samuel huntington wants you to know those theosophists never mattered

My interest in appreciating the story of modernity as one of ‘West’-meets-‘East’ persists. A name to connect with Helena Blavatsky’s and Henry Steel Olcott’s is that of contemporary Edwin Arnold, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph in the turn-of-twentieth heyday of newspapers, but celebrated in his time rather for a work whose title a book by U. of Edinburgh historian Christopher Harding, out last year, reprises.

Harding, interviewed in April for New Books:

So you get this I think interesting moment in the early nineteenth century where Europeans who’re interested in Asia pivot from China to India — um, I think we’ve given a flavor of why that is. One more reason I think that is is that the interest in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is happening against a backdrop in Europe of all these wars of religion. So Europe is a highly unstable place, and the idea that China is a stable country, and has been so for thousands of years — the Jesuits start to dig up all these records that shows just how old China really is — is another reason why Europeans have enormous respect for China. By the time you get to the early nineteenth century, things are changing in Europe. One of the things that Europeans start to idolize instead, in a country or a culture, is not stability but dynamism, and change and growth and progression. Because, whether it’s in the area of science and technology, or perhaps politics as well, some of the, uh, most powerful European countries — like Britain for example, and later Germany — are the ones who are changing rapidly. That starts to be what people are looking for.

And so they think that China, actually, is not so much stable as stagnant. And instead India becomes really interesting because they think of it as a place, at least many centuries before, where there was this kind of pure intuition of reality as it really is, and that some Indians, this is the way Europeans start to think, some Indians, however they do it, they retain this connection with reality at its most fundamental and its purest, perhaps via Nature, perhaps via — some Indian ascetics they encounter, who go through these extraordinary prostrations or diets or whatever it might be to maintain that connection — um, a lot of Europeans are really impressed by that, by what they think, anyway, is going on in India.

And so across the nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries it’s much more India than China that’s thought to be this kind of fount of spiritual wisdom. And Edwin Arnold, uh who you mentioned, I think he’s really — yeah he’s really quite important to that. So he’s writing — he’s a journalist with Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, he’s spent some time out in India, he reads Sanskrit — and he writes this long poem, ‘The Light of Asia’ — as you say, we even borrowed our title from him — which he publishes in the latter part of the nineteenth century in several editions.

But he does something extraordinary: because before Arnold, the general idea about Buddhism in Europe is that it’s this kind of dark and nihilistic religion. People don’t understand it well, but one thing they think they do understand about Buddhism is that the aim of religious practice is to extinguish yourself. And I think the Europeans find that really hard to get hold of, because they have this sense of, that of, you know, a virtuous life in a Christian tradition, crudely, gets you into Heaven, right? . . . The idea that you would spend a life of religious practice only to then not exist afterwards, . . . if that’s the best, as it were, posthumous outcome you can hope for, then this really is a bleak worldview. . . . Edwin Arnold I think manages to give it this kind of makeover — and it’s a makeover that tells you almost everything you need to about how Europeans in, especially educated Europeans, in the second half of the nineteenth century felt about the world, and felt about themselves.

Um, partly, I think, this is about new scientific discoveries in the latter half of the nineteenth century. . . . For all sorts of . . . reasons, Europeans are finding Christianity less plausible. And what Edwin Arnold seems to manage to do is present the life of the Buddha almost as though he were a Victorian gentleman, and kind of a Victorian scientist. So he tells the story of the Buddha as someone who won’t accept the received wisdom of his day, but who sees all this suffering going on around him, and so he goes out and he tries lots of different things — you know, famously the historical Buddha leaves his palace and goes to study with all different, uh, forms of Indian practice of his day, it was quite a rich world when the historical Buddha was alive — and he tries all these different things, as almost, you can almost imagine him with a lab coat on, as a decent scientist would back at home, until he finds the thing which works. . . . So Edwin Arnold presents him as someone who’s really easy to understand for nineteenth-century Europeans — and also someone who’s a little bit Christ-like, as well, in his deep compassion for all who suffer.

What he also does, I think, the last thing he does in that poem — again, the reason why I think it’s so popular — is he actually borrows a little bit from Hinduism. So, rather than say at death you simply cease to exist, he has this lovely line, um, he says, ‘The dew-drop slips into the shining sea’ — so you merge back into this great Consciousness from which you came in the first place, which is much more of a consoling image, I think, than you simply extinguish yourself, um, completely.

So he puts together this long poem presenting Buddhism in this way, . . . and the result is this poem which sells extraordinarily well — it’s on a par with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for sales. It goes on to shape how Europeans think about not just Buddhism but about India. It influences people like Gandhi and Tolstoy, operas get made, films get made. . . . Not only does it get really well received amongst critics, but all these rebuttals start to get written by Christian missionaries who’ve actually worked out in Asia. . . . Some of those take-downs of The Light of Asia [laughs] are extraordinary, they’re really powerful. Um, but nevertheless, as you say, he’s a real hinge figure. Because even people who don’t necessarily end up converting to Buddhism nevertheless, uh, are sold on the idea that Buddhism is an elevated philosophy worth exploring — and, more broadly, India, China and Japan are places where you might go to seek out spiritual wisdom.

Earlier in that conversation, Harding mentions to interviewer Matt Fraser that it was in fact Theosophists, the network around Blavatsky and Olcott (whom Arnold evidently knew well, though e.g. Wikipedia won’t tell you that), who introduced the young Gandhi, studying law in London, to the sacred-text tradition of India (a thing you can learn from Wikipedia).

Listen to the whole: