Anagarika: A Man for Our Times

Anagarika Dharmapala, played a central role in changing the minds of our people and made them demand freedom. He supported the first trade unions. His successors gave us through the monks’ agitation, free education our right to knowledge irrespective of wealth and colonial connections. Our vaunted high marks in the Physical Quality of Life Index are ultimately due to him and his generation.

Distinctive and radical, his protest removed for a short time the cobwebs of our colonial minds. He helped our so-called elite - actually slavish puppets trained by white masters, and Christian missionaries - break through to Asia. He made Sri Lanka once again a part of Asia. He together with forty scholar monks brought together a network of Buddhists and other Asian peoples together. He helped launch the international Buddhist movement and his efforts internationally helped put Asian ideas on the world map. Hindus like Vivekananda, had a similar, but at the time, a smaller impact.

If today there are millions practising meditation in the West and if the churches of Europe in this scientific world are empty, we have to look for him and his generation for the beginnings of these changes. As we prepare to celebrate the shift of the world axis to Asia after a period of three hundred years of European domination in the world, we have to look at facts. We are perhaps the only country in Asia undergoing recolonisation, sub contracted to our new puppets by a set of new masters. This recolonisation takes in only the most superficial of Western culture ignoring its many desirable qualities. Wearing a Western suit becomes for these empty heads the endpoint of Western culture. To overcome this insult we must return to the spirit of defiance of Anagarika.

Enough has been written about Anagarika’s knowledge about local matters. But to deliberately slap the faces of our empty heads, we will concentrate on his internationalism.

Our forefathers traversed all over the then known world. They traveled to all over Asia and to Rome. Our ships were the largest at one time in China, our nuns and monks went to China in the fifth century, our monks went to South East Asia and Central Asia and of course nearer in South Asia. Following in these footsteps, Dharmapala went forth to India and Japan and to the West.

Dharmapala in Asia

Dharmapala created a good impression in a visit to Japan and established links with Buddhist groups there. Soon, Japanese monks visited Sri Lanka to study our Buddhism.

 Sir Edwin Arnold who visited Buddhagaya in 1886 wrote to Ven. Weligama Sumangala –  one of the leading forty scholar monks of the time - about the need to reclaim Buddhagaya. Dharmapala took this up and so helped reintroduce Buddhism to India, its land of birth. In Calcutta, Dharmapala came in touch with key pillars of the emerging elite.  This was the time when all-India politics and the India National Congress were taking shape and Calcutta was its center.  

Dharmapala formed the Mahabodhi Society in Calcutta with the prominent citizen Asutosh Mukherjee as its president. Dharmapala established the Mahabodhi Society not only to revive Buddhism in India but significantly “to educate the illiterate millions of Indian people in scientific industrialism”. He unlike Gandhi was a man of the present looking forward to a scientific future. 

Dharmapala also took the initiative to establish the first University Department of Pali Studies in India, i.e. in Calcutta University, a central institution of the emerging Indian elite, the Bhadralok. He brought Sri Lankan monks to teach Pali. The interest in Buddhist studies thus created contributed to the formation of the Buddhist Text Society of Calcutta by Sarath Chandra Das in 1892, which was modeled after the Pali Text Society of England, established in 1880 by Rhys Davis and with close links to our monks. This interest in Pali and Buddhist studies, not only gave birth to a band of internationally acclaimed Pali scholars with links to Siam, Burma and Sri Lanka, but also gave recognition to the contribution of Buddhism to Indian thought and culture.

The Pali Text Series and the Sacred Books of the East written by European scholars were now made available in Calcutta through the Maha Bodhi Society. Buddhist ceremonies such as Wesak were performed at the latter’s headquarters and were attended by some prominent Bengalis. The Maha Bodhi Society provided support to poor families, for famine and flood relief with collections made from Buddhists in neighboring countries, for example, 10,000 yards of cloth were sent from Sri Lanka. (This was a time when philanthropy thrived among Sinhalese, a shame on their present descendents.)

Dharmapala’s untiring efforts to popularize Buddhist activities in Europe, USA and the Far East attracted many Americans and Europeans to Calcutta, and thus a global Buddhist revivalist movement was born. This was initially envied by Bengali revivalists like Vivekananda, and later copied by them.

The spark lit in India by Anagarika lives on. The Indian flag has the Dharma Chakra. Millions of Dalits have become Buddhists.  And the Buddhist sites are promoted by the Indian government. Today’s governing party; the BJP has its origins in Anagarika’s creation. The BJP is a follower to the earlier Jana Sangh, which was formed by the Mahobodhi Society’s third leader after Anagarika, Mukerjee. BJP leaders Indian PM Vajpayee and Indian Interior Minister Advani have openly admitted this connection

Dharmapala’s main target of attack was the Sinhalese who adopted Western dress, names, language and social habits emphasizing cultural identity, and was linked to the message of Eastern, superiority. Once, his journal the Sinhala Bauddhaya was proscribed. Dharmapala was confined in Calcutta by the British.

In America

An American, Colonel Olcott and a Russian, Madame Blavatsky living in New York read a report about the defeat of Christian missionaries in a debate with a young Buddhist monk Migettuwatte Gunananda. Inspired, they came to Sri Lanka and subsequently met the 16-year-old David Hewavitarane, who later became known as Dharmapala.  The meeting not only inspired young Dharmapala profoundly, but also shaped his future role in the Buddhist revivalist movement.

The World Parliament of Religions of 1893 was meant to be a celebration of Western civilization and its religions. The young Buddhist delegate to it, Dharmapala would turn it upside down.  A few days after the Parliament ended, and at the end of a lecture by Anagarika Dharmapala, Charles T. Strauss, pronounced the five precepts, the first person to be admitted formally to the Buddhist faith on American soil.     

Dharmapala returned to America in 1896 at the invitation of Paul Carus the editor of the Open Court and lectured across America enthusing audiences all the way.  Carus, Soyen Shaku, a Zen monk and Dharmapala shared the view that Buddhism: “was more fitted than Christianity to heal the breach that had opened between science and religion, since it did not depend on miracles and faith".  Dharmapala held the first Vesak celebration in America in 1897.  Subsequently many others joined the struggle for truth in America.

The New York Journal wrote around that time:

 "It is no uncommon thing to hear a New Yorker say he is a Buddhist nowadays...There are several hundred Buddhists here, and every one of them is a man remarkable for his intelligence."

Since those early years over one hundred years ago, Buddhism in America has found many homes and many voices. The number of formal Buddhists today in America is estimated anywhere between 2 to 6 million. But real practitioners of Buddhist higher truth in the form of meditation number in the tens of millions although they would not call themselves Buddhists. There are today over five hundred Buddhist temples in America including Zen, Vajrayana and Theravada meditation centers, and nearly 1500 Buddhist societies. And through literature and the arts Buddhism has percolated widely and sometimes imperceptibly.

No Light Weight

Anagarika Dharmapala’s reading and interests were very wide. No intellectual lightweight, he was well read in the philosophical, scientific and scholarly literature of both East and West. He was read in the history and the different thought systems of South Asia, of the Arab countries and the classical Greek tradition, as well as post Renaissance Western philosophy. He discussed knowingly about Western classical writers of Greece and Rome, such as Antiochus, Antiogonas, Aristotle, Democritus, Diogenes, Plato, Ptolemy, Pythogoras and Socrates. He also spoke with facility on scientific figures such as Galileo, Einstein, Darwin and Huxley, as well as on recent Western philosophers such as Machiavelli, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, William James, Herbert Spencer, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Mill. He was especially enamoured with Darwin, referring to him many times in his writings. His view of Buddhism was that it had no place for “metaphysics, logic, dialectics, loathsome ascetic habits, magic, bacchanalian revelry, priestly formulas, destructive rituals etc”.

            His international friends and deepest views were in keeping with this broad enlightened thrust. Among Dharmapala’s friends was Sir Edwin Arnold the author of The Light of Asia who considered him “my excellent friend”. Among the Indian national leaders that befriended him were Sarat Chandra Das, Rajendra Prasad (who later became India’s President), Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi.

            Dharmapala visited various sites of industrial interest overseas. He toured the US, visiting several industrial schools, and started an industrial school fund in San Francisco. He visited other Industrial Schools in London, Liverpool, Holland, Denmark and Italy. Indicating his Asia-centric perspective, he started his first industrial school, not in Sri Lanka, but at Sarnath, India.

            He was conversant with modern science and technology, admired industrial and scientific progress and wanted to emulate the technological success of the US and Japan. He advised the Sinhalese “Learn from Indians …. Follow the Arya Dharma and learn science, industry and trade. Send your children to Indian universities to learn skills”.  He is a contrast to backward looking medievalists like Gandhi and Ananda Coomaraswamy, both of whom did not like modern industry. (Yet it is in spite of this background of a full commitment to industry and science that the pathologically anti-nationalist Kumari Jaywardene wrote that the Sinhalese around Anagarika were “incapable of creating among the people a national consciousness based on rationalism and a scientific outlook”.)