Mrs Pounds and Mrs Pfoundes: A futuristic historical essay in honour of Professor Ursula King

In this short essay written for Professor Ursula King’s Festschrift I reflect on the general problem of researching and recovering events and individuals previously ‘lost’ to historians of religions, taking as my example recent collaborative research into forgotten early Irish Buddhists. I consider also the problems of researching other traditionally under-represented figures, including many women; for example, the wife (Rosa Alice Hill) and mother (Caroline Pounds) of the Irish Buddhist Charles Pfoundes. In the second and rather more speculative part of the essay I look at some ways in which increasingly sophisticated and increasingly accessible technological developments, allied with growing ‘crowd’ participation in the provision and analysis of historical data, might in future enable us to discover far more than we currently can about events and individuals in the past

Representing Sikhism: Essays in memory of the Irish scholar Max Arthur Macauliffe

This is an introduction, by the guest editors, to the special issue of JISASR (Vol 4, 2017) entitled 'Representing Sikhism: Essays in Memory of the Irish Scholar Max Arthur Macauliffe'. The genesis of this special issue lies in pioneering work on Macauliffe's Irish identity and personal and scholarly life undertaken by Professor Tadhg Foley (Galway). The active interest and support of members of the Sikh community in Ireland led to a conference, hosted by the Study of Religions Department at University College Cork, held to mark the centennial of Macauliffe's death on 15 March 1913. After some brief comments on past and present trends in the study of Ireland-Asia connections in the field of religions, we discuss Macauliffe's significance for modern representations of Sikhism and offer some contextual observations on each of the four papers. The article concludes with a brief resumé of the 2013 conference at which the papers were originally presented

Mysticism: No Experience Necessary?

Robert Sharf argues that if a religious or mystical experience conveys any meaning at all, that meaning derives from shared public discourse, not from the experience as such. Sharf’s argument is, or should be, unsettling for anyone who naively thinks that religious beliefs are grounded in religious experiences. In this paper I examine Sharf’s arguments and suggest another way of approaching the notion of mystical or religious experience within the study of religions. Distinguishing between mystical experience and mystical teachings can help to explain how ‘experience’ can retain a meaningful place in mysticism

A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer European Buddhists and Globalizing Asian Networks 1860–1960

The period from the later nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries—roughly between the Indian Revolt of 1857 and the withdrawal of most European powers from direct rule in Asia—was one of immense change across Southeast Asia and the Buddhist world. This century saw the emergence of the elements that we now take to constitute modern Buddhism, or the multiple modern Buddhisms: the rise of the laity as practitioners and organizers (including meditation movements), new roles for women, for scholars and indeed for monks, the development of national sanghas and ethno-nationalist Buddhist discourses, and the association of Buddhism with a de-mythologized rationalist and scientific discourse. Moreover, the period saw the creation of new Buddhist institutional structures across Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka and multiple ‘Buddhist Revivals’ (late nineteenth century, turn of the twentieth century and, finally again, around 1956 with the Buddha Jayanti). It also saw the culmination of colonial empires (British, French, Japanese) and nationalism, decolonization and the creation of multiple Buddhist nation-states. It was the formative century for Buddhism, Asian modernity and their various hybrids

The first Buddhist mission to the West: Charles Pfoundes and the London Buddhist mission of 1889 – 1892

This article challenges two general assumptions shared by scholars of Western Buddhism: (1) that the earliest Buddhist missions to the West were those established in California from 1899 onwards; and (2) that Ananda Metteyya‘s (Allan Bennett‘s) London mission of 1908 was the first Buddhist mission to London and thus to Europe. Recent collaborative research by scholars in Ireland and Japan demonstrates instead that the Japanese-sponsored ‗Buddhist Propagation Society‘ (BPS) launched in London in 1889 and led for three years by the Irish-born Japanese Buddhist Charles Pfoundes predates both of the above-mentioned ‗first‘ Buddhist missions. In this article we offer a first attempt to document the nature, activities and significance of the London BPS, drawing on Japanese and UK sources to examine Pfoundes‘ role and that of his Japanese sponsors. We discuss the nature of Pfoundes‘ Buddhism, the strategy and activities of the London BPS and the reasons for its eventual demise. The conclusion examines the links between the BPS and the later ‗first‘ Japanese Buddhist missions in California and asks what hidden connection there might be between Pfoundes‘ missionary campaign in London in 1889-92 and Ananda Metteyya‘s return from Burma as the ‗first‘ Buddhist missionary to London, almost two decades later