REL 104 Exam 2 Essay

REL 104 – 2014 Exam 2 Question #3 From the 16th century onward, there have been countless Christian missionaries that have come to Sri Lanka in an attempt to convert the local population of Theravada (“tradition of elders”) Buddhists to Christianity. In the eyes of the Buddhist monks, these missions were antagonistic, suggesting that being a Buddhist was spiritually as well as morally wrong. This was a position that Buddhists had never held towards Christianity. In the early nineteenth century a national Buddhist movement started to counteract these impositions, led by the American Buddhist, Henry Steel Olcott. This reformation movement led to many changes in how newer generations learned about the history and practices of Theravada Buddhism.

Many Theravada texts implied that laymen were not qualified to understand the difficulty of Buddhist and with this knowledge as a basis, Olcott founded many schools to teach Sri Lankan children about the Tripitaka (three baskets, used to describe the various canons of scriptures). In doing this, he did not factor in the fact that Sinhala children were educated in Buddhism in a variety of ways, not just from a scholarly standpoint. In his work, The Buddhist Catechism (a summary or exposition of doctrine, made to serve as an aid in learning introduction), he introduces many new concepts that were outlandish to the Sri Lankan people such as polygyny as well as the idea of Buddhism being a scientific religion. The main flaw that he made in his studies was the fact that he only turned to Western writings to justify Buddhism instead of those that were written in Pali (indigenous language of the Indian subcontinent). This resulted in a variety of absurdities. These absurdities, however, were over looked and as a result, his text was published, translated into 22 different languages, and has been made into 40 separate editions. Shockingly, the Sinhala translation was employed and is still in use as an education tool