The Life of the Buddha in Victorian England

I. Competing Victorian Buddhas

Thousands of late-Victorian Britons went about with images of the Buddha floating in their heads. While this may sound like a statement out of Lewis Carroll (who indeed alludes to Buddhism in the Alice books) it is nonetheless a fact, if for no other reason than that three book-length poems recounting the life of the Buddha were published in London in the 1870s and 1880s: Richard Phillips's The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed: An Epic (1871), Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Being The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Büddhism (1879), and Sidney Arthur Alexander's much briefer verse narrative, Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha (1887), which won the Newdigate Prize that year at Oxford.¹ But there were other reasons; these verse narratives represent the culmination of a trend of swelling interest in the West in Buddhism, which commenced in the 1830s, matured as the study of Comparative Religion in the 1860s, peaked in the popular culture of London's "Buddhism-steeped Nineties," and then submerged until resurfacing in the New Age movement of the 1960s.² Arnold's poem is particularly representative of this trend. It not only was a bestseller but a cultural phenomenon in England, as well as in America and India. Though it has received scant critical attention since the nineteenth century, "[i]mmediately after its first publication in 1879 it became one of the most popular long Victorian poems; its author . . . achieved overnight fame throughout the English-speaking world, and for two or three decades the poem exercised an intellectual and religious influence out of proportion even to the hundreds of thousands of copies which it sold."³ Arnold's work marked and to a limited extent caused a cultural attitude shift in the West concerning perceptions of the Buddha and receptivity to Buddhism. Reading it moved Charles Bennett in 1901 to become Ananda Metteyya, the first British Buddhist monk; "like many before him and untold thousands since, [he] found that a new world of spiritual adventure was opened before his eyes," illumined by The Light of Asia.⁴ Arnold's work inspired Rudyard Kipling's creation of the Teshoo Lama in Kim (1901) and influenced, however diffusely, a generation or more of British writers, including W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.⁵ In one of the many favorable contemporary reviews, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote from America that "its tone is so lofty that there is nothing with which to compare it but the New Testament."⁶ For this very reason, however, the poem motivated no less than four book-length rebuttals, all written by clergymen alarmed that it "had enormously increased an already existing interest in Buddhism which threatened the predominance of Christianity."⁷ What conditions laid the groundwork for the tremendous response—both positive and negative—that The Light of Asia elicited? Why were late Victorians so primed to be fascinated with the life story of a religious figure who lived in India over 500 years before Christ, and what does the fact that they were fascinated tell us about them?

Three preliminary answers to the first of these questions come to mind, which though obvious and sweeping are nonetheless pertinent, namely the modern crisis in Christianity or Victorian "crisis of faith," the advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the culmination of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is not insignificant for Arnold's writing of The Light of Asia or for the popularity of the poem that it was published eight years after Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) and only three years after Queen Victoria was named Empress of India. The British occupation of India and colonial presence throughout Southeast Asia had laid the groundwork for Arnold's poem decades earlier by opening the channels through which the sacred texts of Eastern religions would filter back to Europe.⁸ The years between 1860 and 1890 saw an outpouring of scholarly translations from Sanskrit and, especially, from Pali, and...