Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain

L. Delap, S. Morgan, L. Delap, S. Morgan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137281753
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Charting the growing religious pluralism of British society, this book investigates the diverse formations of masculinity within and across specific religions, regions and immigrant communities. Contributors look beyond conventional realms of worship to examine men's diverse religious cultures in a variety of contexts.

1

Buddhist Psychologies and Masculinity in Early Twentieth-Century Britain¹

Alison Falby

In March 1934, the London playwright Clifford Bax asked the Irish nationalist poet George William Russell (‘A.E.’) to dinner ‘to find out what he really believes about reincarnation and post-mortem states and the Anattā doctrine’.² Anattā is a traditional Buddhist doctrine that denies the existence of self, soul and ego. It may seem ironic, then, that many British men became interested in Buddhism as a form of self-help in the interwar years. As they debated interpretations of anattā and the existence of selfhood, British Buddhists struggled with issues of religion and identity and, through their intellectual conflict, contributed to modern Buddhism’s representation as a rational, practical religion of self-help. In the early decades of the twentieth century, British Buddhism was a diverse and contested ground with adherents engaged in the process of spiritual development and doctrinal formation.³ Two principal Buddhist associations competed for religious authority by offering different doctrines of anattā, each of which signified different types of non-Christian masculinity. The Mahabodhi Society (established 1926) offered a nationalist masculinity predicated upon South Asian ethnicity and the non-existence of a permanent self. It equated self-help with a traditional understanding of the doctrine and knowing that any sense of self is illusory. The Buddhist Lodge (established 1924), in contrast, offered a Western intellectual masculinity predicated on a degree of sexual equality and an evolving self or soul. For Lodge members, anattā generally referred to the absence of a permanent, unchanging ego or individual soul, and self-control came from understanding that the self forms part of a larger, permanent whole or ‘Cosmic Principle’.⁴

These competing views of anattā and selfhood both drew on and fed into larger gender and religious conflicts of the interwar period. Buddhism provided testing grounds for conflicts triggered by occultism, psychology, the Great War, the established Church and colonialism with elements that appealed, for various reasons, to each of these disparate group interests. Both occultism and psychology, for example, shared British Buddhists’ ambivalence about the existence or nature of the self,⁵ conventionally characterised in modern metanarratives as autonomous and individual. Traditional Buddhist pacifism attracted those disappointed by the churches’ support for the Great War. And in terms of its provision for a more masculine religiosity, the modern Buddhist emphasis on reason and science appealed to those seeking an alternative to the feminine religious spaces occupied by both evangelical Christianity⁶ and the British Theosophical Society in the early twentieth century.⁷

Interwar Britain’s Buddhist communities included people of English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Sinhala, Thai, Burmese and other nationalities. While some may find ‘British Buddhists’ an inaccurate, generalised description, its intended reference to multiple ethnicities underscores the constantly shifting definition of what it meant, and still means, to be British. Although ethnic Buddhists (those born into cultures with Buddhist traditions)⁸ likely numbered in the hundreds and only a minority of native-born Britons formally converted, a great number became what the religious historian Thomas Tweed describes as ‘sympathizers’,⁹ and wrote and spoke about Buddhism’s psychological aspects and attractions. This chapter draws mainly on memoirs by British Buddhists and sympathisers, on interwar scholarship about Buddhism and on selected publications by several major Buddhist associations. The first section outlines the nineteenth-century background to Buddhist self-help and explores by way of contextualisation the Protestant Buddhism of colonial Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), the theosophy movement and Edwin Arnold’s enormously popular poem about the Buddha, The Light of Asia.¹⁰ The second section describes the masculine intellectual spaces of interwar Buddhist societies, the gendered debates over anattā and the rival assertions of masculine religious authority expressed therein. The third and final section details the self-help rhetoric that emerged from these assertions in order to demonstrate that British Buddhism’s alternative religious and psychological spaces enabled men to construct their identities in ways that resisted imperial and Christian hegemonies.

The nineteenth-century background: Competition and collaboration in modern Buddhist discourse

The cultural pluralism of Buddhism has been relatively well documented. A number of scholars have shown how modern Buddhism’s rational scientific discourse was ‘cocreate[d] by Asians, Europeans, and Americans’, as David L. McMahan puts it.¹¹ Jeffrey Franklin describes British literature’s nineteenth-century encounter with Buddhism as both ‘discovery’ and ‘counter-invasion’; Sandra Bell documents the ‘active collaboration between Britons and South Asians’ in introducing Buddhist institutions and practices to twentieth-century Britain;¹² and Bell, McMahan and others have noted how psychology became part of modern Buddhism’s discourse.¹³ In both Britain and Sri Lanka, Bell notes almost offhandedly, ‘Buddhism came to be seen as a religion of self-help’¹⁴ – a kind of practical psychology. Influenced by occult movements like theosophy, modern Buddhism helped shift the focus of male self-help from its Victorian dimensions of physical and emotional discipline to more modern notions of mental control.

The precise trajectory of that particular shift has yet to be traced, but its roots lie in nineteenth-century Asian-British collaboration. Colonial and leisure travel to India, Burma and other Asian environs helped shape scholarship and popular literature about Buddhism enormously. In the late nineteenth century, Ceylon became a particularly key intersection for cross-cultural dialogue and experience due to its Buddhist revival and the incursion of theosophy, both of which helped shape the ‘Protestant Buddhism’ of both colonisers and colonised. Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich first proposed the term ‘Protestant Buddhism’ to capture ‘the influence of Protestant missionaries and the Sinhalese experience of modernization’.¹⁵ It was rooted in the Theravāda or Southern school, which stressed the Pāli scriptures¹⁶ and emphasised lay authority,¹⁷ rationalist polemicism, a fundamentalist concern for original texts, Buddhism’s philosophical rather than religious nature and ‘depende[nce] on English-language concepts’. As a result, Protestant Buddhism successfully ‘privatized and internalized’ religion, so that ‘the truly significant is not what takes place at a public celebration or ritual, but what happens inside one’s own mind or soul’.¹⁸

Nineteenth-century Protestant Buddhism also intertwined with theosophy and Western scholarship on Buddhism, both of which highlighted the religion’s rationalism and the primacy of original texts.¹⁹ The Theosophical Society (TS), co-founded by Helena Blavatsky (1831–91) and Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) in New York in 1875, initially propounded a spiritualist doctrine that sought to reconcile religion and science. It established lodges all over the world, including Ceylon, which the co-founders visited in 1880. By this time, they were using increasingly Buddhist and Hindu ideas and language.²⁰ Olcott took Buddhist vows, read works on Buddhism by Western scholars like T. W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922) and studied with the high-ranking bhikkhu (monk or mendicant) Hikkaduve Sumangala, who assisted Olcott as he prepared his Buddhist Catechism (1881...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Post-Christian Britain
• 1 Buddhist Psychologies and Masculinity in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
• 2 ‘The People of God Dressed for Dinner and Dancing’? English Catholic Masculinity, Religious Sociability and the Catenian Association
• 3 ‘To Their Credit as Jews and Englishmen’: Services for Youth and the Shaping of Jewish Masculinity in Britain, 1890s–1930s
• 4 ‘Be Strong and Play the Man’: Anglican Masculinities in the Twentieth Century
• 5 The Emergence of a British Hindu Identity between 1936 and 1937
• 6 ‘Iron Strength and Infinite Tenderness’: Herbert Gray and the Making of Christian Masculinities at War and at Home, 1900–40
• 7 Moral Welfare and Social Well-Being: The Church of England and the Emergence of Modern Homosexuality
• 8 Why Examine Men, Masculinities and Religion in Northern Ireland?
• 9 British Pakistani Masculinities: Longing and Belonging
• 10 ‘Laboratories’ of Gender? Masculinities, Spirituality and New Religious Movements in Late Twentieth-Century Britain
• 11 Men Losing Faith: The Making of Modern No Religionism in the UK, 1939–2010
• Select Bibliography
• Index