Flagging Up Buddhism: Charles Pfoundes (Omoie Tetzunostzuke) Among the International Congresses and Expositions, 1893–1905

Abstract

Charles James William Pfoundes (1840–1907), a young emigrant from Southeast Ireland, spent most of his adult life in Japan, received a Japanese name ‘Omoie Tetzunostzuke’, first embraced and then turned against Theosophy and, from 1893, was ordained in several Japanese Buddhist traditions. Lacking independent means but educated, intellectually curious, entrepreneurial, fluent in Japanese and with a keen interest in Asian culture, Pfoundes subsisted as a cultural intermediary, explaining Japan and Asia to both Japanese and foreign audiences and actively seeking involvement in global expositions and congresses, in Asia and beyond. Drawing on a previously unstudied collection of Pfoundes' personal documents, this paper first outlines Pfoundes' unusual career and then focuses on his engagement, in the last 15 years of his life, in actual or proposed international congresses and expositions in London, Chicago, Japan, Hanoi, St Louis and Oregon. The paper thereby draws attention, through the forgotten figure of Charles Pfoundes, to the distinctive nineteenth century phenomenon of great international expositions and their associated congresses, viewing these complicated events as another kind of crossroads; innovative nodes and material stimuli to the kinds of travel, cultural communication and interaction which, like monastic, trade, political and ethnic networks, helped to exchange and promote modern representations of Buddhism.

Acknowledgements

The initial version of this paper was presented at the Conference SE Asia as a Crossroads for Buddhist Exchange: Pioneer European Buddhists and Asian Buddhist Networks 1860–1960 hosted by the Study of Religions Department, University College Cork, Ireland, 13–15 September 2012 and funded by the Dhammakaya International Society of the United Kingdom as part of the 2012 postdoctoral fellowship ‘Continuities and Transitions in early Modern Thai Buddhism’. I am grateful to my fellow Pfoundes researchers Yoshinaga Shin'ichi and Laurence Cox who have so generously shared their findings in our ongoing and expanding research on pioneer Western Buddhists. Cox's account of Pfoundes in his Buddhism and Ireland (Equinox 2013) was completed before this article was begun, as of course were the 2009 articles by Yoshinaga and Akai. Thanks also to Fiona Fitzsimons of Eneclann for research into Pfoundes' family background, to Gaynor Sekimori (School of Oriental and African Studies) for insights into Pfoundes' Shugendō connections and to Jennifer Keyser of the Oregon Historical Society for help with the Lewis and Clark Exposition papers.

Notes

 1. Congress of Orientalists: The Hanoi Meeting. Times of India, 19 January 1903, p. 6, from the paper presented to the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society by Professor Macmillan two days earlier (Macmillan 1904).

 2. Dhammaloka had broadcast his intention of heading from Hong Kong North, travelling temple by temple to Peking (which he may have reached) and thence Lhasa (which he did not). Kobe. London and China Telegraph, March 2, 1903, 162.

 3. I have not yet found a flag of the period with exactly this combination of elements. The swastika is of course ubiquitous as a sign of Japanese Buddhism and the rising sun flag was, by 1902, well-recognised as the emblem of the Japanese navy. Today's Tibetan ‘snow lion’ flag (accessed January 27, 2013. http://www.artelino.eu/en/articles/tibetan-mythology/179-tibet-snow-lion.html) designed in the same year, 1902, and perhaps by the same Japanese priest Aoki Bunkyō (Shimatsu, 2008, 92), has the Japanese sun's rays, while a circular Buddhist motif with swastika and rays can evidently be found in Vietnam today. See, for example, the chance image from Saigon in a comment by ‘Kasalt’ headed ‘the swastika in Buddhism’ responding to Swami B.G. Narasingha's ‘The Swastika and the Cross’ (accessed January 27, 2013. http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t = 31635).

 4. H.K. Daily Press. November 18, 1902. C. PFOUNDES. Capt. C. Pfoundes of Japan passed through H.K. yesterday on his way to the Hanoi Exposition, where he will represent the chief monasteries of the Tendai, Shingon, Zen, and Jodo sects and also Japanese art (Papers of Harold S. Williams, MS 6681, National Library of Australia).

 5. The French Colonies in China. The Open Court 1903 (3): 175–176.

 6. Charles' age is given as 38 years in his Liverpool marriage certificate of March 1878 and 40 in the 1881 UK census. His elder brother [Joseph] Elam Pounds was born in 1838 in Mothill ( = Mothel?), Co. Waterford, according to his Australian marriage certificate. A younger brother, George St Ledger Pounds, b. 1843, died at 6 months.

 7. Caroline's father, Lt. Joseph Elam (d. 1829), was emphatically not a Quaker; for the long Elam ancestry see Neill (1995). James Baker Pounds can be traced in New Ross, Wexford (late 1830s to 1850s) and in Australia from the mid-1850s to his death in 1884. According to an 1871 court report of Caroline Pounds' testimony (‘Strange Case’, Freeman's Journal, November 3, 1877), Charles' parents separated when he was about 6 years old, Charles emigrating with his father and Caroline abandoned in Ireland. However, Caroline seems to have been in Australia in the late 1840s. Her Australian flower and bird paintings, one reportedly dated 1846, were discovered in the early 1980s in Geelong, Victoria, in the attic of the family home of Lilias Ibbotson, second wife of Charles' elder brother Elam. Butler (1999) writes: ‘By 1846, according to an inscription by the artist on one of her watercolours of native Australia plants, the family had arrived in Sydney’. Such inconsistencies in the records suggest the Pounds might have travelled briefly to Sydney around 1846 and the couple separated on return to Ireland, Charles emigrating to Melbourne in 1854 on the SS Great Britain (President's Office Correspondence), Elam in October 1855 (on the Shackamaxon) and their father James c. 1856, while Caroline remained in Ireland until her death in 1898.

 8. President's Office Correspondence.

 9. The name ‘Pfoundes’ appears (at least to me) to be a clever play on the English name Pounds and his Japanese name ‘Omoie Tetzunostzuke’ (Omoi Tetsunosuke 重鉄之助) literally ‘weight assisted by iron’ reportedly bestowed on Pounds in the 1860s. In The Far East 1 (11), 1908 (after Pfoundes' death), Adachi Konnosuke says: ‘His name I believe was Pound, and we gave him a Japanese name of Omoi Tetsunosuke (which being interpreted means “heavy iron”) which we thought came as near as possible to his original name’ (Gaynor Sekimori, pers. comm.). ‘Pounds’ in katakana ﾌｵﾝﾃﾞｽ is ‘PfuONDESu’, and pounds = libra = weight. If we add fe, the chemical element for iron, to ‘Pounds’ this yields ‘Pfoundes’; pounds plus iron. Incidentally Pfoundes was never called ‘Condor’. The newspaper headline ‘Well done Condor’ quoted in a January 1899 letter to Satow (Ruxton, 2005, 384) is Pfoundes' own salute to HMS Condor, the gunboat heroically captained at Alexandria in 1882 by Charles, Lord Beresford who, Pfoundes hoped, was about to visit Kobe from Hong Kong.

10. Probably not for long: Laurence Cox, Mihirini Sirisena and Rachelann Pisani are currently (2012–2013) engaged in an Irish Research Council-funded project to identify Dhammaloka's pre-monastic identity and whereabouts and hence the course of his political and intellectual formation.

11. Including Count Mutsu Munemitsu (Von Siebold 2000). For China and Japan. Daily Alta California, 23 (7679), 1 April 1871. President's Office Correspondence.

12. President's Office Correspondence. In the Yedo Hong List and Directory (Japan Gazette 1874), p. 45, top of the list of foreigners working for the National Mail Steam Ship Company of Japan is ‘Pfoundes, C., Director's Office’.

13. A report of the sale with prices obtained appeared in the New York Times: Japanese Art Treasures (1876), June 7; The Pfoundes Collection—Remarkable Display of China and Bronzes—Characteristics of Japanese Art.

14. On Hirai, who started as an anti-Christian nationalist and became a Unitarian after participating in the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago see Nozaki (2009, 157ff). On Matsuyama, an English teacher in Kyoto, see Yoshinaga (2009, 124–5).

15. President's Office Correspondence.

16. A Strange Case (1877) Freeman's Journal, November 3.

17. Numerous notices and reports of these events have survived but a full analysis will have to wait for another occasion.

18. Pseudonyms include Censor, ABC, E. Non Fumari, Amateur, Mercator, Argus, Nemesis, A Proselyte, Damocle's (sic) Sword, Scrutator, Argus and Reformer. Pfoundes' collected letters, with two other letters from ‘Merchant’ (Pfoundes 1874), were prefaced by this instruction from Pfoundes: Dear Sir,—Please re-print all my contributions to your paper, without exception, from the beginning. And oblige, Yours truly, C. J. Pfoundes, 17 August 1874.

19. He is listed on p. vi of the Folk-Lore Society's ‘List of Members’, prefacing The Folk-Lore Record, Part I, 1878, as ‘C Pfoundes Esq., Tokio, Japan’. Pfoundes' versions of 11 Japanese folk tales appear on pp. 118–135.

20. In the President's Office Correspondence, Pfoundes explains in great detail how he arranged the sale.

21. See Pfoundes (1882) (paper in London read May 25, 1881), and Pfoundes (1886, 390).

22. Why Buddhism? The Open Court: A Weekly Journal Devoted to the Religion of Science No. 415 (Vol. IX–32), Chicago, August 8, 1895: 4594–4597; The French Colonies in China. The Open Court 1903: 175–176.

23. Rosa Alice Pfoundes remained for some years in London working as a civil servant and long outlived Pfoundes; she died in 1936 at the age of 80 in Worthing, Sussex and is buried there in a pauper's grave.

24. President's Office Correspondence.

25. The Oregon papers (President's Office Correspondence) naturally highlight Pfoundes' role as a diplomatic or business intermediary for Americans.

26. Returning to Japan in 1893 after 17 years absence, Pfoundes claimed on arrival in Matsue to be 62 (Okazaki Hideki, pers. comm.), presumably this was to add credence to his claim that he had taken normal retirement from the Admiralty. In fact he was 53, so his subsequent self-proclaimed status as ‘senior resident’ of the Kobe foreign community (see Richard Gordon Smith, Travels in the Land of the Gods p. 149, cited in Rogala, 2000, 192) relied on his compatriots thinking he was far older than he was. The British consul obligingly estimated his age at death as 79 years.

27. The Buddhist journal Hansei Zasshi 8 (7), July 1893, reports Pfoundes' Tendai ordination at Mt Hiei on July 17, 1893. A photo of Pfoundes taking part in a Shugendō firewalking ritual c. 1904 and another of him in eclectic Zen/Shingon attire appeared in East of Asia Magazine (Pfoundes 1905). The Hong Kong Daily Press, 18 Nov 1902 reports what is presumably Pfoundes' own claim that in Hanoi he would represent the ‘Tendai, Shingon, Zen, and Jodo sects’; the Hanoi Congress Compte Rendu reported that ‘he has succeeded in affiliating himself to several Buddhist sects’.

28. Thelle 1987, 109n cites: Uchiyama Torasuke, ed. 1893. Pfoundes, Bukkyō enzetsushū, [C. Pfoundes: A Collection of Buddhist Lectures]. Kyoto: Kōbundō.

29. Yoshinaga Shin'ichi, pers. comm.

30. Satow refused to help, writing to Hall that ‘it is a piece of impudence for a B[ritish] S[ubject] to ask a British official to help him to get rid of his allegiance to the Queen’ (Ruxton, 2005, 390, 393).

31. Pfoundes (1905).

32. For example, Burris (2001) reports that 20% of the English population visited London's Great Exhibition of 1851 and 27 million of a total US population of 66 million attended the 1893 Columbian exposition in Chicago.

33. Burris (2001, 112–113) points out that commercial priorities meant several cultures were in fact ‘out of place’ in what has usually been characterized as ‘an evolution-minded “sliding scale of humanity”’.

34. India and Japan secured a place in the White City (Burris, 2001, 113–115).

35. The original aim ‘to unite all religion against irreligion’ was revised by 1892 to seeking ‘an accurate and authoritative account of the present condition and outlook of Religion among the leading nations of the world’ while considering ‘the impregnable foundations of Theism’, but most participants retained the universalist aspiration (Seager, 1995, 48–49).

36. The Oriental Congress (1892) The Colonies and India [newspaper], September 17, 16.

37. President's Office Correspondence, letter dated March 25, 1903. A Japanese Exhibition, Gloucester Citizen, October 21, 1902, 3. Pfoundes is listed by Barrows (1893, 46) as one of about 3000 advisors to the Parliament.

38. President's Office Correspondence.

39. Bocking, 2010, 236–237.

40. The President's Office Correspondence has the full undated circular letter, probably September 1902.

41. The French Colonies in China, The Open Court 1903 (3): 175.

42. My translation from the French in Schneider (1903, 51). See the very similar account of Pfoundes' talk in Macmillan (1904, 501–502): he refers to ‘vestments, scarfs and rosaries’. Curiously, Pfoundes' own ‘Bulletin No.1’ circulated to Orientalists worldwide following the Hanoi congress (and which claims that a number of scholars and diplomats have already joined his new ‘Orientalists’ International Union') gives the title of his Hanoi paper as ‘The Iconography and the Buddhist Art, Pinctic and Glyptic, of Japan, &c.’ (President's Office Correspondence, probably early 1903).

43. A Strange Case, Freeman's Journal, November 3, 1877.

44. Much later, in Matsue in 1893, Pfoundes missed encountering Lafcadio Hearn, who had left there in 1891 for Kumamoto.

45. Satow looked down on Pfoundes, in 1899 describing him as a ‘mountebank’ and 20 years earlier dismissing his writings as ‘utterly valueless’ and deriding his plans for a ‘Nippon Institute’ in London (Ruxton, 2008, 127). However, Pfoundes' 1875 collection Fuso-mimi-bukuro: A Budget of Japanese Notes, which appeared 15 years before Chamberlain's admittedly more erudite Things Japanese had an appreciative readership: Reed (1880), for example, took many of his examples from Pfoundes.

46. Congress of Orientalists: The Hanoi Meeting (1903) Times of India, January 19, 6.

47. President's Office Correspondence.

48. On his return from Tokyo to Siam in 1903, U Dhammaloka was inspired by his Japanese experience (specifically, the 1902 launch of the International Young Men's Buddhist Association (IYMBA) but more broadly by the unrealized prospect of a Japanese World's Parliament of Religions), to plan for a large international Buddhist congress in Bangkok (Proposed Buddhist Congress, Bangkok Times Weekly Mail, June 23, 1903, 15).

49. We have no evidence that Pfoundes and Dhammaloka met, though it is entirely possible they did in 1902. Both were in Japan in the autumn but Pfoundes was probably in Kobe rather than present at the September launch of the IYMBA in Tokyo.

50. Kate Crosby has drawn my attention to the following work in Khmer: Sok, Buntheoun (2000, BE); Browat Tong Preah Putthasasna [The History of the Buddhist Flag].