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Idylls of the Buddh': Buddhist Modernism and Victorian Poetics in Colonial Ceylon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sebastian Lecourt
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Abstract

This essay explores how Edwin Arnold's epic poem The Light of Asia (1879) popularized a formal analogy between Buddhism and Christianity. The poem was based on a series of missionary texts that had reshaped the Buddha's career into a close approximation of Jesus's in order to frame Buddhism as a fit object of Protestant conversion. Early anglophone readers in Sri Lanka, however, took it as evidence of Buddhism's equal stature and thus helped make The Light of Asia an international best seller and a touchstone for popular Buddhist nationalisms in the twentieth century. In this way Arnold's poem allows us to develop a more complex sense both of how literary forms globalize—how a literary construct can take on global purchase precisely because readers disagree over its meaning—and of the powerful role that specific literary media play in influencing these different interpretations.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 668 - 685
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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