Taking Buddha to the World
By examining the impact of an 1879 Edwin Arnold poem, Jairam Ramesh has helped map the global influence of Buddhist thought
SSir Edwin Arnold’s poem on the life and teachings of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, was published in 1879. He wrote it as a means of ‘relaxing’ between writing stressful and prosaic Daily Telegraph editorials on the Russo-Ottoman war from a British perspective. It was an extraordinary piece of work; written by an unapologetic, entitled imperialist. His empathetic retelling of the Buddha story managed to move people as diverse as the famous nurse Florence Nightingale, politician Winston Churchill, business tycoon Andrew Carnegie, writer Herman Melville and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. It also had its share of controversy as (mostly) Christian missionaries reacted sharply to his trespassing on their evangelical turf with a rather different messiah.
The book was undeniably influential. It guided the popular reception of Buddhism in Europe and the US; Arnold basked in its glory. But within half a century of its publication, as Buddhism was explored by weightier western academics, it acquired the reputation of being a quaint exegesis, mostly occupying shelf space in libraries.
Jairam Ramesh’s biography, The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined the Buddha, has not only exhumed the book but also explored dimensions of it that are fascinating and relevant today, particularly in India, where it was translated into no less than 12 Indian languages. Ramesh details how free India’s politicians—Ambedkar, Gandhi and Nehru—were all influenced by Arnold’s poem in different ways.
One of the more instructive and sensitively told stories in the book is how Arnold, a passionate advocate of Buddhism, may also have played an unwitting role in spurring the famous late 19th century territorial controversy between Hindus and Buddhists in Bodh Gaya by internationalising it.
“Unwitting” because Arnold— the man who clubbed, in what he called his ‘Oriental Trilogy’, Light of Asia with his translation of the Gitagovinda, The Indian Song of Songs and Pearls of the Faith, his poem on the 99 names of God in Islam--would have, presumably, shied away from political controversy.
The book raises some interesting questions, thereby opening new windows into the exploration of the intellectual history of South Asia. For one, as Ramesh notes, the exit of Buddhism from India was gradual (emphasis in the original), and by the late 19th century, familiarity with its doctrines in India had receded into the background. For another, it begs some questions about modern Indian politics. For example, we know that Gandhi, the politician, had formulated his non-violent non-cooperation movement after reading Tolstoy, who himself was influenced by Light of Asia. A not entirely impossible trajectory, perhaps? And yet again, how did Gurbakhsh Singh’s 1938 Punjabi translation of Arnold’s book impact non-Hindu Indian understanding of pre-1947 politics, especially since his introduction to the translation argues that Buddhism was subverted by ‘Brahmanism’?
No review as brief as the present one can do justice to Ramesh’s diligence and labour, but it is a book with many dimensions from the ‘chhupa rustam’ of scholarship among India’s politicians. ■