Henry Steel Olcott

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Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) was an American lawyer, agricultural journalist, and Civil War investigator who became the co-founder and first president of the Theosophical Society and, in the last decades of his life, a leading organizer of the Buddhist revival in Ceylon. He is remembered less for ideas of his own than for the institutions he built around the ideas of others — and for being, by most reckonings, the first American of European descent to take the Buddhist precepts in public.

Before any of that, Olcott had an ordinary American career of real distinction. He learned scientific agriculture at the model farm of the chemist James J. Mapes outside Newark, edited Mapes’s Working Farmer, and in 1856 founded the Westchester Farm School near Mount Vernon, New York — an early American experiment in formal agricultural education. He published Sorgho and Imphee, a study of the Chinese and African sugar canes, in 1857, and became associate agricultural editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. When the Civil War came he enlisted in the Signal Corps, then was seconded to the War and Navy departments as a special commissioner hunting graft in the army’s mustering and supply contracts — work in which his reputation for incorruptible bookkeeping was made. That reputation earned him a place on the commission that investigated the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. He mustered out a colonel, a title he carried for the rest of his life, and afterward read for the bar, practicing customs, revenue, and insurance law in New York from 1868. None of it forecast what came next.

A Vermont farmhouse, 1874

What turned his life was, characteristically, an assignment. In 1874 the New York Daily Graphic sent him to Chittenden, Vermont, to report on the materialization séances said to be occurring at the farmhouse of the Eddy brothers — figures and faces of the dead reportedly appearing in a darkened upstairs room. Olcott went as an investigator, applied his fraud-examiner’s habits to the proceedings, and came away convinced he had witnessed something real. His dispatches became a book, People from the Other World (1875). The Vermont winter also brought him into the orbit of the spiritualist movement then sweeping the United States — the same current of séance, clairvoyance, and rapport with unseen intelligences that the older European science of mesmerism had seeded a generation earlier. At the Eddy farm in October 1874 he met Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

The meeting was decisive. Blavatsky supplied the doctrine, the claimed contact with hidden Masters, and the encyclopedic synthesis of Eastern and Western esoteric lore; Olcott supplied the discipline, the legal mind, the gift for chartering and minuting and fund-raising. The two formed a working partnership that lasted until her death in 1891, and out of their New York circle, on 17 November 1875, came the Theosophical Society, with Olcott as president — the office he held to the end of his life. The labor of the movement divided along its founders’ temperaments. Blavatsky wrote Isis Unveiled (1877) and, later, The Secret Doctrine (1888); Olcott proofread, organized, lectured, and kept the books. The doctrine that the Society carried into the world was substantially hers. The fact that there was a Society to carry it was largely his.

India, Ceylon, and the turn to Buddhism

In December 1878 the pair sailed for India, arriving at Bombay in February 1879, and in 1882 they fixed the Society’s international headquarters at Adyar, on the river’s mouth near Madras, where it remains. The move expressed a conviction at the center of Theosophy: that the great traditions of Asia preserved a wisdom the West had lost, and that this wisdom should be sought on its own ground rather than imported as curiosity. Where many Western enthusiasts of Eastern religion extracted what suited them and left the living tradition to fend for itself, Olcott did something unusual. He set out to defend and rebuild a religion that was not, by birth, his own.

The occasion was Ceylon. The island’s Buddhist sangha had spent decades on the defensive under British rule, its schools eclipsed by missionary institutions, its public standing eroded. On 25 May 1880, at Weliwatte near Galle, Olcott and Blavatsky knelt before the monk Akmeemana Dharmarama and formally took pansil — the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts — becoming among the first Westerners publicly to profess Buddhism. For Blavatsky the act sat inside the larger Theosophical frame; for Olcott it became a vocation. He threw the whole of his organizing genius into the island’s revival: he founded the Buddhist Theosophical Society, campaigned against the legal and educational disabilities the colonial administration imposed on Buddhists, secured Wesak as a public holiday, and built schools. The colleges he helped establish — Ananda in Colombo, Mahinda in Galle, Dharmaraja in Kandy, among others — endure as flagship institutions of Sinhala education.

The catechism and the flag

In 1881 he published the Buddhist Catechism, a primer in question-and-answer form modeled, with deliberate irony, on the Protestant Sunday-school manuals of his youth — turning the missionary’s own instrument against the missionary. It carried the approval of Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, the leading scholar-monk of the Southern school, ran through dozens of editions, and was translated into some twenty languages; generations of Ceylonese children learned the rudiments of their religion from it, and it remained in classroom use for well over a century.

Two further projects fixed his name in the institutional furniture of modern Buddhism. In 1885 a committee in Colombo, chaired by Sumangala, devised a six-colored Buddhist flag — the hues drawn from the radiance traditionally ascribed to the Buddha himself. The original was a long streaming pennant; Olcott proposed reshaping it to the proportions of an ordinary national flag so that it could fly beside the banners of nations. In that rectangular form it spread across the Buddhist world and was adopted, in 1952, as the international Buddhist emblem it remains. And in 1891 Olcott drafted a set of Fourteen Fundamental Buddhistic Beliefs — a minimal common platform he carried personally between the Theravada lands and the Mahayana sects of the north, obtaining the signatures of authorities in Ceylon, Burma, Chittagong, Japan, and, later, among the Mongolian lamas. It was an audacious thing for a layman, and a Western one at that, to attempt: a written creed on which the divided schools of a religion two and a half millennia old might agree. That so many signed it is a measure of the moment, and of the man.

His reach extended beyond the island. Invited by Buddhist reformers, he landed at Kobe in February 1889 and toured Japan for four months, addressing — by the tally his hosts kept — tens of thousands across dozens of towns, helping to quicken a Meiji-era Buddhist self-confidence then asserting itself against the prestige of the West. The currents he helped stir in Ceylon and Japan flowed into the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago, the event at which Asian Buddhists addressed a Western audience as equals and the modern global presentation of the tradition can be said to begin.

”Protestant Buddhism” and the contested phenomena

How much of his enterprise was a faithful recovery of Buddhism, and how much an invention, is the question scholarship has pressed hardest. The historian Stephen Prothero, in the standard study, The White Buddhist (Indiana University Press, 1996), describes Olcott’s catechized Buddhism as a creole — a Buddhist vocabulary set to a Protestant grammar and spoken, as Prothero puts it, with a theosophical accent. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere had earlier named the phenomenon “Protestant Buddhism”: a rationalized, ecumenical, lay-centered reform shaped by Victorian assumptions — distrust of miracle, emphasis on reason and individual conscience, the organization of religion into schools and societies — as much as by the tradition it meant to serve. The label is descriptive, not dismissive. The Buddhism the urban Sinhala middle class carried into the twentieth century was in real part the one Olcott helped frame, and it became, in turn, an instrument of Sri Lankan and broader Asian self-assertion under and after colonial rule.

The Theosophical side of his life carried heavier shadows. In 1884, while the founders were abroad, Emma and Alexis Coulomb — dismissed employees at Adyar — produced letters they said proved that Blavatsky’s apported messages from the Masters had been stage-managed through a sliding panel in a shrine-cabinet. The Society for Psychical Research dispatched the young investigator Richard Hodgson, whose 1885 report judged the phenomena fraudulent and Blavatsky one of history’s more accomplished impostors. The verdict has been contested ever since — a 1986 re-examination by the document expert Vernon Harrison found Hodgson’s methods badly wanting, and the SPR itself later distanced from the report — but it was never fully laid to rest. Olcott, for his part, never repudiated his partner or the Masters; the man who had once made his name exposing fraud spent the rest of his life inside a movement permanently shadowed by the charge of it. He held the two together as he seems to have held most things: by force of organizing conviction rather than by resolving the tension.

What he built

Olcott represents a particular nineteenth-century type — the Westerner who arrived through spiritualism and the new comparative study of religion, and who tried to act on the conviction that the great traditions guarded a single shared truth. In his case the conviction issued not in a system but in schools, charters, a catechism, a flag, and a creed of fourteen articles. He died at Adyar on 17 February 1907, having named Annie Besant his successor as president — the office she would hold until 1933, and through which the entanglement of Theosophy with Indian national life deepened. His six-volume memoir, Old Diary Leaves, remains the founder’s-eye chronicle of the Society’s first quarter century, partisan and indispensable in equal measure.

The houses he raised outlasted him on three continents. In Sri Lanka his memory is kept with a frankness rare for a colonial-era foreigner: streets bear his name, the day of his death is observed, and the schools he founded still teach. He had spent his last thirty years, with the patience of a man who liked nothing better than a building committee, putting up the scaffolding for other people’s faith — and on the island he loved best, the scaffolding became the thing itself.

Texts, lives, and scholarship

The indispensable modern study is Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Indiana University Press, 1996), which reads the catechism, the schools, and the flag as one project — Protestant method carrying Asian content. Olcott’s own Old Diary Leaves (Theosophical Publishing Society, six volumes, 1895–1935) is the primary narrative source, and his Buddhist Catechism (Colombo, 1881), still in print, is the most consequential document he authored; the early question-and-answer text and its appended Fundamental Buddhistic Beliefs are available in public-domain transcription. A concise sympathetic account of the Ceylon and Japan campaigns is B. P. Kirthisinghe and M. P. Amarasuriya, Colonel Olcott: His Service to Buddhism (Buddhist Publication Society, Wheel No. 281). For the wider milieu that produced both founders — mesmerism, spiritualism, and the Victorian comparative-religion movement — Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY Press, 1994) remains the essential frame; a serviceable open-license biographical overview is the New World Encyclopedia entry on Olcott. The Chicago meeting at which the Asian Buddhist revival announced itself to the West is documented by the Pluralism Project’s account of the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions.

→ In the library: Blavatsky — Isis Unveiled (1877) · Blavatsky — The Key to Theosophy (1889) · Blavatsky — The Secret Doctrine (1888)

→ Related: Theosophy · Theosophical Society · Helena Blavatsky · Adyar · Asia · Buddhism · Buddhism Theravada · Buddha · Spiritualism · Mesmerism · Rudolf Steiner