THE CONTEXT OF VICTORIAN BUDDHISM

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the foundations for a Victorian Buddhism had been laid in the evolving in the West of an ideal Buddhism, a Buddhism constructed from textual sources increasingly located in and therefore regulated by the West. As a consequence, for the remainder of the century, a uniquely Victorian perception of Buddhism was to emerge. Buddhism developed as a ‘something’ primarily said in the West, delimited and designated by virtue of its ideological containment within the intellectual, political, and religious institutions of the West. Buddhism as it manifested itself in the East could only there be seen through the medium of what was definitively said about it elsewhere.

In the middle and late Victorian periods, there were conditions – both material and ideological – that were congenial to the development of the scholarly study of Buddhism. More importantly, for our purposes at least, they were conducive to the flowering of an interest in Buddhism among the middle and upper classes of Victorian England, and, although certainly to a much lesser extent, among the literate of the working class also.

One considerable influence on the emergence of Victorian Buddhism was the mounting interest in reading in the 1850s, among the middle class especially. The appearance during this decade of a cheap and popular literature combined with a social climate of increasing prosperity, improving education, and an expanding population combined to produce an enormous demand for reading materials.