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The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott

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Description: A review of this book.
The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Chicago Henry Steel Olcott was, by all accounts, a strange and interesting man. Born into a piously Presbyterian New Jersey family in 1832, Olcott went on to become a New York journalist, a Civil War colonel, and most famously a founding member of the Theosophical Society and a major figure in the nineteenth-century Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka. Although Olcott has been the subject of numerous studies over the years, Stephen Prothero's The White Buddhist examines Olcott from a new and unusual angle. Prothero has three specific purposes: first, he presents a "sympathetic yet scholarly" interpretation of Olcott's life; second, he uses that life as "an opportunity to interpret the broader nineteenth-century American encounter with the religions of Asia"; and third, he introduces the linguistic term "creolization" as a means of understanding cultural and religious interactions. This is a promising premise with which to begin; Prothero proposes to view Olcott less as an individual and more as an emblem of a particular moment in American religious history, a moment when America was both exporting and importing religious ideas: "From his mid-life passage to Asia until his death in 1907, Olcott functioned as culture broker between Occident and Orient, facilitating the commerce of religious ideas and practices between America and Asia even as he helped to bring into the world's religious marketplace a wholly new spiritual creation" (p. 3). As Prothero demonstrates, Olcott viewed Kipling's "East is East and West is West" dictum as fundamentally false, believing instead that the two cultures could indeed meet and, furthermore, that an amalgamation of Eastern and Western religions was both possible and desirable, such that the best of both could be preserved in a new, hybrid tradition (this is the tenet upon
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