This dissertation analyzes the life of Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), co-founder of the Theosophical Society and one of America's first Buddhists. It begins with Olcott's American careers as an agricultural entrepreneur, Civil War colonel, New York journalist, insurance lawyer, and genteel reformer. It explores Olcott's spiritualism, his encounter with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), and his founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875. But the bulk of the dissertation explores Olcott's contributions to the nineteenth-century Sinhalese Buddhist revival in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and to the religious tradition the revival birthed: "Protestant Buddhism."
Although Olcott saw himself as a defender of "pure, primitive Buddhism," his faith and work mirrored that of the Christian missionaries whose proselytizing he so vehemently decried. Like the missionaries, Olcott authored and distributed catechisms, promoted the translation of scriptures into the vernacular, established Sunday Schools, founded youth organizations, preached temperance, conducted revivals, and organized his converts into parish-like branches.
Scholars who have explored this marriage of Buddhist language and Protestant norms in reformers like Anagarika Dharmapala have described the union, ably in my view, as "Protestant Buddhism." But they have based their analysis of the Protestant contribution to this syncretism almost exclusively on Max Weber's troublingly synchronic characterizations of Protestantism as lay-oriented, rational, this-worldly, and ascetic.
This dissertation attempts to nuance current understandings of Protestant Buddhism by rooting it, in one biographical case, in the Anglo-American communities of discourse out of which it grew. Thus Protestant Buddhism emerges in this narrative not as a mixture of some generic Protestantism and some generic Buddhism but as a creative creolization of traditional Theravada Buddhism, liberal Protestantism, metropolitan gentility, and academic Orientalism. As such, its salient characteristics include not only Weber's laicization, rationalization and this-worldly asceticism but also nineteenth-century Anglo-American norms such as adaptationism, cultural immanentism, self-reliance and an emphasis on education and social reform.
