How An English Poet Triggered A Buddhist Revivalist Movement

How a buddhist revivalist movement was triggered in India by an english poet’s visit to Gaya

- Mandira Nayar

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD is not a name that comes to mind in Bodh Gaya. But the poet, and his popular poem Light of Asia—which inspired Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling—is at the heart of reclaiming the temple for the Buddha at Gaya.

“The dispute [seeking the return of control of the temple from Hindus to Buddhists] got triggered by Arnold’s visit to Bodh Gaya in February 1886,” says Jairam Ramesh, who has written The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined the Buddha, a book on this epic bio-poem on the Buddha. The poem was instrumental for the “discovery” of Indian Buddhism for the west. Arnold taught in India; in London, he was the vice president of the West London Food Reform Society that promoted vegetarianism. Gandhi was the secretary of this society while he was a law student in London.

“It is at Buddha-Gya, that ‘most hallowed spot where, under the Bodhi tree, the sun of truth rose for Prince Siddhartha’, that Arnold feels the most depressed and anguished,” writes Ramesh in his book. “Then he uses a term for it which would cause endless political controversy for the next half a century and more. He calls the shrine ‘the Mecca of Buddhism’….”

About the temple being used as a Shaivite shrine, Arnold wrote: “While the granite floor was carved with votive inscriptions and desecrated in the middle by the Brahmans who have usurped the place… Buddha is unknown and unhonoured upon his own ground by Shaivites...”