The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire

Chapter 2 Buddhism and the Emergence of Late-Victorian Hybrid Religions

Chapter 2 Buddhism and the Emergence of Late-Victorian Hybrid Religions The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the generation of new, alternative or syncretic religions in Europe at a rate perhaps unprecedented in modern Western history. Examples include The Church of Christ, Scientist; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the Theosophical Society; and Anthroposophy . Some scholars would challenge this broadened use of the term “religion”; I would open the definition even further by including a number of humanist institutions that likewise emerged during that period as surrogates for Christian institutions.1 For example, the Positivist Political and Social Union, inspired by the writings of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), was founded in London in 1867 and became so ceremonial that Thomas Henry Huxley quipped that “Positivism was Catholicism minus Christianity” (W. Smith 92). In a statement that now appears at least cultural-centric and at worst racist, one commentator in 1889 observed that “for some reason that is not very immediately apparent, the Anglo-Saxon is the only one among modern races that has been fertile in the invention of new religions” (Legge 10). Though most religions claim to have been revealed by a deity, all religions are in fact syncretic , having been formalized through context-specific social processes within history, and all societies invent religions, at the least by reshaping the beliefs and rituals handed down to them to serve new social conditions and cultural urgencies.2 Given that, the Victorians nevertheless appear to have been extraordinarily active in the invention of new religions. Why? Explanations must come from consideration of the convergence of events and discourses that occurred in nineteenth-century England as in no other time and place. The reason that Buddhism and Late-Victorian Hybrid Religions ~ 51 will be of particular interest here is the European encounter in the first half of the century with Buddhism. Buddhism—the Western construction of it—was a necessary though not in itself sufficient source for the formation of a number of late-Victorian hybrid religions. Indeed, this was one of the most immediate as well as most far-reaching impacts of the encounter with Buddhism upon Western culture. The ways in which new hybrid religions sampled from and modified elements of Buddhism is a study in cultural assimilation and, more telling, failed assimilation. After attempting to summarize the range of discourses and events that contributed to the late-Victorian flurry of religion production, and after theorizing a working definition of “hybrid religion,” this chapter focuses on a case study of a representative example: Theosophy.3 I analyze the specific ways in which the founders of Theosophy borrowed elements from Buddhism and combined them with elements drawn from other theologies, mythologies, and contemporary ideologies for the purpose of synthesizing a new hybrid religion. Background: Spiritualism versus Materialism One of the most pervasive and persistent tensions within the history of European culture is the conflict between materialism and spiritualism, most broadly conceived. One manifestation of this conflict finally erupted in the nineteenth century in full-scale public combat between evolutionary scientists and Church of England apologists following Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species (1859). The stage long had been set, not only by immediately preceding scientists like Charles Lyell and Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, nor alone by the culmination in the preceding century of Enlightenment skepticism, but as far back as the materialist philosophy of the pre-Socratics.4 Prior to the connotation of “materialism” as a desire for material possessions, “materialist” meant “one who denies spiritual substances,” according to Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary (Johnson, np). Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, commentators increasingly associated materialism in this sense with scientific naturalism, the ideology of science’s truth-telling authority, as well as with atheism. Many Victorians saw materialism as the historical nemesis not only of Christian belief but of spirituality at the most fundamental level of belief in the human soul. Indeed, “materialism was widely perceived as the arch-villain of the [Victorian] age” (Oppenheim 61). The Victorian “crisis of faith” was to no small degree the product of the erosion of the credibility of key Christian truth-claims as a result of the widely perceived failure of the Church of England to mount a convincing rejoinder to the challenges of materialism and, in particular, scientific naturalism. Anglicanism , among all denominations, was compromised by the fact that from early [18.222.67.251...