Olcott, Henry Steel

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OLCOTT, HENRY STEEL

OLCOTT, HENRY STEEL . Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) was the first American to formally convert to Buddhism and a major contributor to the Sinhalese Buddhist revival in nineteenth-century Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He was also a founder and president of the Theosophical Society, the first American organization devoted to promoting Asian religions in the West.

Born into a Presbyterian household in Orange, New Jersey, in 1832, Olcott first made a name for himself in agriculture, establishing a farm school and delivering a series of agricultural lectures at Yale University. He then moved on to careers in journalism and law. During the American Civil War he investigated fraud in the military, then served on the three-person team investigating Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

The life of this self-described "radical anti-Tammany Republican" took a fateful turn when the New York Sun dispatched him to write about spirit communications that mediums were receiving in a farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont. There he met the Russian-born occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who impressed him with her Bohemian bearing, boundless charisma, and alleged connections with occult "Masters," members of an esoteric brotherhood in the East.

Now devoted to spiritual matters, Olcott joined forces with Blavatsky in New York City in 1875 to establish the Theosophical Society. He was the organization's president and she its corresponding secretary, but more importantly Blavatsky was the charismatic force propelling the society forward, while Olcott's job was to prevent it from spinning out of control. Initially, the "Theosophical Twins," as they were known, focused on reforming Spiritualism. But guided by Blavatsky's "Masters," they quickly reset their sights, transforming their society into the first American organization devoted to spreading the ancient wisdom of the East.

Unfortunately for Olcott and Blavatsky, there was not much of an American audience for their eclectic theology. So in the winter of 1878 to 1879, they took their society to India, first to Bombay (now Mumbai) and later to Adyar, a suburb of Madras (Chennai), where the society is still located. There Olcott edited the Theosophist, which offered its readers a heady mix of comparative religion, anti-missionary agitation, free thought, and esotericism. He and Blavatsky also promulgated for the first time the "three objects" of their organization: (1) to form the nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color; (2) to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; (3) and to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.

In 1880 Olcott sailed with Blavatsky to Ceylon, and in Galle they formally converted to Buddhism. The Buddhism they embraced, however, was confessedly idiosyncratic. "If Buddhism contained a single dogma that we were compelled to accept, we would not have…remained Buddhists ten minutes," Olcott explained in his six-volume Old Diary Leaves (1895–1935). "Our Buddhism was that of the Master-Adept Gautama Buddha, which was identically the Wisdom Religion of the Aryan Upanishads, and the soul of all the ancient world-faiths."

Given his status as a new convert, Olcott might have spent time sitting at the feet of Buddhist monks, correcting his misapprehensions. Instead he got about the business of converting the island's inhabitants to his understanding of what he called "pure, primitive Buddhism." Soon he was founding Buddhist schools, establishing Young Men's Buddhist Associations, and writing a popular Buddhist Catechism (1881), which was published in more than forty editions and at least twenty languages. In the process, he helped to spread, especially among the English-speaking middle-class, a form of Buddhism that borrowed heavily from the liberal Protestantism of his youth. Activistic, optimistic, didactic, progressive, and adaptive, this creole tradition is now widely described as "Protestant Buddhism."

While Olcott upset some monks, he was lionized by the populace, who thronged to hear "the White Buddhist" lecture on the vices of Christian missions and the virtues of Buddhist thought. In his lectures Olcott rejected stereotypes of Buddhism as "a grossly materialistic, nihilistic, a negative, a vile-breeding religion," describing the tradition instead as a philosophy (not a religion) rooted in the ancient teachings of the Buddha and confirmed by experience (rather than faith).

Olcott devoted his last years to intra-Buddhist ecumenism. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, he traveled to Burma and Japan in an effort to enlist all the world's Buddhists into one International Buddhist League. He also helped to design a six-colored Buddhist flag, which was adopted in 1950 as an international Buddhist symbol by the World Fellowship of Buddhists and now hangs in Buddhist centers worldwide.

Back in India, Olcott also made important contributions to the Indian Renaissance, founding schools for Dalits (formerly known as "untouchables"), promoting a Sanskrit revival, and establishing Hindu boys' associations. Olcott's work reverberated most powerfully, however, outside of his adopted homeland, especially in the United States, where his Theosophical activities helped to popularize Asian religions and New Age thought, and in Sri Lanka, where upon his death in 1907 over twenty thousand students were attending 183 grant-in-aid Buddhist schools.

Olcott died in India in 1907, and his cremated remains were scattered in the Ganges and the Indian Ocean. Though largely forgotten in the country of his birth (where the New York Times once denounced him as "a man bereft of reason"), Olcott is something of a folk hero in Sri Lanka, immortalized on a postage stamp and remembered each year on Olcott Day. Olcott is also admired in the Theosophical Society, which now maintains hundreds of branches on five continents and continues to preach the essential unity of all religions.