Taking Buddha to the World

By examining the impact of an 1879 Edwin Arnold poem, Jairam Ramesh has helped map the global inf luence of Buddhist thought

- Siddiq Wahid

Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem on the life and teachings of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, was published in 1879. He wrote it as a means of ‘relaxing’ between writing stressful and prosaic Daily Telegraph editorials on the Russo-Ottoman war from a British perspective. It was an extraordinary piece of work; written by an unapologetic, entitled imperialist. His empathetic retelling of the Buddha story managed to move people as diverse as the famous nurse Florence Nightingale, politician Winston Churchill, business tycoon Andrew Carnegie, writer Herman Melville and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. It also had its share of controversy as (mostly) Christian missionaries reacted sharply to his trespassing on their evangelical turf with a rather different messiah.

The book was undeniably influential. It guided the popular reception of Buddhism in Europe and the US; Arnold basked in its glory. But within half a century of its publication, as Buddhism was explored by weightier western academics, it acquired the reputation of being a quaint exegesis, mostly occupying shelf space in libraries.

Jairam Ramesh’s biography, The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined the Buddha, has not only exhumed the book but also explored dimensions of it that are fascinating and relevant today, particularly in India, where it was translated into no less than 12 Indian languages. Ramesh details how free India’s politicians—Ambedkar, Gandhi and Nehru—were all influenced by Arnold’s poem in different ways.