Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (August 2, 1832 — February 17, 1907) was an American military officer, journalist, lawyer and the co-founder and first President of the Theosophical Society.

Olcott was the first well-known person of European ancestry to make a formal conversion to Buddhism. His subsequent actions as president of the Theosophical Society helped create a renaissance in the study of Buddhism. Olcott is considered a Buddhist modernist for his efforts in interpreting Buddhism through a Westernized lens.

Olcott was a major revivalist of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and he is still honored in Sri Lanka for these efforts.Olcott has been called by Sri Lankans "one of the heroes in the struggle of our independence and a pioneer of the present religious, national and cultural revival." More ardent admirers have claimed that Olcott was a Bodhisattva.

Biographical Overview more less

Olcott was born in 1832 in Orange, New Jersey. Henry was the oldest son of six children born to a Presbyterian businessman Henry Wyckoff Olcott and his wife Emily Steel Olcott. As a child, Olcott lived on his father's New Jersey farm.

During his teens he attended first the College of the City of New York and then Columbia University, where he joined the St. Anthony Hall fraternity, Baird's Manual of American College Fraternities ...: Information and Much More from Answers.com at www.answers.com a milieu of well-known people, until his father's business failed during 1851. Unfortunately, he had to leave the university since his father could not afford the tuition.

In 1860 he married Mary Epplee Morgan, daughter of the rector of Trinity parish, New Rochelle, New York. They had four children, two of which died in infancy. Olcott was the agricultural correspondent for the New York Tribune and The Mark Lane Express from 1858 to 1860, and he sometimes submitted newspaper articles on various other subjects. He also published a genealogy of his family that traced him back to Thomas Olcott, one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut in 1636.

He served in the US Army during the Civil War and afterward was admitted as the Special Commissioner of the War Department in New York. He was later promoted to the rank of Colonel and transferred to the Navy Department in Washington, DC. He was well respected, and in 1865 when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Olcott assisted in the investigation. In 1868 he became a lawyer specializing in insurance, revenue, and fraud.

In 1874 he became aware of the séances of the Eddy brothers of Chittenden, Vermont. His aroused interest motivated Olcott to commission an article from the New York Sun, allowing him to investigate the Eddy Farms. His article was popular enough that other papers, such as the New York Daily Graphic, ran it. His 1874 publication of People from the Other World began with his early articles concerning the Spiritualist movement.

In 1874, while writing this series of articles, Olcott met Helena Blavatsky when both of them visited the Eddy farm. His foundational interest in the Spiritualist movement and his budding relationship with Blavatsky helped foster his development of spiritual philosophy. Olcott's official conversion to Buddhism is considered the first among American Buddhists. Olcott once described his adult faith as "pure, primitive Buddhism," but his was a unique sort of Buddhism.

Olcott continued to act as a lawyer during the first few years of the establishment of the Theosophical Society, in addition to being the financial supporter of the new religious movement. In early 1875 Olcott was asked by important Spiritualists to investigate an accusation of fraud against the mediums Jenny and Nelson Holmes, who had claimed to materialize the famous spirit control Katie King (Doyle 1926: volume 1, 269-277).

Theosophical Society more less

From 1874 on, Olcott's spiritual growth and development with Blavatsky and other spiritual leaders would lead to the founding of the Theosophical Society.In 1875, Olcott, Blavatsky, and others, notably William Quan Judge, formed the Theosophical Society in New York City, USA. Olcott financially supported the earliest years of the Theosophical Society and was acting President while Blavatsky served as the Society’s Secretary.

In December 1878 they left New York in order to move the headquarters of the Society to India.They landed at Bombay on February 16, 1879. Olcott set out to experience the native country of his spiritual leader, the Buddha. The headquarters of the Society were established at Adyar, Chennai as the Theosophical Society Adyar, starting also the Adyar Library and Research Centre within the headquarters.

While in India, Olcott strove to receive original translations of texts which had grown in popularity as a result of colonialist collections of sacred Oriental texts. His intent was to avoid the Westernized interpretations often encountered in America, and to discover the pure message of texts from the Buddhist, Hindu, and Zoroastrian religions, in order to properly educate Westerners.

Olcott's main religious interest was Buddhism, and he is commonly known for his work in Ceylon. They arrived in Colombo, in what was then known as Ceylon, currently known as Sri Lanka on May 16, 1880. Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott took Five Precepts at the Wijayananda Viharaya located at Weliwatta in Galle on May 19, 1880.On that day Olcott and Blavatsky were formally acknowledged as Buddhists, although Olcott noted that they had previously declared themselves Buddhists, while still living in America.

During his time in Ceylon, Olcott strove to revive Buddhism within the region, while compiling the tenets of Buddhism for the education of Westerners. It was during this period that he wrote the Buddhist Catechism (1881), which is still used today.

The Theosophical Society built several Buddhist schools in Sri Lanka, most notably Ananda College in Colombo, Dharmaraja College in Kandy, Mahinda College in Galle, and Maliyadeva College in Kurunegala.Olcott also acted as an adviser to the committee appointed to design a Buddhist flag in 1885. The Buddhist flag which was designed with the assistance of Olcott was later adopted as a symbol by the World Fellowship of Buddhists, as well as the universal flag of all Buddhist traditions.

Helena Blavatsky eventually went to live in London where she died in 1891, but Olcott stayed in India and pursued the work of the Theosophical Society there.Olcott’s role in the Theosophical Society would still be as President, but the induction of Annie Besant sparked a new era of the movement. Upon his death, the Theosophical Society elected her to take over as President and leader of the movement.

Buddhist Catechism more less

Death and Legacy more less

Olcott was President of the Theosophical Society until his death on February 17, 1907.

Two major streets in Colombo and Galle have been named Olcott Mawatha, to commemorate him. A statue of him has been built in front of Colombo Fort Railway Station. Many other schools that he helped to found or were founded in memory of him have commemorative statues in honor of his contribution to Buddhist education. He is still remembered fondly by many Sri Lankans today.

The date of his death is often remembered by Buddhist centers and Sunday schools in present-day Sri Lanka, as well as in Theosophical communities around the globe. Olcott believed himself to be Asia's savior, the outsider hero who would sweep in at the end of the drama to save a disenchanted subcontinent from spiritual death.

The effort to revitalize Buddhism within Ceylon was successful and influenced many native Buddhist intellectuals. Ceylon was dominated by colonial power and influence at the time, and many Buddhists heard Olcott’s interpretation of the Buddha’s message as socially motivating and supportive of efforts to overturn colonialist efforts to suppress Buddhism and Buddhist tradition. As David McMahan wrote, “Henry Steel Olcott saw the Buddha as a figure much like the ideal liberal freethinker — someone full of ‘benevolence,’ ‘gratitude,’ and ‘tolerance,’ who promoted ‘brotherhood among all men’ as well as ‘lessons in manly self-reliance”. His view of Buddha influenced Sri Lankan leaders, such as Anagarika Dharmapala.

Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala were associates, which reflects both men’s awareness of the divide between East and West - as seen in their presentation of Buddhism to the West. Olcott helped financially support the Buddhist presence at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893. The inclusion of Buddhists in the Parliament allowed for the expansion of Buddhism within the West in general and in America specifically, leading to other Buddhist Modernist movements.

As Stephen Prothero wrote,

It was Olcott who most eloquently articulated and most obviously embodied the diverse religious and cultural traditions that shaped Protestant Buddhism, who gave the revival movement both its organizational shape and its emphasis on education-as-character-building. The most Protestant of all early Protestant Buddhists, Olcott was the liminoid figure, the griot who because of his awkward standing betwixt and between the American Protestant grammars of his youth and the Asian Buddhist lexicon of his adulthood was able to conjure traditional Sinhalese Buddhism, Protestant modernism, metropolitan gentility, and academic Orientalism into a decidedly new creole tradition. This creole tradition Olcott then passed on to a whole generation of Sinhalese students educated in his schools.

Olcott is probably the only major contributor to the nineteenth-century Sinhalese Buddhist revival who was actually born and raised in the Protestant fold. As such, he can be credited with influencing the start of Protestant Buddhism.Prothero, Stephen. "Henry Steel Olcott and what has been termed by scholars as "Protestant Buddhism"." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63.2 (Sum 1995): 281-302. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. EBSCO. Norlin, Boulder, Colorado. 27 April 2009 , Pg. 283

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