ABSTRACT
Caroline Rhys Davids is given with the concepts of decadence, evolution and a framework for explicating Buddhist doctrine that enabled her to incorporate Victorian ideas into her view of Buddhism and to express unfamiliar tenets in a language easily comprehended by her readers. Unlike many Victorians who felt that Buddhism taught passivity and the elimination of all desire, she was convinced that the Buddha had advocated aspiration and exertion as the means by which humanity would develop. The work of her links the religious questioning of the Victorian period with the era of disillusionment and religious eclecticism that followed. Her knowledge of the Abhidamma enabled her to understand the Buddhist belief that the individual "self" was in fact a series of transient mental processes. She struggled for many years to understand the doctrine of anatta and to reconcile it with her vision of Buddhism as a lengthy path of spiritual evolution.
