150 CHAPTER SEVENsituation strongly affected the government's religious policy. Throughout the
area, the spread of Western education and medicine deprived city and village
monks of their traditional roles as teachers and doctors, reducing them to
a social role composed of ritual functions based on a worldview that western-
ers, and Christian missionaries in particular, began attacking as ignorant and
superstitious.
7.4.1 Sri lankaOf the three focal countries under discussion, Sri Lanka suffered most from
the colonial period. The Portuguese (1505-1658) were the first Europeans to
take power, seizing the lowlands, destroying monasteries, persecuting Bud-
dhists, and forcibly converting them to Catholicism. Under this onslaught, the
Sinhala kings withdrew to Kandy in the mountains, where they ruled from
1592 until 1815, supporting Buddhism insofar as their circumstances andre-
sources would allow. When the Dutch and later the British replaced the Por-
tuguese as the dominant powers in the lowlands, their religious policy was
somewhat more benign, but the schools and printing presses that the Protes-
tant missionaries established under their rule mounted an active campaign to
disparage Buddhism as the superstitious faith of ignorant masses. After the
British took over the entire island in 1815, the level of scholarship and prac-
tice in the Sri Lankan Sangha-now deprived of government support-
steadily degenerated. Stripped of their traditional role as teachers, their medical
knowledge discredited, monks found their social role increasingly curtailed.
Finally, in the 1860s, Mohottiwatte Gul).ananda, a Buddhist novice who
had received his education in Christian schools, responded to the Christian
attack by wandering throU:glJ,out the country, engaging Christian missionaries
in open debates. His campaign climaxed with a week-long debate in 1873 at
which he was declared the winner. As a result, Gul).ananda's cause attracted
large-scale support not only from fellow Sri Lankans, but also from Helena
Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, founders of the Theosophical Society.
Blavatsky and Olcott came to Sri Lanka from America, declared themselves
Buddhists, and campaigned to free Sri Lankan Buddhism both from the op-
pression of the colonial Christian regime and from the syncretic spirit cults
that had been a part of the Buddhist tradition from its earliest days on the
island.
The Theosophists encouraged Sri Lankan lay people to play an active role
in the revival of Buddhism, giving rise to what has been called Protestant Bud-
dhism, both in the sense that it was a protest against Christianity and in the
sense that it adopted many of the techniques and traditions of the Christian
missionaries. As was the case with Protestant Christianity, Protestant Bud-
dhism was spearheaded by educated lay people who took over the role of reli-
gious teacher from the monks and tried to strip away from the tradition any
elements that had no basis in the early texts. As in any confrontation, Protes-
tant Buddhists-led by a Sri Lankan protege of Olcott and Blavatsky, Ana-