ABSTRACT
Constance Gordon Cumming was one British visitor who came to the conclusion that some Westerners were creating a theoretical Buddhism with no foundation in reality (Gordon Cumming 1892, II: 416). She went on to assume that religious change within Sri Lanka was the result of Western oriental scholarship alone, a view that twentieth century students of orientalism have taken up.1 But the fact that Gordon Cumming and missionaries such as Moscrop were the first to voice this forces me to question the twentieth-century appropriation of it. Gordon Cumming’s construction of Buddhism, in spite of her romantic appreciation of its spirituality, was negative, and her belief in the superiority of European culture, unshakeable. Her view of Vidyodaya College, quoted earlier, was steeped in this. It did not enter her mind that rigorous textual study could have been part of the existing monastic tradition, nor that the main inspiration for the College’s innovation could have been indigenous. The writing of scholars such as Devamitta challenges Gordon Cumming’s stance and adds complexity to comfortable generalizations about ‘The New Buddhism’. In addition, the work of scholars such as Blackburn is now bringing new data to light concerning the form and content of the teaching at Vidyodaya in the nineteenth century. Rather than appropriating Western textual scholarship, she has argued, it pursued an education quite similar to that demanded of a monk at the end of the eighteenth century, albeit with a new examination system. But even this, she suggests, probably drew more from Thailand than the West (Blackburn 2002a,b).
