Henry Steel Olcott

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Steel Olcott was born on the 2nd of August 1832 in Orange, New Jersey, the oldest of six children in a Presbyterian household. He would go on to become a military officer, a journalist, a lawyer, a Freemason, and the co-founder of one of the nineteenth century's most unusual spiritual organizations. But the fact that sets him apart from all his contemporaries is this: he was the first well-known American of European ancestry to formally convert to Buddhism.

  How does a boy raised in Protestant New Jersey end up taking Buddhist vows in Galle, Sri Lanka? How does a man who investigated Abraham Lincoln's assassination wind up writing a catechism still used in Sri Lankan temples today? And what made his particular blend of Western rationalism and Eastern religion compelling enough to ignite a genuine revival across an entire island nation?

  Those questions run through the story of a life that spanned continents, faiths, and revolutions in thought.

• 2. A Life Before Theosophy

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  Young Olcott grew up on his father's New Jersey farm, then in his teens began studies at the College of the City of New York before transferring to Columbia University, where he joined the St. Anthony Hall fraternity. In 1851 his father's business failed and he had to leave university without completing his degree.

  He rebuilt himself through agriculture. From 1858 to 1860 he worked as the agricultural correspondent for the New York Tribune and the Mark Lane Express. He was present for John Brown's execution in 1859, a detail that places him squarely in the turbulent center of pre-war American life.

  The Civil War made Olcott a colonel. He served in the US Army and afterward was admitted as the Special Commissioner of the War Department in New York, later transferred to the Department of the Navy in Washington, DC. In 1865, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he assisted in the investigation of the murder. In 1868 he reinvented himself again, becoming a lawyer specializing in insurance, revenue, and fraud.

  His entry into spiritualism came through relatives in Amherst, Ohio, who had formed a spiritualist circle after seeing the Fox sisters perform in Cleveland. By 1853 he was a founding member of the New York Conference of Spiritualists, publishing letters in the Spiritual Telegraph under the pseudonym "Amherst".

• 3. Meeting Blavatsky

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  In 1874 Olcott heard about the Eddy Brothers of Chittenden, Vermont, who were said to conduct remarkable séances. He traveled to investigate, writing up his findings for the New York Sun. The piece was popular enough that papers including the New York Daily Graphic republished it. It became the opening of his 1874 book People from the Other World.

  At that same Eddy farm, Olcott met Helena Blavatsky. That encounter proved decisive. His existing interest in spiritualism and his growing relationship with Blavatsky accelerated his shift from investigating the supernatural to building a philosophy around it.

  In early 1875, prominent Spiritualists asked Olcott to investigate fraud allegations against mediums Jenny and Nelson Holmes, who had claimed to materialize the famous "spirit control" Katie King. It was the kind of investigation Olcott had been doing for years, but the milieu was pulling him toward something larger.

  By the end of 1875, Olcott, Blavatsky, and William Quan Judge had founded the Theosophical Society in New York City. Olcott served as its first president and financed its early operations while Blavatsky served as the Society's Secretary.

• 4. Sri Lanka and the Buddhist Revival

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  After a two-year correspondence with Sri Piyaratana Tissa Mahanayake Thero, Olcott and Blavatsky arrived in Colombo on the 16th of May 1880. Three days later, on the 19th of May 1880, they both took the Five Precepts at the Wijayananda Viharaya located at Weliwatta in Galle. In doing so they became, as the source notes, the first Westerners to receive the Three Refuges and Five Precepts in the traditional Buddhist ceremony. Blavatsky was the first Western woman to do so.

  Sri Lanka at the time was under British colonial rule, and Buddhism had suffered under that pressure. Olcott threw himself into reversing that decline. He helped found a series of Buddhist schools: Ananda College in 1886, Dharmaraja College Kandy in 1887, Maliyadeva College Kurunegala in 1888, and Mahinda College Galle in 1892.

  In 1885 he also served as adviser to the committee appointed to design a Buddhist flag. That flag was later adopted by the World Fellowship of Buddhists as the universal flag of all Buddhist traditions.

  His influence extended to native Sri Lankan intellectuals and leaders. Anagarika Dharmapala, who would carry Buddhist ideas to Europe and America, was shaped by Olcott's work. Olcott also financially supported the Buddhist presence at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, an event that opened doors for Buddhism's expansion in the West.

• 5. The Buddhist Catechism

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  In 1881, while still active in Sri Lanka, Olcott wrote the Buddhist Catechism. It remains in use in Sri Lanka today. The text was structured as a series of questions and answers, deliberately echoing the format of Christian catechisms, and covered the life of the Buddha, the Dharma, the role of the Sangha, and the relationship between the Buddha's message and contemporary society.

  The catechism included a chapter entitled "Buddhism and Science", which scholars regard as one of the earliest attempts to formally align scientific reasoning with Buddhist religion. Olcott believed the interrelationship between the two paralleled the Theosophical project of grounding supernatural phenomena, including auras, hypnosis, and Buddhist "miracles", in rational investigation.

  Scholar David McMahan summarized the tension at the heart of the text: Olcott "allied Buddhism with scientific rationalism in implicit criticism of orthodox Christianity, but went well beyond the tenets of conventional science in extrapolating from the Romantic- and Transcendentalist-influenced 'occult sciences' of the nineteenth century."

  The catechism's answer on Karma reads: "A causation operating on the moral, as well as physical and other planes. Buddhists say there is no miracle in human affairs: what a man sows that he must still reap." On the essence of Buddhism, the text offers two phrases: "Self-culture and universal love." These formulations are distinctly Western in flavor, which was precisely Olcott's intent and, for many critics, his lasting complication.

• 6. Protestant Buddhism

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  What Olcott created was not simply a translation of Buddhism for Western audiences. Scholars have named it "Protestant Buddhism" because his Protestant Christian upbringing shaped the very categories he used to interpret the Buddha's teachings.

  Stephen Prothero wrote that Olcott "most eloquently articulated and most obviously embodied the diverse religious and cultural traditions that shaped Protestant Buddhism," calling him "the most Protestant of all early Protestant Buddhists" and describing him as a "liminoid figure" caught between the "American Protestant grammars of his youth and the Asian Buddhist lexicon of his adulthood." Prothero argued that from this in-between position Olcott conjured "traditional Sinhalese Buddhism, Protestant modernism, metropolitan gentility, and academic Orientalism into a decidedly new creole tradition."

  That tradition took root. Sri Lanka was dominated by British colonial power, and many Buddhists heard Olcott's liberal, rationalist reading of the Buddha as a socially motivating force against colonialism, even though his re-interpretation was shaped by the same British liberal ideas he was ostensibly helping them resist.

  Olcott had also met the Victorian scholars of religion who were shaping how the West understood Asia. He corresponded extensively with Max Müller on Hinduism and Buddhism, and personally met both Müller and anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor at the University of Oxford. Those conversations informed his effort to access sacred oriental texts directly rather than through already-Westernized translations.

• 7. Death and Remembrance

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  Olcott remained president of the Theosophical Society until his death on the 17th of February 1907. Helena Blavatsky had preceded him, dying in London in 1891. Upon Olcott's death, the Society elected Annie Besant to take over as president.

  The scale of his commemoration in Sri Lanka is striking. Two major streets in Colombo and Galle have been named Olcott Mawatha in his honor. Statues of him stand in both cities, and many Buddhist schools he helped found or that were founded in his memory hold commemorative statues as well. The date of his death is still observed by Buddhist centers and Sunday schools across Sri Lanka and by Theosophical communities worldwide.

  On the 10th of September 2011, a statue of Colonel Olcott was unveiled at a Buddhist temple near Princeton, New Jersey, close to where he was born.

  Samitha Seneviratne, Vice President of the Ananda College Old Boys Association, offered this assessment: "Col. Olcott's contribution towards the betterment of our country, nation, religion, justice and good conduct has been so great that he remains in our hearts forever." Ananda College, which Olcott helped establish in 1886, produced the alumni association that now carries his name forward.