Protestant Buddhism

Protestant Buddhism refers to a certain genre of Buddhist beliefs and practices that developed in the mid-to late 19th century, particularly in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), among middle-and upper-class urban Buddhist laity as a result of contact with European and American Protestant missionaries, colonial officers, and Orientalists. The term Protestant Buddhism was first coined by the Sri Lanka historian/anthropologist Gananath Obyesekere in 1970 as constituting a theoretical ideal type, and it represents an early form of global religion in two senses: On the one hand, the historical phenomenon that Obeyesekere describes, the collaborations and contestations between Theravada Buddhists and Western Protestants, constitutes one significant 19th-century type of transregional religious encounter. On the other hand, the theoretical category that Obeyesekere creates represents an important early attempt to theorize global influences on religion. Since Obeyesekere's coining, the phrase Protestant Buddhism has increasingly been scrutinized by scholars who question the appropriateness of the term because it gives Protestants and Protestantism too much agency in the development of modern Buddhism and neglects important reform and revival movements within Buddhism itself.

In coining the term, Obeyesekere saw Protestant Buddhism as the result of two processes: cultural borrowing and cultural protest. In terms of borrowing, Protestant Buddhism described certain new forms of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, which resulted from the mingling of traditional Buddhist practices and beliefs with those of European and American Protestant colonists and missionaries. Under the heading of Protestant Buddhism, Obeyesekere grouped a number of borrowings from Victorian British Protestant colonial officers and other English-speaking Christians such as Henry Steel Olcott, the American cofounder of the Theosophical Society. These features included a stress on certain moral ideals, including sexual morality, monogamy, temperance, hard work, economic independence; the adaptation of certain organizational forms from Christianity, such as the Young Men's Buddhist Association, Buddhist chaplains in armies and hospitals, Sunday Schools, and missionary organizations; and the development and reformation of certain ritual and textual forms, including the elimination of astrology and deity worship from religious practices, a more socially engaged role for Buddhist monks, a more religiously engaged role for lay men and women, an emphasis on the authority and centrality of Pāli texts, and the creation of new liturgical texts such as the Buddhist Catechism (authored by Olcott) and the Daily Code for the Laity (authored by Anagarika Dharmapala). In terms of protest, Obeyesekere points out that Protestant Buddhism not only refers to the fact that new Buddhist features derived from Protestantism, but it also referred to the fact that many of these new religious forms were part of a protest against Christianity. Thus, the Buddhists adopted some of the rhetorical and organizational features of Christian missionaries to fend off missionary challenges. They developed their own Buddhist printing presses to counter missionary pamphleteering, their own schools to counter proselytizing missionary schools, and even their own missionary organizations to compete with Christian missionaries, such as the Society for the Propagation of Buddhism (a direct appropriation of/protest against the missionary Society for the Propagation of the Gospel).

In the years after 1970, Obeyesekere's category of Protestant Buddhism has been used by a number of other scholars, mainly to describe changes to Sri Lankan Buddhism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Historians of Buddhism, including Kitsiri [Page 1029]Malalgoda, George Bond, and Richard Gombrich, have built on and further nuanced this category. Malalgoda describes the 19th-and 20th-century history of monastic schisms, which contributed to the development of Protestant Buddhism. Bond outlines the way in which Protestant Buddhist idioms, cultivated in turn-of-the-century Sri Lanka, fed into the mid-20th-century Buddhist “revival,” in particular into engaged Buddhism and lay meditation movements. In a collaborative volume with Obeyeskere, Buddhism Transformed, Gombrich traces the trajectory of Protestant Buddhism in modern, urban Sri Lankan religiosity. In addition to these works, a number of studies have focused on major historical events, organizations, and personages that have influenced the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity and, thus, shaped the development of Protestant Buddhism. A significant study by Richard Fox Young and G. P. V. Somaratna, Vain Debates, examines the missionary-monk debates on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka during the mid-and late 1800s. Similarly, standout studies have been written on influential figures in the development of Buddhism in Sri Lanka during the 19th century, particularly Henry Steel Olcott, T. W. Rhys-Davids, and Anagarika Dharmapala.

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