Abstract
In the early 20th century, an Irish Buddhist monk by the name of Dhammaloka enjoyed celebrity-like status throughout large parts of Asia and beyond. For British imperial authorities, he was a troublemaker annoying enough to deserve police surveillance and prosecution; for the colonised, he was a friend and defender of Buddhism against the encroachment of missionary Christianity and imperial rule. News about him circulated not only in Burma (today’s Myanmar), where he resided, but also across the countries he journeyed in his quest to revive and defend Buddhism – from today’s Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand to Sri Lanka, India and Japan – and, further still, in Australia, North America and Europe.
The product of over ten years of collaborative research spanning many continents and languages, The Irish Buddhist reconstructs the story of this fascinating figure, while also opening an important window into the early stages of de-colonisation in Asia. As Laurence Cox (2020b) writes elsewhere, the book is as much about Dhammaloka as about the networks and intellectual currents that supported and animated his work – a feature that makes the book an exemplar of Wright Mills’s call for illuminating the intersection between biography and history.
There is much in Dhammaloka’s life which sheds light on wider historical patterns; yet, his biography has something elusive about it. The authors deserve credit for having pieced together a credible narrative of a man who surely knew a thing or two about how to leave no traces behind him – a skill useful when escaping authorities but a challenge for anybody writing histories of those who were not in power. Laurence Carroll, the future Dhammaloka, was probably born in 1856 in Booterstown. How did a boy from South Dublin end up as a champion of Buddhism and anti-colonial resistance across Asia? Dhammaloka reached Asia not by travelling East, but by sailing West, following on the footsteps of many “poor whites” of his generation: first to America and then further afield across the Pacific (for brief accounts see Cox, 2020a, 2020b). In the US, hoboing his way from coast to coast allowed Carroll to immerse himself in a culture that – as Nels Anderson documented in his 1923 study of Chicago Hobo life – praised reading, free thinking and disruptive politics. Once in Burma, he encountered a social field that bore striking structural parallels with Ireland. As an Irish, Laurence Carroll was both an insider and outsider of the imperial order – a potential army recruit as much as a potential rebel. And, just like in Ireland, an important nexus developed in Burma and elsewhere in Asia between the defence of local religion and anti-imperialism. Although conversions to Buddhism among poor and middle-class whites were not unheard of, Dhammaloka’s ordination embodied a theme that, as the authors note, appears in widely read colonial novels of the time: the theme of the Irish turned Buddhist.
Carroll’s conversion to Buddhism was in itself an act that subverted the established order (for conversions were supposed to occur the other way around). But it was Dhammaloka’s political engagement that was to constitute his distinctive mark, and which gained him both friends among the people he shared his life with and enemies among imperial rulers. Seeing his duty to defend his adopted religion and culture from what he interpreted as the threat of missionary Christianity – and by extension Western rule – set him on a course that was bound to clash sooner or later with imperial authorities. In this quest, Dhammaloka artfully deployed his skills as an organiser, public speaker and “plebeyan intellectual” – be it touring Burma and Sri Lanka to wide acclaim, demanding that imperial authorities respect local customs, making massive editions of Thomas Paine’s the Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, denouncing corrupt officials, or founding Buddhist schools for the poor. In all these ventures, he benefited from solidarity networks that brought together people and groups which the logic of empire sought to keep apart: Buddhists and Hindu; peasants, merchants and local elites; the different “races” that imperial rule sought to create – all of them found common ground with Dhammaloka’s resistance against imperial domination.
In this respect, Dhammaloka was “an early example of engaged Buddhism in the Asian sense rather than a western interpreter – something which explains his immense popularity among traditional peasant audiences, and his political significance” (Cox, 2020b). Dhammaloka’s politics speaks to us about historical pathways different from those leading to the atrocious violence committed against religious and ethnic minorities in the name of Buddhism, nationalism and “race” in Myanmar and elsewhere (see, for example, Myint-U, 2019). As the authors stress, these crimes are not fate, but the outcome of specific histories that could also have taken other, more tolerant and (plebeian) cosmopolitan turns: “Religious fundamentalism and ethnic supremacism were not inevitable within post-colonial Buddhism” (p. 20).
The Irish Buddhist is no idealised account, but one that is well aware that Dhammaloka’s approach to Buddhism and life often courted controversy, and often quite intentionally so. The reader is left with many questions about a character that could have been taken from a novel – and whose life actually was portrayed in a 1910 best-selling travel book: Harry Alverson Franck’s A Vagabond Journey Around the World. What to make of Dhammaloka’s self-aggrandizing rhetoric, self-promotional style and conflicts with other Western Buddhist monks such as Ananda Metteyya? Likewise, the book raises important questions about the functioning of the British Empire underneath its structures of administration, commerce and science and of the anti-colonial struggles that eventually contributed to bring it down. It also adds a new angle to recent debates about the place of the Irish within the empire. Indeed, the authors help us to see how writing histories of “poor whites” in the colonies makes our picture of empire more nuanced.
As biography and socio-historical portrait, The Irish Buddhist will be of interest not only to scholars of Buddhism but also to social researchers interested in such diverse topics as religion, historical sociology, homelessness, solidarity, social movements and decolonial studies. I trust the book will find the wide readership it deserves, and that it will be translated into other languages, not least those used in the regions where Dhammaloka journeyed. I hope, too, that the book will provide an impetus for the inclusion of an entry about Dhammaloka into The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, whose splendid 2014 edition only mentions him under the entry of British Buddhist monk Ananda Metteyya. The Irish Buddhist is a book about which C. Wright Mills would have been, I think, very pleased.