Modernity and the Early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism · N THE International Encyclopaedia of Buddhism, published in India, an anonymous essay entitled “Religion without Speculation”

Journal of the American Academy of Religion December 2004, Vol. 72, No. 4, pp. 897–933doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfh083© 2004 The American Academy of Religion

Modernity and the Early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism David L. McMahan

The interpretation of Buddhism as consonant with science has been anessential factor in the transmission of Buddhism to the West, as well as inthe success of certain reform movements in Asia. Both westerners andAsians developed the discourse of scientific Buddhism in response to differ-ent but interrelated crises in their various cultural contexts in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries. Anagarika Dharmapala’s contributionto this discourse arose out of a crisis of legitimacy in Sinhalese Buddhismthat stemmed from colonialism, missionization, western hegemony, andwestern representations of Asians and Buddhism common to this period.Two Americans, Paul Carus and Henry Steel Olcott, attempted to establishthe scientificity of Buddhism in response to the Victorian crisis of faith. Thisdiscourse represented Buddhism as an inverse reflection of what skepticsand liberal Christians believed to be problematic about orthodox interpreta-tions of Christianity in light of scientific developments and biblical criticism.

IN THE International Encyclopaedia of Buddhism, published in India, ananonymous essay entitled “Religion without Speculation” contrastsBuddhism to “unscientific or speculative religion, the sort which isalmost entirely the only kind known to the West” (Singh: vol. 18, 45).Buddhism, it says, is

David L. McMahan is an assistant professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College,Lancaster, PA 17604-3003.

I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a 2002 Summer Stipend that contributedto this work.

898 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

[I]ntellectual enlightenment, supreme intuition. And it is this whichdifferentiates it from all other religions or philosophical systems: it isnonspeculative, scientific. (47)

What Gotama did was not to devise a law or formulate a system, butto discover a law, to perceive a system. His part may be compared to thatof Copernicus or Galileo, Newton or Harvey, in physical science. . . .Buddhism extends the natural laws, the laws of causality to the mental orpsychic domain, or, more exactly, perceives their operation in thissphere, and thereby disposes of the idea of supernatural or transcendentalagencies working independent of or in contravention to the natural lawsof the universe. (47–48)

This quotation exemplifies one of the most important ways thatBuddhism gained cultural currency in the West when it was introducedin the nineteenth century: through its representation as a religion uniquelycompatible with modern science. This was also an important idea forBuddhist reform movements in Asia, such as those in Ceylon (now SriLanka) and Japan. Nor was this a transient phase in the early encounterof Buddhism and modernity; what I shall call the discourse of scientificBuddhism has become not only more voluminous but far more sophisti-cated throughout the late twentieth century and is now at its productiveand creative zenith. In the last few decades a steady stream of books, bothpopular and academic, has come out on the subject of Buddhism and thesciences (Austin; Davidson and Harrington; Goleman: 1997, 2003;Hayward; Hayward and Varela; Houshmand, Livingston, and Wallace;Varela; Wallace and Lutzker). The compatibility of Buddhism and mod-ern science has not only become a staple of popular Buddhist literature, ithas also become a hypothesis in a large number of quite sophisticatedexperimental studies. Although all historical religious traditions in theirencounters with modernity have had to reinterpret doctrines in light ofthe dominance and symbolic capital of scientific thinking, its tremen-dous transformative effects on the world, and its unsurpassed legitimacyin establishing “what is the case,” perhaps no major tradition hasattempted to adopt scientific discourse more vigorously than Buddhism.Given the prominence of the idea that Buddhism is uniquely compatiblewith modern science—or in a stronger version of the claim, was scientificin some sense from the beginning—it should be useful to examine thegenealogy of this idea.

This article addresses one crucial part of a much larger question. Thelarger question addresses how various forms of Buddhism have encoun-tered, incorporated, or been incorporated by narratives of modernity—that is, narratives emphasizing the autonomy of individual reason, thescientific method, the inevitable progress of humanity, the suspicion of

McMahan: Modernity and the early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism 899

tradition and traditional authority, and the reformist impulses of theEnlightenment and Protestantism. Also inevitably intertwined with thisquestion of the Buddhist encounter with modernity are issues involvingcolonialism, missionization, and orientalism. If we begin by looking atthis issue from the period of the earliest sustained engagements betweenAsians and westerners regarding Buddhism, the question becomes(from the western side): How was Buddhism incorporated into the pre-existing network of concerns, assumptions, ideas, agendas, and practicesthat characterized certain features of late nineteenth-century life? Fromthe perspective of Asian Buddhists the question is the inverse: How wasthe western narrative of modernity reconfigured and incorporated intothe Buddhist narratives and sometimes Buddhist nationalism, thusproducing forms of Buddhist modernism not reducible to westernmodalities?

These intertwining modernizing processes over the last 150 years orso have been creating unprecedented forms of Buddhism that are hybridsof Buddhism and modern, western thought and practice. Donald Lopez,Jr. suggests that this new international Buddhism be considered a sectitself (xxxix). Martin Baumann likewise sees “modernist Buddhism” as adistinct form of demythologized and rationalized Buddhism and posits,as well, a distinctively postmodern or “global Buddhism,” which has inturn secularized and psychologized modernist Buddhism. The questionof how various forms of Buddhism have met the modern West and howthey have incorporated and transformed each other is, I believe, thefundamental question to understanding most of the developments inrecent Buddhist history. One of the most important facets of thisencounter has been the ways in which Buddhists and Buddhist enthusiastshave taken up the issue of science. Moreover, the story of the early effortsto make accomplices of Buddhism and science illustrates some of thefundamental tensions haunting modernity—tensions between optimisticconfidence in human progress and creeping epistemic and existential doubt,between the rationalist’s need for hard certainties and the romantic’slonging for exotic mysteries, and between the colonizer and the colonized.

In what follows I show how some of the primary contributors to theformation of the discourse of scientific Buddhism had different but over-lapping agendas spurred by two crises of legitimacy in disparate culturalcontexts: For the American contributors it was what scholars have dubbedthe Victorian crisis of faith—a widespread questioning of traditionalforms of Christianity in the late nineteenth century. For the Asians—andin this case we will deal specifically with Ceylon—it was the crisis of colo-nialism, western hegemony, and demoralization over Buddhism’s loss ofprestige in the wake of Christianization. The three figures I examine here


are those most crucial to the early development of this discourse. TwoAmericans, Henry Steel Olcott and Paul Carus, represent differentapproaches to relating Buddhism and science, one embedded in Theosophyand spiritualism and one reflecting the extravagant optimism in thepromise and epistemic reach of science in the Victorian era. The third isAnagarika Dharmapala, the most important figure in the turn-of-the-century Sinhalese Buddhist revitalization movement. Each of thesefigures was essential to the early formation of a discourse that has hadprofound effects not only on the scholarly interpretation of Buddhismbut also on its historical development.

ANAGARIKA DHARMAPALA: BUDDHISM, SCIENCE, AND COLONIALISM

A pivotal moment in the history of the discourse of scientific Buddhismwas the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893. It was herethat some of the themes connecting Buddhism to modern science thatendure to the present day were proffered to an American audience by AsianBuddhists. Dharmapala was a young, articulate Buddhist from Ceylonwho by all accounts had a highly favorable reception at the Parliament.He was already a well-known reformer in Sri Lanka who had worked toestablish what has been dubbed “Protestant Buddhism,” both for its resis-tance to Christian missionary efforts and its appropriation of themes andvalues derived from Protestant Christianity (Gombrich and Obeyesekere:202–239). In his address he likely made the Christians hosting theassembly uncomfortable by declaring that the Buddha rejected thenotion of a “supreme Creator”; yet immediately following this statementhe claimed that the reason for this rejection was that the Buddhaaccepted “the doctrine of evolution as the only true one, with corollary,the law of cause and effect.” He then quotes a passage from Grant Allen’sLife of Darwin (in quotation marks within the quoted passage below),seamlessly interweaving Buddhist concepts with western scientific ones,claiming that Allen’s passage “beautifully expresses the generalized ideaof Buddhism.”

The teachings of the Buddha on evolution are clear and expansive. Weare asked to look upon the cosmos “as a continuous process unfoldingitself in regular order in obedience to natural laws. We see in it all nota yawning chaos restrained by the constant interference from without ofa wise and beneficent external power, but a vast aggregate of originalelements perpetually working out their own fresh redistribution inaccordance with their own inherent energies. He regards the cosmos as


an almost infinite collection of material, animated by an almost infinitesum of total energy,” which is called Akasa. (Dharmapala: 9)

The rhetorical moves in this short passage are illustrative of the mostcommon ways early authors attempted to blend Buddhism with science.The first is the allying of key concepts in scientific discourse with thosefound in Buddhism. It was certainly not lost on Dharmapala, who waseducated in an English school in Ceylon, that he was using two termscharged with significance for his largely western audience: The first, causeand effect, was the sine qua non of the modern scientific worldview; andthe second, evolution, was perhaps the most radical, controversial, and“cutting edge” notion in late nineteenth-century intellectual discussion.In claiming these concepts for Buddhism, he fused them with the doc-trine that everything emerges from causes and conditions (hetupratyaya),dependent origination (pratityasamutpada), and the doctrine of karma.By rejecting a supreme creator, he risked alienating his liberal Christianallies at the Parliament; but following this rejection with explicitly scien-tific terminology and claiming it for Buddhism, he threw his hat in withthe one discourse in the western world compelling enough to challengethe largely Christian assumptions of the organizers of the Parliament—that of empirical science.

The second rhetorical move common in the discourse of scientificBuddhism and illustrated in Dharmapala’s talk is the subsuming of west-ern scientific description and explanation within Buddhist discourse.This was especially prevalent among Asian Buddhists and western enthu-siasts who presented Buddhism as embracing, but also preceding andsurpassing, western science. In the passage above Dharmapala treats theAllen quote as if it were a direct formulation of Buddhist ideas, nestling itwithin his discussion of the Buddhist view of the cosmos, then adding theassertion that what Allen is really talking about by the “infinite sum oftotal energy” is akasa, a Sanskrit term used in Buddhism to denoteunconditioned space. Clearly the implication is that the Buddha himselfunderstood these scientific ideas 2,400 years ago, though they had beendiscovered only recently by the West.

Soyen Shaku, a Japanese Zen priest and the other important Buddhistrepresentative at the Parliament, continued these themes in his addressentitled, “The Law of Cause and Effect, as Taught by the Buddha.” Soyencalled the Buddha’s notion of cause and effect “the law of nature” andinsisted that the myriad phenomena of the world are not governed by anexterior force but by this all-encompassing law. Using one of the mostprominent Enlightenment metaphors of the law-abiding cosmos, he says:“Just as a clock moves by itself without any intervention of any external


force, so is the progress of the universe” (Barrows: 390). In a letter written,three years after the conference, to Parliament organizer John HenryBarrows, who had publicly criticized Buddhism in the intervening time,Soyen forcefully but tactfully reprimanded Barrows for his comments onBuddhism, defending his tradition by even more overtly allying it withmodern science. Responding to Barrows’s claim that Buddhism “groansunder the dominion of inexorable and implacable laws,” Soyen replied:“Now I grant that Buddha taught the irrefragability of law, but this isa point in which, as so many others, Buddha’s teachings are in exactagreement with the doctrines of modern science” (122). Later in theletter he questions whether “mankind can be benefited by believing thatJesus Christ performed miracles,” further affiliating himself with scien-tific ideas of natural law and causality against notions of supernaturalintervention (124–125).

To understand the historical context of these attempts to allyBuddhism and science by the Buddhist representatives at the Parliament,it is helpful to take a step back and notice some of the central themes ofthe 1883 world’s fair, of which the World’s Parliament of Religions was apart. The fair that year was the Columbian Exposition, a celebration ofthe achievements of Christopher Columbus. Robert Rydell and RichardSeager have both convincingly argued that its exhibitions and activitiesrepresented a liberal utopian vision of late-nineteenth-century Americain which white America was vividly contrasted with “exotic” and “lesscivilized” peoples. The physical layout of the fair and its exhibitions weredivided between the “White City,” a temporary neoclassical utopia con-structed for the fair and celebrating the triumphs of Christopher Columbusand America, and the Midway Plaisance, which consisted of exhibitsrepresenting the non-western world. They included large-scale replicas ofscenes of far-away places: a recreation of a north African village; “CairoStreet,” with a bazaar, dancing girls, and camel rides; a Chinese theaterfeaturing a Confucian play and a fortuneteller. Victorian ladies andgentlemen could meander through the exhibition and gaze at the spec-tacle of the world’s “primitive cultures,” complete with native peoplesshipped in for the event, right in the heart of Chicago.

The ideology behind such representations was the evolutionary modelof religion, according to which all world religions were stages along theway to the most highly evolved form of religion and society. Thus,although the Christian organizers of the fair were liberal and enthusiasticabout representing non-western cultures, this model and notion of pro-gressive revelation implicitly relegated these cultures to a lower status(Seager: xxii–xxiii). Thus, it is particularly ironic that two of the mostsignificant Buddhist contributors to the Parliament presented Buddhism


as not only in accord with what most educated Americans believed to bethe most advanced scientific thinking of the day but as having anticipatedsuch thinking by over two millennia. The use of the language of evolu-tion and cause and effect signaled an attempt to subvert the triumphal-ism of the evolutionary model of the development of religions and thewidespread derogatory representations of Buddhism and Asians ingeneral. The Buddhists’ use of scientific language at the Parliament—notto mention their eloquence and sophistication—disrupted the taxonomyof civilized/primitive implicit not only in the condescending languageand attitudes displayed by some of the American hosts but also in thevery physical design of the fair. Employing scientific language to express,translate, and transform Buddhist ideas represented both the stretchingof scientific vocabulary to particular emerging Buddhist agendas and away of attempting to subvert aspects of the dominant western culture’shegemonic ideology—an ideology graphically presented at the world’sfair—in its own language.

Concerns that gave rise to this discourse on the part of Asians werenot unique to the Parliament, of course, but were part of a broaderattempt to negotiate with representations of Buddhism that hadsurfaced with the European “discovery” of Buddhism as well as moregeneral representations of Asians. Those Asians who were conversant inEnglish or, like Dharmapala, educated in British-run schools were quitefamiliar with the characterizations of Asians prevalent in the West inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Virtually all western literatureof this period that made reference to non-Anglo-Saxon peoplesattempted to explain them through reference to supposedly inherentcharacteristics and predetermined inclinations, temperaments, andintelligence. The typical Victorian characterization of the “Orientalmind” was that it lacked intellectual ability, was plagued by an excessof imagination, and was indolent and childlike. John Davy said of theSinhalese:

In intellectual acquirements, and proficiency in arts and sciences, theyare not advanced beyond the darkest period of the middle ages. Theircharacter, I believe, on the whole, is low, tame, and undecided: with fewstrong lights or shades in it, with few prominent virtues or vices. (141;quoted in Almond: 43)

Such attitudes were used to justify colonial control over Asia—indeedsuch control was seen to be the only hope of the Oriental. Dharmapalawas inflamed by such characterizations, particularly of the Sinhalese, andlabored in many writings to combat them.


Buddhism itself was often characterized in nineteenth-century westernliterature as pessimistic, nihilistic, devoid of any power for promotinggoodness, and in a state of degradation and decline. Especially represen-tations of living Buddhism decried its apparent idolatry, benightedsuperstition, and mechanical ritualism. It was not just the uninformedwho made such assertions but the early orientalist scholars who werelargely responsible for introducing Buddhism to western audiences,such as Jules Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, who described Buddhism as thenihilistic nadir of Indian pessimism. The interpretation of Buddhism aspessimistic touched off considerable debate among scholars and enthusi-asts. Much was at stake in these arguments; as Thomas Tweed points out,“the optimistic spirit of the late nineteenth century made little room forpopular adopting of an overtly pessimistic doctrine, and such inter-pretations may well have spelled the end of the first wave of interest inBuddhism in America.” Thus, it is no accident that Dharmapala’s presen-tations of Buddhism to Americans and Europeans insisted on its optimismand activism nearly as much as its scientificity.

Although such disparaging characterizations of Buddhism aboundin the European and American literature of the time, the assessment ofBuddhism was not universally negative. Indeed, Dharmapala arrived forthe Chicago fair during a surge of interest in and enthusiasm forBuddhism. Westerners favorably disposed toward Buddhism at thistime, however, seldom if ever embraced the living tradition; rather theylooked to the figure of the Buddha, popularized by Edwin Arnold’sromantic poem, Light of Asia, and to the Buddha’s original, “pure”teachings, which they believed had later become adulterated by theignorant. The Buddha often was portrayed in the latter decades of thenineteenth century as a noble ethical reformer who rejected the castesystem and set forth a touching doctrine of infinite compassion for allbeings. Henry Steel Olcott saw the Buddha as a figure much like theideal liberal freethinker—someone full of “benevolence,” “gratitude,”and “tolerance,” who promoted “brotherhood among all men” as well as“lessons in manly self-reliance” (1883: 36, 37, 42, 45; quoted in Pro-thero: 97). The Buddhism of the Buddha, no longer practiced by theignorant masses of Asia but recovered by scholars and Olcott’s ownTheosophical movement, was utterly distinct from the rituals, celebra-tions, attempts to control spirits, and image veneration present in thepopular Buddhism of Ceylon. Olcott took his cue here from orientalistscholars for whom the search for origins was a dominant theme. Thesescholars located “true Buddhism” in the texts of the ancient past anddelimited it to carefully selected teachings, excluding any considerationof living Buddhists, save reformers like Dharmapala and Soyen. Philip


Almond argues that the rejection of living Buddhism and the creation ofan “ideal textual Buddhism” allowed the construction and appropria-tion of a Buddhism “grounded in the past, ideally conceived, and textu-ally constructed.”

Dharmapala, a close associate of Olcott for a time, was well aware ofthe various European and American representations of Buddhism and ofAsians in general. It was not just these representations to which he feltcompelled to respond, however; underlying Dharmapala’s efforts to revi-talize Buddhism was his deep resentment against colonial suppression ofhis native Ceylon. He aimed to rehabilitate Buddhism not only in the eyesof its western detractors but in those of the colonized and demoralizedSinhala Buddhist population. Indeed, Dharmapala was not only one ofthe earliest and most important evangelists of Buddhism in the West, healso was the single most significant reformer of Buddhism in his owncountry. With colonial rule and its attendant missionary activity Bud-dhism faced a crisis of legitimacy, having lost prestige and considerableeconomic and political power. Dharmapala vigorously opposed Christianmissionization and promoted a nationalistic revival to bring Buddhismback from its demoralization.

Dharmapala’s writings and talks make evident that part of the wayout of the crisis was a revival of Buddhism in ways that embraced thefavorable representations of Buddhism put forth by western enthusiastsand vigorously countered the disparaging ones. Thus, he portrayedBuddhism as a religion perfectly suited to the challenges of the modernage, combatting the impressions of Buddhism as nihilistic, pessimistic,passive, ritualistic, and superstitious and promoting Buddhism as activist,optimistic, and scientific. He largely adopted the textualist reconstruc-tion of his tradition offered by orientalist scholars, as well as the positivecharacterizations of Buddhism by westerners who tried to make itappealing to late Victorian culture. Dharmapala proffered a rationalBuddhism centering on the individual and his or her own salvation aswell as altruistic social service. He adopted the perspective commonamong orientalists that the living Buddhism of his day was in a state ofcorruption and degeneration, having declined from the pristine, scien-tific, rational teachings of the Buddha himself. He emphasized the inter-nal and ethical elements of Buddhism and was critical of many practicesthat could be interpreted as superstitious or ritualistic. In place of themhe attempted to codify a version of Victorian morals and decorum inthe style of Buddhist monastic codes of behavior in order to reformthe everyday behavior of the peasants (Gombrich and Obeyesekere:212–215). Portraying the Buddha as a rebel against the authority ofBrahmanical priesthood and their rites, he insisted that the Buddha was


“democratic” and saw no intermediary between the individual andtruth. Thus, Dharmapala’s representation of Buddhism, though it couldbe fiercely critical of Christianity and the West, was deeply informed byProtestantism, Enlightenment rationalism, and Victorian culturalforms. Moreover, this influence is largely masked in his writings—nowhere does he admit influence from the West, and perhaps he washimself unaware of its extent. Always these themes are presented as“pure Buddhism.”

It was because Dharmapala’s Buddhism resonated so well with liberalVictorian sensibilities that it could be used as a powerful rhetorical toolfor harmonizing with natural allies as well as as a weapon against those ofwhom he was critical. His presentation to western audiences of a rational,scientific Buddhism represents a kind of reverse orientalism what Seager,following James E. Ketelaar, calls “strategic occidentalism”: “the selectiveand often highly politicized appropriation of western ideas, techniques,and critiques for use in undermining the claims of the West, assertingAsian independence, and negotiating roles in the emerging global society”(Seager: 96; Ketelaar). Although Dharmapala often used this strategy forundermining western claims to superiority, he also used it to ally himselfwith certain carefully selected western ideas and practices. Especiallywhen directed at western audiences, such discourse was often finelytuned to reflect the sentiments of his listeners and readers. For example,while in the United States for the Parliament, Dharmapala gave a talk inNew York in which he exploited liberal upper-middle-class Protestantprejudices against Catholicism, ritual, superstition, and perhaps evenJews and Arabs, at the same time acutely appealing to their progressiveVictorian sensibilities, which extolled individualism, altruism, and scientificrationalism:

In Christian countries scientists are at work to elevate the masses byscientific methods, while the missionaries that go to Asia are utterlydeficient in scientific knowledge, and all they can offer are the myths ofCanaan and Galilee which had their origin in the backwash of Arabia. (25)

The message of the Buddha that I bring to you is free from theology,priestcraft, rituals, ceremonies, dogmas, heavens, hells and other theo-logical shibboleths. The Buddha taught to the civilized Aryans of Indiatwenty-five centuries ago a scientific religion containing the highestindividualistic altruistic ethics, a philosophy of life built on psychologi-cal mysticism and a cosmology which is in harmony with geology,astronomy, radioactivity and reality. (27)

Even a cursory knowledge of Sinhalese Buddhism on the groundbelies Dharmapala’s characterization of Buddhism as free from ritual,


priests, ceremony, heavens and hells; yet this sentiment is repeated oftenby early apologists, and its echo continues today. What is striking is theway Dharmapala clearly perceived the fissures in American society andcaste his lot with educated liberals who embodied the modernist ideals ofthe European Enlightenment against his nemeses, the evangelical,mission-minded Christians, whom he saw as political tools of westerngovernments. Dharmapala vociferously opposed these missionaries andtheir activities in his native Ceylon. Their behavior, he claimed, revealedtheir Christianity to be “political camouflage” whose three aspects are“politics, trade, and imperial expansion” and whose weapons were “theBible, barrels of whiskey and bullets” (439). He even suggests, in anamusingly prescient passage, that America should be sending scientistsrather than missionaries to Asia:

Instead of sending missionaries who preach the unscientific doctrine offundamentalism to India and Buddhist lands, I would suggest that scien-tific missionaries who can give needed knowledge on radioactivity, andteach technical industries to the youths be sent. It is more meritorious togive pure knowledge born of science than to give the antiquated theo-logical dogmas which originated in the brain of muddleheaded priests ofthe medieval period. (29)

Elsewhere he claims that Christianity has been detrimental to theprogress of the nations of Europe, who “groveled in darkness until thelight of physical science began to dawn” (440). The western narrative ofthe evolution of “civilization” is thus turned on its head, with the ancientIndians possessing a scientific religion while Europe wallowed in igno-rance until the Enlightenment. Clearly he was appealing to, and adoptingthe rhetoric of, late nineteenth-century American modernist Christiansand skeptics who themselves had quarrels with evangelical Christianity,missionization, and theologies that they believed could not withstandscientific scrutiny.

Dharmapala’s contribution to the discourse of scientific Buddhismreflects concerns specific to the legitimation crisis of Buddhism in hisown land and abroad. Although his project was highly influenced bywestern notions of science, democracy, individualism, and enlighten-ment, he remained loyal to a distinctively Buddhist vision of theworld. For him Buddhism encompassed these western ideas; theywere already nestled comfortably within the Dharma, which antici-pated them by centuries. For the early western contributors to thisdiscourse Buddhism would have to find its place within a differentworldview.


HENRY STEEL OLCOTT’S THEOSOPHICAL BUDDHISMAND OCCULT SCIENCE

If the development of the discourse of scientific Buddhism on thepart of Asians like Dharmapala was in part a response to the demorali-zation brought about by colonialism, racist representations, and mission-ization, the interests of some of the important western interpreters usingsuch rhetoric were somewhat different. Each side construed Buddhism inscientific–rationalist terms in response to separate crises in their variouscultural contexts. Yet these responses were not isolated from each other.Dharmapala’s emphasis on science and reason was deeply influenced byhis relationship with Henry Steel Olcott and the Theosophical move-ment. He also was invited to the United States several times by PaulCarus. Although Olcott’s and Carus’s approaches to the relationship ofBuddhism and science were quite similar, their general philosophies weredistinct, Olcott representing an esoteric approach and Carus a morerationalist–positivist one.

Olcott, one of the founders of the Theosophical movement alongwith Helena P. Blavatsky, was by all accounts the first American formallyto become a Buddhist. He and Dharmapala joined forces for a time in aneffort to reform Buddhism in Ceylon and in an attempt to create a globalBuddhist network. Theosophy grew out of the spiritualist movementwhich attempted to investigate supernatural phenomena, to contact thedead by use of mediums, and to bridge the chasm between the humanand spirit worlds. Theosophists considered this a fundamentally scientificendeavor—albeit an “occult science”—using empirical research andrational arguments to prove their hypotheses. Olcott and Blavatsky drewon the German Romantics’ yearnings for magic and mystery and ideas ofthe Indian origins of all things spiritual found in Schlegel and otherRomantics. Claiming that she was in telepathic communication with the“mahatmas,” a group of spiritual masters in Tibet who still possessed anancient wisdom tradition, Blavatsky brought together the romanticimages of the mysterious East with the current vogue in spiritualism,tempered by scientific and quasi-scientific concepts. Like Dharmapalathey made liberal use of Darwinian theory to promote the idea of spiri-tual evolution and were among the first to suggest that Asian traditionshad developed internal empirical sciences for fostering this evolution.

The Theosophical Society took a decidedly universalist directionthat attempted to find the hidden truth behind all religions. One of thefundamental premises of the movement was that there exists beneath thediversity of the world’s religions a primordial esoteric tradition that isthe wellspring of the visible traditions. Buddhism, Olcott and Blavatsky


believed, was the best representative of that primordial tradition.Blavatsky said of Buddhism that it was “incomparably higher, morenoble, more philosophical and more scientific than the teaching of anyother church or religion” (quoted in Batchelor: 269). Their understandingof Buddhism was deeply informed by orientalist scholarship, especiallythat of Rhys Davids and his pioneering work in translating Pali texts. Likethe orientalists they paid little attention to the living traditions ofBuddhism, except to declare their debasement and attempt to reformthem. Olcott was careful in his writings to distinguish “true Buddhism”from the supposed degenerate Buddhism of the masses.

Olcott went to great lengths to take control of the representation ofBuddhism and promote his vision of the Dharma not only to the Westbut to the Sinhalese during his extensive time in Ceylon and to otherBuddhists worldwide. The most influential and enduring legacy ofthis attempt is The Buddhist Catechism published in 1881. The work wasintended as a compilation of fundamental Buddhist beliefs, set out inquestion-and-answer format. It had five sections, the first three onthe Buddha, Dharma, and sangha and the last two on “The Spread ofBuddhism” and “Buddhism and Science.” Modeled on Christian catechismsused by both Catholics and Protestants, it attempted to extract whatOlcott considered the most important doctrines from the Buddhist tradi-tion and lay them out clearly and simply. His aim was to disentangle thetrue teachings—which by definition were those that could be interpretedas consonant with the modern, scientific worldview (though broadlyinterpreted vis-à-vis Theosophy)—from the weight of what he consideredaccumulated cultural baggage. The Catechism became hugely popularand helped to define Dharmapala’s Protestant Buddhism of Ceylon.Indeed, it is still used in schools there today.

The Catechism’s chapter on Buddhism and science was probably theearliest attempt to work out a definite correlation between Buddhismand science, however idiosyncratic its view of both. Far from the increas-ingly prominent positivism of the late nineteenth century, Olcott’s wasan “occult science.” Early in this chapter Olcott states definitively that“we [Buddhists] do not believe in miracles” and then spends quite a fewpages discussing artistic depictions and textual descriptions of the Buddhawith buddharansi, rays of light emanating from the Buddha (1947: 115)and other apparently supernatural phenomena that are standardelements of Buddhist literature. The light rays, Olcott claims, are thehuman aura, which has been photographed and scientifically proven toexist “by carefully conducted experiments” (1947: 114). This aura, heinsists, is a natural phenomenon, not a miracle, and “it has been provedthat not only all human beings but animals, trees, plants and even stones


have it” (1947: 115). Olcott introduces the human aura as an example ofiddhi (Sanskrit, rddhi), a term found throughout Buddhist literaturedesignating supernormal phenomena believed to be cultivated through,or a byproduct of, meditative practice. One of the common iddhi inBuddhist and other ancient South Asian writings is the ability to createillusory bodies (manomåya)—duplicates of oneself, someone else, oran object.1 Olcott refers to an instance of multilocation in the tale of Chulla-panthaka and insists that it is an example of hypnotic suggestion, anelement of a “branch of science” well known to those acquainted withmesmerism and hypnotism. The bhikkhu in the tale who makes his bodyappear as 300 identical bodies was, he claims, using his mental powers toimpress an image on the mind of the viewer and did not actually createother physical bodies for himself (1947: 115–118).

A double rhetoric, therefore, is present in the Catechism regarding themiraculous. On the one hand, “we do not believe in miracles.” On theother, the miraculous can in fact occur, but it is fully explainable byscience—not the positivistic science of the day but occult science. Inanother passage Olcott tells his questioner that human beings do in facthave “latent powers for the production of phenomena commonly called‘miracles’” but that these are “natural, not supernatural” (1947: 119–120).He then describes the various kinds of “occult powers” and ways theymight be developed (1947: 120–121). Throughout, he carefully maintainshis scientific rhetoric:

377. Q. Our scriptures relate hundreds of instances of [miraculous]phenomena produced by Arhats: what did you say was the name of thisfaculty or power?

A. Iddhi vidha. One possessing this can, by manipulating the forces ofNature, produce many wonderful phenomena, i.e., make any scientificexperiment he chooses. (1947: 123–124)

Olcott’s worldview was highly influenced by his own Theosophicalmovement and the long tradition of alternative American spirituality andas such admitted the existence and value of clairvoyance, faith healings,and communication with the dead and with the mysterious mahatmas(Fuller). In response to the growing popularity of Catholicism in Ceylonand especially of a Catholic shrine where numerous healings were said tohave taken place, he even went on his own Buddhist faith-healing tour ofthe island. Drawing on his early training in mesmerism he is reported to

1 In classical literature the most extensive description of such phenomena is found in Buddhaghosa.


have performed many healings which he publicly attributed to theBuddha, no doubt to show that the Catholic healing shrine was not theonly healing game in town and to dissuade Sinhalese from converting.In private, however, he again rejected the “miraculous” nature of hiscures. Insisting on strictly physiological explanations, he accounted forthem in terms of “the passing of a ‘nerve-aura’ between himself and apatient whose ‘mesmeric fluid’ was in ‘sympathy’ with his” (Prothero:108).

Although the Catechism relies extensively on occult science, Olcottalso marshals some of the essentials of mainstream science to the defenseof Buddhism. Siding with science against Christianity, he denies “cre-ation out of nothing,” claiming that this would be a miracle—presumablyin the sense of the abrogation of natural law rather than the “manipulationof the forces of Nature” referred to above. Buddhism also affirms, alongwith science, the “indestructibility of force” and the consistent operationsof causality (Olcott 1947: 119). Like Dharmapala, Olcott also presses thetheory of evolution into his service, claiming that, according toBuddhism, “everything is in flux, and undergoing change and reforma-tion, keeping up the continuity according to the law of evolution” (1947:110). He also asserts that the Buddha taught that “there were many pro-genitors of the human race” and that the theory of evolution verifies theBuddhist doctrine of karma.

Modern scientists teach that every generation of men is heir to theconsequences of the virtues and the vices of the preceding generation,not in the mass, as such, but in every individual case. Every one of us . . .gets a birth which represents the causes generated by him in an ante-cedent birth. This is the idea of Karma. (1947: 118)

On the basis of these parallels between science and Buddhism, he claimsthat Buddhism is a “scientific religion” rather than a “revealed religion,”obviously giving more credence to the former category (1947: 109).

Olcott’s emphasis on science was part of a larger attempt to presentBuddhism as congruent with the more liberal elements in Victorianculture, combining influences from Enlightenment philosophy with theideas deriving from the German Romantics and late-nineteenth-centuryoccultism. Olcott sums up the essence of Buddhism with the word“justice” because of its insistence that, through karma, “everyone willunerringly reap the rewards of his actions, bad or good” (1947: 53), aswell as “self-culture” and “universal love” (1947: 54). He also takes painsto insist that Buddhism opposes “idol worship” and the observance of“ceremonies and other external practices” (1947: 55–58). “[C]harms,


incantations, the observance of lucky hours and devil-dancing,” more-over, are all “positively repugnant” to the fundamental principles ofBuddhism (1947: 58), and such practices found among contemporaryBuddhists are due to the decline and corruption of the Dharma. Olcottinsists, as well, that Buddhism perfectly embodies the social virtueshighly valued among liberal modernists: women are on a “footing ofperfect equality with men” and the Buddha was a social reformer whorejected caste inequality outright (1947: 71–72). Buddhism, moreover,displays an experimental, pragmatic attitude and is based on empiricalevidence and autonomous reason, an implicit but obvious contrast withtraditional Christianity for which he often showed contempt. “[W]e areearnestly enjoined to accept nothing on faith; whether it be written inbooks, handed down from our ancestors, or taught by the sages” (1947:62). A Buddhist is required to believe only “when the writing, doctrine orsaying is corroborated by our own reason and consciousness” (1947: 63).Derived primarily from the Kalama Sutta, this insistence on verificationthrough personal experience and distrust of “faith” in the Christian sensewould become perhaps the most central theme of modernist Buddhism.

PAUL CARUS: BUDDHISM AND THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE

Perhaps the most important western figure in the attempts at inter-preting Buddhism through science was Paul Carus, a German immigrantto the United States and prolific author who edited the periodicals TheOpen Court and The Monist and wrote over seventy books and 1,500 articleson a wide variety of subjects including Kant, Spence, Goethe, Christianity,science, and mathematics. A participant at the World’s Parliament ofReligions, Carus was not a scholar of Buddhism per se; like Olcott he rodeon the orientalists’ coattails for his understanding of things Buddhist. Hisimportance to this inquiry lies in his popular presentations of a defini-tively rationalist, scientific Buddhism that, like Olcott’s Buddhism, alsoreflected the broad themes of liberal Protestantism and Enlightenmentphilosophy but was much more devoted to a mainstream, rather thanoccult, understanding of science.

Carus’s own religious background is significant in understanding hisattitudes toward Buddhism. He grew up a devoted conservative Christianbut had a crisis of faith that shattered his early worldview. His ownspeech at the World’s Parliament of Religions poignantly hints at thetrauma of believing that he was damned for his increasing doubts aboutChristianity. He declared to the audience that he himself had “sufferedfrom the misapplication of religious conservatism. . . . I have experiencedin my heart, as a faithful believer, all the curses of infidelity and felt the


burning flames of damnation” (1916: 34). Condemnations of evangelicalChristianity later in the talk suggest the cause of his loss of faith:

You who preach such a religion, can you fathom the tortures of a faithfuland God-loving soul, when confronted with ample scientific evidence ofthe untruth of his religious convictions?. . . . Whenever there is a souldistorted by a conflict between faith and scientific insight, the latter will,in the long run, always be victorious. And what a downfall of our noblesthopes must ensue! The highest ideals have become illusions; the purposeof life is gone, and desolation rules supreme. (1916: 34–35)

Out of this desolation, however, Carus came to believe that a new “purified”Christianity could be built. Indeed, from the fragments of his lost faith heconstructed a new one, the cornerstone of which was the very science thathad destroyed his old one. He believed that his own experience mirrored theevolution of religion itself, the “dross” of which must be stripped away bythe light of reason and science to leave only the gold. The despair entailed inthis purging was necessary in order to “learn to appreciate the glory andgrandeur of a higher stage of religious evolution” (1916: 36). This higherstage is heralded by the ascendancy of the scientific worldview, and Carus’snew faith sacralized science as nothing less than a new revelation.

The religion of the future cannot be a creed upon which the scientistmust turn his back, because it is irreconcilable with the principles of sci-ence. Religion must be in perfect accord with science. . . . Science isdivine, and the truth of science is a revelation of God. Through scienceGod speaks to us; by science he shows us the glory of his works; and inscience he teaches us his will. (1916: 20)

Carus was so insistent that science was a religious revelation that hecriticized antipathy to science by the religious as “a grievous fault,” a“moral error,” and, in fact, itself “irreligious” (1916: 34). Not content toleave Christianity behind completely, he came to believe that he couldretain its essential truths while jettisoning its dogmatic and mythicalelements. His new faith was in a religion not yet fully formed but that wasemerging through the rise of science and the increasing contact amongthe world’s religions. What was developing from this historical situation,Carus asserted, was a “religion that can never come into conflict withscience, which is based on simple and demonstrable truth” and which is“the goal and aim of all religions” (1892: vi–vii). Carus called it theReligion of Science.2

2 For a thoughtful treatment of Carus’s Religion of Science, see Verheoven.


Carus’s encounter with Buddhism came at the World’s Parliamentof Religions, where he was especially impressed by the speeches ofDharmapala and Soyen, whose talks, as we have seen, reflected analready-modernized and westernized Buddhism. Their presentation of aBuddhism whose essence was evolution, cause and effect, natural law,and experiential knowledge convinced Carus that he had found thebest representative of the Religion of Science among all the traditional,historical religions. He spent the next few years vigorously studying Asianreligions and quickly became America’s most enthusiastic supporter ofBuddhism. His position as editor of two journals plus the Open CourtPublishing Company allowed him to disseminate books and articles onBuddhism to a wide audience. Although explicit connections betweenscience and Buddhism were scant in his works, he presented the broadoutlines of Buddhism as a religion containing many essentials of Enlight-enment rationalism and late-nineteenth-century science: karma wasnatural law translated into the ethical realm; rebirth anticipated theDarwinian understanding of species transforming themselves into otherspecies; the detailed analyses of mind in Buddhist texts were in funda-mental agreement with modern psychology; the exhortations of theBuddha to be “lamps unto yourselves,” not blindly believing but toverifying his statements experientially, contained the quintessence of thescientific sprit.

Carus’s most influential work, The Gospel of Buddhism, assembledmaterial from the Buddhist canon edited to resemble the chapter andverse arrangement of the Christian gospels. Although disparaged by somescholars, it became quite popular and was translated into numerouslanguages. Like Olcott’s Catechism, Gospel was used to introduce AsianBuddhists themselves to Buddhism: Soyen reported that it was used atTokyo Imperial University, Dharmapala promoted it widely in Ceylon,and a sect of Japanese Pure Land Buddhists used it for training priests(Sharf: 12). Gospel used translations of Buddhist texts available at thetime, but Carus admitted to occasional “modernization” of the contents,and he added six chapters of his own that he called “elucidations of [Bud-dhism’s] main principles”—principles, of course, that were considered“main” insofar as they appeared to be in harmony with the Religion ofScience (1915: vi). He made little attempt to conceal that he was high-lighting certain aspects of Buddhism and suppressing others.

The mark of the Buddhism relevant to the modern world was, likethat which embodied the true spirit of Christianity, whatever could beinterpreted as in accord with the current scientific worldview. Althoughhe did not expunge all of the miraculous elements in the texts—keepingthose that he believed morally significant or that “bear witness to the holy


awe of the first disciples and reflect their religious enthusiasm”—henevertheless “pruned away the exuberance of wonder which delights inrelating the most incredible things, apparently put on to impress while infact they can only tire” (1915: viii). Those texts, summaries, and excerptshe chose to include were many of the ethical and doctrinal teachings inthe Pali canon, as well as parables and stories from the Buddha’s life.Keen to show that the heart of Buddhism was basically the same as theheart of Christianity, he also included an appendix drawing parallelsbetween passages in his Buddhist gospel and passages in the Christiangospels. These parallels serve, in turn, another purpose: that of demon-strating that the essential truths of both Buddhism and Christianity pointtoward a universal religion not yet manifest in the world. His program isclear from a passage in the introduction to the Gospel:

All the essential moral truths of Christianity, especially the principle ofuniversal love, of eradication of hatred, are in our opinion deeply rootedin the nature of things, and do not, as is often assumed, stand in contra-diction to the cosmic order of the world. Further, some doctrines of theconstitution of existence have been formulated by the church in certainsymbols, and since these symbols contain contradictions and come inconflict with science, the educated classes are estranged from religion.Now, Buddhism is a religion which knows of no supernatural revelation,and proclaims doctrines that require no other argument then the “comeand see.” The Buddha bases his religion solely upon man’s knowledge ofthe nature of things, upon provable truth. Thus, we trust that a compar-ison of Christianity with Buddhism will be a great help to distinguishin both religions the essential from the accidental, the eternal from thetransient, the truth from allegory in which it has found its symbolic expres-sion. We are anxious to press the necessity of discriminating between thesymbol and its meaning, between dogma and religion, between themetaphysical theories and statements of fact, between man-made for-mulas and eternal truth. And this is the spirit in which we offer this tothe public, cherishing the hope that it will help to develop in Christianitynot less than Buddhism the cosmic religion of truth. (1915: xiii)

In this passage are many of the basic elements of Carus’s translationof Buddhism into a religion of scientific modernism, and it deservesextended commentary. It begins with a reference to a scientific notion ofthe fundamental order of things, in Carus’s words, “the cosmic order ofthe world” or the “constitution of existence.” It is taken for granted thatthe science of the day has uncovered this basic order and that there is abedrock of scientifically discernible facts that are discoverable, provable,and undeniably true. “Scientific truths,” he claims elsewhere, “are suchstatements as are proved by undeniable evidence or by experiments and


formulated in exact and unequivocal terms” (1916: 28). For Carus “sci-ence is stern and unalterable; it is a revelation which cannot be inventedbut must be discovered” (1916: 46–47). Carus often insists that scientifictruth and religious truth are one and the same—this means that truth isthe correspondence of ideas and reality and that no matter the path to it,science or religious, truth is one. If a religion has any claim to truth, thattruth must also be scientific—for Carus, there simply could be no otherdefinition of truth. Furthermore, as was common in the late nineteenthcentury, his understanding of science assumed that it was inextricablylinked to the progress of humankind as a species—that it would, as Carusputs it, “raise our civilization to a higher plane” (1916: 79).

Carus also refers in the passage above to the spiritual crisis of theeducated (and no doubt his own spiritual crisis) and the problem of the dis-junction between the order of things revealed by science and the doctrinesand stories of the world’s religions that present an outdated worldview.This disjunction is mended by recourse to the ideas of symbolism, allegory,and mythology, loosely used, in Carus’s vocabulary, to indicate non-literalstories or ideas that nevertheless contain ethical meaning or point obliquelyto literal truths. The recasting of ideas incompatible with a scientific world-view as having non-literal, symbolic meaning was and still is among themost common tools of the modernizing religious reformer. All discoursein a tradition that is obviously counter to the dominant—in this case,scientific—discourse is interpreted as non-literal, allegorical, and symbolic.In the case of Buddhism, miracle stories and pre-scientific cosmologies areerased from the realm of cognitive statements describing actual events orontological facts about the world and translated into the realm of ethical,allegorical stories that can exist within the scientific conception of theworld—or be dropped altogether as the “exuberance of wonder . . . puton to impress.” Like Rudolph Bultmann in his demythologization ofChristianity over half a century later Carus attempted to find a home forBuddhism in the modern era by interpreting material unacceptable toscience as mythological and symbolic. Carus, in fact, claimed that under-standing such things literally was irreligious, a kind of “paganism.”

A religious truth symbolically expressed is called mythology, and he whoaccepts the mythology of his religion not as a parable filled with mean-ing but as a truth itself, is a pagan. Now we make bold to say, that noconflict is possible between genuine science and true religion. Whatappears as such is a conflict between science and paganism. (1916: 38)

Once material deemed unacceptable to science could be transposedinto the realm of the symbolic, and thereby effectively neutralized, the


“essential” in a tradition could be extracted from the “accidental . . . theeternal from the transient, the truth from allegory.” Confident in hiscapacity to discern between the fundamental truths of Buddhism andits superstitious cultural accretions, Carus could then declare thatBuddhism—no doubt, the “essence” of Buddhism—“knows of no super-natural revelation, and proclaims doctrines that require no other argu-ment than the ‘come and see.’ ” Thus, all of religion is divided up intotwo realms consisting of the distinctions “between symbol and meaning,dogma and religion, metaphysical theories and statements of fact, man-made formulas and eternal truth.”

Finally, the passage discloses what Carus considered his ultimatepurpose in presenting The Gospel of Buddhism: that it may further thedevelopment of a universal, cosmic religion. Carus proposed an evolu-tionary survival of the religious views most congruent with science untilultimately science and religion would merge.

Mankind is destined to have one religion, as it will have one moral idealand one universal language, and the decision as to which religion will atlast be universally accepted, cannot come about by accident. Science willspread, maybe, slowly but unfailingly, and the universal acceptance of ascientific world-conception bodes the dawn of the Religion of Truth—areligion based upon the plain statements of fact unalloyed with myth orallegory. (1897: 10)

Like many of his day, Carus applied rather promiscuously the broadcontours of Darwin’s evolutionary theory to cultural phenomena, takingit for granted that religions “evolve” and will either continue developingto culminate in the Religion of Science or simply become anachronisticand die away. Religions as well as species were in a struggle of the survivalof the fittest, and a religion that rejects science is “inevitably doomed.It cannot survive and is destined to disappear with the progress of civili-zation” (1916: 39). Eventually, he came to believe that Buddhism wasthe religion most likely to develop into the Religion of Science, forBuddhism, he claimed, “is a religion which recognizes no other revela-tion except the truth that can be proved by science” (1897: 114).

In contrast to Olcott, Carus represents an attempt to assimilate Bud-dhism with the positivistic scientism of his day. Although Olcott’s andCarus’s circles overlapped—both were associates of Dharmapala andShaku—they had different views of science, if not Buddhism. Carus, infact, was somewhat hostile toward “esoteric Buddhism” (Tweed: 60).Both, however, were responding in varying ways to a social crisis towhich we now turn.


SCIENCE AND SOCIAL CRISIS

The discourse of scientific Buddhism as represented by these figureswas part of a response to crises of legitimacy in their various culturalcontexts that were at once personal, cultural, and political as well asreligious. The development of the discourse among Europeans andAmericans must be understood within the context of two widespreadsocial phenomena of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:the Victorian crisis of faith and the emergence of the immense symboliccapital of scientific discourse. Carus’s embrace of Buddhism and hissacralization of science were occasioned by a sense of radical anomieattendant upon his loss of faith in traditional Christianity—a lossbrought about in part by his belief in its incompatibility with science.Like many westerners attracted to Buddhism in his time, he had come tosee orthodox forms of Christianity as deficient, effete, and pre-scientific.Although he found scientific accounts of the world irresistibly compel-ling, he still longed for a spiritual view of humanity and the cosmos. Hisloss of faith and attempts at reconstruction were not unique; a great dealof literature reflects similar crisis-of-faith experiences and religiousdisorientation, insecurity, and doubt among Victorians as well as new,skeptical modes of secular, religious, and quasi-religious life that arose inresponse (Helmstadter and Lightman). The reasons for this phenomenonare too complex to address here, but among those most important to ourinquiry are the increasing dominance of scientific explanations forthings formerly explained through religion and the growing distributionof scientific ideas, as well as those of non-Christian traditions, in the popularpress. This crisis was also a reaction against a wave of religious revivalismand evangelical fervor in England and America and an associatedincrease in missionary activity (Turner: 9–38).

Carus’s solution to his own crisis of faith was the valorization of thevery science that had formerly robbed his world of meaning. Hisembrace of science as the road not only to absolute certainty but alsoto the progress of human civilization is clear throughout much of hiswriting:

Bear in mind that the nature of science is the endeavor to establish anunquestionable orthodoxy on the solid foundation of evidence andproof? (sic) (1916: 80)

Science has changed our life and is still changing it, raising our civili-zation to a higher plane, and making us conscious of the great possibili-ties of invention, which by far outstrip the boldest promises of theillusions of magic. (1916: 79)


To escape the moral degradation of religion, we can no longer shutout the light of science, we must learn to understand that God is a Godof evolution, and the evolution means progress, and progress is theessence of life. (1916: 89)

Although extreme in contrast to today’s understanding of the rolesand possibilities of science, such pronouncements reflect the widespreadconfidence in science in the late Victorian era. The scientism of this timeclaimed for science not only the capacity to establish certainties about allquestions that could reasonably be asked but also the ability to advancethe material, ethical, and, for some, spiritual progress of humankind. Norwas Carus alone in giving a religious cast to science; religious interpreta-tions of evolution linked with an optimistic view of inevitable progressalong with religious or quasi-religious social forms were not uncommon.August Comte, the father of positivism, attempted to found a positivistchurch devoid of metaphysics. Henry Ward Beecher claimed that geologi-cal research had discerned “the long-hidden record of God’s revelation inthe material world” (quoted in Barbour: 67). Lyman Abbot referred to thescientific endeavor as describing the history of the outward signs of an“infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed,” an energyboth immanent and transcendent (quoted in Barbour: 67).

Indeed, a new scientific religiosity was emerging that conjoined thescientific confidence of the time with a spiritualized optimism derivedfrom modernist Protestantism. Accounts even of skeptics who rejectedreligion completely suggest that their unbelief mirrored in importantways the religious life they rejected, often involving “anti-conversion”narratives, a sense of renewed moral commitment, dedication to humanwelfare, and a kind of evangelical desire to promote their new views(Turner: 16–17). Thomas Huxley described the scientific establishmentas the “Church Scientific” and preached what he called “lay sermons”popularizing science as well as condemning organized religion (Knight:3–4). Carus’s sacralizing of science, then, was a radicalization of tenden-cies well ensconced in late Victorian thinking. His attempt to mergeBuddhism with science, although unusual, was a part of the widerreligious experimentation not uncommon among those affected by theVictorian crisis of faith. For him science promised the certainties thatreligion had failed to deliver, not because religion could not access thosecertainties but because it was diluted by superstition and “paganism.”Now that science provided the standard by which all religious claimscould be checked and verified, humanity had an inerrant tool for dis-cerning spiritual truth.


BUDDHISM AND UNIVERSALISM

Among Britishers and Americans who were becoming increasinglyaware of cultural and religious diversity through the popular press, animportant aspect of the Victorian crisis of faith was the challenge of reli-gious pluralism and conflicting truth claims among the world’s religions.Although the late nineteenth century was a time in which missionaryexpansion was at its height and traditional forms of Christianity thrived,many were profoundly challenged by the relativization occasioned by theunprecedented awareness of the profusion of worldviews. For some,including Carus and Olcott, the solution to the problem of pluralism layin a universalist interpretation of religion in which the conflicting claimsof the various philosophies and religions could be reconciled by theirown self-transcendence. Theosophy’s motto, “There is no religion higherthan Truth,” illustrated a common universalist theme: that the individualreligious traditions were partial and incomplete reflections of a hidden,transcendent Truth that no one historical religion could claim exclu-sively. This idea was an important, albeit minority, position amongVictorians and was a crucial element in the increasing acceptance ofBuddhism and other non-western traditions. Its early expressions werethose of James F. Clark, in his 1871 work Ten Great Religions and Sam-uel Johnson’s ambitious three-volume Oriental Religions and TheirRelation to Universal Religion published in 1872. Although they werequite informed by Christian presuppositions, both affirmed the essen-tial unity of all religions. Although Olcott and Carus seemed to believethat Buddhism—albeit a heavily edited and revised version—was thebest window on this Truth, neither saw any tradition as having exclu-sive possession of it. For Olcott, Buddhism was the best expression ofthe primordial esoteric tradition that infused all religions. Although heconsidered himself a Buddhist and had taken refuge in the three jew-els, this identity was subsumed under his allegiance to the more uni-versal vision of Theosophy. Olcott’s Buddhism was not just a traditionamong traditions but the best representative of the primal, perennialtradition:

Our Buddhism was that of the Master-Adept Gautama Buddha, whichwas identically the Wisdom Religion of the Aryan Upanishads, and thesoul of all the ancient faiths. (Olcott 1974–1975, vol. 2, 168–169)

For Carus, Buddhism was the most promising pointer to the Religionof Science, not Olcott’s ancient, primal tradition but an emerging universalreligion science that would retain what is true in historical religions anddiscard the rest as nature casts off species no longer viable. Carus’s


primary existential commitment was clearly to this grand narrative ofscientific religion rather than to Buddhism per se. His enthusiasm forBuddhism lay in his interpretation of the Buddha as the “first prophet ofthe Religion of Science” (1897: 309). Insofar as Buddhism—as well as asimilarly demythologized Christianity—could be integrated into thetotalizing discourse of religious scientism, it could help to elevate scienceto the status of a religious revelation rather than the cold, harsh destroyerof religion that it had seemed in his initial crisis of faith.

This commitment to a notion of religious truth that transcends anyhistorical religion was a crucial theme in the western interpretation ofnon-western traditions. Few Europeans and Americans in the Victorianera embraced Buddhism exclusively; rather, they saw it as a compellingpart of a larger picture. Then, as well as today, the allegiance of manywestern Buddhists or Buddhist sympathizers was not to Buddhism assuch but to a truth to which they believe Buddhism is one path amongmany (Gregory). Themes from Buddhist scriptures such as the metaphorof the raft and skillful means (upaya) are easily interpreted in such a light.This solution to the problem of pluralism, however, is less an adaptationof Buddhist ideas than a further elaboration of issues at the heart of theEuropean Enlightenment and the very birth of modern scientificdiscourse itself. Stephen Toulmin convincingly demonstrates that theopening gambits of the Enlightenment—Descartes’s attempts to estab-lish a totalizing discourse of truth and a method that would ascertain cer-tainties transcending sectarian differences—were themselves rooted in anearlier crisis of religious pluralism: the Thirty Years’ War. The project ofmodernity itself, Toulmin argues, was founded on a reaction againstthe tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty characteristic of Renaissancewriters such as Montaigne and the pressing need to overcome the doctrinaldifferences and pluralism perceived to have caused these wars. Truth, onthis model, must transcend specific cultural contexts, religious positions,and political agendas; it must establish universal laws, ethical norms—inCarus’s words, establish an “unquestionable orthodoxy on the solidfoundation of evidence and proof ” (1916: 80).

The desire for transcendent certitude and universal truth is, however,inevitably shaped by particular traditions and cultural conditions, andthis apparently universalist position was from the beginning a part ofthe pluralistic mix. Moreover, despite its disaffection with westernmodes of thought and practice and its frequent appeals to the wisdom ofan exotic tradition, it was a position grounded in western modernity. AsProthero shows, however much Olcott distanced himself from tradi-tional Christianity, the deep structure of his Buddhism remained embeddedin Protestantism (7–9, 176–177). Olcott and Carus were anxious to


fit Buddhism into the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centurymetanarrative of modernity with its themes of Enlightenment reason,scientific and social progress, optimism, and activism. Nevertheless, justas Descartes’s dream of establishing indubitable foundations of philo-sophic and scientific discourse failed to banish ambiguity and plurality,Carus’s and Olcott’s universalism could not escape becoming oneposition among others; nor could it avoid clashing with modernizerswith somewhat different interests—most notably, Dharmapala.

INDIGENOUS MODERNITY AND INVERSE CHRISTIANITY

If Carus’s and Olcott’s contributions to the discourse of scientificBuddhism were inextricably intertwined with the scientific triumphal-ism of their time and place, Dharmapala, as well as some other modern-izing Asians like Soyen, used scientific rhetoric to legitimate his owntriumphalist Buddhist–nationalist discourse. Despite the considerableinfluence of Olcott and Protestantism on Dharmapala, his partnershipwith Olcott and the Theosophical movement could not ultimately with-stand their fundamental differences. One of the important factors inDharmapala’s rejection of Theosophy centered on this issue of universal-ism; the price of Buddhism being assimilated into a non-Buddhist modelof truth was ultimately too high for him. Theosophy’s main tenet,“There is no religion higher than Truth,” necessarily subsumed livingreligious traditions beneath a supposed abstract, universal religion tran-scending all of its imperfect and fragmentary reflections. Olcott hadalready acutely experienced the practical problems of approachingadherents of living traditions with this idea; Dayananda Saraswati, whoseorganization, the Arya Samaj, had once merged with the TheosophicalSociety, eventually renounced his ties to it because he saw Olcott as beingtoo Buddhist and not accepting the higher revelation of the Vedas.Dharmapala, in turn, broke with Olcott, asserting that Theosophy was“only consolidating Krishna worship” and that because “theosophyenunciates the existence of the Great Lifegiver, the fundamental identityof all souls with the Universal Soul, emanation of souls from the CentralLogos, etc.,” Theosophy was not Buddhist (Henry Steel Olcott corres-pondence; quoted in Prothero: 167). “To say that all religions have acommon foundation only shows the ignorance of the speaker . . . Dharmaalone is supreme to the Buddhist” (Henry Steel Olcott correspondence;quoted in Prothero: 172). Furthermore, he was incensed by Olcott’ssuggestion that the famous tooth relic of the Buddha at Kandy wasreally an animal bone. Olcott, in turn, was disturbed by Dharmapala’s


encouraging of Sinhalese Buddhists to go on pilgrimages and attendfestivals (Obeyesekere: 239).

Especially after his break with Theosophy, Dharmapala was often vit-riolic in his discussions of other religions, vilifying Christianity, Judaism,and Islam. His critiques frequently used terms of opposition common toEuropean and American literature of the time—civilized vs. primitive,Aryan vs. Semitic. Such oppositions were used to advance the idea that“Semitic religion,” be it Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, was archaic, pre-scientific, and “unsuited for a civilized Aryan community” (Dharmapala:400). “The Semitic religions,” he claimed, in contrast to Buddhism, “haveneither psychology nor a scientific back ground (sic)” (439). Althoughconciliatory toward Christianity while in America and toward Hinduismwhile in India, by the 1910s his writings were increasingly intolerant ofboth. Apparently no longer concerned with allying himself with liberalChristians, as he had at the Parliament, he portrayed Jesus as a “personalityof an irritable temper,” whose “turbulent behavior at the temple . . .aroused the passions of the mob”; who preached of a god who sent peopleto eternal fire; demonstrated his lack of compassion by “sending 2000hogs to be drowned in the sea”; had “unclean habits”; associated with the“socially and morally low”; and was rude to his own mother (439–440).

Crucial to Dharmapala’s attacks on Christianity was the fact that itwas Semitic rather than Aryan and was rooted in the worship of theanthropomorphic “tribal god of Horeb.”

The British people today take pride in calling themselves Aryans. Thereis a spiritualized Aryanism and an Anthropological Aryanism. . . . Bud-dhism is spiritualized Aryanism. The ethics of the Bible are opposed tothe sublime principles of the Aryan Doctrine promulgated by the AryanTeacher. We condemn Christianity as a system utterly unsuited to thegentle spirit of the Aryan race. (442)

Along with references to the violent nature of both the Jews of theHebrew Bible and European Christians, who had plundered the world ina crass grab for wealth and power, is the pervasive opposition of Chris-tianity and Buddhism with regard to science.

With the spread of scientific knowledge, Christianity with its unscientificdoctrines of creator, hell, soul, atonement, will be quite forgotten. Withthe expansion of knowledge Europeans may come to know more ofevolution, of the laws of causation, of the changing nature of allphenomena, of the divisibility of matter, of the progressive nature of theanimal and human consciousness, then will Buddhism meet with asympathetic reception. (465)


Through the rhetoric of scientific Buddhism Dharmapala was able toembrace and yet deflect the racialist themes widely accepted in Europeanculture at the time. Appealing to the image promulgated by the Romanticsof an ancient, cultured, and advanced, but now lost, Indo-Europeancivilization, he could present not only the “Aryan” element as the noblestin European civilization that was overshadowed by the Semitic elementbut also Buddhism as the true antecedent to the most impressive ofmodern western accomplishments, the rise of science. In contrast to theoften-stated formula that nineteenth-century authors characterized “theEast” as primitive and mystical compared to the modern, rational West,Dharmapala presented Buddhism as quintessentially modern and rationalin ancient times. Europe, in contrast, was a kind of lost tribe of theAryans who had been seduced into primitivism and barbarism by theSemitic religions and only now were becoming modern and scientific.

Dharmapala’s vitriol against other religions and his continued rever-ence for many traditional aspects of Sinhalese Buddhist culture turnedthe universalism of Olcott and Carus on its head, claiming scientificityfor Buddhism alone. His rejection of the assimilating tendencies ofreligious universalism and his rootedness in the social and religiousworld of Ceylon, while at the same time incorporating modernist themesinto this tradition, constitute an aspiration to a type of modernity differ-ent from that of the West. Rather than submitting Buddhism to the logicof western modernism, he strategically appealed to science in orderto reinforce what he perceived to be the inviolable truths of the Dharma.In this sense his Buddhist modernism, though it employed the samediscourse of scientific Buddhism used by Carus and Olcott, representedan indigenous modernity—one that selectively utilizes distinctivelymodern western discourses but incorporates them into indigenous dis-course to form a unique hybrid that refuses to be fully assimilated towestern philosophical, social, and praxeological formations.

Finally, it is important to draw out explicitly what is implicit in thisarticle: that the discourse of scientific Buddhism emerged in directrelation to Christianity and that the questions each of our authors askedof Buddhism were framed in terms of Christianity. It is hard to over-estimate the extent to which the early discourse of scientific Buddhismwas inextricably intertwined with Christianity. Although it adopted theProtestant emphasis on text, personal experience, social activism, andVictorian Christian social mores, it was also in many respects a point-by-point negation of elements of the Christianity that Victorian skepticsquestioned. Buddhism had no cumbersome concept of a personal god; itpresented a universe run by “natural law” and “cause and effect” ratherthan the capricious dictates of a creator; its founder encouraged skeptical


questioning and experimentation rather than blind faith; it anticipatedrecent psychological discoveries in the West rather than embracing naïvetheories of a soul; its ideas of karma, rebirth, and the continuity of speciesanticipated, rather than clashed with, evolutionary theory; it had no morallyrepugnant eternal hell, no divine incarnation, no miracles. It became, ineffect, an inverse reflection of what skeptics and liberal Christiansbelieved to be problematic about orthodox interpretations of Christianityin light of scientific developments and biblical criticism. This, perhapsmore than any other factor, was the reason for the effectiveness of thisdiscourse. For spiritually unmoored Victorians it offered the hope of areligion that did not conflict with the dominant discourse of science. Forthe colonized it offered a tool by which to critique the hierarchical taxon-omies implicit in the colonial project and the dominant worldview of thecolonists.

The story of the early development of the discourse of scientificBuddhism, therefore, suggests that it emerged out of two intertwiningcrises in different cultural contexts: the Victorian crisis of faith inEngland and America, and the crisis of colonialism and western hege-mony in Asia. It also drew on the immense prestige and legitimizingpotential of science in the late nineteenth century. Although thediscourse promoted by all three of our figures was relatively homogenouswith respect to Buddhism’s “scientific” aspects, their divergent motiva-tions and allegiances revealed the fissures in the discourse between theuniversalist approach and indigenous modernist approaches—fissuresthat continue till today.

A NOTE ON THE DISCOURSE OF SCIENTIFIC BUDDHISM TODAY

The discourse of scientific Buddhism, despite these rather inauspiciousbeginnings, is no less powerful now than it was a century ago. Althoughthe nineteenth-century optimism regarding the unmitigated goodness ofscience is now but a distant dream, the transformative power of science andits dominance regarding claims of truth remain virtually unchallenged.The discourse of scientific Buddhism, moreover, has changed signifi-cantly in recent decades, in part because of the far greater knowledge ofBuddhism those involved in the discourse have and because of theempirical component that has emerged in recent decades. Contemporaryresearchers hook up meditating monks to functional magnetic resonanceimaging (MRI) machines mapping their brain states and physiologicalfunctioning and do long-term studies on the health benefits of Buddhistmindfulness practices to heart patients. Thus, in contrast to one hundred


years ago, the forefront of the discourse of scientific Buddhism is now thelaboratory, where scientists perform experiments informed by Buddhist-inspired questions.2 Although these empirical studies are sometimesnestled within the same vague assertions of scientific Buddhism we haveexamined, they tend to explore more specific questions related to healthand psychology and, at their best, can rightly claim a far more extensiveand mature understanding of both textual and living traditions ofBuddhism. My purpose in this final note, however, is not to evaluate thisnew phase of the discourse or its place in the academic study ofBuddhism but rather to ask, as a historian of Buddhism, what is its possiblehistorical significance to Buddhism itself.

For the historian of religion the question of whether two verycomplex and internally variegated phenomena—Buddhism and science—are compatible is rather unwieldy. It posits a monolithic “Buddhism” aswell as a monolithic “science,” reduces Buddhism to its highly philo-sophical elements abstracted from any living context, and further reducesthese to “general principles,” which are then rendered compatible withscientific principles (Leidecker: ix). Like Dharmapala’s “generalized ideaof Buddhism” (see his first quotation in this article) such reductionscreate an abstract Buddhism already constituted by modernist presuppo-sitions. The wealth of Buddhist scholarship in the last few decades hasmade it clear that Buddhism is too complex and diverse to be reduced tosuch generalities. This does not mean, however, that fruitful work cannotbe done in the sciences with questions derived from Buddhist perspectivesand practices—after all, much of western science has developed withinthe rubric of implicit Christian assumptions—rather, it means that thediscourse is not the best one to inform the historian about Buddhism as ahistorical and cultural phenomenon, because the Buddhism in questionis already reconfigured in terms of modern scientific thinking. Yet, whathistorians and cultural critics are liable to miss in their rush to dismissthe discourse of scientific Buddhism as an orientalist or “occidentalist”representation is that it is not simply a matter of representation but ratheris a concrete and highly significant transformation of Buddhist traditionsthemselves. It is not just a western orientalist representation of the easternOther, nor is it just a native strategy of legitimation for Asian Buddhists,though it does involve both. It is rather a part of the ongoing hybridization

2 At the forefront of these studies is the Mind and Life Institute, which hosts conferences andsponsors empirical research on the scientifically discernible effects of Buddhist meditation andcontemplative practices. Participants have published a number of books on the Institute’sconferences with the Dalai Lama and on the results of empirical research. (See Davidson andHarrington; Goleman: 1997, 2003; Hayward and Varela; Houshmand, Livingston, and Wallace;Varela.)


of certain forms of Buddhism with distinctively modern cultural formationsand intellectual practices. The historical question regarding contemporaryBuddhism, then, is not “Is Buddhism scientific?” but “How is Buddhismtransforming itself through its engagement with science?” Rather thantelling us “what Buddhism is,” this discourse is itself constitutive of novelforms of Buddhism with shifting epistemic structures and criteria forauthority and legitimacy.

Daniel Goleman, one of the leading popularizers of research involv-ing Buddhist meditation practices, illustrates this shift with an offhandcomment in an interview for a popular Buddhist magazine. Discussingempirical studies of experienced meditators performing compassionmeditation, Goleman reports that MRI machines showed that areas oftheir brains associated with joy were highly active—more than any othersthat had ever been measured (Goleman, “Taming Destructive Emotions,”2003]; Davidson and Harrington). When asked about the significance ofthis he said of traditional Buddhist approaches to overcoming klesasnegative psychological states: “[I]t’s beginning to look like the Buddhajust might have had it right” (Goleman, “Taming Destructive Emotions,”2003: 78). This research itself is interesting from both a scientific andreligious point of view, but it is this statement that is compelling from theperspective of the history of Buddhism. It suggests that the epistemicauthority of the sutras, the purported words of the Buddha (buddhava-cana), which have been authoritative for virtually all Buddhists, is nowbeing subsumed beneath the epistemic authority of the scientist.3 For wecan assume that honest scientific investigation may find that in somerespects the Buddha, as it were, got it wrong. This suggests that some ofthe tensions present in the early development of the discourse of scientificBuddhism are still at work today. Although some Buddhists may simplybe looking for legitimation of the Dharma through science, and may lose

3 The issue of epistemic authority in Buddhism is complex and variegated. The Kalama Sutta,which is often cited by Buddhist modernists to show the compatibility of Buddhism with modernscientific and rationalist modes of inquiry, presents the Buddha telling his disciples to accept histeachings only when they have verified them personally. Yet some schools have accepted the “reliabletestimony” (sabda) of the Buddha as a means of valid knowledge (pramana), making the words ofthe Buddha as authoritative as perception and inference, the other two universally accepted pramanas.Even among those who rejected reliable testimony it is difficult to find evidence that the word of theBuddha was not held supremely authoritative, both in the texts and certainly on the ground.Dignåga, the sixth-century master of Buddhist epistemology, rejected reliable testimony as a pramana,not because he held the words of the Buddha as less than authoritative but because, he argued, theythemselves were based on the Buddha’s perception and inference; adding reliable testimony to thelist of pramanas acceptable to the Buddhist, therefore, was redundant. I believe that one would behard pressed to find a “non-modern” Asian Buddhist, living or in the ancient texts, who did notconsider the words of the sutras all but supremely authoritative. For a further discussion of Buddhistpramanas see Hattori; McMahan: 47–51; Mohanty.


interest if science fails to deliver, others no doubt see scientific experi-mentation as the ultimate arbiter of what is the case and, like Carus andOlcott, are willing to subject Buddhist claims to a non-Buddhist standardof truth.

That Goleman and other western scientists, qua scientists, do this isnot surprising. What is extraordinary, however, is that the fissurebetween indigenous modernists like Dharmapala and those maintaininga universalist discourse (in this case, contemporary science) has beenrecently transgressed by prominent Buddhists, notably the most prominentone in the world, the Dalai Lama, who has actively encouraged much ofthe aforementioned research. The Dalai Lama has famously said that ifthere are Buddhist doctrines found definitively to contradict establishedscientific conclusions, then these doctrines must be abandoned. Taken atface value this would seem to signal a profound change in the structure ofBuddhist claims to authority if the Dharma itself is subject to scientificepistemic authority. To my knowledge, however, there has been no large-scale jettisoning of Buddhist doctrine; Buddhists have not suggested thatthe pre-scientific cosmologies and miracle stories be expurgated from thecanon. Rather, these elements are either ignored or become reinvestedwith meanings that are viable within a modern worldview. Many modernBuddhist teachers, for example, present the wheel of rebirth, the tradi-tional doctrine of the various realms into which beings are reborn, asneither obsolete nor literal cosmology but as a psychological reality, witheach realm representing a state of mind. Chögyam Trungpa, for example,claimed that an individual might enter each realm in a single day. Therealms of rebirth, then, become psychological realms representing greedor jealousy rather than actually places in which hungry ghosts orjealous gods dwell. The discourse of scientific Buddhism, therefore, hasbecome an important part of how Buddhists address a question thatpermeates religious thought in the modern world: how to decide what isto be understood as literal and what is to be reinterpreted as myth,symbol, or allegory. In some respects this is a modern transformation ofa traditional Buddhist hermeneutical issue regarding literal or allegoricalmeaning—indeed, the distinction was not invented by modern westerners(Lamotte). The contemporary hermeneutic situation is unique, however,in that for the first time a non-Buddhist discourse is increasingly used todecide this question.

The unique and prominent place of scientific discourse in Buddhism,therefore, is not just a representation of Buddhism but a powerfulconstituent of what certain forms of modern or postmodern Buddhismare becoming. It is an important aspect of the continuing hybriditybetween modern, western thought and Buddhism and a part of the


ongoing negotiation regarding what claims can still be maintained onto-logically and what must be construed as mythic, symbolic, or psychologicalin significance. Such questions already cause a fair amount of contesta-tion, and the discourse of scientific Buddhism, having arisen out of crisis,may well provoke its own crises as traditions struggle over what points ofDharma are negotiable and what are not. Again, this process is in no wayunique to Buddhism—virtually all historical religious traditions gothrough such processes in their encounters with modernity. Becausescience has had such an important legitimating role in modernBuddhism, however, it will likely play an unusually powerful constitutiverole in what modern Buddhism is to become.

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Documents

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