Transnational Buddhist Activists in the Era of Empires

Abstract

This chapter is about the ways in which religious activists populated and mobilized transnational pathways in an era when expansive empires opened new pathways, widened and reconfigured pre-existing ones, and facilitated their traversing for a wide variety of not only ideas, discourses, institutions, commodities and technologies but also social actors (e.g. merchants, capitalists, labourers, bankers, explorers, adventurers, treasure-hunters, fundraisers, ideologues, revolutionaries, propagandists, scholars, students, militarists, colonial officers, soldiers, sex workers, conference-goers, world exhibition-goers, tourists, Christian and Buddhist missionaries, relic traffickers, pilgrims, cosmopolitans, exiles, refugees etc.). The key images and words in this narrative are ‘flows’, ‘encounters’, ‘congresses’, ‘mergers’, ‘taking advantage’, ‘collaboration’, ‘collusion’, ‘elective affinities’, ‘mistaken identities’ and ‘resistance.’ By ‘the era of empires’, for the purpose of my chapter, I mean specifically the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, when an imperially ambitious Japan, tutored by, yet aiming to better, Western imperialism, encroached onto the rest of East Asia militarily and culturally in its attempt to build a pan-Asianist empire with Japan at its centre and acting as its ideological leader – later coined the ‘East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ during the Pacific War – that could counter and roll back the influence of Western colonial and imperial powers.