Anagarika Dharmapala

• 1. A Protector of the Dharma

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  Anagarika Dharmapala stepped into the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya in 1891. What he found there was a shock. The site was the chief of the four ancient Buddhist holy sites. A Saivite priest held control of it. The Buddha image had been converted into a Hindu icon. Buddhists were barred from worship. Born Don David Hewavitarne on the 17th of September 1864 in Colombo, Ceylon, Dharmapala came from a family of considerable wealth. His parents, Don Carolis Hewavitharana and Mallika Dharmagunawardhana, were counted among the richest merchants in Ceylon. He attended four schools under British colonial administration, including S. Thomas' College, Mutwal and the Colombo Academy. He became a reformer who revived Buddhism in Ceylon and carried it to the West. He inspired a mass movement among South Indian Dalits, half a century before B. R. Ambedkar. He created a form of religious life that had not previously existed in modern times. The questions his life raises begin with two Western visitors who arrived in Ceylon in 1880.

• 2. The Anagarika

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  'Dharmapala' means 'protector of the dharma' in Pali. 'Anagārika,' the title he assumed, translates as 'homeless one.' Together they described a formal position between monk and layperson. It was a position with no real precedent in modern Buddhist life.

  The eight precepts he committed to for life covered a wide range of conduct. He undertook to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual activity, and wrong speech. He also agreed not to consume intoxicating drinks or drugs, not to eat after noon, not to attend entertainments or wear fashionable attire, and not to sleep in luxurious beds. Ceylonese Buddhists commonly observed these same precepts on special religious days. For Dharmapala, they were a permanent commitment.

  He wore a yellow robe, though not of the traditional bhikkhu pattern. He did not shave his head. He judged that strict adherence to all the vinaya rules would obstruct his work, particularly given his constant travel. A vow of celibacy, which he appears to have undertaken at the age of eight, he kept throughout his life. He has been described as "the model for lay activism in modernist Buddhism." He is regarded in Sri Lanka as a bodhisattva, a being on the path to Buddhahood.

  His path had been shaped by two reformers from the West: Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. They had founded the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1875.

• 3. Theosophy and Its Limits

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  In 1880, Blavatsky and Olcott arrived in Ceylon. At a public ceremony, they declared themselves Buddhists and took the Refuges and Precepts from a prominent Sinhalese bhikkhu. Olcott made several subsequent journeys to the island, devoting himself to Buddhist education. He founded many Buddhist schools on Ceylon, some of which remain in operation.

  The young Hewavitharane worked alongside Olcott, primarily as his translator. Blavatsky advised him to study Pali and to work for the good of humanity. He followed both pieces of counsel for the rest of his life.

  Olcott's conviction that all religions shared a common foundation became the breaking point. Dharmapala rejected this. He described Theosophy as "only consolidating Krishna worship." He was equally direct on the core principle. "To say that all religions have a common foundation only shows the ignorance of the speaker; Dharma alone is supreme to the Buddhist." For Dharmapala, the integration of Buddhism into a universal framework of truth exacted a price too high to pay.

  The Maha Bodhi Society, which Dharmapala founded in Colombo in 1891, would become his principal instrument for what came next.

• 4. The Battle for Bodh Gaya

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  Moving its offices from Colombo to Calcutta in 1892, the Maha Bodhi Society placed itself at the center of Indian public life. Its primary mission was the restoration of the Mahabodhi Temple to Buddhist control. The cause had gained early momentum through Sir Edwin Arnold, author of The Light of Asia, who visited the site in 1885. Arnold had been guided toward this campaign by Weligama Sri Sumangala Thera. He began calling publicly for the temple's renovation and its return to Buddhist hands.

  To pursue that restoration, Dharmapala initiated a lawsuit against the Brahmin priests who had controlled the site for centuries. It was a protracted struggle. Maha Bodhi Society centers were established across many Indian cities. This raised wider awareness of Buddhism and drew converts, particularly among the educated and among some low-caste communities in the south.

  The lawsuit did not succeed within Dharmapala's lifetime. Indian independence, which came in 1947, was a necessary precondition. In 1949, sixteen years after his death, the Mahabodhi Temple was partially restored to Maha Bodhi Society management. A committee with equal numbers of Hindus and Buddhists was entrusted with its governance. A statue of Dharmapala was later placed at College Square near the Kolkata Maha Bodhi Society.

  Dharmapala also directed attention toward Kushinagar, in Uttar Pradesh, where the Buddha's physical death had occurred. His work helped draw pilgrims back to the site, as they had come for many centuries before. In 1893, an invitation arrived to represent Buddhism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, and Dharmapala accepted.

• 5. On the World Stage

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  'The World's Debt to Buddha' was read at a crowded session of the World Parliament of Religions on the 18th of September 1893. It was one of his first major addresses to a Western audience. At this early stage of his career, he framed Buddhism in terms familiar to that audience: references to science, the European Enlightenment, and Christianity. He hinted, even so, that Buddhism was superior to any Western philosophy. He spent considerable time on the ideal Buddhist polity under the emperor Asoka, and on the Buddha's ethics for lay people.

  At the Parliament, Dharmapala represented what was then called "Southern Buddhism," the term applied at the time to the Theravada tradition. He met Swami Vivekananda there. Like Vivekananda, he was a notable presence at the Parliament and drew substantial attention from the press.

  Traveling back toward India by way of Hawaii, he met Mary E. Foster, a descendant of King Kamehameha. She was experiencing emotional difficulties, and Dharmapala consoled her using Buddhist techniques. In return, she gave him a donation of over one million rupees, worth more than $2.7 million in 2010 dollars.

  Paul Carus invited him back to the United States in 1896. He visited again between 1902 and 1904, traveling and teaching widely. In 1897, Miranda de Souza Canavarro was drawn to Buddhism through his influence. She took the name Sister Sanghamitta and went to Ceylon to establish a school. Among the temples Dharmapala built in India was one at Sarnath, the place where the Buddha first taught.

  The form of Buddhism he was promoting had a name, coined by the scholar Gananath Obeyesekere: Protestant Buddhism.

• 6. Protestant Buddhism

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  Obeyesekere's term is Protestant in two senses. First, it absorbed Protestant ideals: freedom from religious institutions, freedom of conscience, and emphasis on individual interior experience. Second, it was itself a protest: against claims of Christian superiority, against colonialism, and against missionary work aimed at undermining Buddhist practice. Its defining characteristic, as the scholar described it, was "the importance it assigns to the laity." It arose among the literate middle class centered in Colombo.

  Buddhist modernism, the broader tradition to which Dharmapala belonged, tends to downplay the supernatural and mythological elements of traditional teaching. It emphasizes rationality, democratic values, and the priority of meditation over ceremony. Dharmapala was a paradigmatic case. He was particularly concerned with showing that Buddhism was compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution, the cutting-edge science of his era.

  His writings trace this project across several decades. "The Constructive Optimism of Buddhism," published in 1915, countered the charge, often made by Christian missionaries, that Buddhism was pessimistic and passive. "Message of the Buddha," from 1925, showed his anti-Christian stance at its most pronounced. "Evolution from the Standpoint of Buddhism," from 1926, engaged directly with Darwinian theory. Most of these works are collected in Return to Righteousness, edited by Ananda Guruge. It was published in Colombo by the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs in 1965.

  Dharmapala's nationalism found its sharpest expression not in essays but in public speeches. There, he placed responsibility for Ceylon's condition directly on British administrators and Christian missionaries.

• 7. Sarnath and After

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  The scholar DeVotta has identified four elements in Dharmapala's public rhetoric. The first was praise: for Buddhism and for Sinhalese culture. The second was blame, directed at British imperialists and those who served them, including Christians. The third was fear: that Buddhism in Sri Lanka faced extinction. The fourth was hope: for a renewed Sinhalese Buddhist ascendancy. A public speech gave these currents their starkest form:

  "This bright, beautiful island was made into a Paradise by the Aryan-Sinhalese before its destruction was brought about by the barbaric vandals. Its people did not know irreligion... Christianity and polytheism i.e. Hinduism are responsible for the vulgar practices of killing animals, stealing, licentiousness, lying and drunkenness... The ancient, historic, refined people, under the diabolism of vicious paganism, introduced by the British administrators, are now declining slowly away."

  This rhetoric drove the 19th-century Buddhist revival in Ceylon. From that revival came institutions designed to match those of the missionaries: schools, the Young Men's Buddhist Association, and others. Dharmapala was among the primary contributors to these efforts. His work also fed into Ceylon's independence movement of the 20th century.

  In 1931, he visited Ceylon and established the Dharmapala Trust. That year he was ordained as a Buddhist monk, taking the name Sri Devamitta Dharmapala. Two years later he took his higher ordination. He died on the 29th of April 1933 at the Mulagandhakuti Viharaya in Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh, India. He was 68 years old.

  In 2014, both India and Sri Lanka issued postage stamps to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka issued a commemorative coin the same year. A road in Colombo has been named in his honor: Anagarika Dharmapala Mawatha. A biographical film, Anagarika Dharmapala Srimathano, was released in 2014, with Palitha Silva in the lead role. His diaries, written voluminously across his decades of travel, and his memoirs have both been published, leaving a first-hand record of the life he built.