Part 5 of 5
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Notes:1. Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7.
2. To be more precise, in the 1920s Japanese Buddhists composed a hymn based on The Light of Asia, the title of which translates as “the sun rises” or “sunrise comes.” Judith Snodgrass, “Performing Modernity: The Lumbini Project, Tokyo 1925,” Journal of Religiouis History 33, no. 2 (2009): 133-48.
3. Immanuel Kant, “Towards Perpetual Peace,” especially 105-8, and “The Metaphysics of Morals,” 132-6, in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
4. Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” October 61 (1992): 84.
5. “The Late Ven. Dharmmapala,” Ceylon Daily News, May 15, 1933.
6. A.S. Fernando, “Anagarika Dedicated His Life to Serve Entire Mankind,” Sunday Observer, June 2, 1991.
7. “Six Processions for Dharmapala Meeting Today,” Ceylon Observer, September 13, 1964; “Anagarika Dharmapala Remembered,” Ceylon Daily News, September 29, 1979; Kahawatte Siri Sumedha, Anagarika Dharmapala: A Glorious Life Dedicated to the Cause of Buddhism (Varanasi: Maha Bodhi Society of India, 1999), 36.
8. “Anagarika Would Doubt Sincerity of Those Who Praise Him,” Ceylon Daily News, September 19, 1986.
9. Gunadasa Amerasekera, Dharmapala Marksvadida? (Colombo: M.D. Gunasena, 1980), 2. Amerasekera’s target is the Catholic historian G.C. Mendis.
10. “Dharmapala and the National Identity,” Divaina, September 17, 1993.
11. “Dharmapala Battled His Sexual Urges,” Sunday Observer, September 20, 1998.
12. “MP Seeks Probe over Defamation of Anagarika,” Sunday Times, October 4, 1998.
13. K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), 377.
14. C.A. Chandraprema, “The J.V.P. and Gunadasa Amarasekera: Two Sinhala Buddhist Tendencies,” Lanka Guardian 11 (1988): 15 and 24 at 15.
15. Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 207-18.
16. See, for instance, S.J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 131; and H.L. Seneviratne, The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
17. In 1930 Dharmapala transferred eleven pieces of property to the Anagarika Dharmapala Trust. Sinha Ratnatunga, They Turned the Tide: the 100 Year History of the Maha Bodhi Society of Sri Lanka (Colombo: Government Press, 1991), 134.
18. Mark Frost, “’Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, 1870-1920,” Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002): 937-67.
19. “Anagarika Dharmapala,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society and the United Buddhist World 14 (1906): 126. At the end of his 1892 diary, Dharmapala made a list of “magic lantern slides” he showed in village settings. The majority show the Bodh Gaya temple, but he also screened images of Hindu ascetics, a funeral pyre, Indian convicts, a Bengali wedding ceremony, an Indian darbar (council), the Jain temple in Calcutta, and Lord Elgin and his suite.
20. Sheldon Pollock, “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (1993): 261-97.
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 40.
22.
Gombrich has argued against calling the premodern Buddhist world a social formation, even a notional one. His view is that Buddhism’s lack of interest in civilizational matters and disregard for exclusive allegiance meant that there was no Buddhist world save what little coherence the monkhood as a transcontinental institution provided. “The Buddhist Way,” in The World of Buddhism, ed. Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 9-14. An account of Buddhism that neither hypostasizes the tradition nor reduces it to what the Buddha taught can be found in Frank E. Reynolds and Charles Hallisey, “Buddhism,” in Encyclopedia of Reglion, ed. Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2005), 1087-1101.
I prefer to think of early Buddhism as a social formation held together by civilizational practices, such as the importance of Asokan kingship, as well as traffic in relics, ordination traditions, monks, texts, and artistic forms. ASHOKA, ARCHITECT OF BUDDHIST HELLSSince the Buddha didn’t even endorse the idea of the afterlife, someone else must have adapted the Vedic hells to the Buddhist idiom. The Buddha’s sermons were not written down during his lifetime, and were maintained in an oral tradition for hundreds of years, so we can’t establish precisely when the hells were injected into Buddhist doctrine. However, we can identify the time period when they appeared in Buddhist literature.
Buddhist writings began to proliferate during the rule of the Indian King Ashoka, a major Buddhist historical figure. Although reverenced by the Buddhist hierarchy because of his conversion to Buddhism and adoption of the faith as his state religion, Ashoka killed all three of his brothers, slaughtered hundreds of thousands to establish the Mauryan Empire, and ruled the Indian subcontinent with an iron hand from 273 to 232 BCE. Although Buddha had ordered that his teachings not be written down, Ashoka put up many stone pillars with admonitions reflecting his Buddhist beliefs, and these pillars are some of the first "Buddhist writings." According to Buddhist tradition, the Third Buddhist Council was conducted under Ashoka’s auspices, in the seventeenth year of his reign. There were many conflicting doctrines contending for legitimacy at the Council, and various factions appealed to Ashoka to give royal approval to their doctrines. The factions that received Ashoka’s endorsement would also have accommodated his doctrinal predilections.
Hell first appears in Buddhist literature in the Ashokan era, in a compilation of Buddhist tales entitled the Mahavastu, in which one of Buddha's disciples, Maugdalayana, makes a trip to hell to fetch his mother, and returns to tell the tale. The Mahavastu includes the "Jataka Tales," that ostensibly tell the story of the Buddha's past lives, and present him as a transcendent being with supernatural powers who merely pretended to suffer from human vulnerabilities for the edification of ordinary humans. Thus the Mahavastu upends the revolutionary story that Buddha was a man who rejected wealth and power as the son of a king, and wandered in the jungle, meditating in solitude until he mastered his fate through the diligent study of his own mind. The Buddha of the Mahavastu is presented as an inherently divine being, a spiritual king, who descended to the earthly plane like a standard Hindu deity. The Mahavastu is thus the first of an innumerable sequence of Buddhist books that fit the Buddha into a standard Hindu cosmo-conception, and inject his life story with mystagoguery. The Mahavastu is written in Buddhist Sanskrit, not Pali, the language of the original Buddhist Scriptures, and thus likely includes interpolations made to reach a rapprochement with Hinduism.[41] Such writings can be seen as a corruption and concealment of the true doctrine that remake Gautama Buddha in the image of a universal monarch, depriving him of his inspiring character as a humble, egalitarian renunciate.
Before he converted to Buddhism, Ashoka was obsessed with the tortures of hell, and even built a torture den designed to look like a beautiful palace that would lure unsuspecting visitors to enter in search of pleasure. His chief torturer, Girika, swore an oath to kill every person who entered the torture palace, that history has named “Ashoka’s Hell.” Legend says that Girkia convinced Ashoka to “to design the torture chamber based on the suffering endured by people reborn in Buddhist hell,” and “was so terrifying, that Emperor Ashoka was thought to have visited hell so that he could perfect its evil design.”[42] When Girika failed in his efforts to boil a Buddhist saint alive, Ashoka put Girika to death, demolished the torture palace, and converted to Buddhism. This legend is often paired with the story that Ashoka repented of warfare after killing 350,000 people while conquering the kingdom of Kalinga; thus, there is some ambiguity about which event prompted Ashoka to convert. In any event, historians concur that after he conquered Kalinga, although he did not abandon warfare altogether, Ashoka reduced the frequency and brutality of his wars, and encouraged the growth of the Buddhist Sangha. As a Buddhist king, Ashoka realized that threatening people with hellfire could be more effective than actually killing them. As the Tao Teh Ching observes, "If the people no longer fear death, it is useless to threaten them with death."[43] People who do not fear death are the ultimate danger to authority, as Ashoka had learned in the conquest of Kalinga, where the people sacrificed their lives in great numbers to resist his domination.
Ashoka's doctrinal servants were enthusiastic purveyors of hell, and placed strong emphasis on the idea that the disembodied soul, after death, cannot actually die. Thus, in a clever innovation that makes this point, the first Buddhist hell is called "Alive Again!", where victims are executed by horrendous devices, and revived again to suffer the same fate,
ad infinitum.-- 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
23. I have made this argument more fully in The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
24. “The Discourse of Civilization and Decolonization,” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 2.
25. See Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 27.
26. In its original form, the expression appeared in German, referring to Christianity as the “uniquely universal” religion of Christ. As the taxonomic and pluralistic expression “world religions” developed, this Christian monopolistic use of the term persisted. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 23.
27. Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 20.
28. Walter R. Houghton, ed., Neely’s History of the Parliament of Religions and Religious Congresses at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago: F.T. Neely, 1893), 28.
29.
Gombrich writes that Dharmapala was perhaps the first Buddhist to learn meditation from a text. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London: Routledge, 1988), 189. It is true that he learned how to embody the chela role (the student of a Tibetan mahatma) from reading Blavatsky’s “Chelas and Lay Chelas” (Theosophist, July 1882), and how to be a vegetarian from reading a vegetarian cookbook (Diary, August 12, 1925). Meditation, as it happened, he learned in person during the annual convention of the Theosophical Society in Adyar. As his diaries have it, “Woke at 3 a.m. & sat for a while in meditation …. Bro. S. Ramasamier of Chela fame came in the evening…. Ramasamier showed me how to sit in ‘Siddhasana.’ I saw at Mihintale two years ago a marble statue of the Buddha sitting in this posture. You sit in such a way as to shut the passages of the anus and the penis” (January 2, 1891). At the same meeting he “had a few instructions on Dhyana Bhavana from my Burmese friend” (January 9, 1891). The manual on dhyana meditation – to which Gombrich refers – he did not locate until 1893. So if we are to make any claim here, we might say that Dharmapala was the first Buddhist to learn meditation from Theosophists.30. Ernest Eitel, Buddhism: Its Historical, Theoretical and Popular Aspects (London: Trubner, 1873), 64.
31. Edwin Arnold, The Light o fAsia; or, The Great Renunciation: The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (New York: A. L. Burt, 1879); The Diaries of Anagarika Dharmapala, typescript, 36 vols., Maha Bodhi Society, Colombo, Sri Lanka, hereafter cited parenthetically as “Diary” followed by specific dates. For more information about the form and content of the Diaries, see appendix 1.
32.
His disdain for conversion derived from his encounter with Christian teachers in the missionary schools he attended as a boy. There was a second constraint that must have occurred to him. A layperson such as himself could not administer the Three Refuges to anyone, and thus he could not convert anyone. Olcott traveled in the West with a heterodox, if official, warrant in the form of a certificate from Hikkaduve Sumangala and other leading monks, which authorized him to “register interested people” as Buddhists. C.V. Agarwal, The Buddhist and Theosophical Movements, 1873-2001 (Calcutta: Maha Bodhi Society of India, 2001). Olcott’s document, dated February 2, 1884, is reprinted as the endpaper of the book.
33. Philip Almond provides a persuasive account of the affinity between Buddhism and the Victorian imagination in The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
34. Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 17.
35. Becoming Imperial Citizens, 17.
36. Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 209.
37. Becoming imperial Citizens, 193.
38. Becoming Imperial Citizens, 53.
39. British National Archives, CO/54/768/33250, September 24, 1913.
40. Ibid., CO/54/768/33250, 1913.
41. Ibid., CO/54/791/39771, August 28, 1915.
42. Ibid., CO/54/791/35095, July 30, 1915.
43. “Islam in Japan,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 19 (1911): 28-30, at 29.
44. “1900 June at Chittagong. I had written an article for the Bauddhaya condemning the habits of the European women. This gave offense to the European community. This was before the war. The whole European community rose up in arms, and the Govt. of Ceylon prosecuted the printer of the paper and he was sentenced to 3 months imprisonment. My mother advised me not to return to Ceylon for 2 years.” The Notebooks of Anagarika Dharmapala, manuscript, 58 vols., Dharmapala Museum, Sarnath, India. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Sarnath Notebook followed by notebook number. For more information about the form and content of the Notebooks, see Appendix 1.
45.
The meaning of Dharmapala’s reference to “the Holy Ones” is unclear. At first glance, the referent is obvious – the Buddhist monkhood – but he avoids using “sangha,” the expression that conventionally follows the other two parts of the Triple Refuge. He might be referring to the Theosophical mahatmas, Buddhist adepts residing in the Himalayas, but I suspect he is overcoding the Buddhist monastic role in Theosophical terms.46. Dharmapala’s critic turned out to be a kinsman of Lloyd George, a connection that led to a friendship between a Welsh train conductor and a Buddhist ascetic. The two always greeted one another in later years when they ran into one another on the Kandy line.
47. In Ananda Guruge, ed., Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala (1965; repr., Colombo: Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1991), 59. When Dharmapala inaugurated Buddhist temples in Calcutta and Sarnath, he invited the most senior British officials and used the occasion to invoke his devotion to the Crown. But he also did so on occasions where his expressions of loyalty were hardly required by the event. He established his short-lived newspaper the Ceylon Nation in 1911, for example, to commemorate the coronation of King George V. The paper was intended as a vehicle for Sinhalese Buddhists to express their grievances to British authorities. “The Ceylon Nation,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society, 10 (1912): 30.
48. C. A. Hewavitarne, “An Appeal,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society, September 21, 1913, 197. Hewavitarne notes that spreading the Dhamma in England would draw “Ceylon closer to the heart of the Empire.”
49. E.L. R. Thornton, “God Save the King,” Hindu, quoted in “A Notable Speech,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 20 (1912): 22-3, at 23.
50. It was only with the coming of the British Commonwealth that the British began to think that the status of imperial subject was inadequate to the complexity of people in the Commonwealth. To that extent, Dharmapala’s lifetime spanned the same period when the interaction of universalism and particularism came to the fore, and the structure of the empire played a part in producing the category “citizen.”
51. The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual Traditionalism or Historicism?, trans. Diarmid Cammel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 153-77.
52. “The Crisis of French Universalism,” Yale French Studies 100 (2001): 45n4.
53. Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 1, no. 1 (1892): 1-2.
54. Olcott, Old Diary Leaves: The True Story of the Theosophical Society, 6 vols. (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1895-1935), 2:301.
55. “Diary Leaves of the Buddhist Representative to the World’s Parliament of Religions,” in The Maha Bodhi Centenary Volume, 1891-1991, ed. M. Wipulasara (Calcutta: Maha Bodhi Society, 1991), 72-5, at 73.
56. The principles, rules, and bylaws of the society itself showed the dual commitment, as did the society’s name, The Theosophical Society, or Universal Brotherhood. The first principle was “The Theosophical Society is formed upon the basis of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity.” Theosophist 1 (1880): 179-80, at 179.
57. “What is Buddhism?,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 36 (1928): 502-12, at 510.
58. Old Diary Leaves, 2:301. Olcott was a Buddhist, but a white Buddhist, and embodying those two identities allowed him to sliop out of one identity and into the other. David Karunaratne’s account of Dharmapala, for instance, critique’s Olcott’s universalism, arguing that Sinhalas doubted his “Buddhist sincerity because he married the daughter of a Christian father and looked after Christian children. He became a Buddhist but he treated all religions as one religion. Therefore it is well-known that Colonel Olcott was not sufficiently Buddhist.” Anagarika Dharmapala (Colombo: M.D. Gunasena, 1965), 66-7.
59.
Dharmapala’s universalism followed logically from his commitment to the mahatmas, whose renunciation and spiritual advancement led them to transcend nation, ethnicity, and other social identities. “They are, then a very small number of highly intelligent men belonging not to any one nation but to the world as a whole.” Anagarika Dharmapala, “The Great White Brotherhood,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 18 (1910): 362-3, at 363.60. “General Report of the Sixteenth Convention and Anniversary of the Theosophical Society,” supplement, Theosophist 13 (1892): 1-42, at 2.
61. “Past General Secretaries after Anagarika Dharmapala,” in Wipulasara, Maha Bodhi Centenary Volume, 56-7.
62. These Arakanese Buddhists celebrated Vesak early on with the Maha Bodhi Society, Maha Bodhi Society events were sometimes held at their vihara, and the Arakanese helped Dharmapala rent his quarters at 2 Creek Road (Diary, December 13, 1917). The two groups also enjoyed the patronage of the same elite Bengalis. Hemendu B. Chowdhury, Jagajjyoti Kirpasaran Mahathera 125 Birth Anniversary Volume (Calcutta: Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha, 1990). Why there was not more solidarity between the two groups is unclear, although differences of class are hard to overlook. Dharmapala had misgivings about Kripasaran, whom he described as “illiterate but respected” (Sarnath Notebook no. 23).
63. I have discovered after the fact that I have been thinking about Dharmapala’s several Buddhisms in a way that parallels Anne Blackburn’s approach to Hikkaduve Sumangala. I thank her for articulating the point better than I could. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
64. In 1897 Dharmapala responded to an article by a Protestant minister who dismissed Buddhism by saying that it was “one thing in Ceylon, quite another in Tibet, and still another in China and Japan.” Dharmapala’s response was to insist that all Buddhists shared the same basic beliefs, while admitting everyday differences in Buddhist practice. “Is There More Than One Buddhism?,” Open Court 2, (1897): 82.
65. Dharmapala gave his first lecture, “Buddhism in Its Relationship to Hinduism,” in Calcutta at the Albert Hall on October 25, 1891.
66. “The Hindu Maha Sabha,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, reprinted in Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 31 (1923): 354-6.
67. “Buddhism and Christianity,” in Houghton, Neely’s History, 803.
68.
Part of Gombrich’s rationale for saying that Dharmapala practiced a “Protestant Buddhism” is based on an argument for religious egalitarianism: “Dharmapala accepted the Western Protestant view of religion as one and the same for everybody.” Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London: Routledge, 1988), 192.
69. “The Maha Bodhi Society,” Ceylon Daily News, December 29, 1926.
70. Don Carolis put great confidence in astrology, and when he examined his son’s horoscope, Dharmapala noted that “within my hearing he said that my stars were bad and that I could therefore make no progress in my studies. This was balm to me” (“My Autobiography,” Sarnath Notebook no. 53). In a later passage he writes of his father, “He did not care to have me follow him to learn his business, and he had a clerk who did all correspondence.” I suspect Don Carolis discovered that his son was a hatara Kendra paluvima kenek, having a horoscope that destines a man to become either a king or a beggar. In the local context what recommends a life of renunciation is the practical impossibility of becoming a king and the undesirability of becoming a beggar.
71. Jack P. Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2-8.
72. A Free Though Conquering People: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (London: Ashgate, 2003).
73. Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Gombrich and Obeyesekere characterize Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), as itself a history of Protestant Buddhism, 6. Malalgoda applies the Protestant Buddhism notion to circumstances that predate Olcott’s arrival, characterizing the Buddhist resistance more as an indigenous response to Christian missionizing than a product of Theosophical intervention, 246.
74. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7-16, at 13.
75. When he visited in the fifth century, Faxian saw three monasteries at Bodh Gaya, one of which was the Sinhala monastery. In the seventh century Xuanzang found only the Sinhala monastery, and he says the monks there were studying the “Great Vehicle.” Li Rongxi, The Life of Hsuan-Tsang: The Tripitaka-Master of the Great Tzu En Monastery (Beijingt: Chinese Buddhist Association, 1993). When the Tibetan Dharmasvamin visited just before the place was abandoned by Buddhists, one of the last remaining monks at Bodh Gaya was Sinhala. But it is unclear whether “Sinhala” carries an ethnic referent or an ideological one, as in the Buddhism spread from the island to Burma and Thailand in medieval times.
76. Frank J. Karpiel, “Theosophy, Culture, and Politics in Honolulu, 1890-1920,” Hawaiian Journal of History 30 (1996): 177-89.
77.
For all of its emphasis on fostering Buddhism and Sinhala causes, Dharmapala’s newspaper, the Bauddhaya, gave editorial support to both Ponnambalam Ramanathan in the first legislative council election, and E.W. Perera, a Catholic, who led the Lankan delegation in talks in London about independence. Ratnatunga, The Turned the Tide, 94.
78. A newspaper account describing Dharmapala as a curious blend of the prophet Jeremiah and Jonathan Swift suggests why Buddhists and non-Buddhists found him hard to ignore. “A Colombo Diary,” Ceylon Daily News, January 13, 1927.
79. The Work of Kings, 96-117, at 103, quoting Hendiyagala Silaratana, Vinnanaya (Kuliyapitiya: Sastrodaya Press, n.d.), 289, 310.
80. Not looking for evidence beyond Guruge has led to inferences that have no warrant. Consider Combrich’s saying that Dharmapala left Colombo because his political activities had attracted official attention. Theravada Buddhism, 188. In 1892 he left for Calcutta to continue his campaign for Bodh Gaya, not because his militancy had gotten him into trouble with colonial officials. Trouble came some two decades later. After he returned to Calcutta in 1914, his mother wrote him that he should not come home because she had heard rumors of official displeasure. But he was not “exiled” in 1915. Ibid.
81. Dharmapala’s comment links his people to low birth by making a literary reference to low status that I suspect he learned from the Mahavamsa.
82. A Sincere Buddhist, “Mr. Dharmapala and His Work,” Ceylon Daily News, December 9, 1926.
83. A History of Sri Lanka, 377. In a chapter on the nationalist movement in the early twentieth century, de Silva suggests that the failure of the nationalist movement to influence “the formal political activities of the elite at this time” was due to Dharmapala’s “being out of the island for considerable amounts of time.” “The Reform and Nationalist Movements in the Early Twentieth Century,” in University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, vol. 3 (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries, 1973), 384. De Silva finds another source of the failure of nationalist movement in Dharmapala’s failure to act on “clearly defined political objectives” because he has so many other interests. I would say that these other interests need to be understood in the context of personal reform preceding social reform. De Silva’s assertion that Dharmapala was the “most militant” of the nationalists needs more substantive reconsideration. It implies that Dharmapala, advocating svaraj, fell out with other nationalists because he was more radical than they were. His language was more radical, but the change he advocated understood svaraj as personal reform, and his political goals were much the same as other nationalists. What separated Dharmapala from his colleagues is what separated Gandhi from Nehru – his politics were driven by a spiritual agenda not shared by others.
84.
The diaries track Dharmapala’s relationship with Gandi over several decades with comments on Gandhi’s political strategies, public presence, and minimal knowledge of Buddhism and temporizing support for the Bodh Gaya cause. On one occasion Gandhi spoke on Buddhism at the temple Dharmapala built in Calcutta.85. A History of Sri Lanka, 378.
86. Gananath Obeyesekere, “Personal Identity and Cultural Crisis: The Case of Anagarika Dharmapala of Sri Lanka,” in The Biographical Process: Studies in the History and Psychology of Religion, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Donald Capps (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 221-52, at 244.
87. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 246, 260-2.
88. “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon,” 58-78.
89.
As John Holt points out, Protestant Buddhism in its first iteration, that is, Obeyesekere’s “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon,” Modern Ceylon Studies 1 (1970): 43-63, represented a protest against Christianity, and in Gombrich and Obeyesekere’s 1988 Buddhism Transformed, it became a protest against traditional Buddhism. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” Religious Studies Review 17, no. 4 (1991): 309.
90. Obeyesekere, “On Buddhist Identity in Sri Lanka,” in Ethnic Identity Creation, Conflict, and Accommodation, ed. Lola Romanucci-Ross and George A. De Vos, 3rd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1993), 222-47, originally published in Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, 202-40.
91. Buddhism Transformed, 215-6.
92. Theravada Buddhism, 192.
93.
At the Paris Congress of Orientalists in 1897, Dharmapala told his audience: “Buddhism has two aspects – one for the simpleminded, the other for the philosopher …. Worship was intended for the simple people.” (Diary, September 14, 1897).94. Harischandra adopted the robes of a tapasa when he took on the brahmacarya role on January 1, 1898. Praneeth Abhayasundere, Brahmachari Walisinge Harischandra (Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, 2000), 35.
Dharmapala said Harischandra was “the only individual who follows my ideas.” Ibid., 20. Harischandra called himself an anagarika, and the only other anagarika was Devapriya. He did not exactly choose that role, having been brought up by Dharmapala to follow him as leader of the Maha Bodhi Society.95. “Why Not Establish an Anagarika Order of Brothers?,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 33 (1925): 181-2.
96. Ibid., 181.
97. Bhikkhu Devamitta Dhammapala, “Reminiscences of My Early Life,” Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 41 (1933): 151-62, at 155.
98. Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism, 186.
99. Buddhism Transformed, 8, 6.
100. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900, 246.
101. Gombrich has him in white robes. Theravada Buddhism, 190.
On July 12, 1892, Dharmapala was sent to Darjeeling by Hikkaduve Sumangala to present a relic and leaves from the Bodh Gaya bo tree to Tibetan lamas. At a procession, Dharmapala rode “on a dark bay horse, dressed in the orange colored garment of the order of Upasakas.” F.H. Muller, “Meeting at Darjeeling,” supplement, Theosophist 13 (1892): lxxxvii-lxxxviii, at lxxxvii. I’d call that foray a trial and locate the decisive change as coming in 1895.
102. “In my 4th year, my left [crossed out] right leg was permanently injured and I could not [crossed out] which debarred me from entering the order of Bhikkhus. Had not this defect been a hindrance I would have become a Bhikkhu. Some bad karma I might have done in the past or it might have been due to neglect of my nurse.” (Sarnath Notebook no. 4). Elsewhere he speaks of his right leg in particular – “But for my lameness in my right leg I would have joined the order” (Diary, January 31, 1919) – or attributes the injury to a “paralytic stroke” (Diary, September 17, 1926).
103. “Message of the Buddha,” in Wipulasara, Maha Bodhi Centenary Volume, 76-83, at 81.
104. See, for instance, Torkel Brekke, Makers of Modern Indian Religion in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 68.
105. Dharmapala made another reference to Khantivada in his diary: “I do no harm to anybody but there are many who work agst: me. Khantivada was patience personified, but his holy body was hacked to death by a cruel king” (January 4, 1927).
106. L.S. Cousins, “Aspects of Esoteric Southern Buddhism,” in Indian Insights: Buddhism, Brahmanism and Bhakti: Papers from the Annual
Spalding Symposium on Indian Religion, ed. Peter Connolly and Sue Hamilton (London: Luzac Oriental, 1997), 185-207. The society in Lanka distributed five thousand copies of the “Dhammapala Jataka” to Theosophical Schools. C.P. Goonewardene, “Report on the Buddhist Work of the Theosophical Soc’y,” supplement, Theosophist 10 (1889), 20-3 at 22. The “Dhamapala Jataka” itself appeared in Theosophist 10 (1888): 100-5. The story centers on a young boy of the Dhammapala lineage who is reported to have died under tragic circumstances. His family is completely nonplussed by the news, responding that they know the boy has not died because no Dhammapala dies young. Their lineage is so righteous that they invariably enjoy long lives. What might have recommended the story of Dhammapala to Dharmapala is the conventional closing in which the Buddha says, “And the characters of this story are we ourselves; the Brahman Dhammapala is now King Suddhodana, the preacher is Sari Putra… and the Prince Dhammapala is I Myself” (105). The story and the five thousand books both speak of Dhammapala, unlike Dharmapala’s own spelling. Although it was not consistent, the journal itself referred to him as Dhammapala (when he was going by Dharmapala). See, for example, “Brother Dhammapala,” supplement, Theosophist 10 (1889), cxix.
107. Women under the Bo Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Chambridge University Press, 1899), 55-6.
108. Dharmapala gave a title to this account of bhikkhu life and signed it, and eventually published it.
109. Bartholomeusz does not speak of Dharmapala’s disability on his early interest in becoming a monk. She mentions the episode when he sought ordination in 1899 and his taking ordination in the 1930s (Women under the Bo Tree, 55-6) but attributes no significance to either.
110. When he received ordination in 1933, he took the name Dhammapala. The transition from “Dharmapala” to “Dhammapala” reflects his recognition that the Pali form of his name was more appropriate.
111. I read that diary entry in 1930 as saying that being a samanera in 1906 would have impeded his sasana work, even if the thrust of the comment falls on 1930 when he was ready to step aside from involvement in the world. Whether he became a samanera in 1906 or remained a brahmacarya, the key was celibacy for both his spiritual development and social reform.
112. The Work of Kings, 110n40.
113. Bartholomeusz, Women under the Bo Tree, 55.
114. Buddhism Transformed, 312.
115. The Pali tradition assumes that there were twenty-five previous Buddhas in the infinite past. When the hjistorical Buddha met the previous Buddha countless lifetimes before his incarnation as Gautama, he made a vow to become a Buddha. The vivarana functions as a warrant, given by the incumbent Buddha, that the vow will be realized. See I.B. Horner, Buddhavamsa (London: Pali Text Society, 1975); and Jan Nattier, “The Meanings of the Maitreya Myth: A Typological Analysis,” in Maitreya, the Future Buddha, ed. Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 23-47. Arhats do not receive a warrant, but the texts equivocate on this point. Even when an arhat achieves nirvana in a flash, he has seen the Buddha in a previous life. Otherwise he would not have known the Dhamma. See Peter Masefield, Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1995). I think it is fair to say that Dharmapala knew only the tradition that has only future Buddhas meeting and receiving a warrant from the Buddha.
116. Before his public career reached that forty-five-year point, Dharmapala worried that his health problems would keep him from matching that figure, noting, “If I live 18 years more, I would have worked 45 years” (Diary, December 20, 1917). By 1930 he was writing that he had lived the life of an anagarika for forty-five years (Diary, September 26, 1930). He also made calculations relative to how old his reincarnated self would be at the Buddha Jayanti, assuming he were to die presently: “If I die in 1932, I will be 15 in 1956” (Diary, May 11, 1930).
117. Lakshman Jayawardana, ed., Mage Jivita Kathava (Colombo: Dayawansa Jayakody, 2000), chapter 10.
118. “Personal Identity and Cultural Crisis,” 230-1.
119. “Personal Identity and Cultural Crisis,” 231. Obeyesekere says that Dharmapala was at least “latently” homosexual because of his close identification with his mother. He was not close to his mother and struggled with heterosexual urges virtually to the end of his life.
120. “Writing to Devapriya with Fatherly Love,” in Ananda W.P. Guruge, ed., Dharmapala Lipi (Anagarika Dharmapala ge Sinhala Lipi Sangrahayaki) (Colombo: Government Press, 1965), 415.
121. In Gombrich’s account, “By devoting his life to Buddhism Dharmapala meant not merely, in fact not primarily, seeking his own salvation, but promoting the Sasana, and indeed the general welfare of Buddhists as he saw it.” Theravada Buddhism, 190.
122. That choice can be interpreted in numerous ways -– as evidence of his seeing himself without connection to any one place in Sri Lanka, disdain for Sri Lanka, an expression of his universalism, his sense of mission, or a reference to the monk Devamitta who was going to give him ordination in 1906.