The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (review)

This book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the reciprocal cultural relations between Buddhism and Britain between 1870 and 1920. It mainly focuses on literary works from the writings of Sir Edwin Arnold to D. H. Lawrence, although it touches on early British scholarly work on Buddhism, texts by founders of Victorian hybrid religions, and philosophical texts, too. It paints a portrait of a Victorian elite—its fears, concerns, aspirations, and hopes—by unearthing those aspects of Buddhism that were assimilated, rejected, or ignored by influential Victorian literary works.

Following an introduction that sets the scholarly scene, chapter 1 compares Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879) with Richard Phillips’s The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed (1871)—two book-length poems on the life of the Buddha. This introduces the first theme of the book: the appeal and abhorrence of certain Buddhist concepts to Victorians, primarily karma and Buddhist ethics and (later in the book) not-self, reincarnation, and nirvana. Chapter 2 concerns the representation and assimilation of Buddhism in Victorian hybrid religions, with special care for Theosophy; this theme naturally develops, in chapter 3, into an examination of fictional forms of religious hybridity, especially those represented in the novels of Marie Corelli and H. Rider Haggard. These chapters present the book’s core argument about the selective and distorted representations of Buddhism. Chapter 4 represents a departure, presenting a controversial argument for a new Buddhist reading of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). The fifth chapter concerns the Victorian outlook on nirvana and how it influenced philosophical thinking and, consequently, early-twentieth-century literary works.

Although this is not a theoretically laden book, a postcolonial theoretical background is assumed; Homi Bhaba’s notion of “productive ambivalence” and Robert C. J. Young’s “racial hybridity” are especially important (8, 9). Franklin furthers Philip Almond’s argument in The British Discovery of Buddhism (1988) by showing how the initial encounter between Britain and Buddhism, which indeed contained a great deal of “construction” of Buddhism rather than “discovery” (5), eventually resulted in the “counter invasion” of Britain (7), a process that yielded hybrid cultural forms that continue to develop today.

Systematic scholarly reading of many different texts compensates for the lack of long discussions of postcolonial theory. The comparison of The Light of Asia with The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed aims to explain why the former was tremendously successful while the latter was not. The question of what appealed to Victorian authors informs the rest of the book. By carefully reading scholarly resources that were available to nineteenth-century authors, Franklin reconstructs the process by which distortions have gradually been introduced into textual representations of Buddhism. In the case of hybrid religions and their literary offspring this was often intentional, and illustrates a Victorian reluctance to comply with certain aspects of Buddhism that challenged Western notions of free will and individuality. Franklin makes an important contribution to the study of the evolution of modern selfhood by identifying these points of conflict between Western Protestant-inspired individuality and Buddhist non-self philosophy. It also contributes to our understanding of colonial cross-cultural exchange by pointing to systematic misrepresentations of Buddhism that were instrumental in its dissemination into popular culture (86).

The first three chapters offer a sophisticated but straightforward historical analysis of literary texts. The fourth, however, is different methodologically: in it Franklin performs not just an analysis, but a Buddhist analysis of Kipling’s Kim. He argues that not reading Kim “from a perspective informed by knowledge of Buddhism” is as problematic as reading Paradise Lost (1667) without inquiring into its relations with the Bible, the Reformation, and the Restoration (130). More provocatively yet, Franklin also suggests that previous studies of the novel were no less than reproductions of “dualistic thinking of imperialism” (173). The attempt to correct this is perhaps the most controversial suggestion of the book. Unfortunately...