“The Esoteric Buddhist”: William Sturgis Bigelow and the Culture of Dissent

Abstract

This article moves beyond Lears' argument and asserts that the white American fascination with the exotic East not only reflected their desire to escape from and to protest against the emerging urban-industrial world but, more importantly, to come to terms with modernization and mechanization in the Gilded Age. In the end, their dissension was a limited one. While conversion to Buddhism seemed to be a revolutionary disengagement from New England traditions and worldviews, Bigelow and other aficionados were, in fact, attempting to redefine cultural meanings and social structures within the very world they appeared to be abandoning. In so doing, they hoped that an understanding of Eastern religious tenets would enable them to better survive the challenges and demands of modernity. Furthermore, historians have all too often dismissed the emergent passion for Asian practices as the proliferation of dilettantism in late nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. This contention, though, neglects the implications of...