Weber: Protestantism and Buddhism

Like the other Abrahamic religions, Christianity did not come through an intellectual search, but was 'revealed' to Jesus, considered the son of a non-existent 'God'. Christianity's initial imprint, Catholicism, was challenged in the 16th century by Protestantism which although accepting the myths of Christianity wanted to search for 'God' through the Bible by-passing the then corrupt Catholicism. Weber, writing 100 years ago at a time of European supremacy, thought that the rise of the industrialized West was due to Protestant attitudes, and from this perspective, examined the stagnation of civilizations with other belief systems including Buddhism. His understanding and interpretation of translated Buddhist texts was scanty and, with the rise of Asian societies 100 years later, Buddhism is shown not inimical to industrialization. A 'Protestant' perspective has also been adopted by Obeyasekara who unlike Weber, had not read foundational Buddhist texts. Obeyasekara interprets the anticolonial Buddhist revival of the 19th and early 20th century as due to colonial Protestant forces allegedly brought by Olcott who had rejected Protestantism. Due to these two intellectual misunderstandings, one by a distant European who read the Buddhist texts, and the other by a colonised Sri Lankan who had not read the texts, a generation of colonised social scientists has grown up in Sri Lanka. They operate in effect as today's intellectual carriers of the White Man's Burden.