The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire

Introduction

Introduction In the family temple [of the magistrate of Kolang, Tibet], in addition to the usual life-size images of Buddha and the Triad, there was a female divinity, carved at Jallandhur in India, copied from a statue representing Queen Victoria in her younger days—a very fitting possession for the highest government official in Lahul. —ISABELLA BIRD BISHOP, Among the Tibetans (1894) Should I be considered too bold if I were to go one step farther and suggest that there are really some points in the philosophy of the East, and especially of India, which are fated sooner or later to find their place in, and to exercise a not inconsiderable influence over, the thought of Western nations? —T. W. RHYS DAVIDS, The History and Literature of Buddhism (1896) The European “Discovery” of Buddhism It would not be inaccurate to say that Buddhism did not exist in the West until near the beginning of the Victorian period (1837–1901), despite the fact that it had existed for over 2,400 years and was being practiced at that moment by millions of people throughout Southeast Asia, Tibet, China, and Japan. Prior to the early nineteenth century, few Europeans had heard of Buddhism at all, and the few who had heard of it pictured the Buddha as a minor Hindu deity or a celestial sun god in the pantheon of the “exotic Orient.” Of course, Eastern thought long had trickled back toward the seats of Western empires along the same routes used for silk, tea, and opium, but serious engagement with that 2 ~ The Lotus and the Lion thought only began in the late eighteenth century with the first translations of the Bhagavad-Gita into French, German, and English.1 Systematic study of Eastern sacred texts did not begin in Europe until around the 1820s, when collection and translation of ancient Buddhist manuscripts commenced. One of the earliest Western studies to focus exclusively on Buddhism was Edward Upham ’s The History and Doctrine of Buddhism, published in 1829. Only in subsequent decades did “the term ‘Buddha’ (‘Buddoo’, ‘Bouddha’, ‘Boudhou’, etc.)” begin to “gain currency” in common English usage (Almond 7). As late as the 1860s, but rapidly at that point, Buddhism “hit” Europe in general and England in particular, becoming a widespread topic both in the scholarly and popular literatures that peaked in London’s “Buddhism-steeped Nineties” (Caracciolo 30). Yet, despite this relatively recent dawning of awareness of Buddhism, by the end of the twentieth century there were an estimated 150,000 professed Buddhists in England practicing in 370 different groups representing lineages from Japan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Vietnam, among others (Coleman 19, 20). To understand why, according to the British census, Buddhism was second only to Christianity as the most widely observed religion in Devon and Cornwall in 2001, one might begin by asking about the events and discourses that moved John R. Ambereley to write during 1872 in London that “there is no religion the study of which is likely to be so useful to Europeans as Buddhism” (BBC; Ambereley 293). To understand why in the early twenty-first century many of the bestselling books from the religion sections of British and North American bookstores are about Buddhism, one should ask why in the latter decades of the nineteenth century three book-length poems recounting the life of the Buddha were published in London, of which Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879) became an international bestseller. If one wishes to understand the chain of events by which the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet is now the patron and figurehead of the British Network of Buddhist Organizations , one well might follow those events back to Brian Houghton Hodgson, an employee of the British East India Company who, while on assignment in Nepal in the 1820s, collected ancient Buddhist manuscripts in Sanskrit, the delivery of which to the Royal Asiatic Society in London in 1835 and to the Societe Asiatique of Paris in 1837 launched the serious scholarly investigation of Buddhism in Europe. Within the Victorian period, if one wants to understand from which influences and sources Edwin Arnold created his character of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, or how H. Rider Haggard derived his portrayal of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in his novel Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), then one needs not merely some knowledge of the British Empire in India and Tibet but also some background on the Indian origins of...