The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott,
by Prothero, Stephen
Reviewed by Matthew Mulligan Goldstein
History of Religions
Vol.37 No.3
Feb 1998
pp.291-293
COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Chicago
Stephen Prothero performs a minor miracle in The White Buddhist. The
Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott--he constructs a historical
narrative whose careful attention to cultural context does not make
the biography's immediate subject, the first U.S. citizen of
European descent to convert to Buddhism any less sensational.
Between reductive social history and ahistorical romantic
individualism, that is, Prothero discovers a third historiographical
way, an approach to Olcott's story at once historically grounded and
sensitive to personal eccentricity. Further, Prothero, an assistant
professor of religion at Boston University, puts recent literary and
cultural theory to good use, bringing the work of, among others,
Edward Said and Jean-Francois Lyotard to bear on his analysis--a
particularly refreshing move in a field too often marked by
disciplinary provincialism and critical naivete.
Best known in the United States as the first president and
cofounder, with the celebrated "Madame" Helena Petrovna Blavatsky,
of the Theosophical Society, Olcott became a national hero in
preindependence Ceylon when in 1880 he took Pansil and immediately
launched a campaign against Christian missionaries. Olcott, who grew
up Presbyterian in Orange, New Jersey, flirted with spiritualism
after making colonel fighting for the Union in the Civil War, then
turned theosophist in 1875. Four years after his conversion to
theosophy, Olcott and Blavatsky went to India, where they
established a new branch of their Theosophical society. The society
fared quite well in its new home, attracting the attention and
support of such powerful Anglo-Indians as Pioneer editor A. P.
Sinnett, and A. O. Hume, former colonial administrator and "father
of the Indian National Congress."
Prothero argues convincingly that Olcott!s crises of faith and his
apparent ideological fickleness, far from being anomalous in
Anglo-American Victorian culture, were very much consistent with the
religious doubt and epistemological instability of his historical
moment. In particular. Prothero demonstrates with countless examples
culled from Olcott's diaries and speeches the ways in which the
colonel's brand of Theravada Buddhism was in fact little more than a
somewhat idiosyncratic synthesis of Protestant-informed pragmatism,
theosophical universalism and Buddhist philosophy.
To make his point, Prothero borrows from comparative linguistics the
notion of creolization, the process by which various languages and
dialects come into contact and fuse, generally in a colonial
context. Prothero, in what becomes a kind of mantra in the text,
develops the linguistics metaphor further, characterizing Olcott's
faith as "a `Buddhism' of his own invention--a Buddhist lexicon
informed by a Protestant grammar and spoken with a theosophical
accent" (p. 69). Creolization proves a useful tool for Prothero, as
it form the related issues of imperialism and cultural appropriation
into his analysis; there are Phenomena of crucial historical
importance too often overlooked by scholars working on Olcott and
the Theosophical Society. (See, e.g., Sylvia Cranston's unabashedly
hagiographic HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena
Blavatsky. Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement [New York:
Putnam] and Peter Washington's finely written, if inadequately
theorized, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon [London: Secker & Warburg],
both published in 1993, neither of which clearly defines the broader
sociopolitical and cultural context from which its subject emerged.)
Interestingly, sensitive as Prothero is to the issue of cultural
imperialism he occasionally betrays surprising Bashes of irritation
with Olcott's "stridently anti-Christian position" (p. 65).
"Unfortunately," Prothero, laments, "Olcott never explicates ... why
he came to see Christianity as an enemy" (p. 64). But isn't the
explanation self-evident? There seems to be every reason to believe
that the activities of the Christian missionaries, the dependable
handmaidens of imperialism, deserved worse than just the "militantly
anti-Christian" (p. 64) rhetoric leveled against them by Olcott.
Prothero speculates that Olcott's "Christian-bashing" (p. 64) may
have been the product of Blavatsky's malignant influence, an
expression of the "Modern Unbelief" (p. 65) characteristic of
post-Civil War America, or a rhetorical concession to Hindu allies
in India who were fighting to protect their culture from predatory
Christian evangelicals. The loaded language Prothero uses to
describe Olcott's position vis-a-vis Christianity (he talks about
the colonel's "anti-Christian propaganda" [p. 65] and "vitriol" [p.
82]) is perhaps intended to suggest the hypocrisy of Olcott's
profession of universal religious tolerance; at times, though,
Prothero's incomprehension seems almost defensive. I would not
argue, of course, that the Theosophical Society was innocent of
imperial intentions. On the contrary, Olcott, as Prothero argues,
clearly projected a species of imperial desire in his development of
a Western-style "Buddhist catechism" and his designing of the
Buddhist flag. Rather, I am suggesting that Prothero's confusion
over Olcott's contempt for Christianity may hint as much at the
author's cultural biases as it does at Olcott's.
The White Buddhist remain an impressive achievement, despite its
author's refusal to recognize the legitimacy of his subject's
indignation at the morally dubious practices of nineteenth-century
Christian missionaries. And while Prothero may be faulted for
overstating his central thesis about Olcott's faith--namely, that it
may be glossed as "a Buddhist lexicon informed by a Protestant
grammar and spoken with a theosophical accent" (p. 69)--it is clever
and apt enough a metaphorical description of the colonel's
peculiarly heterogeneous belief system to bear the repetition.
Further, Prothero's volume is meticulously footnoted and includes
seven subject bibliographies and a thorough index; this, in
combination with its engaging narrative and lively theoretical
insights, makes The White Buddhist a marvelous reference tool for
scholars of history, religion, and cultural studies alike.