Rethinking Early Western Buddhists: Beachcombers, ‘Going Native’ and Dissident Orientalism

Abstract

Recent research on the life of U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia has interesting implications in relation to class, ethnicity and politics. ‘Beachcomber Buddhists’ highlight the wider situation of ‘poor whites’ in Asia—needed by empire but prone to defect from elite standards of behaviour designed to maintain imperial and racial power. ‘Going native’, exemplified by the European bhikkhu, highlights the difficulties faced by empire in policing these racial boundaries and the role of Asian agency in early ‘western’ Buddhism. Finally, such ‘dissident Orientalism’ has political implications, as with specifically Irish forms of solidarity with Asian anti-colonial movements. Within the limits imposed by the data, this article rethinks ‘early western Buddhism’ in Asia as a creative response to colonialism, shaped by Asian actors, marked by cross-racial solidarity and oriented to alternative possible futures beyond empire.

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’. Many thanks are due to Brian Bocking, Alicia Turner and Kate Crosby for their comments on earlier versions of this piece. I wish to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council in relation to this research.

Notes

 1. The conversion of a European to Buddhism in Bangkok, Straits Times, August 10, 1878.

 2. Alicia Turner (pers. comm.) notes that the implication here is that the Thai king had restricted certain positions to former monks because of their assumed education and status.

 3. Times of Burma, July 19, 1905; Ceylon Observer, September 4, 1909.

 4. See also http://www.payer.de/budlink.htm under ‘Materialien zum Neobuddhismus’ for some ground-breaking work in this direction.

 5. See also Elleray (2005, 169) on European clothing as a visible and controllable index of less tangible aspects of ‘metropolitan orders of being’.

 6. The Irish Buddhist priest, Ceylon Observer, September 11, 1909; Correspondence, Ceylon Observer September 14, 1909.

 7. http://buddhism.about.com/b/2012/11/22/the-president-and-the-buddha.htm

 8. Warning to Buddhists, Times of Burma, January 9, 1901.

 9. From Catholic priest to Buddhist monk, Englishman (Calcutta), April 11, 1912.

10. ^‘Christianity' in Burma, Deseret Evening News, August 24, 1901.

11. The cases mentioned here are discussed in greater detail in Cox (2013).