Charles Pfoundes
| Charles Pfoundes FRSL | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Born | 1840 | ||||||||
| Died | 1907 | ||||||||
| Residence | Admiralty, Spring Garden Terrace | ||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
1881.11.08 proposed
Notes From Elsewhere
The First Buddhist Mission to the West: Charles Pfoundes and the London Buddhist mission of 1889 – 1892
According to every scholarly account of the introduction of Buddhism to the West, the first London Buddhist mission was that of the British monk Ananda Metteyya (Allan Bennett, 1872-1923) who arrived in London in 1908 on a visit sponsored by a wealthy Burmese Buddhist laywoman. However, an earlier Buddhist mission has just been discovered, that of Omoi Tetsunosuke (Charles Pfoundes, 1840-1907), an Irish emigrant who arrived in Japan in 1863, became fluent in Japanese and lived through the Meiji Restoration. Between 1889-1892, Pfoundes headed a Buddhist mission in London, acting on behalf of the Japanese Buddhist missionary organisation the kaigai senkyōkai. This mission, so long forgotten, has been rediscovered in the past few months through collaborative research undertaken by Yoshinaga Shin’ichi (Japan) and Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking (Ireland
Charles James William Pfoundes (1840–1907), a young emigrant from Southeast Ireland, spent most of his adult life in Japan, received a Japanese name ‘Omoie Tetzunostzuke’, first embraced and then turned against Theosophy and, from 1893, was ordained in several Japanese Buddhist traditions. Lacking independent means but educated, intellectually curious, entrepreneurial, fluent in Japanese and with a keen interest in Asian culture, Pfoundes subsisted as a cultural intermediary, explaining Japan and Asia to both Japanese and foreign audiences and actively seeking involvement in global expositions and congresses, in Asia and beyond. Drawing on a previously unstudied collection of Pfoundes' personal documents, this paper first outlines Pfoundes' unusual career and then focuses on his engagement, in the last 15 years of his life, in actual or proposed international congresses and expositions in London, Chicago, Japan, Hanoi, St Louis and Oregon. The paper thereby draws attention, through the forgotten figure of Charles Pfoundes, to the distinctive nineteenth century phenomenon of great international expositions and their associated congresses, viewing these complicated events as another kind of crossroads; innovative nodes and material stimuli to the kinds of travel, cultural communication and interaction which, like monastic, trade, political and ethnic networks, helped to exchange and promote modern representations of Buddhism.
Publications
External Publications
Fu-so Mimi Bukuro. A Budget of Japanese notes. VOL.I
by C. Pfoundes (Author)
