St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Mar 2024)
Ananda Metteyya/Allan Bennett (1872–1923)
Abstract
Allan Bennett was one of the first British people to be ordained as a Buddhist monk (bhikkhu) in Asia, taking the name Ananda Metteyya. He was a liminal figure who stretched across different nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. He was well-educated but experienced poverty and chronic illness. He was able to live in colonial Ceylon and Burma because of British imperialism but mercilessly critiqued the failings of Britain’s imperial ambitions. Before gaining higher ordination (upasampadā), he was a Theosophist and a ceremonial magician within the Order of the Golden Dawn, becoming a close friend of Aleister Crowley, and he never gave up the yogic practices he learnt from a Hindu teacher in Ceylon. For Buddhists in Ceylon, he became a symbol of the developing confidence of Buddhism under imperialism, but for some Westerners, he was a dubious figure and a ‘sham’ monk. For yet others in the West, he remained essentially a magician and a master of esotericism. After his death he was claimed and appropriated both by occultists, followers of Crowley, and by Asian and Western Buddhists. Allan Bennett/Ananda Metteyya preferred to refer to himself as Ananda M, even after he disrobed toward the end of his life. He was a prolific and fluent writer, convinced that the West could only be saved from its consumerism, individualism, and violence through Buddhism. Both from Yangon and after he returned to Britain in 1914, he sought to communicate the teaching of the Buddha in ways Westerners might be able to understand. His representation of Buddhism combined sensitivity to lived Buddhism in Asia and a conviction that the Buddha’s teaching was compatible with the contemporary science of his day. He drew from the Pāli canon and commentaries such as the Visuddhimagga but did not fall into the orientalist trap of seeing texts as the sole bearer of meaning within Buddhism. One of his main priorities was to contest misconceptions of Buddhism, for example that it was pessimistic (an accusation beloved by Christian missionaries), essentially esoteric (a view advocated by some Theosophists) or unsuitable for the activist West. In contradistinction to these views, he argued that Buddhism was rational, devotional, ethical, and centred on the practice of compassion. He defended devotion as a legitimate response to the self-sacrifice of the Buddha and resisted modernist reductions of the Buddha’s life and significance. This article contextualizes Allan Bennett/Ananda Metteyya within the spiritual seekership of the late nineteenth century. Its main focus is Ananda Metteyya’s representation of Buddhism and the factors that conditioned it, together with his role in the early transmission of Buddhism to the West.
