Excerpts from the Buddhist Correspondence of Ananda Metteyya
Selected Essays of Allan Bennett, Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya - (Volume 2 of Allan Bennett, Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya: Biography and Collected Writings) - Elizabeth J. Harris
Allan Bennett [+]
Description
Ananda Metteyya, ‘An Open Letter to the Buddhists of London by the late Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya, Rangoon, 28 December 1908’ (published 1930) Ananda Metteyya, ‘Extracts from Letters to a Friend in England by Ananda Metteyya, April 25 1909’ (published 1931). This consists of correspondence published posthumously in The Buddhist Annual of Ceylon. First is ‘An Open Letter to the Buddhists of London written on 28 December 1908’, a few months after the end of his 1908 mission, published in 1930. In it, Metteyya speaks autobiographically of his conversion to Buddhism, significantly omitting his link with Theosophy and the Order of the Golden Dawn, and his decision to become a Buddhist monk in order to bring Buddhism to the west. He also makes an impassioned plea that his readers should offer continued financial and moral support to what his mission had begun in the west. Second is a collection of extracts from letters to an unnamed friend in England, written from Burma in 1909 and 1910, published in 1931. The topics are wide-ranging. For instance, in the third extract, Metteyya argues that the term ‘Buddhism’ was frightening westerners away from engaging with the Buddha’s teaching, because they saw it as linked with the esoteric. He, therefore, suggests that Buddhism could be communicated in the west, without using the term ‘Buddhism’ at all and that the best environment for this was not the public meeting but more intimate one-to-one conversations.