Dhammaloka (Carroll, Laurence) (fl.
By his own account, he left school in his early teens to work in the family business, then emigrated to Liverpool, where he lived briefly before shipping across the Atlantic as a cabin boy, landing in the USA in the early 1870s. He worked for a time on east coast ships, then made his way by degrees across the continent as a casually employed itinerant manual labourer, his occupations over the years including sailor, dishwasher, shepherd, truckman and stevedore. After a period on fruit boats on California's Sacramento river, he made several trans-Pacific voyages in packet ships between San Francisco and Yokohama, before staying behind (or being expelled) in Japan. Drifting through east and south-east Asia, he arrived in Burma in the half-decade before the country's annexation into British India in 1885. During these years of wandering, he rejected the Roman catholicism of his rearing for the atheistic 'free thought' that enjoyed some currency within the North American 'hobo' and Asian 'beachcomber' milieus in which he moved. It is possible that in America he was involved in radical trade unionism or political activism of an anarchist cast. Through all these years, he was a heavy drinker and ready brawler.
While working as a tally clerk with a British timber firm, he became deeply interested in Buddhism, through conversations with Burmese monks and exposure to Buddhist tracts, and was ordained a novice monk at the Tavoy monastery in Rangoon (Yangon). After a five-year novitiate, he received higher ordination as a full monk (bhikku) in the Theravada tradition, assuming the name Dhammaloka (sometimes prefixed with the Burmese honorific 'U'). He then taught children and novices in the monastery school before becoming a travelling preacher. While the chronology of his pre-1900 life is vague, the recognition and status he had attained within the Burmese sangha (body of ordained monastics) by 1900 suggests that he might have been fully ordained for several years at least. An ordination prior to 1899 would have preceded that of any previously confirmed ordination of a westerner.
Dhammaloka enters the historical record in November 1900, when his name first appeared in the English-language Burmese press below a notice in the Times of Burma warning Christian missionaries to refrain from distributing tracts at Rangoon's Shwedagon pagoda and other Buddhist sites during the impending festival season. Over the next fifteen months, he undertook three preaching tours, visiting every part of the country, the peril posed to Buddhism and Burmese culture by Christian missions being his dominant theme. His reputation among Burmese Buddhists was sealed when he confronted an off-duty Indian police officer for wearing shoes at the Shwedagon pagoda (March 1901). (Only uniformed police and military and all westerners were exempted from the prohibition on entering the pagoda precincts shod.) Charged by a district magistrate with insulting a police officer, Dhammaloka appears to have been convicted, but received a minor sanction. Fellow Buddhists rallied to his support; the pagoda trustees refused government requests to reprimand him and to institute a policy of removing anyone harassing a shod visitor. The incident ignited vigorous debate in both the English- and Burmese-language press on whether westerners should comply with the prohibition. On arriving to preach in Mandalay (December 1901), Dhammaloka was received by local monastic and lay dignitaries, and attracted rapturous crowds, far larger than those that had greeted the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, the previous month.
For the balance of the decade, Dhammaloka's activities are amply chronicled in contemporary newspaper reportage and other printed media. His career comprises two Burmese periods sandwiched around a five-year interval (1902–7) when he operated mainly in several other Asian countries. Yellow-robed, tonsured and barefoot, taking his part in the daily begging of alms, he fully engaged in Buddhist communal ritual and pageantry. As a preacher, lecturer, polemicist, organiser, temperance activist, publisher and controversialist, he was a prominent figure of the pan-Asian Buddhist revival provoked by western colonialism and modernity. His regular preaching tours and lectures were sponsored by local monasteries and lay organisations, and along with his other varied activities were funded by the well-to-do (often merchants and feudal aristocrats). Expounding his ideas in newspaper articles and letters columns, he also made ample use of the press to publicise his comings and goings. His exploits were noticed by the western press. In May 1902 he was interviewed by a Canadian journalist for an article in Harper's Monthly Magazine, while Dublin's Sunday Independent in April 1911 highlighted his Irish origins.
While he claimed to speak eight Asian languages, Dhammaloka preached and lectured in English through an interpreter. (Buddhist preaching in Burma had traditionally been conducted in Pali (the ancient language of the earliest extant Buddhist texts), so the laity were accustomed to hearing a preacher utter a language unintelligible to most; merit lay in simply hearing the words (akin to generations of Roman catholics 'hearing' the Latin mass).) Central to Dhammaloka's mission was his understanding of the compatibility of Buddhism with western free thought and scientific inquiry. Maintaining that Buddhism was better described as a philosophy than a religion, when asked if he worshiped 'the Buddhist god', he corrected his interlocutor, asserting that Buddhists worship no god, but revere the Buddha as a man who showed other men and women the way to salvation (Contemporary Buddhism (2010), 215–16). His strident critique of Christianity castigated its doctrine as superstitious unreason, lambasted the avaricious and hypocritical corruption of its clergy, and implied its marriage to the imperial project. In a recurring rhetorical trope, he held that western culture had brought to the east nothing more than 'the Bible, the bottle and the Gatling gun' (Cox (2013), 251).
Increasingly active from 1902 outside Burma, Dhammaloka was the only European to speak at the launch of the International Young Men's Buddhist Association (YMBA) in Tokyo (September–October 1902), and delivered a temperance lecture at the Singapore lodge of the International Organisation of Good Templars (February 1903), a body with which he maintained continuous contact. Residing six months in a Bangkok monastery in the independent kingdom of Siam (February–August 1903), he founded a free, multi-racial, bilingual school (the country's first), co-founded a temperance society, and launched the Siam Buddhist Society. During a prolonged period in the Straits Settlements and elsewhere on the Malay peninsula (September 1903–January 1905), he opened a Buddhist mission and free school in Singapore, founded the Straits YMBA, and organised pan-Buddhist New Year celebrations that brought together varied Buddhist traditions in Singapore for the first time (April 1904). He aroused the ire of Edward Alexander Morphy, Irish-born editor of the Straits Times, who vilified him as a 'fraud' and extortionist, a functional illiterate incapable of composing the publications appearing under his name.
Dhammaloka spent several months travelling in India and Nepal (February–May 1905). (His claim to have visited Lhasa (a mere one year after the Younghusband incursion into Tibet), and to have been received by the 13th Dalai Lama, challenges credibility.) At intervals during his return journey towards Burma, he met the American vagabond traveller Harry Franck (1881–1962), who described the encounters at length in A vagabond journey around the world (1910) (Contemporary Buddhism (2010), 214–19). His whereabouts for the next two years are obscure (he may have been active in the Malay peninsula and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)), till he reappears in Burma in May 1907. During this second Burmese period (1907–11), his chief vehicle was the Buddhist Tract Society (BTS), which he established in Rangoon in August 1907. Over the next several years, the BTS published and distributed numerous titles in considerable print runs, including polemics by Dhammaloka and other Asian-based Buddhists, and editions of works (in the original or translation) by European and American free-thinkers, historical and contemporary. The latter often included Dhammaloka's introductions, afterwords, and interpolated or footnoted commentary. He corresponded extensively with western free-thinking individuals, organisations and journals, his letters and polemics peppering the latter. In June 1909 he addressed an audience of 5,000 on the centenary of the death of Thomas Paine, and announced a projected three-volume Burmese translation of Paine's The age of reason (already distributed by the BTS in English, along with The rights of man.) Resuming his trans-Burma touring, he founded local BTS branches and temperance societies. His agitation against Christian missions became more confrontational; in January 1908 he disrupted the annual convention of the American Baptist mission to Burma by distributing anti-Christian tracts and encouraging reconversion to Buddhism. While he retained widespread popularity with the broad mass of Burmese Buddhists, his relations were strained with a newly emergent, upwardly mobile and westernised Rangoon elite.
After preaching a series of anti-Christian sermons to large crowds over several nights in Moulmein (Mawlamyine) (October–November 1910), Dhammaloka was charged by a district magistrate with promoting enmity and hatred between different classes of his majesty's subjects. Found guilty of sedition under an Indian statute, he was bound over against financial sureties posted by supporters. It was the first time the statute had been applied in Burma, and the only time against a westerner; the case became a precedent for the statute's subsequent application against Burmese nationalists.
Dhammaloka's subsequent career is even murkier than his origins. His unsuccessful appeal against the sedition conviction (January 1911) is the last documentation of his presence in Burma. It appears that he went to Australia; a letter printed in the Times of Ceylon (April 1912) reporting his death from beri-beri in a temperance hotel in Melbourne was probably fabricated, for it is contradicted by evidence of his presence at subsequent dates in the Straits Settlements and Cambodia (Kampuchea); a reliable record places him in Penang in late 1913. The circumstances of his eventual death are unknown.
It would appear that the last word on Dhammaloka is still out. Research into his career by three scholars – Brian Bocking (UCC), Laurence Cox (NUI Maynooth) and Alicia Turner (York University) – commenced c.2009 and is ongoing. They interpret Dhammaloka within the contexts of the Buddhist revival, with its emphasis on moral reform; of plebeian free thought in conflict with established Christianity; and of an anti-colonial cultural nationalism defined in religious terms, perhaps drawn from the Irish model. (At time of writing, events in Myanmar expose the dark underbelly that is potential in such a nationalism.)
Dhammaloka's brief known career challenges the traditional narrative of early western encounters with Buddhism, in which the first westerners to become ordained Buddhist monks were gentlemen scholars, seeking to demonstrate the intellectual and spiritual respectability of Buddhism in western eyes, thus securing its place within western scholarship among the world's 'great religions'. Dhammaloka reveals a contemporary, if not earlier, phenomenon of plebeian conversion and ordination, activist in character, situated within the Asian sangha, engaged with the concerns of Asian devotees, with scant regard for how Buddhism was adjudged by western elites. It would appear that, referencing the title of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel, the first western bhikku was not a gentleman scholar, but rather the original 'dharma bum'.