reconfiguration of politics and civil society under colo-
nial rule, the transformation of modes of educating the
population, and the role of the printing press in the
dissemination of ideas among the indigenous popula-
tion. In the case of Ceylon, the key factor was the in-
troduction of the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms of the
1830s, which sought to unify the political economy of
the island, promote laissez-faire capitalism, and estab-
lish a national educational framework to be delivered
through the medium of the English language. These
changes led to the development of a new middle class
within Sinhalese society that was educated in English
and empowered by the new social, economic, and po-
litical reforms. This was to have a profound effect upon
the Sinhalese population’s appreciation of its Buddhist
heritage (Scott; Gombrich and Obeyesekere). Similar
processes were underway throughout the colonized re-
gions of southeast Asia at this time.
The first printing press was introduced to Ceylon
by the Dutch in 1736 and was immediately put to use
in the printing of local vernacular translations of
Christian texts and, later, classical European litera-
ture. In a speech to the Methodist Missionary Society
Committee, on October 3, 1831, D. J. Gogerly out-
lined the importance of the printing press as a vehi-
cle for undermining the authority of indigenous
Buddhist traditions. Gogerly stated that “at present,
it is by means of the Press [that] our principal attacks
must be made upon this wretched system.... We
must direct our efforts to pull down the stronghold
of Satan.” Gogerly was a missionary in Ceylon for
forty-four years and also worked as a translator of the
Pali Buddhist scriptures into English. It was not un-
til 1862, however, that, as a result of a gift from the
king of Siam (now Thailand), Sinhalese Buddhists
themselves gained access to a printing press and were
thus able to disseminate their own materials and lit-
erature to the native population.
The establishment of a uniform educational system
by the European colonizers tended to promote Euro-
pean Christian forms of education and literacy, either
through the direct medium of European languages or
by the study of European and Christian literature in
vernacular translations. The curriculum and agenda in
this context usually involved the teaching of Euro-
Christian values alongside mathematics, science, and a
Eurocentric version of history. The overall effect of tak-
ing the burden of educating the population away from
the Buddhist monastic communities, where it consti-
tuted one of the traditional roles of the bhikkhus, was
to undermine the status of the SAN ̇GHAwithin society.
Later the number of Christian missionary schools de-
clined and secular government schools increased in
number. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century,
however, a reformist spirit developed within Buddhist
circles, partly in response to the criticisms of Christ-
ian missionary groups, which sought to reform the
san ̇gha. In Ceylon, with the help of the American
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and his Buddhist Theo-
sophical Society (founded in 1880), three higher edu-
cation institutes and some two hundred Buddhist high
schools were set up to protect and preserve the study
of the Buddhist tradition.Orientalism and the rise of
“Protestant Buddhism”
Many of the westernized middle-class groups that
emerged in Southeast Asia as a result of European colo-
nial reforms first encountered their own Buddhist tra-
ditions through the mediating lenses of European
textbooks, literature, and translations of Buddhist sa-
cred texts. This reflects an important factor in under-
standing the way in which Buddhism develops and is
presented in the modern era, namely the role of “BUD-
DHIST STUDIES” as a Western academic enterprise and
the enormous authority accorded to Western scholars
and texts in representing Buddhism during the colo-
nial era (King; Lopez). Western interest in under-
standing Asian civilizations precipitated a “discovery”
and translation of Buddhist sacred texts into modern
European languages. Western scholars, however, gen-
erally replicated a series of basic Christian assumptions
in their approach to Buddhism (Almond; King). There
was a strong tendency to emphasize Buddhist sacred
texts as the key feature in determining the nature of
Buddhism as a religious tradition. This approach
tended to ignore Buddhist traditions as changing his-
torical phenomena and also underplayed the role of
ritual practices and local networks and beliefs in the
preservation and renewal of Buddhist forms of life.
Buddhist sacred literature has traditionally been
revered in Asian societies, but this reverence rarely led
to a depreciation of local practices and beliefs that were
not found in the ancient canonical literature. Bud-
dhism as a living tradition tended to be either ignored
or denigrated by Orientalist scholars as a corruption
of the original teachings.
This attitude had a profound effect upon the emerg-
ing middle-class elites of Asian societies in the nine-
teenth century. This was the case even for nations that
were not subject to European colonization such asCOLONIALISM ANDBUDDHISM