The Life of the Buddha in Victorian England

Franklin discusses the life of the Buddha in Victorian England through a comparative analysis of Sir Edwin Arnold's "The Light of Asia. Being The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism and Richard Phillips' "The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed: An Epic." He argues instead that Arnold's Buddha, and Phillips's Buddha to a lesser extent, is a genuinely hybrid figure that cuts both ways both toward appropriation and toward self-effacing acknowledgement of the other. The Victorian Buddha was an identification by Westerners with an Eastern way of knowing, and what is most graphically enacted in the moment of colonial identification is the splitting of the subject in its historical place of utterance.