On Tuesday, December 28, 1954, Hollywood actress and columnist Hedda Hopper announced a full-leng... more On Tuesday, December 28, 1954, Hollywood actress and columnist Hedda Hopper announced a full-length feature film-soon to be made-with an unusual story line. Wayfarer would chronicle the "life of Gautama Buddha, extraordinary warrior-prince who founded a way of life which now numbers more than 500 million followers." The story of this "outstanding swordsman and horseman who renounced the world" was to be filmed in India using cutting-edge CinemaScope technology and brought to the screen courtesy of MGM and screenwriter Robert Hardy Andrews, who had "recently returned from his second tour of India where he had long sessions with [India's Prime Minister] Nehru who is 100% behind the project." 1 Hopper's announcement was premature: The Buddha project would later collapse under the weight of Hollywood and intra-Asian politics and the film never made. For historians and religionists, however, it is the backstory of Andrews's script that needs to be told. Wayfarer was a failed psychological warfare project of a CIA-front organization founded in 1951, the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA), later renamed the Asia Foundation. Developed in collaboration with the Ceylonese Buddhist scholar G. P. Malalasekera, Wayfarer was conceived as a bloc-building strategy to draw Asian Buddhists away from the Communist orbit and into the Free World. Andrews's completed script equated Communism-in the form of the Buddha's nefarious cousin Devadatta-with deceit, despotism, and a ruthless disregard for India's downtrodden. Communism's ideological opposite was the Buddha: the handsome and gifted prince who forfeits worldly rule to pursue truth and fairness and to help all suffering people realize peace. Through this stratagem, Andrews's Free Asian Wayfarer would presumably endear the CFA to Nehru and enable the CFA to forge valuable ties with Asian governments and cultural leaders.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, Asian Buddhist monks have been associated in American t... more From the late nineteenth century onwards, Asian Buddhist monks have been associated in American thought with science, rationality and anti-coloni-alism. Though the narrative of nineteenth century 'Buddhist Modernism' is routinely invoked to explain this, a more illuminating genealogy of this 'modernist monasücism' identifies deeper roots in anti-Catholicism. This paper explores these roots through a genealogy of the Buddhist Modern-ist Monk Beginning with the seventeenth century travel journals of Jesuit missionoeries, it winds its way through varied British rhetorics to nineteenth century Sri Lanka, and ends in Chicago, at the World's Parliament of Religion of 1893. There, these intertwined discourses coalesced in the form of the Buddhist Modernist Monk a figure now familiar and beloved in American culture as an embodiment of compassion and rationality, yet with a history of prejudice and politics that has yet to be meaningfully explored. As we acknowledge anti-Catholicism's centrality to the history of the Modernist Monk, we are necessarily reminded of the moral ambivalence of the 'science-religion' dichotomy that fuels his mystique. At minimum, future analyses must critique the presumption of such supra-historical binaries, and deploy an open framework attentive to the contradictions and relations of reciprocal determination that characterize his genealogy. In the fall of 2005, the world's most famous Buddhist monk found himself at the center of an international scientific controversy. A long-time supporter of neu
On Tuesday, December 28, 1954, Hollywood actress and columnist Hedda Hopper announced a full-leng... more On Tuesday, December 28, 1954, Hollywood actress and columnist Hedda Hopper announced a full-length feature film-soon to be made-with an unusual story line. Wayfarer would chronicle the "life of Gautama Buddha, extraordinary warrior-prince who founded a way of life which now numbers more than 500 million followers." The story of this "outstanding swordsman and horseman who renounced the world" was to be filmed in India using cutting-edge CinemaScope technology and brought to the screen courtesy of MGM and screenwriter Robert Hardy Andrews, who had "recently returned from his second tour of India where he had long sessions with [India's Prime Minister] Nehru who is 100% behind the project." 1 Hopper's announcement was premature: The Buddha project would later collapse under the weight of Hollywood and intra-Asian politics and the film never made. For historians and religionists, however, it is the backstory of Andrews's script that needs to be told. Wayfarer was a failed psychological warfare project of a CIA-front organization founded in 1951, the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA), later renamed the Asia Foundation. Developed in collaboration with the Ceylonese Buddhist scholar G. P. Malalasekera, Wayfarer was conceived as a bloc-building strategy to draw Asian Buddhists away from the Communist orbit and into the Free World. Andrews's completed script equated Communism-in the form of the Buddha's nefarious cousin Devadatta-with deceit, despotism, and a ruthless disregard for India's downtrodden. Communism's ideological opposite was the Buddha: the handsome and gifted prince who forfeits worldly rule to pursue truth and fairness and to help all suffering people realize peace. Through this stratagem, Andrews's Free Asian Wayfarer would presumably endear the CFA to Nehru and enable the CFA to forge valuable ties with Asian governments and cultural leaders.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, Asian Buddhist monks have been associated in American t... more From the late nineteenth century onwards, Asian Buddhist monks have been associated in American thought with science, rationality and anti-coloni-alism. Though the narrative of nineteenth century 'Buddhist Modernism' is routinely invoked to explain this, a more illuminating genealogy of this 'modernist monasücism' identifies deeper roots in anti-Catholicism. This paper explores these roots through a genealogy of the Buddhist Modern-ist Monk Beginning with the seventeenth century travel journals of Jesuit missionoeries, it winds its way through varied British rhetorics to nineteenth century Sri Lanka, and ends in Chicago, at the World's Parliament of Religion of 1893. There, these intertwined discourses coalesced in the form of the Buddhist Modernist Monk a figure now familiar and beloved in American culture as an embodiment of compassion and rationality, yet with a history of prejudice and politics that has yet to be meaningfully explored. As we acknowledge anti-Catholicism's centrality to the history of the Modernist Monk, we are necessarily reminded of the moral ambivalence of the 'science-religion' dichotomy that fuels his mystique. At minimum, future analyses must critique the presumption of such supra-historical binaries, and deploy an open framework attentive to the contradictions and relations of reciprocal determination that characterize his genealogy. In the fall of 2005, the world's most famous Buddhist monk found himself at the center of an international scientific controversy. A long-time supporter of neu
Uploads