Occult Buddhism and Transcultural Flows: Religious Modernity in the United States and the Indo-Pacific World, 1879–1917

There was a global spiritual crisis in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. In Asia, Europe, and the Americas, many of those engaged in religious practice struggled to adjust to the social, economic, and technological sources of modernity—industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, capitalism, and the new travel and communication technologies, from telegraphs and printing to railroads and steamships. Those new technologies, as they were employed in transnational institutional networks, mediated the flow of ideas, artifacts, and practices and deepened the widely shared disquiet by increasing the awareness of religious diversity, intensifying (east-west and west-east) missionary activity, popularizing the comparative study of religion, and circulating anti-religious interpretations of the new biology, geology, and psychology. This crisis, which varied according to social position and assumed very different local forms, was as powerful in Meiji Japan and Colonial Ceylon as it was in Victorian Ireland and Gilded Age America. Focusing on U.S. exchanges with Asia, in this paper I trace the transnational flows of occult beliefs among those who identified with Buddhism. These occult sympathizers sought “hidden” sources of wisdom in a variety of intellectual frameworks and religious movements, including Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. They mixed occult themes and Buddhist doctrines, as they championed that Asian religion’s “scientific,” “reforming,” and “tolerant” spirit. Whether they favored modernist accommodation or countermodernist retrenchment, they insisted that ancient Buddhism and its hidden wisdom met the intellectual and social needs of the age of spiritual disquiet.