Rescued from the Nation

Among Sinhalese Buddhists Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) is widely regarded as a great hero of nationalism who countered the effects of three hundred years of colonial domination and missionary effort. In scholarly circles, on the other hand, his name has been associated with a new way of practicing an old religion, Protestant Buddhism, and as aiding the expansion of bourgeois values throughout Ceylon. Finally, some see his legacy as a tradition of Dharmapalite monks, who are linked in turn to the estrangement among Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims that motivates contemporary politics. Based on extensive primary sources hitherto untapped by any previous scholar, anthropologist Steven Kemper shows that all of these accounts of Dharmapala ignore his time abroad, which amounted to the great majority of his adult life. Even though Dharmapala was a leading figure in the emergence of nationalism, he spent most of his life living outside Ceylon, traveling between England, Japan, China, India, Korea, continental Europe, and the United States. In these contexts Dharmapala pursued a universalizing project of creating a unified Buddhist world with enthusiasm at least equal to his work to advance Ceylonese political independence. In failing to attend to his life in such places we lose track of the role Dharmapala and other Buddhists played in the historical moment, when universalisms (Buddhism, Theosophy, Christianity, Western civilizing missions, etc.) and nationalisms were interactive movements. Moreover it results in a serious misjudgment of him as a person. We should rather appreciate him in his own terms as a world-renouncer first and an activist second. "Rescued from the Nation" aims to recover Dharmapala by sorting through the relationship between universalism and nationalism in his work and paying close attention to the effect that his extensive travels had on his life and thought. Such a book has long been a major desideratum in the study of Buddhism and modernity."