Barbara O’Brien (Guardian): Anxiety about what Buddhism ‘really’ is has followed it around for centuries. It’s a mental habit Buddhist teaching warns us of.
Henry Steel Olcott, TW Rhys Davids, and other 19th century western “Buddhologists” arrived in Asia brimming with Orientalist idealism about the pure wisdom of the ancient east. Then they looked around and concluded that the people of Asia were largely an ignorant lot who didn’t appreciate “authentic” Buddhism as well as them. Olcott in particular made it his mission to explain Buddhism to the Sinhalese, publishing a Buddhist catechism and organising Buddhist Sunday schools.
Both Rhys Davids and Olcott made important contributions to the understanding of Buddhism in the west, and I understand the people of Sri Lanka still honour Olcott’s memory. We might well dismiss 19th-century western attitudes toward “inauthentic” Asian Buddhism as typical Victorian-era white arrogance. However, westerners continue to want to save Buddhism from backward, superstition-ridden Buddhists, who (they believe) have contaminated the Buddha’s authentic philosophy with rituals, altars, bowing, incense and other clutter of religion.