The many lives of an Irish Buddhist

• Date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Joseph Woods
• Published date: 19 December 2020

On his ordination, Carroll took on the name of Dhammaloka, "light of the Buddhist law", and began his new life, which was to last 13 years, as an activist and promoter of Theravada Buddhism on tours throughout Burma and southeast Asia where he preached to many thousands.

With the zeal of the convert and considerable self-promotion, he spoke on the three evils as he saw them: "the Bible, the bottle and the Gatling gun". Burma was then ruled by the British and as part of India, and Dhammaloka railed against western missionaries and attempts to convert the Burmese, alcohol and colonialism. The subtitle of the book, The Forgotten Monk who Faced Down the British Empire, makes too big a claim for him but the empire inevitably led to his undoing.

It is speculated that Dhammaloka left Ireland in the 1870s, probably for Liverpool and then for New York where almost three decades of his life are largely unaccounted for. The three authors, all authorities on Buddhism, have spent a decade of digital and archive-based scholarship recovering and discovering pieces of evidence of this "plebeian intellectual" in an attempt to fill out the blanks in his life.

Unfortunately, Dhammaloka, who operated under a number of aliases, appears to this reader to be a pathological liar, misleading everyone he encountered including journalists and writers. In piecing together the lost decades in America, the forgiving authors present a number of "competing chronologies" and agree that after arriving in New York, Dhammaloka worked his way across America, he may have had to beg for food in Chicago, became a hobo, rode the trains to San Francisco and from there sailed to Japan, possibly as a deckhand.

Bizarrely, Dhammaloka appears at length in Harry Franck's A Vagabond Journey Around the World based on their encounter on a journey from Calcutta to Rangoon. He told Franck that while working as a tallyman on the Rangoon docks, he became absorbed by Buddhism and gave all his belongings away, "even his socks", and joined Tavoy monastery. It had a reputation of being open to foreigners and Dhammaloka was ordained there in 1900.

By "taking the robe" Dhammaloka was not seeking the quiet life and as soon as he could he began his missions throughout Burma and southeast Asia, denouncing Christian missionaries, alcohol - he may have been an alcoholic - and the colonial power. His oratory was more rabble-rousing than philosophical but effective. He was also an incorrigible self-publicist and not averse...