Elegant, engaging, theoretically perceptive, and rich in historical evidence, Anne M. Blackburn's Locations of Buddhism is an important new contribution to the rapidly expanding fields of modern Buddhism and colonial religion. It will become required reading for advanced students of South Asian and Southeast Asian history, colonialism, and Buddhism, but it is accessible enough for use in undergraduate classes on Buddhist history and/or colonial religion.
Locations of Buddhism brings to life the intellectual projects and personal commitments of Venerable Hikkaḍuvē Sumaṅgala, a prominent Buddhist scholastic and sangha leader in late nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, as he guides Buddhist institutions and ideas through the complexities of the modern colonial world. Rejecting the long-held scholarly notion that Hikkaḍuvē and his contemporaries adapted to a “modernity” imposed on them by European colonizers by developing a subversive but highly mimetic “Protestant Buddhism,” Blackburn argues that sangha life in Laṅkā is best viewed instead in terms of literary continuities, intellectual legacies, monastic and caste alliances, strategic choices, and, above all, through a microhistorical lens of individual interactions, motivations, and emotions.
What emerges is a view of colonial life in which individual Buddhist actors have far more agency than they have been given credit for in either a “Protestant Buddhist” register or the kind of large-scale study of colonial world structures that Blackburn associates with Foucauldian-influenced and subaltern studies of South Asian colonialism. Blackburn argues for a turn to “human-scale studies of modes of thought and practice” in order to understand the “local social logic and intellectual creativity of lives fashioned in the context of colonialism” (p. xiv). Hikkaḍuvē's life provides us with a perfect vantage point for Blackburn's scholarly experiments in scale. As we follow Hikkaḍuvē's adventures—painstakingly reconstructed by Blackburn from letters, newspaper accounts, pamphlets, monastic records, diaries, and colonial documents in Sinhalese, Pali, Thai, and English—we see the extent to which individual personalities shaped the historical development of Sri Lankan Buddhism.
Chapter 1 sets the “scale of examination” for this study, introducing us to the “considerable human complexity” of Hikkaḍuvē's social environment by immersing us in some of his late nineteenth-century projects such as editing Vinaya texts, which in turn reveals the preoccupations with lineage, purity, and proper monastic deportment characteristic of Buddhist monks in numerous Asian monastic communities during this period. Although these concerns resonate with trends elsewhere, they were also deeply local, responding to the particularly vociferous experience of Christian–Buddhist debates in colonial Sri Lanka as well as the ways in which colonial control weakened sangha institutions. Chapter 2, which follows Hikkaḍuvē through his work in Buddhist educational institutions, reveals the continuities of Buddhist knowledge systems; Hikkaḍuvē and his monastic colleagues selectively engaged and ignored different European scientific and educational discourses while simultaneously extracting funds from colonial officials for their own projects.
Evidence for Hikkaḍuvē's autonomy from British control is amplified in chapter 3—the heart of this study—in which Blackburn lays out Hikkaḍuvē's own vision (in contrast with the British vision) for Buddhist institution building; far from reconstructing Lankan Buddhism in imitation of Protestant Christianity, Hikkaḍuvē and other monks of this period were actively pursuing their own agendas. Blackburn's work in this chapter represents the most sophisticated analysis of the complex politics of colonial Buddhist education to date. Side-stepping Charles Hallisey's notion of “intercultural mimesis” as a way of characterizing the interactions between colonial officials and Lankan Buddhist scholars, Blackburn instead emphasizes Hikkaḍuvē's “locative pluralism,” the multiple social networks that allowed him to simultaneously respond to and take advantage of different (and sometimes competing) discourses, social exchanges, and opportunities.
By the time we reach chapters 4 and 5, we have digested Blackburn's imperative for studying colonial Buddhism on a different scale. These last two chapters examine Hikkaḍuvē's interactions and experiments with translocal actors and ideas. Chapter 4 is astonishing for the fresh view it offers of the much-studied theosophist Colonel Henry Olcott and “his” prodigy, Angarika Dharmapala; chapter 5 on religion and empire traces Hikkaḍuvē's exchanges with the larger Buddhist world in Southeast Asia and, to a more limited extent, Japan, as a way of protecting besieged Lankan Buddhism and resolving internal disputes. Letters between Hikkaḍuvē and sangha leaders in Siam and elsewhere give new evidence of the politically autonomous translocal networks in which Buddhists of this era operated. As accustomed as we are to viewing colonial pan-Asian movements as wholly secular (i.e., nationalism and communism), Blackburn's new work on pan-Asian Buddhist diplomacy is simply breathtaking.
Cautioning that the terms “modern Buddhism” and “Buddhist modernism” have too often been used to inscribe overly generalized shifts in Buddhist thought worlds, Blackburn sees her microhistorical biographical study of Hikkaḍuvē as one among many potential and varied portraits of Buddhist ways of being in the modern world. While there were and are multiple ways of being Buddhist at different historical moments, it is also important to recognize the “locative pluralism” of individuals. Hikkaḍuvē—like all of us—drew on a vast repertoire of competing resources and networks.
Locations of Buddhism reiterates Blackburn's role as a leading scholar in Theravadin studies, one whose work invents and invites challenging paths for others to follow.
