Dharma Kings and Flying Women: Buddhist

DHARMA KINGS AND FLYING WOMEN: BUDDHIST EPISTEMOLOGIES IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIAN AND BRITISH WRITING by CYNTHIA BETH DRAKE B.A., University of California at Berkeley, 1984 M.A.T., Oregon State University, 1992 M.A. Georgetown University, 1999 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English 2017 This thesis entitled: Dharma Kings and Flying Women: Buddhist Epistemologies in Early Twentieth-Century Indian and British Writing written by Cynthia Beth Drake has been approved for the Department of English ________________________________________ Dr. Laura Winkiel __________________________________________ Dr. Janice Ho Date ________________ The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Drake, Cynthia Beth (Ph.D., English) Dharma Kings and Flying Women: Buddhist Epistemologies in Early Twentieth-Century Indian and British Writing Thesis directed by Associate Professor Laura Winkiel The British fascination with Buddhism and India’s Buddhist roots gave birth to an epistemological framework combining non-dual awareness, compassion, and liberational praxis in early twentieth-century Indian and British writing. Four writers—E.M. Forster, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Lama Yongden, and P.L. Travers—chart a transnational cartography that mark points of location in the flow and emergence of this epistemological framework. To Forster, non- duality is a terrifying rupture and an echo of not merely gross mismanagement, but gross misunderstanding by the British of India and its spiritual legacy. To both Krishnamurti and Lama Yongden, non-dual awareness is a source of wisdom. For Krishnamurti, initially it is separation and then later, it is wisdom in action. For Yongden, it is experiencing the entire world as beloved, transcending personal territories and boundaries and expanding appreciation and connectedness out beyond imagination. Finally, for Travers, it is a magical display that represents restorative justice to the cosmos, a way of bringing things back into balance and bringing healing to the universe. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the insightful, precise, and thorough support and feedback from my dissertation advisor, Dr. Laura Winkiel. In addition, thank you to a wonderful dissertation defense committee: Laura Winkiel, Janice Ho, Jane Garrity, Loriliai Biernacki, and Deepti Misri. I received teaching release support from Naropa University, which made it possible to finish in 2017, as well as tremendous moral support and encouragement from the best colleagues in academia, especially Susan Burggraf, Carole Clements, Janet Cramer, Lily Board, Ramon Parish, Deb Young, and Bhanu Kapil. Deep gratitude to friends and family too numerous to name, for their personal support and love, but some special mention to Norah, Charley, Michael and Jo. Extra special mention to my mother Barbara Drake. And finally a thank you beyond words to Peter Grossenbacher, without whom this dissertation would not have been started or finished. iv CONTENTS CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION Global Transactions in Twentieth-Century Buddhism 1 CHAPTER II The Ashokan Legacy in A Passage to India 26 CHAPTER III “These Are Not My Words”: The Theosophists, Krishnamurti, and an Epistemology of Non-duality 57 CHAPTER IV “All is vain but kindness”: A Praxis of Liberation in Mipam 88 CHAPTER V Mary Poppins Never Explains 117 WORKS CITED 158 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION GLOBAL TRANSACTIONS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BUDDHISM The early decades of the twentieth century mark a fascinating and surprisingly under- examined era of Buddhist influence on British and Indian literature. By 1900, ideas about Buddhism had been circulating around Britain and India for over 100 years. In novels, paintings, and poetry, British artists were expressing their (sometimes idealized, sometimes jarringly racialized) ideas about the historical Buddha, the history of Buddhism, or contemporary Buddhists in Asia.1 In India, the life of the Buddha, and particularly, his identity as an Indian, was also in circulation, as a British discovery, as an Indian hero and exemplar in ethics and leadership, and even at times an inspiration and model for future Indian independence.2 The absorption of Buddhist images and ideas into both British and Indian cultural spaces included the recovery and interpretation of Buddhist sites, buildings, and artifacts; the conversion to Buddhism by Britons and Indians; organizations such as the Theosophists, who claimed Buddhist roots in the formation of a syncretic religion; and artistic production featuring the Buddha and Buddhist ideas. While the complex literary interfaces amongst Buddhism, England, and India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been more well studied and documented, the early 1 Some notable British and European works are Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia (1879), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922), and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933). 2 Some notable Indian works are Nabin Chandra Sen’s Amitabha (1895), Aghoranath’s Sakyamunicarit O Nirvana Tattva (1882), Krishnabehari Sen’s Asokacarita (1892), Satyendranath Tagore’s Bauddhadharma (1901), and Sunita Devi’s The Life of Princess Yasodhara (1929) 2 twentieth century is a larger gap in the academic record. Recent books by Mark Lussier (on Buddhist influence on British Romanticism) and Jeffrey Franklin (on Buddhism and the Victorians) claim that the British fascination with Buddhism culminated at the end of the nineteenth century. I view the situation differently, and indeed argue that rather than a diminution of interest in or influence by Buddhism, the twentieth century ushered in a new era in which the images and ideas that had been circulating around British and Indian cultural spaces— of the Indian roots of Buddhism, of the historical Buddha, of the core ideas and practices of Buddhism—were being reshaped and injected into British and Indian cultural forms in new ways, making them feel at times more British than Indian, or more contemporary than ancient, and at times were a reclaiming of something authentically Indian. What had been out there (to the British) came home to Britain and intermixed with what felt British. What had been appropriated and taken out beyond India was being reclaimed and brought back home to India. The British fascination with Buddhism in the nineteenth century resulted in a colonial proprietary ownership of the understanding of Buddhism. This sense of ownership brought the first seeds of Buddhism to Britain. What the British did not realize is that those seeds, once planted, would reap unexpected results. A new epistemology—of non-dual wisdom intertwined with compassionate action—had been sown and was coming through in the cultural work of British and Indian writers. The British tried to control the message. They tried to limit what the historical Buddha was, what Buddhism meant, and how it could be received. But this new epistemology had its own life force, and it came through in ways that could not be controlled through colonial power. This dissertation will look at the uncontrollable life force of this new epistemology. What I argue in the following chapters is that while the British tried to assert interpretive control over 3 what Buddhism was, what it looked like, and how it manifested, the wild variety of Buddhist schools, lineages, and practices had already migrated and planted themselves into British and Indian cultural spaces and that the interpretive authority that the British were so invested in could not stand. What came through, instead, was an epistemological legacy that was both encumbered by Anglo India’s colonial legacy and thrillingly evocative of decolonizing possibilities. Buddhism has become such a rich and important tradition in the twentieth century because of its emphasis on liberation. All schools of Buddhism speak to a human longing to be free from suffering. Liberation is also at the heart of the anti-colonial work of the early twentieth century. Spiritual activists such as Sri Aurobindo brought into play a kind of liberation that manifests through activist as well as spiritual work. This longing was particularly apt for the early decades of the twentieth century, when millions of colonized subjects were examining their own status as occupied peoples, where fascist dictatorships were asserting collective control over their citizens, and in the lands of European colonizers, like Britain and France, where some citizens were contemplating their own culpability in empire. Some forms of Buddhism emphasize the personal nature of liberation, and it is no surprise that this form of Buddhism became for the British the doctrinally correct form. But other forms of Buddhism offer a different view of liberation, one in which any subject’s liberation is directly tied to the liberation of all. Thus the nature of liberation and the kinds of liberation are at play when we think about Buddhism in the twentieth century. The epistemology of non-duality and compassion offered new forms of knowing that were libratory but costly and tricky. We continue to see the cost today, one hundred years later, in the work of scholars like David Loy, who argues that the Mindfulness Industrial Complex reinscribes the very things that people are seeking freedom

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