Henry Steel Olcott was, by all accounts, a strange and interesting
man. Born into a piously Presbyterian New Jersey family in 1832,
Olcott went on to become a New York journalist, a Civil War colonel,
and most famously a founding member of the Theosophical Society and
a major figure in the nineteenth-century Buddhist revival in Sri
Lanka. Although Olcott has been the subject of numerous studies over
the years, Stephen Prothero's The White Buddhist examines Olcott
from a new and unusual angle. Prothero has three specific purposes:
first, he presents a "sympathetic yet scholarly" interpretation of
Olcott's life; second, he uses that life as "an opportunity to
interpret the broader nineteenth-century American encounter with the
religions of Asia"; and third, he introduces the linguistic term
"creolization" as a means of understanding cultural and religious
interactions.
This is a promising premise with which to begin; Prothero proposes
to view Olcott less as an individual and more as an emblem of a
particular moment in American religious history, a moment when
America was both exporting and importing religious ideas: "From his
mid-life passage to Asia until his death in 1907, Olcott functioned
as culture broker between Occident and Orient, facilitating the
commerce of religious ideas and practices between America and Asia
even as he helped to bring into the world's religious marketplace a
wholly new spiritual creation" (p. 3). As Prothero demonstrates,
Olcott viewed Kipling's "East is East and West is West" dictum as
fundamentally false, believing instead that the two cultures could
indeed meet and, furthermore, that an amalgamation of Eastern and
Western religions was both possible and desirable, such that the
best of both could be preserved in a new, hybrid tradition (this is
the tenet upon which Theosophy was based).
However, as Prothero notes, Olcott did not simply go off to Asia to
trade ideas. On the contrary, he went as a peculiarly Orientalist
reformer, with a very definite notion of what true religion should
be. Indeed, as Prothero argues throughout The White Buddhist, Olcott
was fundamentally a product of his liberal Protestant upbringing,
and even in his reform efforts in Asia, his notion of proper
religious practice was informed by his religious roots. As Prothero
puts it, "Olcott's encounter with the Asian 'other' reduced, more
often than not, to an encounter with his liberal American and
Protestant 'self'" (p. 12). This is perhaps nowhere more true than
in Olcott's activities in Sri Lanka, where he at once embraced
Buddhism and at the same time lashed out at some of the leading
monks on the island, charging them with practicing a corrupt,
adulterated form of Buddhism that went counter to the original
teachings of the Buddha.
The author puts the concept of "creolization," which he borrows from
linguistics and applies to cross-cultural interaction, to
particularly good use in his analysis of Olcott's hybrid Buddhism.
According to Prothero, the Buddhism that Olcott championed, indeed
that he created, "was not the tradition of the Buddhists but a
'Buddhism' of his own invention - a Buddhist lexicon informed by a
Protestant grammar and spoken with a theosophical accent" (p. 69).
He argues that Olcott was not, in fact, so much a cultural pluralist
as a kind of unwitting hegemonist; in Olcott's creole religious
language, the grammar of Protestant Christianity had a tendency to
run roughshod over the lexicon of Theravada Buddhism. Unfortunately,
however, the author far too often shies away from the complexities
and problematics of Olcott's activities. For instance, Prothero
points out that in his denunciation of the "decay of spiritualism,
the corruption of the Sangha" (p. 106) Olcott was corroborating the
negative stereotypes of Orientalism, but then he pursues the issue
no further. There is a rich and complex body of literature on
nineteenth-century Orientalist practices, and one wishes that
Prothero had engaged in a more sustained analysis of Olcott in light
of this discourse. Indeed, Prothero far too frequently lapses into
an apologetic stance just as his critique gets going.
Part of the problem here is tone. In chronicling Olcott's early life
in New York, his career as a reformist journalist, his partnership
with his Theosophical sidekick, Madame Blavatsky, and his travels in
Asia, Prothero adopts a reverential, at times almost hagiographic
tone. For instance, in chapter 2, "Universal Reformer," Olcott
emerges as a valiant captain of liberal Protestant idealism, aiming
"not only to reform individuals but also to uplift institutions,"
institutions as diverse as the Army and Navy, Tammany Hall, and
insurance law: "If American society was an Augean stable, then
Olcott was its Hercules, cleansing the mess with the rivers of moral
decency" (p. 37). This tone unfortunately continuously crops up
throughout The White Buddhist, and it masks some of the serious and
complex issues involved in Olcott's career as a culture broker.
Indeed, toward the end of the book, even Prothero admits that when
Olcott encountered differences between his own creolized Buddhism
and the Buddhism actually practiced by Buddhists in Sri Lanka, he
insisted that the island's Buddhists conform with his invented
religion. Prothero writes that the "tragedy of this response is that
it prevented Olcott from engaging in genuine dialogue with Asian
religious reformers" (p. 179). Is this a tragedy, though, or merely
a symptom of the contingencies of the specific context? Except for a
brief footnote that draws attention to the issues but does not
address them, Prothero's analysis ends there. In this and several
other points earlier in the book, one is left feeling that Prothero
has curtailed his scholarly analysis in the name of sympathy.
Readers interested both in nineteenth-century American religion and
in broader issues of East/West cultural contact will find The White
Buddhist engaging and thought provoking, but many readers will also
find this a frustrating book in the way that it raises a number of
important issues without fully analyzing them.