei was “on the left side of things” [thought that Tanaka was the more important person]. The train has come, and they said how said it was to say goodbye. Dharmapala and Mr. Kudo went into the train together. Dharmapala repeated the promise to exchange pictures. We concluded our meeting of this day with the whistle of the train.

Tanaka’s self-confidence derived from more than the idea that Japanese Buddhism was Buddhism fully mature or that Nichiren preached real Buddhism. When he told Dharmapala that Buddhism was not myohorengekyo’s house, but myohorengekyo Buddhism’s house, he made a claim about truths that had grown deeper – Nichirenism outstripped its Indian origins. Under these circumstances, he would hardly want to cast his lot with Dharmapala’s campaign for a united Buddhist world. He gave some credence to Dharmapala’s exposition of center-oriented and cosmo-magical cakravartin kingship for the way it confirmed a parallel formulation in the Nihongi, the ancient source on Japan’s mythic origins and early emperors that was equally center-oriented and inclusive.140 As they were conversing, another long-distance effect occurred in the form of Japanese efforts to make a connection with South Asia. Just before Dharmapala met Tanaka, Okakura Kakuzo had arrived in India to negotiate with the Saivite abbot of Bodh Gaya for a Japanese presence at the place.

_______________

Notes:

1. Guruge, Dharmapala Lipi, 52, and Diary, June 27, 1925.

2. Dharmapala had traveled overseas as early as 1884, if we count his attendance at the annual conventions of the Theosophical Society in South India as overseas. He attended those meetings as a Theosophist, and those trips were not intended to build a united Buddhist world.

3. Kazushige Yamakawa, “Dharmapala and Japan: His First and Second Visits,” Journal of Pali and Buddhist Studies 14 (2000): 46.

4. What we now call Theravada was identified with a geographical reference. The present-day term – despite being an ancient expression – only came into currency as an alternative to Southern Buddhism or Hinayana in 1907. Todd Leroy Perriera, “Whence Theravada: The Modern Genealogy of an Ancient Term,” in How Theravada Is Theravada! Exploring Buddhist Identities, ed. Peter Skilling et al. [Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2012], 550.

5. Yukiko Sumi Barnett, “India in Asia: Okawa Shumei’s Pan-Asian Thought and His Idea of India in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” Journal of the Oxford University History Society 1 (2004): 1-13.

6. To judge from the photograph that Tanaka Chigaku had taken of their visit to Nichiren’s shrine, Dharmapala wore white robes at least one time in his 1902 visit to Japan. My guess is that reverting to white was Dharmapala’s attempt to respond to Japanese sensibilities. Graphic Biography of Chigaku Tanaka (Tokyo: Kokuchukai, 1961), 23.

7. He began after his first visit to Bodh Gaya (Diary, March 6, 1891).


8. “Seeking Sakyamuni: Travel and the Reconstruction of Japanese Buddhism” Journal of Japanese Studies 30, No. 1 (2004): 65-96.

9. He said, for example, “Right now three hundred millions of lives in India are in a diseased state … Though I am from India, I’m still claiming that my country is sick. I’m insulting my ancestors, I’m speaking ill of my brothers. Please sympathize with me for my regrets and resentments toward my country.” “Japan and India,” Chuo Koron 17, no. 6 (June 1902). The article is a translation into Japanese of Dharmapala’s talk at Koyokan Hall in Suraga. On other occasions in Japan, Dharmapala identified himself as Sri Lankan, usually in the cause of emphasizing the oppressed condition of Sinhala Buddhists.

10. “Buddhism in Japan,” in The World’s Parliament of Religions: An Illustrated and Popular Story of the World’s First Parliament of Religions, 2 vols., ed. John Henry Barrows (Chicago: Parliament, 1893), 1:544.

11. Richard Jaffe suggests that Kozen Gunaratana could be considered a cofounder of the Maha Bodhi Society, but he was absent from the founding of the first two branches at Colombo and Calcutta. “Seeking Sakyamuni,” 86.

12. Edwin B. Lee, “Nichiren and Nationalism: The Religious Patriotism of Tanaka Chigaku,” Monumenta Nipponica 30, no. 1 (1975): 19-35. Tanaka did not establish Kokuchukai until 1914, the last and most successful of a series of religious movements he had established.

13. He took the advice and did not become a member of Western Honganji. But later that month he told a representative of Honganji of his interest in becoming a Shinshu missionary (Diary, May 27, 1902). Honganji the sectarian movement (known as Jodo Shinshu) needs to be distinguished from Honganji the headquarters temples of the movement. Minor L. Rogers and Ann T. Rogers, “The Honganji: Guardian of the State (1868-1945),” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 17, no. 1 (1990): 3-28. I will refer to the sect as Jodo Shinshu and the headquarters temple as Honganji, eastern and western, and speak specifically of the two branches as the context requires.

14. Grant Goodman, “Dharmapala in Japan, 1913” Japan Forum 5, no. 2 (1993): 195-202.

15. Barakatullah moved to Japan in 1909 as instructor of Urdu at the School of Foreign Languages and used anti-British feeling in Japan to establish a center for revolutionary work among Indians living there. Arun Coomer Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905-1922: In the Background of International Developments (Patna: Bharati Bhawan, 1971), 66-71.

16. “Count Otani,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 18 (1910): 379-80.

17. “Japan’s Duty to the World,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 21 (1913): 177-82, at 181.

18. “The Danger of ‘White Peril.’”

19. “The Social Gospel of the Buddha,” speech at International Institute of Shanghai, September 18, 1913, published in Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 21 (1913): 221-4.

20. Hansei-kai zasshi, January 1894.

21. “Buddhism: The Threat of Eradication,” in Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, ed. Marius B. Jensen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 144.

22. James Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 313.

23. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, 65.

24. Hiroko Kawanami, “Japanese Nationalism and the Universal Dharma,” in Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia, ed. Ian Harris (London: Pinter, 1999), 120n1.

25. Collcutt, “Buddhism: The Threat of Eradication,” 162.

26. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, 89.

27. See Allan G. Grapard, “Japan’s Ignored Cultural Revolution: The Separation of Shinto and Buddhist Divinities in Meiji (shimbutsu bunri) and a Case Study: Tonomine,” History of Religions 23, no. 3 (1984): 240-65.

28. Collcutt, “Buddhism: The Threat of Eradication,” 163.

29. Rogers and Rogers, “The Honganji: Guardian of the State,” 13.

30. Richard Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 36-7.

31. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, 197-207. Published under the authority of the Transsectarian Cooperative, the five volumes do not represent as much of an attempt to find common ground as do the fourteen principles that Olcott attached to his Buddhist Catechism. Chapters were written by representatives of the several denominations, and the introduction created a measure of unity by recounting Sakyamuni’s life.

32. Richard Jaffe, “Seeking Sakyamuni: Travel and the Reconstruction of Japanese Buddhism” Journal of Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 65-96. Shaku Unsho was an ascetic Shingon reformer who met Edwin Arnold in Tokyo and resolved to purchase Bodh Gaya. Kozen was the monk who traveled with Dharmapala to Bodh Gaya in 1889. Tsunemitsu Konen, Meiji no Bukkyo-sha (Buddhists in the Meiji Period) (Tokyo: Shunju-sha, 1968), 87.

33. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, 182.

34. An April 2, 1887, article in the Japan Weekly Mail spoke of “the strange spectacle of national churches,” emphasizing the Japanese case and drawing the contrast with the “the tendency to union, now everywhere observable in Presbyterian countries,” citing the American Mission joining the Mission of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and then these two groups joining the Dutch, having a common theological hall in Tsukiji, Tokyo.

35. “The Church ‘Official Recognition,’” Japan Weekly Mail, February 9, 1889, 131-2.

36. “Christianity versus Sectarianism,” Japan Weekly Mail, March 9, 1889, 237-8.

37. “Colonel Olcott in Japan,” Japan Weekly Mail, March 16, 1889, 262.

38. “Would Win Converts to Buddhism,” in Houghton, Neely’s History, 157.

39. “Mr. Shaku Soyen and the Brotherhood of Man,” Japan Weekly Mail, March 3, 1894, 276.

40. Ketelaar makes the useful distinction among three forms of unity, which he says Japanese Buddhists sought: transsectarian, transnational, and cosmopolitan. Of Heretics and Martyrs, 177. The writing of Buddhist “histories for drawing together the Buddhists of Asia” – transnational Buddhism in Ketelaar’s terms – “discursively produced a cosmopolitan Buddhism which could not be constrained within Asia because the logic of Buddhism’s spread across Asia was already universalizing or cosmopolitan.”

41. “The President in Ceylon,” supplement, Theosophist, 10 (February 1889): XXVII-XXXIX, at XXXVII.

42. Old Diary Leaves, 4:93.

43. Old Diary Leaves, 4:88.

44. I rely on Noguchi’s account, “The Way That Dharmapala Who Has Passed Away Recently, Came to Japan,” Contemporary Buddhism 106 (1933): 77.

45. Jayawardana, Mage Jivita Kathava, 45.

46. In his diaries Dharmapala says that Takakusu Junjiro was his first correspondent in Japan and “therefore my first friend since the time when he was a student at the Bunga Kurio” (May 10, 1902). Takakusu was the scholar and reformer associated with Nishi Honganji, and through him Dharmapala came to know Sakurai Gicho, who was the founding editor of Young East, the English-language journal established in 1925 to promote pan-Asian Buddhist solidarity. Judith Snodgrass, “Performing Modernity.” Dharmapala was likely to have known of Akamatsu in another way because he had sent one of the two Japanese students to Colombo to learn Pali or Sanskrit. “The President in Ceylon,” XXXVII. The two students lived at the Theosophical Society headquarters, where Dharmapala himself worked and lived.

47. Yamakawa, “Dharmapala and Japan,” 45. Before he arrived, Dharmapala had published four articles in Hansei zasshi. He kept corresponding with the journal during his visit, and articles by him or about him continued sporadically through his second visit to Japan after the World’s Parliament of Religions. The last piece appeared January 1894 (9, no. 1) and concerned his dinner with a chief monk at Koishikawa Dentsuin. During his first visit, he also witnessed an evening of “high revelry, drinking & C[?] Dancing” with priests and laypeople in Kyoto that left a lasting impression (Diary, April 17, 1889).

48. “Temperance,” Hansei-zasshi, March 1888.

49. Although it began as a movement advocating temperance among Buddhist students, Hanseikai influenced a variety of new Buddhist movements. Notto Thelle, Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From Conflict to Dialogue, 1854-1899 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 199-202. In Dharmapala’s time it had some four hundred members. By 1895 the movement had enrolled twenty thousand members (200).

50. The other student, Tokuzawa Chiezo, came to study Sanskrit with Pandit Batuwantudawe, and Dharmapala says little of him even though he must have encountered both students in Colombo and traveled to Bodh Gaya with them.

51. Jaffe mentions in passing another complication: the Zen and Shingon monks represented two primarily monastic denominations as opposed to Jodo Shin Honganji, a nonmonastic sect. “Seeking Sakyamuni,” 80.

52. “The Way That Dharmapala Came to Japan,” 77-82. [size=110]Before he became a teacher at a school owned by the Otani group of the Ibaraki branch of Honganji, Noguchi was a storyteller, whose task was to relate light stories of historical events at Oriental Hall (78). Elsewhere Noguchi described himself as a Buddhist who belonged to no sect. “Would Win Converts to Buddhism,” 156. On his third trip to Japan Dharmapala learned that Noguchi had become a Unitarian (Diary, May 1, 1902).


53. Noguchi Zenshiro, “The Way That Dharmapala Came to Japan,” 77-82.

54. Old Diary Leaves, 4:85-6. Noguchi spoke in Japanese as a prepared English translation was read to his audience. My guess is that by “the religion of India” he meant that of both India and Lanka, the Japanese blurring the distinction in the same way Dharmapala did in his interactions with them.

55. Hochi, February 10, 1889, 2. The article mentioning Olcott’s arrival says nothing of Dharmapala, indicating only that Olcott was met by General Hojo Itoh and a journalist, Suehiro Jukyo, who worked for the newspaper Asano.

56. In fact the Japan Weekly Mail, March 16, 1889, described him as the “representative of a movement that has made so much stir as Esoteric Buddhism” (250). Christian critics in Japan called him an “evangelist of Esoteric Buddhism,” which must have muddled his efforts for sectarian unity. Japan Weekly Mail, April 6, 1889, 233.

57. Old Diary Leaves, 4:102-5.

58. “On the President’s Japan Tour,” Lucifer 4 (1893): 243-48, at 245-46.

59. “On the President’s Japan Tour,” 247.

60. Despite his wanting to establish doctrinal agreement between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, Olcott regarded The Buddhist Catechism as a “perfect compendium of Southern Buddhism.” Old Diary Leaves, 4:255. Agreement was possible, Olcott assumed, because Theravada was historically prior to, and at the core of, Mahayana Buddhism.

61. Old Diary Leaves, 4:111.

62. A Buddhist, “Colonel Olcott in Japan,” Japan Weekly Mail, March 16, 1889, 262.

63. Prothero, The White Buddhist. Prothero says that forming this committee allowed Olcott to resist the financial dominance of any one sect and of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist sect in particular (125). As it turned out, the eight sects only nominally agreed to support Olcott’s project, and the financial backing came from the two Honganjis. See “On the President’s Japan Tour,” 244.

64. Old Diary Leaves, 4:156.

65. Noguchi, “The Way That Dharmapala Came to Japan,” 77.

66. Old Diary Leaves, 4:276. The “Fundamental Buddhistic Principles” came to be published at the end of The Buddhist Catechism, and the careers of the two documents became intertwined.

67. Old Diary Leaves, 4:279.

68. Old Diary Leaves, 4:277. “The Chittagong Maghs … concurred through a special Delegate, acting as proxy for Babu Krishna Chandra Chowdry, the leader of the Maghs, who had requested me by telegraph to appoint one for him.” Olcott then asked a Burmese delegate to represent the Maghs. “A Buddhist Council,” supplement, Theosophist 17 (1891): xxi.

69. Murphet, Hammer on the Mountain, 330.

70. Henry Steel Olcott, “An United Buddhist World,” Theosophist 13 (1892): 239-40, at 40.

71. Old Diary Leaves, 4:428 and 433-36.

72. The Buddhist Catechism (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975), 128-33.

73. Olcott, “An United Buddhist World,” 239. In one of his notebooks, Dharmapala writes of his relationship to Olcott: “In 1889 we were together in Japan. In 1890 Decr. I drafted the fundamental principles of Buddhism, which he approved & then presented as his own compilation!” Sarnath Notebook no. 23. I can find no corroboration for this assertion.

74. Old Diary Leaves, 2:300-301.

75. Old Diary Leaves, 2:300.

76. Olcott, The Buddhist Catechism, 136. By 1975 The Buddhist Catechism had gone through forty-six editions, and the “Fundamental Buddhistic Principles” has been included in versions published by the Theosophical Society as an appendix since shortly after Olcott secured common agreement. There are other print versions of the Catechism that do not contain the “Principles.”

77. Olcott, “Un United Buddhist World,” 240.

78. Olcott also compiled a Shinshu catechism, “A Shin-shu Catechism,” Theosophist 10 (1889): 751-6, 11 (1889): 9-13, and 11 (1889): 89-92, and contemplated doing the same for Zoroastrianism and Islam.

79. Olcott, “An United Buddhist World,” 240.

80. “On the President’s Japan Tour,” 247.

81. Old Diary Leaves, 4:156-7.

82. Old Diary Leaves, 4:99.

83. Gandhi, Affective Communities, chapter 2.

84. Olcott shared an interest in budu ras with Hikkaduve, who wrote of having seen a rainbow over a Buddhist relic mound on a full-moon day. Olcott, “The Buddha Rays at Badulla,” ci-cii. Olcott understood budu ras in the kindred and transidiomatic context of human “auras,” which in turn guided his efforts at mesmeric healing.

85. Dharmapala writes in his diary that he had sent a rendering of the flag to Kyoto in 1888. Diary, May 31, 1920.

86. Old Diary Leaves, 4:148.

87. “The Need of the Times – Creating a Nucleus of Universal Brotherhood,” Ceylon Daily News, November 18, 1999.

88. Emil Burnouf characterized the society’s position in terms borrowed from Olcott: “The Society is foreign to politics …. It formally forbids its members to compromise its strict neutrality in these matters.” “The Theosophical Society,” Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris), July 1888, reprinted in Theosophist 10 (1888): 1-7, at 3.

89. Old Diary Leaves, 4:132.

90. Konen, Meiji no Bukkyo-sha, 212-22. Shaku Soen had been sent to Sri Lanka by Fukuzawa Yukichi, the founder of Keio University, where Shaku Soen was a student, to study Sanskrit and Southern Buddhism with Hikkaduve (213-4).

91. Old Diary Leaves, 4:154. Otani was attended by a group of young people personifying bodhisattvas.

92. Japan Weekly Mail, November 4, 1893, 549, and November 11, 1893, 553.

93. “Would Win Converts to Buddhism,” 156.

94. “To Convert Christendom to Buddhism,” Calcutta National Guardian, reprinted in Theosophist 10 (1889): 244-6, at 246.

95. Richard M. Jaffe, “Buddhist Material Culture, ‘Indianism,’ and the Construction of Pan-Asian Buddhism in Pre-War Japan,” Material Religion 2 (2006): 266-92. Jaffe says that the journal had a Theosophical flavor as well as a Buddhist orientation, 271.

96. Noguchi, “The Way That Dharmapala … Came to Japan,” 78.

97. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 159. Noguchi was a lay member of Honganji, whatever his aspirations for unity. Richard Jaffe, personal communication.

98. Japan Weekly Mail, April 13, 1889, 347-8.

99. Kathleen M. Staggs, “Defend the Nation and Love the Truth: Inoue Enryo and the Revival of Meiji Buddhism,” Monumenta Nipponica 38 (1983): 270.

100. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, 126.

101. Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 162.

102. Jayawardana, Mage Jivita Kathava, 47.

103. Interviewed by the Osaka Mainichi on his 1913 visit, Dharmapala told the reporter that “the Japanese are heartily welcome in India. They will be worshipped as the saviours of India if they come as permanent residents and apply their energies to the development of the country.” Japan Weekly Mail, May 3, 1913, 558.

104. U. B. Dolapilla went to Japan as a Hewavitarne scholar to study in Tokyo. After he passed his exams, he returned to Colombo in 1911. “Journal of the Indo-Japanese Association,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 14 (1911): 123.

105. “New Pilgrimage,” Japan Weekly Mail, June 28, 1902, 701.

106. Jacqueline Stone, “Placing Nichiren in the ‘Big Picture’: Some Ongoing Issues in Scholarship,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 26, nos. 3-4 (1999): 411-17.

107. Shaku Unsho’s interest in South Asia derived from its association with monastic law and celibacy in particular, the more so in a time when Japanese monks were able to marry legitimately. Konen, Meiji no Bukkyo-sha, 84-5. His interest in Vinaya led to the bitter disagreement he was soon to have with Kozen over monastic discipline.

108. Kusunagi Zengi, Shaku Unsho, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Tokukyokai, 1913), 126; and Knonen, Meiji no Bukkyo-sha, 87.

109. Konen, Meiji no Bukkyo-sha, 87-91.

110. On the 1913 visit he spoke of wanting to “start Buddhist work in Japan and establish a Buddhist Mission at Tokyo” (Diary, May 12, 1913). He added, “I also have the desire to be a naturalized Japanese,” although the rest of the diary entries from that visit make no reference to his having plans to remain in Japan.

111. The branch firm Dharmapala was imagining would sell furniture made by the family business, H. Don Carolis, and generate income for his religious work.

112. Jaffe devotes considerable attention to Kokuchukai, focusing on its innovative approach to clerical marriage. Neither Monk nor Layman, 165-88.

113. Lee, “Nichiren and Nationalism,” 20.

114. George J. Tanabe, “Tanaka Chigaku: The Lotus Sutra and the Body Politic,” in The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture, ed. George J. Tanabe and Willa Jane Tanabe (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 193-4.

115. “Realizing This World as the Buddha Land,” in Readings of the Lotus Sutra, ed. Stephen F. Teiser and Stone (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 225. The universal scope and nondual cosmology of the Lotus Sutra duly noted, by the eighth century the Japanese had begun to link the Lotus Sutra to Japan (217-27).

116. Tanabe, “Tanaka Chigaku,” 203.

117. Neither Monk nor Layman, 176.

118. Neither Monk nor Layman, 165.

119. For a treatment of cakravartin/cakkavatti kingship in its South and Southeast Asian context, see S.J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 16-8 and 39-53. Tanaka was also interested in what he thought was Dharmapala’s facility at street preaching. Graphic Biography of Tanaka Chigaku, 114.

120. Frank E. Reynolds, “The Two Wheels of Dhamma: A Study of Early Buddhism,” in The Two Wheels of Dhamma: Essays on the Theravada Tradition in India and Ceylon, ed. Gananath Obeyesekere, Reynolds, and Bardwell L. Smith (Chambersburg, PA: American Academy of Religion, 1972), 6-30.

121. Stone, “Placing Nichiren,” 411-7.

122. Kosei, “Dharmapala’s Activities in Japan,” unpublished paper, 4.

123. Lee, “Nichiren and Nationalism,” 27.

124. Graphic Biography of Chigaku Tanaka, chapter 53.

125. See W.G. Aston, trans., Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 131.

126. Tambiah uses the Pali expression cakkavatti, while predecessors such as Heine Geldern used the Sanskrit cakravartin. The ambiguity reflects the interdigitation of the two languages and the two religions we now call Hinduism and Buddhism.

127. “Dharmapala’s Visit to Japan: After I Preached,” in Tanaka Chigaku’s Autobiography (Tokyo: Shishi Obunko, 1977), 251-60, at 252.

128. Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman, 175.

129. Dharmapala’s diary entry for the day says little about the meeting, noting the visit to the place where Nichiren Shonin first preached and the Daibutsu in Kamakura, and telling Tanaka “that I hope the great Dharma will spread all over India” (June 23, 1902)

130 Chiou Yamakawa, “Dharmapala’s Visit to Japan in Meiji 35,” reprinted in Tanaka Kouho, ed., Recollections of Chigaku Tanaka, November 13, 1988, 546-67.

131. In 1885 Tanaka changed the name of the Rengekai (Lotus Society), which he had founded in 1881, to Rissho Ankokukai, a name that brings to the fore his lifelong concerns, rissho (the establishment of righteousness) and ankoku (the security of the country). Lee, “Nichiren and Nationalism,” 21.

132. Again Dharmapala is identified, if not as an Indian, as a representative of India. His cause was Indian, the Maha Bodhi Society was founded in Calcutta, and his lectures on Bodh Gaya confirmed that association with India.

133. Tanaka meant that such figures would have been drawn to Nichiren because they shared revolutionary programs.

134. In fact he had just met Kawai, the director of the Nichiren Insurance Company with whom Dharmapala organized the rotating credit association for Japanese pilgrims wanting to go to India. Dharmapala heard the assertion about the insurance company’s being at the center of Nihonbashi and Nihonbashi being the center of Tokyo from Mr. Kawai two months earlier (Diary, May 26, 1902). A day after the encounter with Tanaka, Dharmapala again met Kawai and went with him to meet the directors of the steamship line regarding subsidized travel for pilgrims (Diary, June 24, 1902).

135. At their most aggressive, Nichiren Buddhists made a practice of “admonishing” Buddhists of other sects, as well as the emperor. In the present context Tanaka politely asks whether Dharmapala would like to be “admonished.” See Jacqueline I. Stone, “Rebuking the Enemies of the Lotus: Nichiren Exclusivism in Historical Perspective,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 21 nos. 2-3 (June-September 1994): 231-59.

136. I cannot do justice to the Japanese, but the sense here is “steal something in order to acquire the first teaching.”

137. The Buddha under the appellation “Takeguchi” on the model of the Dainichi Buddha.

138. Along the side of the Japanese characters for myoho in the original appears the expression satsudharma, which Dharmapala used earlier to provide an alternative rendering for myoho.

139. I am not sure what to make of Tanaka’s using the Sanskrit expression for blessing.

140. See Aston, Nihongi. Chronicles of Japan, 131.
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