This post is by Brian Bocking, Heid Fellow, on his research in the Harry Alverson Franck Papers. Brian is Professor Emeritus of the Study of Religions at University College Cork (Cork, Ireland).
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I spent the week of 17-21 April 2023 as a Heid Fellow in the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections Research Center, combing through almost two dozen boxes of the Harry Alverson Franck Papers. My visit had been postponed from 2020 by the Covid years – with the advantage that in the interim the Harry Alverson Franck Photographs were digitised, so I could review those beforehand at home.
A blacksmith’s son and U-M graduate, Harry Franck specialised in globetrotting incognito as a hobo, or beachcomber, scratching a living among the lowest social classes on every continent. His first book, A Vagabond Journey around the World (1910), was an unexpected best-seller (read it and you’ll understand why); on the strength of this book Franck abandoned teaching to become a (famous) travel writer.
From the archives I learned a lot about Harry Franck, and his intrepid wife Rachel Latta Franck. However, my research focus wasn’t Harry but a yet more remarkable individual Franck encountered in India in May 1905; this was U Dhammaloka, “The Irish Buddhist”, one of the very first and (in his time) best-known Europeans to become a Buddhist monk. Yet history forgot Dhammaloka for nearly a century. Working class and self-taught, Dhammaloka was ignored by the intellectual types who forged the history of Western Buddhism. Having settled in Asia he became invisible to Irish historians and, despite his outstanding anti-colonial credentials, because he was white he was omitted from later Burmese and other Asian nationalist histories.
Forgotten and ignored, that is, until I and two wonderfully knowledgeable and generous scholarly colleagues, Prof. Alicia Turner (York University, Toronto) and Prof. Laurence Cox (Maynooth University, Ireland) came serendipitously together (online) in 2009 to embark on a rediscovery of Dhammaloka; a quest that involved a lot of detective work and results more surprising than we could imagine. How we resurrected Dhammaloka – and why Dhammaloka’s story matters today – is told in The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford, 2020). Ongoing research is chronicled in “The Dhammaloka Project”.
Harry Franck was deeply impressed by ‘Oo Damalaku’ as he misspelled Dhammaloka’s name. Nine pages of Franck’s Vagabond Journey book document the outspoken and resourceful “Irish Buddhist” and the archives show that Franck seriously considered becoming a Buddhist monk himself. Dhammaloka’s condemnation of British colonial rule was skilfully encoded in a trenchant criticism of missionary Christianity. Dhammaloka would have been thrown in jail had he openly preached against the British occupation, but the British, conscious of the long history of inter-religious violence in Europe, were officially neutral in religious matters. The missionaries (read: the colonial occupiers), Dhammaloka often declared, brought with them three evils to Burma – the bible [hostility to Buddhism], the bottle [alcohol and opium], and the knife [military violence].
Had Alicia, Laurence and I tried to reconstruct Dhammaloka’s forgotten life even a few years before 2009, it would have been impossible. Earlier scholars had to know where to look for a physical item before finding it; now we could explore ever-growing collections of digitised material. Together we unearthed more than a thousand items, mostly fragmentary, relating to Dhammaloka.
A few longer accounts came to light, including those pages in Franck’s Vagabond Journey, a 1902 Harper’s Magazine piece by the journalist Sara Jeannette Duncan, a chapter in Gertrude Adams Fisher’s A Woman Alone in the Heart of Japan (1906), a sequence of interviews with Dhammaloka published in Japanese in the Nipon newspaper (1902), and a serialised Sinhala account of Dhammaloka’s controversial 1909 speaking tour of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the Sinhala Bauddhaya newspaper. Not bad coverage for an ex-hobo from Dublin!
Several research grants meant we could recruit talented postdoc researchers including Mihirini Sirisena and Phibul Choompolpaisal to delve into non-digitised Asian archives and libraries. Conferences were organised focusing on the forgotten origins of today’s ‘global’ Buddhism. Throughout, we received valuable and generous scholarly help from the more than 150 individuals mentioned in the Acknowledgments pages of The Irish Buddhist.
From the start, we were determined to find a photograph of Dhammaloka. In fact we found two. The archives reveal that Franck was very disappointed that a photograph of himself with Dhammaloka, taken on May 5th 1905 had been ruined by damp. It would have proved that Franck really had met Dhammaloka and was not making him up! Ironically, had Franck but known it there was an excellent photo of Dhammaloka available right under his publisher’s nose in New York. Harper’s Monthly Magazine in October 1902 carried an image of Dhammaloka taken in late 1901. Unfortunately the photo was mis-captioned “Oo Dhamma Nanda”: a mistake that rendered the real Dhammaloka invisible to Harper’s international readership.
I am writing this blog post very early in my study of numerous interesting documents and images found in the archive. Here I offer just one finding which sheds light on Franck’s research methods as a ‘vagabond traveler’. We had long speculated on how Franck, travelling often penniless and in perilous circumstances, managed five years later to publish a book brimming with detailed names, dates and events from more than a dozen countries and languages. Surely, he must have written up his notes and periodically mailed them to himself in America to await his return? He could hardly, we felt, have carried a growing bundle of documents and photos with him across desert, ocean and jungle for fifteen months.
The archives however tell a different story. Franck had no intention of writing a book! In his unpublished autobiography Franck writes:
"I had kept during the trip a careless kind of diary, as laconic as the average boardingschool girl’s “line-a-day” book. The largest of these three thin notebooks had been stolen out of a pocket of my sun-faded khaki jacket in Colombo, Ceylon. I had carried a kodak because I happened to have one; my snapshots, a handful of paper “souvenirs'' and the scanty notes I had jotted down from Colombo homeward [i.e. April-September 1905] were all the “documentation” I needed. For I found that I had little difficulty in remembering even the minor incidents of the trip; such a journey, at the age of twenty-three and twenty-four, in the heyday of youth, stencils itself in the memory with the clarity of illuminated medieval texts”.
I would like to thank Martha O’Hara Conway, Shannon Zachary, Paul Conway, and all staff and colleagues of the Special Collections Research Center for making me feel so at home and for providing me with such excellent facilities and assistance with my research.