Anagarika Dharmapala’s Meditation

ABSTRACT

Dharmapala was the son of a pious Buddhist family, although educated in missionary schools where he acquired knowledge of English and Christian scripture. English gave him access to Western scholarship on Buddhism and made him a useful member of the Theosophical Society, which arrived in Sri Lanka in 1880. Wanting to be a religious worker, Dharmapala served as Colonel Olcott’s translator, and he soon came to be influenced by Madame Blavatsky’s highly imagined interpretation of Buddhism. The upshot was that Dharmapala’s lifelong practice of meditation was shaped by Theosophical interest in esoteric Buddhism and the moral course of the advanced spiritual seeker.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Dharmapala’s notebooks are unpublished, but can be found at the Dharmapala library, Sarnath. His diaries have been transformed from English handwriting to English typescript. They exist as 30-odd hardbound volumes at the Sri Lankan National Archives and the Dharmapala library at the Maha Bodhi Society headquarters in Colombo. The most convenient guide to these materials appears in Kemper 2015: Appendix One.

2. Master Moriya and Koot Hoomi were presented as the two specifically Buddhist mahatmas, both attributed with the role of looking out for the interests of all people, while trying to re-establish the sāsana (Buddhism as a social formation) in India, which was also Dharmapala’s goal.

3. Neff, 1967, 271, 277, and 278.

4. 1988, 222–4.

5. 2006, 6–10.

6. Lankan monks are identified by a first name indicating their birthplace, followed by an ordination name. Here I shall be using their birthplace name.

7. 1895-1935, 3, 208.

8. 1969: 21.

9. The Bambaragala ms. duly noted, most of what Dharmapala knew of the dhyana tradition came from Theosophy, which paid little attention to subtle distinctions between methods and types of practice.

10. Woodward says that Doratiyaveye had received the yogāvacara’s technique from his teacher, but refused to practise it because he feared receiving nirvana immediately. Instead, he gave it to a student to practise and he soon died (p. xviii). That may have been the end of the yogāvacara technique as a monkly tradition, as Woodward suggests, but it lived on in Dharmapala’s practice.

11. As we shall see below, Dharmapala understood dhamma here to refer to teaching for uttari manussa, rather than the superhuman qualities/phenomena.

12. As cited in Bodhi 2002.

13. 1914, 212.

14. Maha Bodhi, 1899, 97.

15. Buddhaghosa, B.1976.The Path of Purification. Vol. 2,Translated by B. Nyanamoli, Berkeley: Shambala.

16. Woodward, 1970: xviii.

17. The Visuddhimagga is quite a lot more than a meditation manual. By way of explaining the path to purification, it explicates the whole of the Buddha’s teachings.

18. Sinnett 1912, 231.

19. Neff 1967, vol. 1, 41.

20. The esoteric wisdom that Blavatsky distinguished from mundane knowledge was not exclusively Buddhist, because ‘esoteric philosophy reconciles all religions…and shows the root of each to be identical with that of every other great religion’ (Neff, 1967, p. 43). Dharmapala was not interested in locating the core of all ‘great’ religions. He wanted the secret wisdom found in Tibet in Buddhist form.

21. The man Dharmapala described as his ‘Burmese friend,’ I suspect is the same man he later described as ‘the Arakanese upasaka.’ It was that same Burmese, I am assuming, who also told Dharmapala to practise vipassanā, implying that he saw a difference between what Dharmapala was practising and vipassanā (Diary 14 April 1891). The complication is that he later says the “Burmese upasaka gave him instruction in kammatthana (Diary 14 February 1921). There are four possibilities here – Dharmapala is misremembering, there were two Burmese at Adyar, he received instruction in both vipassana and kammatthana, or he uses these two words interchangeably.

22. On boran kammathan, see the contributions by Choompolpaisal, Skilton and Crosby and Gunasena in this volume.

23. Kemper 2015, 187.

24. 1971: 281, n.18. Gombrich (1983) concludes his piece on modern meditation by saying that there are traces of Tantrism in lay practice nowadays, ‘From Monastery to Meditation Center: Lay Meditation in Modern Sri Lanka,’ in Philip Denwood and Alexander Piatigorsky (ed.), Buddhist Studies Ancient and Modern, London, 20–34 at 32.

25. Braun 2013, 28–9.

26. Crosby, Skilton, and Gunasena have shown that there were both monks and laypeople practicing boran kammatthan techniques in Southeast Asia at Dharmapala’s time. There were also predecessor texts for these techniques, and they may have been rought to Sri Lanka by the 18th century monks who brought higher ordination to Kandy and stayed to teach. See Crosby 2000 and Crosby 2013.

27. My hesitation here comes from the disparate spellings used to transcribe the monk’s name–Sing Hin, Xian Hui, Pe Wang Sim and Wan Hui. Dharmapala speaks in his diaries of having met ‘Wan Hui’ (14 February 1921).

28. ‘A “Brocher” in Ceylon: A Visit to Adam’s Peak,’ Northern Counties Advertiser, 30 March 1897, reprinted in The Overland Times of Ceylon, 16 April 1897, 644.

29. ‘Arrival of Hermit Priest Sing Hin,’ Ceylon Standard, 13 April 1898, 5.

30. As it turned out, Sing Hin never made it home to Fuzhou. When the party reached Singapore, they were met by a leading local Buddhist, Lo Kim Pong who had built a temple in anticipation of the arrival, Lo said, ‘of a radiant man coming from the West.’ The Shuanglin temple has since become the largest Buddhist temple in Singapore, accommodating a lineage of ascetic monks deriving from Sing Hin and an ordination tradition that began at the Xi Chan Si temple in Fuzhou. See Kemper forthcoming.

31. As early as the seventeenth century Chan Buddhist masters began to send out monks from South China to Chinese merchant settlements in Southeast Asia. See Wheeler 2007, 303–24. It is worth contemplating whether those Chan masters brought meditation texts to Southeast Asia.

32. Diary 15 August 1897.

33. I owe this summary of nimitta usage in the Yogavacara’s Manual to Kate Crosby (personal communication).

34. Gombrich and Obeyesekere suggest a South Asian paradigm, a role known as naisthika brahmacharin, eschewing the householder stage of life, remaining celibate, and continuing to study, 217. Dharmapala shows no sign of knowing of this life choice. His paradigm was Damodhar Mavalankar, the Theosophists’ favourite acolyte, Dharmapala’s fellow chela, and the young man who disappeared on his trek to Tibet. While Gombrich and Obeyesekere looked to a South Asian paradigm, neither they nor Dharmapala seem to have been aware of diversity of statuses available to renouncers (bhikkhu, hermits, itinerants) in Thailand traditionally as documented in Bizot (1993).

35. Guruge 1965a, 415.

36. Dharmapala did not hide his hopes for traveling to Tibet, announcing at the Congress of Orientalists in 1897 that he intended ‘on going to Tibet in search of the truth.’ He added that he had the support of Sir Charles Elliot, who promised to write to the Commissioner of Darjeeling ‘to afford facilities for the carrying out of my project.’ ‘European Explorers of Tibet,’ The Maha Bodhi, April 1899, 115. He indicates that the princely Thai monk Jinavaravamsa had agreed to go with him (Diary 19 November 1897) and that he wanted to take a ‘Gramophone’ with him – “Mantras and pirit [protective verses] will be spoken to the cylinders” (Diary 11 September 1897).

37. I do not know what became of the Hanguranketa manuscript, nor what it contained.

38. Another point I owe to Andrew Skilton (personal communication).

39. Eliade 1958, 194.

40. Woodward’s translations of parikamma, uggahanimitta and appanāsamādhi respectively.

41. TW Rhys Davids 1896, xiii.

42. Crosby 2000, 180. Historians and anthropologists interested in the Kandyan period have argued about exactly how culturally alien were the Nayakkar kings who ruled from 1739 to 1815. They were Tamil by birth and followed Saivite practices in some contexts. But they met their responsibilities as Buddhist kings, and Kirti Sri Rajasinha was responsible for bringing Thai monks to re-establish higher ordination among Kandyan monks. That members of the Kandyan court held Buddhist meditation manuals throws light on this question. See Cousins, 1997; Crosby, Skilton, and Gunasena, 2012; and Crosby, 2014.

43. He does not indicate in the diaries whether he made use of his copy of the Bambaragala manuscript when he meditated. After receiving it back from Rhys Davids, he handed it over to Palane Vajiranana, likely during his final stay in London (Diary 2 September 1930).

44. The Maha Bodhi, 1894, 51.

45. Guruge 1965b, 737.

46. The notion that sleep constitutes an obstacle to spiritual development is ancient, identified in the Mahābhārata (XII, 241, 3) as one of the five sins (sexual desire, wrath, greed, fear and sleep). Among the four dispositions, sleep stands out as a biological need and part of the diurnal cycle. Eliade says that the ‘five hindrances’ notion continues in the Dhammapada (151, n. 21). The Dhammapada uses the same metaphor, speaking of the yogin’s need to ‘cut off’ the ‘hindrances’. In Carter and Palihawadana’s (1987) translation, the five hindrances are given as ‘lust, hate, confusion, self-estimation, and [wrong] views’ (pp. 74 and 383). It is unclear why sleep remains a hindrance, but other ascetic monks have followed the same formula, including Ven. Lokanatha of Burma (born Salvatore Cioffi of Brooklyn, New York), ‘Never Goes to Bed,’ The Singapore Free Press, 1 September 1929, p. 3. Lokanatha renounced using a bed altogether, and spent the night meditating in a chair in the third-class lounge while traveling from the United States to Burma.

47. 1997, 193.

48. For Burma, Sarkisyanz 1965,149–59; for Sri Lanka, Bond 1988, 75–129.

49. Blavatsky 1995, 434.

50. Blavatsky 1971, 324.

51. 1972, 152.

52. Viswanathan 2002, 2.

53. The contrast with early 19th century Sri Lanka is instructive. In early census records, Sinhalas identified themselves as ‘Buddhist Christians.’ Besides Ilukvatte and Dharmapala, no one thought of themselves as Buddhist Theosophists in the full sense of those terms.

54. Kemper 2015, p. 81.

55. Kariyawasam 2009, 90.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Kemper

Steven Kemper is Charles Anderson Dana Professor of Anthropology at Bates College.  His most recent publication is Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (Chicago, 2015). Nowadays he is working on a book to be entitled A Larger Buddhism, focusing on Dharmapala's contradictory role in establishing a cosmopolitan Buddhism abroad and nationalist Buddhism in Sri Lanka.