The Anagarika’s Lists: Time, Space and Emotions in the ‘Sarnath Notebooks’

Abstract

This article focuses on the plethora of lists that the Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) composed across his many notebooks. Rather than seeing lists as mere repositories of data, the text foregrounds aspects of form and formatting of the list as a genre and practice. Dharmapala’s notebooks emerge as key material aspects in the creation of his self, and list-making is revealed as an emotional practice. The various lists and their central role in Dharmapala’s life and thinking are explored by tracing list-making as a cultural practice belonging both to colonial modernity and to the ancient Theravada Buddhist tradition. This is shown in two particular foci: the temporal operations performed by Dharmapala’s historical and autobiographical lists, and the spatiality and visuality in and around his lists.

Keywords:

• Anagarika Dharmapala
• emotions
• India
• lists
• Maha Bodhi Society
• spatiality
• Sri Lanka
• temporality
• Theravada Buddhism

Introduction

Anagarika Dharmapala,¹ born in 1864 as Don David Hewavitharane in British Ceylon², was instrumental in shaping movements that sought to reform and reinvigorate Buddhism in South Asia. (Co)founding the Maha Bodhi Society (MBS) in Ceylon (1891) and India (1892), Dharmapala spent his life working towards the establishment of new religious networks spanning East and West. He devoted himself and the institutions he founded to re-establishing a Buddhist presence at, and gaining control over, all important religious sites associated with the life of the Buddha. In the nine decades since his passing, Dharmapala has been cast in various roles: religious zealot or ‘crusading Bosat’, fervent Sinhalese nationalist, Sinhalese ‘babu’, a figure of reverence, adoration and critique.³

This article does not seek to evaluate the Anagarika’s life once again. Instead, I explore whether we can glean further insights into Dharmapala’s life and work by taking a new look at the historical sources he has left us, in particular the many lists that he composed in his notebooks. In so doing, I am interested in aspects of form and formatting of the list as a genre and practice, which go beyond the level of their content and have much to tell us about the author’s thoughts, experiences and feelings. I focus here on the so-called ‘Sarnath notebooks’ held in the Anagarika Dharmapala Museum in Sarnath, Varanasi, administered by the Maha Bodhi Society of India. Among the notebooks currently accessible in Sarnath, 47 are written by the Anagarika himself, with a few others erroneously attributed.

Dharmapala’s notebooks cover the first three decades of the twentieth century, with the earliest entries probably dating to 1903 and the last ones to the year of his passing, 1933. Like his diaries, they are written overwhelmingly in English but also include other languages. Their internal structure of entries is mostly chronological, though instances of apparent later additions and revisions occur. The notebooks cluster around periods of higher activity, such as his interment in Calcutta (now Kolkata) between 1916 and 1917, and exhibit jumps in time that suggest lapses in use. We also have to assume that several notebooks were used parallelly. Furthermore, Dharmapala had a habit of starting notebooks from both ends, meaning that there usually comes a point at which the text switches facing and the notebook needs to be turned. Combined with very irregular dating, this makes the exact historical pinpointing of entries difficult and largely dependent on contextualisation with events in his life. I work with the general assumption that the vast majority of his notebooks were indeed written by himself, as confirmed by his handwriting and other clues. However, when his health was failing in the very last months of his life, this line becomes blurred, and we can find traces of the assistance of Devapriya Valisinha, his successor as general secretary of the Maha Bodhi Society of India.⁴

The current collection allows for surprising finds. Notebook 42,⁵ for example, was placed under the label ‘Diary of Ven. Dharmapal 1918’ when I first encountered it in 2022. Upon inspection, it is anything but a diary and instead an ideal representative of what I will explore throughout this article: the list form. From cover to cover, 42 is an index of topics, alphabetically sorted, with an alphabetical register on the margin of the pages all but entirely broken off from use and age.

Anagarika Dharmapala’s notebooks (and less so his diaries) are filled with lists on an incredible variety of topics and in a plethora of forms.⁶ As Steven Kemper succinctly remarked: ‘Dharmapala was a list maker—of friends, enemies, accomplishments. Some lists appear repeatedly, and listing things seems to be less a matter of record keeping than internal conversation’.⁷ It is this profusion of lists, this striking obsession with the practice of list-making, that I focus on in this paper. My concern is twofold: firstly, I analyse them as not only reflective but constitutively connected to the author’s thoughts and feelings. Secondly, I view list-making not only in connection with modern and colonial practices of writing, but crucially also as a core aspect of the ancient Buddhist Theravada literature’s form and philosophy. While this article remains focused on Dharmapala’s writings in his notebooks, I will explore how early Buddhist concepts of the list can enrich the analysis of his lists. The article therefore spans a temporal arc reflective of Dharmapala’s own temporal horizon, connecting ancient Buddhism with colonial modernity.⁸

Anagarika Dharmapala and the Maha Bodhi Society

Dharmapala lived through the period of high imperialism in which the British empire at its apogee became increasingly interlaced with a multitude of local and global movements of religious, social and political reform. Born into a family of wealthy merchants in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he had received a Christian education in school and a Buddhist one at home. Through the circles of his father, Don Carolis Hewavitharane, he was close to leading figures of the outspoken Buddhist opposition to Christian proselytisation in colonial Ceylon.⁹ Theosophy became another important influence in his early life. As he repeatedly recounted in his autobiographical accounts, Dharmapala was among the first Sinhalese to greet Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky upon their arrival in Sri Lanka in 1880. He became a member of the Theosophical Society in 1884 (by Olcott’s special permission) and resigned his post in government service in 1886 to devote himself fully to his spiritual studies. Changing his name to Dharmapala in 1887, he began his transformation into a Buddhist reformer.

Dharmapala spent the majority of his adult life in India, away from his early tutors in Sri Lanka. Though he grew and actively maintained an extensive network of acquaintances both locally and internationally, his diaries and notebooks reveal the hardships and precarities of his often solitary life.¹⁰ His very acute dependency on the financial and material support of others—first and foremost his own family, but crucially also the Hawaiian Buddhist philanthropist Mary Elizabeth Foster-Robinson—are visible not only in his own reflections, but especially also in the many lists of inventories and accounting. They speak of the constant need for and anxiety about carefully managing an existence under uncertain material circumstances, and of the obligation to account for the funds he received.

In the subsequent sections of this article, I will explore further what both the contents and the very form of the list itself can tell us about their author. I will dive into the variety of types of lists found across AD’s notebooks, finding the list form both rooted in colonial modernity as well as in ancient Buddhist thought. List-making emerges as a vital part of thinking, and as an emotional practice. Next, I explore two particular foci: the temporal operations performed by AD’s many historical and autobiographical lists, and their spatiality and visuality. The conclusion then sums up my reflections on Dharmapala’s list-making.

The Anagarika’s lists

Anagarika Dharmapala used his many notebooks as tools for thinking. More than just repositories of data, the notebooks were environments crucial to his intellectual and emotional life. The study of cognition recognises such interactions under the framework of the ‘extended mind’, which stresses the active involvement of external objects in the mind’s operation.¹¹ Feelings, too, connect to the material world in what Downes, Holloway and Randles described as the ‘co-constitutive nature of emotions and things’.¹² The notebooks’ materiality—the different types and formats of books, their paper, the pens used, subtle changes in handwriting and the presence of other coincidental influences—is inseparable from Dharmapala’s thoughts.

Dharmapala filled the notebooks when he had time to devote to study, news and reflection, writing notes and quotes on books he read and people he encountered, translations of Buddhist texts, drafts of essays or occasional diary entries. Generally, periods of his life in which he spent more time in one place, thus having more time to devote to study and reflection, resulted in a higher number of lists made and notes taken. Dharmapala’s list-making therefore clusters especially around his extended stays in Calcutta at the end of the first and during the second decade of the twentieth century, and around the last years of his life in the early 1930s, when he was staying in Sarnath. This is not to say he did not compose lists at other times—they can be found in notebooks covering virtually every year between 1903 and 1933—but that he generally took fewer notes in periods of his life when he was less settled. On the other hand, some lists and notebooks were also written particularly during his travels, such as notebook 22, which acts in entirety as an inventory list of what he saw on his travels in the United States of America in 1903, or several notebooks containing lists made in 1923, a year in which he travelled extensively across South Asia.

There is an astonishing profusion of lists across the notebooks. At first glance one could say that parataxis, the writing of shortened sentences without syntactical coordination or subordination, was simply an expedient means for jotting down bits of information. Lists are, at their most basal, tabular or abbreviated arrangements of data.¹³ But they are also much more than that. As Liam Cole Young has argued, the cultural practice of listing and the list form itself are structuring devices both on the page and in the mind:

Listing is a cultural technique that performs ontic operations that inscribe concepts and categories upon which technical systems and social institutions are built. As a form that is constitutive of certain kinds of knowledge, the list can tell us much about the material circumstances in which human beings enact thought and action.¹⁴

As a cultural technique, list-making differs across the globe and through time, and Dharmapala’s lists are situated at a particular moment of confluence. Some of them suggest the influence of his years working for the colonial civil administration in Ceylon, pointing to the centrality of accounting to colonial bureaucracy but also to the colonial state’s general preoccupation with indexing and listing.¹⁵ Dharmapala’s many historical lists, too, reveal a new way of historicising Buddhism that was a particular feature of colonial modernity.¹⁶ On the other hand, as I will explore further below, listing is a cultural technique central to Buddhism and in particular to the ancient Theravada Pali literature that AD spent his life studying. The Anagarika’s lists therefore speak of the multiple transtemporal operations he himself performed and show how the colonial and the vernacular coalesced in his thought.

But what are Dharmapala’s lists about? In his 1977 chapter on ‘What’s in a List?’, Jack Goody differentiates between three general types of lists: (1) the retrospective or inventory list; (2) the ‘shopping list’, which Young paraphrases as the prescriptive list; and (3) the lexical list.¹⁷ All three types of list can be found abundantly in Anagarika Dharmapala’s notebooks.

Dharmapala compiled lexical and grammar lists for the languages he encountered and studied. Some languages appear more often than others, foremost among them Pali, the language of the ancient Buddhist canonical literature.¹⁸ Closely connected is his interest in scripts, shown in lists of the characters of the Aśoka script.¹⁹ His linguistic interests were diverse, however. Notebook 53 contains another list of the Aśoka characters, this time together with Sinhala, but it also contains a page of an ornate cursive Latin alphabet. We can further find an English-German vocabulary list in, again, notebook 53, a list of ‘Tamil words’ in notebook 102, two pages on ‘Persian’ letters with Latin transcriptions in notebook 108 (likely around 1910), and an English-Japanese vocabulary list in notebook 109, dating back to his stay in Hawaii and Japan in 1913.

Due to the prominence of Calcutta in Dharmapala’s life and work, the Bengali language is another recurring topic in the notebooks.²⁰ As becomes clear, the thoughts on languages that we can glean from AD’s notebooks were often directly related to his travels and other activities. However, there were also larger institutional concerns about language learning and language politics. In the notebook TIT BITS, written towards the very end of his life in 1932, Dharmapala notes how he advised Sachindra Nath Mukherjee to send his son, who was then studying philosophy at Oxford, to Heidelberg ‘to study Pali’,²¹ demonstrating his familiarity with the (European) centres of Orientalist scholarship. He then muses about the lack of Buddhist institutions of higher education in India and formulates (parataxically) concrete steps: ‘The Isipatana Library has to be well organised. We require books in all Indian languages. We have to teach Tibetan to our Sāmaneras [novice monks], also Sanskrit. They should be taught with Devanagari [script]’.²²

A few years earlier, around 1928, Dharmapala had already jotted down notes on the importance of multiple languages and translation projects:

To translate scientific books an encyclopaedia is needed

German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish,

Englishmen learn different languages + translate important works in German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Latin into English. They learn Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, Hindustani + c and translate important works into English.

Chinese, Tibetan, books are very important.²³

These remarks, moving in and out of the list form, point to another category of AD’s lists: the prescriptive ‘to do’ list. Many of these were probably mnemonic devices for Dharmapala’s day-to-day doings, including shopping lists and minor tasks to be done, sometimes crossed out or ticked off, apparently marking tasks as completed.²⁴ Others often pertain to the MBS and its particular institutions.²⁵ But the prescriptive lists also include moral commandments, such as one from 1923 in notebook 105 titled ‘Good thoughts that came to my mind at the Domel, R.H. Kashmir 14 Aug 23’, beginning, ‘1 All boys should recite the Mettá bhavana [prayer] 2. Every School should have a Buddhist flag 3. Practice the Sáránīya Dhamma 4. Every house should have a Charkhā [spinning wheel] 5. Every house should have a small library 6. Every boy and girl should learn Pali …’.

Prescriptive lists such as the above demonstrate the centrality of narratives of self-improvement and moral cultivation to Dharmapala’s thinking, combining Buddhist morality with modern practices such as education and hygiene. A list of ‘Wesak Manifests’ exemplifies this well: ‘X Do not eat meat for a week X Abstain from drink. Economise—Save, Practice Self denial, Observe Atasil [attha sila, the Buddhist “eight precepts”] Give up going to theatres Give ornaments to your wives + daughters—Let them wear the Sari’.²⁶ Seemingly put together ad hoc with little order, the list recalibrates the traditional Buddhist celebration of Vesak, marking the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and passing. It combines Buddhist practices such as observing the eight precepts or abstaining from eating meat with more modern practices of temperance or economising, extends the denial of pleasures to include theatres, and also reflects the neo-traditional popularisation of the sari as a piece of clothing linked to moral values.

By far the most numerous among Dharmapala’s many lists, however, are those of the inventorising or indexical kind. This includes many accounting lists, often (but not always) formatted with neatly drawn lines and columns, in varying configurations depending on the individual mode of book-keeping AD was doing. They tally gifts, income, savings, assets, expenses and loans for himself and his organisations. These lists seem shaped most directly by Dharmapala’s experience working in the colonial bureaucracy, but perhaps also speak of his family’s ties to the imperial economy through his father’s company, H. Don Carolis & Sons Ltd, which was instrumental in sustaining AD’s renunciant living. In the instances when these lists are titled, they often bear descriptions in the third person.²⁷ More rarely, their titles are in the first person,²⁸ or list the costs associated with a particular place or item in his life. Notebook 102, written between 1914 and 1916, neatly records the expenses of upkeep, accessories and repairs as well as the trips taken by whom, when, where and at what distance and fuel expense of a motor car in Calcutta. Often, the accounting lists record the Maha Bodhi Society’s financial situation, preparing the yearly financial reports published in the journal, The Mahabodhi.²⁹

As Young has argued, inventory lists are assembled in orientation towards a present moment, after (and before) which the inventory might shift and lose its capacity to represent an ontic reality—items are gained, lost, funds transferred and so on.³⁰ However, as Young continues, lists can also record pasts and programme futures. All three temporal orientations are already apparent in AD’s lists of language learning, quotidian and moral tasks or commandments and accounting.

Besides the specialised subgroup of accounting lists, the vast majority of Dharmapala’s most numerous lists, the inventories, are indexes that taken together constitute a meta-index of the impressive breadth of his interests and activities. Among them, we find those more closely related to his own life, such as lists concerned with the motor car already mentioned above, of travel distances and prices,³¹ of which books he acquired or read³² or were missing from the MBS library,³³ or of ‘enemies’ of himself or the MBS.³⁴ Many lists index the contents of his wide readings and interests, ranging from topics as diverse as the members of the Ceylon State Council,³⁵ ‘martyrs’ shot during the 1817–18 Ceylon rebellion,³⁶ the ‘Chemical composition of the Earth’,³⁷ the opium trade,³⁸ or the colleges in Cambridge and when they were founded.³⁹ Religion and philosophy often appear in the inventory lists, including first and foremost Buddhism but also often Christianity, Islam or Hinduism. We can find, for example, lists of ‘The gods of the Bible’,⁴⁰ of ‘Foolish Acts of Jesus of Nazareth’,⁴¹ of miracles attributed to Jesus in Matthew and of the contents of various gospels of the Bible,⁴² of the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavad Gita and their contents,⁴³ of ‘religio-political preachers’⁴⁴ and several other lists of European and non-European thinkers,⁴⁵ or a comparison list of ‘Aryan religions’ and ‘Religions that lead to hell’.⁴⁶

Many lists index Buddhist teachings and key doctrinal concepts. As I will explore further below, these demonstrate how central the list form is to ancient Buddhist literature and philosophy, reflecting the organisation of knowledge as found in the Pali canon. Often, these canonical concepts are aggregated into lists themselves, frequently in numbered order. Notebook 62 contains a list spanning eight pages in which Dharmapala inventorises many of the most important numbered groups in Theravada Buddhist philosophy, including the four Noble Truths, four satipaṭṭhānas (establishings of mindfulness), five indriyas (senses), seven bojjhangas (factors of awakening), ten saṃyojanas (mental fetters), ten kusalas (good actions) and akusalas (bad actions), ten sīlas (precepts) and ten Paramitas (moral perfections).⁴⁷ Though doctrine fills the majority of AD’s Buddhist lists, he also composed inventories of other aspects, such as a list of places the Buddha visited and how many years he spent there, or a list of the Buddha’s bodily signs (lakkhanas),⁴⁸ a list of ‘Plants + Trees’ found in Pali texts,⁴⁹ or of ‘scripture’ taught in Burmese monasteries.⁵⁰

Lists abound throughout the notebooks. But why? Was the list form merely Dharmapala’s chosen way of recording data? Without doubt, that is the common denominator of all these and many more lists. Nonetheless, I argue that the Anagarika’s lists were doing more by being more.

Lists in Buddhism

Besides a Eurocentric understanding of lists, we also need to account for the long history of the list form in South Asia, and in particular its centrality to the ancient Pali Buddhist literature that so occupied Dharmapala.⁵¹ The Pali Tipiṭaka, the ‘Three Baskets’, is the canonical collection of texts of the Theravada Buddhist tradition.⁵² This vast⁵³ collection of texts exhibits particular literary devices, including a high number of repetitions and pericopes, as well as lists. Lists occur repeatedly as pedagogical devices in the Buddha’s teachings, the suttas. The vinaya section, the monastic rules, is itself a collection of lists. But it is in the canon’s third section, the abhidhammapiṭaka (‘basket of higher doctrine’), that the list is at is most central and productive in systematising the doctrine. As Rupert Gethin summarises: ‘Lists may be a feature of ancient Indian literatures in general, but it is probably true to say that no one makes quite as much of lists as the Buddhists.’⁵⁴

The first of the seven texts constituting the abhidhammapiṭaka is the dhammasaṅganī, the ‘collection of Dhammas’, which ‘sets out an extraordinarily detailed catalogue of all perceivable phenomena [that is, dhammas]’.⁵⁵ At its beginning stands a mātikā, a matrix list, which organises all phenomena into an abstract structure: 22 types of triads (tika), 100 types of dyads (duka) and a further 42 types of dyads found in the sutta section of the canon.⁵⁶ The mātikā type of list, more generally, is, as Gethin explains, not only a mnemonic device indexing information, but also a matrix that visualises the underlying patterns of the internal structure of Buddhist teachings.⁵⁷ In the examples of AD’s lists above, we can see resonances of this practice, especially his penchant for counting elements of his lists and nesting lists within lists. Apart from this meaning and function of the mātikā as matrix, however, Gethin makes an important further point about the term as related to the word ‘mother’ (Sanskrit mātṛ), meaning a source or a ‘seed from which something grows. A mātikā is something creative—something out of which something further evolves’.⁵⁸ The list in this sense, even if at first glance indexing data is its primary function, exceeds the sum of its parts through the generative power inherent in its form.

The second important aspect of lists in ancient Buddhist literature is exemplified by the second text constituting the abhidhammapiṭaka: vibhaṅga.⁵⁹ Literally meaning ‘division’ or ‘breaking apart’, vibhaṅga is a type of analysis that separates out the constituents of larger formations. Quintessentially, the vibhaṅga analysis of the mātikā/matrix list of phenomena has soteriological importance in Buddhism: deconstruction reveals all ‘wholes’ as only sums of parts, empty of independent essence. The list as Buddhist practice is therefore a meditation on the world and an analysis that breaks it apart, revealing the inherent transience of all aggregate phenomena. Returning to the lists proliferating across Dharmapala’s notebooks, we need to consider them not only in relation to cultural practices of colonial modernity, but also as part and parcel of a vernacular Buddhist identity. Like matrices and operations of analysis, AD’s lists perform ontic and heuristic operations that show him coming to terms with the world he existed in, breaking up and recombining its complexity and idiosyncrasies across past, present and future.

List-making and emotions

Dharmapala’s lists were integral to his encounter with the world. As such, they can tell us much about the author’s thoughts, experiences and feelings. In probing lists for emotions, I am inspired by the work of Ervin Malakaj, who has recently re-evaluated the ‘affective effect’ of lists, their potential to transport and elicit particular feelings through the form of their arrangement of information.⁶⁰ The lists in Dharmapala’s notebooks, however, are not primarily directed at an audience. I am therefore less interested in the effects that ‘affective lists’ may have (had) on hypothetical audiences, and more in something that Malakaj mentions in passing—that the list ‘contains traces of the affective labor’ of its author.⁶¹

I propose to view the practice of listing as an emotional practice itself. In her seminal intervention, Monique Scheer has argued that ‘emotions not only follow from things people do, but are themselves a form of practice’. The ‘feeling subject’ itself is formed in these very practices and emotions emerge only from the doings and interactions of culturally shaped bodies.⁶² In the case of AD’s lists, this means analysing the lists not only for their contents, but also as practices central to the feeling processes themselves. The notebooks were thus vital environments in the constitution of Dharmapala’s subjectivity, as Marcelo Borges has argued about personal writing more generally:

As an expression of thoughts and feelings, personal writing not only contributes to self-making but, through textualisation, it also shapes feelings and creates emotional experiences. In turn, emotional dispositions created in this interconnected way, condition choices and effect action.⁶³

Dharmapala was an avid writer of personal diaries, which Michael Roberts has argued show his ‘desire for self-mastery’.⁶⁴ For Roberts, the diaries acted as an ‘emotional prop’, as a receptacle and embodiment of Dharmapala’s ‘affectivity’.⁶⁵ The notebooks, however, are a different case. Dharmapala here only sometimes slides into diary writing, and never as consistently. When they occur, diary entries (often list-like in form) point to the complex dynamics of the emotional practices at play.

Notebook 53 contains a long string of journaling that chronicles the Anagarika’s time in Calcutta during World War I, including his internment on the behest of the government of Sri Lanka between June 1916 and December 1917, following the Ceylon riots of 1915. An entry dated June 10, [likely 1915], presents a self-steeled Dharmapala: ‘Anxiety had gone out of mind. I am prepared to meet death with perfect calm. If I am arrested I shall defend myself’. Anxiety returns in the next entry on the following page: ‘I am anxious about the state of affairs in Ceylon’. We can see time passing across the pages, a list of often brief diary entries sometimes empty save for the string of dates: ‘13 June; 14 June; 15 "; 16 June’, and so on. Awaiting news from Sri Lanka as well as about his own situation, Dharmapala reflects on stomach worries, nightly pain and severe neuralgia. The journaling often follows the list form, with each sentence broaching a new topic per line, combining personal reflections with the state of the world as on August 1, [likely 1915]: ‘Neuralgia very severe. …Māra [lord of death] is troubling me very much. What is the matter? Warsaw captured by the Germans’. A few days later, he reflects on his own suffering from a Buddhist perspective: ‘What is in store? Pain, Misery, Poverty, imprisonment—all possible. Birth is painful. When shall I be free to write the life of the Compassionate One [?]’ The entries continue in similar fashion, interspersed with lists of Buddhist terms or one of acquaintances and family members now dead, and of the few still alive: his mother, Mrs. Foster, his brothers.⁶⁶ We see a suffering Dharmapala in Calcutta, worrying about his family in Sri Lanka and the larger state of the world, all the while making sense of it through Buddhist doctrine: ‘It is the law that all things born must die. Disintegration is the law’. Summing up the state of feeling in an autobiographical essay later in the same notebook, he writes: ‘Suffering has been my lot since 1891’.

This string of emotive expressions in the list-like journaling in the notebook points to the complexity of emotions feeding into the writing process. We can see Dharmapala not only expressing his emotions, externalising them, but using the inscription on the page as a way of reflecting on his at times conflicting emotional states. Fearlessness and calm alternate with anxiety, bodily pain intersects with world events, Buddhist teachings invoking detachment from suffering and death co-occur with worries about his relatives. Such emotional practices extend to the many lists scattered across the notebooks, as part and parcel of Dharmapala’s religious ambitions. They show his persistent cultivation of the Buddhist doctrine and practices of self-discipline cast into the mould of numerous lists indexing religious concepts and moral precepts, but also the frictions between his often unsteady emotional life and the rationalistic approach to religion that was a hallmark of Dharmapala’s modernised Buddhism.

Through their content and their emotions, the Anagarika’s lists indexed his present and past and the future he planned. Dharmapala’s inner life and feelings reveal themselves in the lists, just as list-making for him was a practice of the self, of cultivating discipline and religious feelings, but also accountability and gratitude towards the sponsors on whom he depended. While on the surface, many of them are mnemonic devices, Dharmapala’s preoccupation with lists also speaks of their performative function in taking stock, if not control, of his life by indexing the external and internal worlds of his often unpredictable life. The following section will explore a particular example of this practice: the historiographic list.

Stepping through time: The list as historiography

Notebook 55, dated to the year of Dharmapala’s passing in 1933, is a large but slender volume roughly 11 centimetres wide but 35 centimetres in height. The format of the ledger structures at least some of its contents, which include several accounting lists of the MBS. In the latter half of the notebook, after a spell of empty pages, we find a remarkable list. It begins:

Before Buddha.

1000000.000,000. one million millions

900000.000,000

800000.000,000

…

400. Assyrian Middle Empire

300. Medes

200. Spartan Civilization

100. B.B. [before Buddha] Decline of Assyria

At this point, the list changes, now formatted to count two chronologies: the years before and after Christ (‘B.C.’ and ‘A.C.’), and the years after the Buddha’s birth (‘A.B.’). The list therefore continues: ‘$\frac{\mathrm{B}.\mathrm{C}.}{642}$ 1 Birth. May full moon. Lumbini’, then proceeding with one year per line across 70 numbered pages all the way up into the future year 1956, 2500 A.B., on the notebook’s very last page.⁶⁷

In many ways, this enormous historical index is a master list among AD’s many lists. As has been discussed in the previous sections, Dharmapala’s lists sit at the intersection between colonial modernity and the ancient Buddhist tradition of list-making. The historical list, too, is a mātikā or generative matrix that organises and structures knowledge. The vast majority of its lines are empty except for their dating, indicating that for Dharmapala, the list form preceded its contents—a matrix to be filled in later. Moreover, the historical list is no mere repository of information. Like the vibhaṅga analysis, it breaks apart the totality of history, thereby making claims such as that the Buddhist temporal regime can subsume Christian chronology. The historiography list demonstrates the list form’s potential for ‘archiving’ pasts and ‘programming’ futures.⁶⁸ Composed in the historical present near the end of Dharmapala’s life, it establishes multiple transtemporal relations connecting immediate and ancient pasts, ranging from a million million years before the birth of the Buddha to the Anagarika’s own life events, to the present as the fulcrum of the envisioned future.

Even beyond this single remarkable list, many more across the notebooks reflect Dharmapala’s particular occupation with history—of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, philosophy, European colonialism and more. In the quest for finding and dating ‘origins’ and asserting historical ‘facts’, they reveal the particular influence of modern and colonial epistemologies on his thinking. That is not to say that the South Asian Buddhist and other traditions had not been occupied with history, too. Dharmapala often references classical works such as the Sinhalese Pali chronicles, the dīpavaṃsa and the mahāvaṃsa.⁶⁹ Even so, his access to vernacular sources was often mediated through Orientalist scholarship, such as the translations of the travel accounts of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims Fa Xian and Xuan Zang. More generally, Dharmapala’s notebooks show his engagement with the modern and colonial Orientalist historicisation of religions via philology.

The historical ‘master’ list from notebook 55 appears to be the culmination of a decades-long occupation with historiographic lists in which the format slowly formed. Already in notebook 108, dating to around 1910, we can find a short list of world history dated in the Gregorian calendar and beginning with the eighth millennium BC.⁷⁰ Later, in the same notebook, we find a list of Sinhalese kings stretching over 11 pages. Beginning with ‘Vijaya. 1 = 543 B.C.’ and ending with ‘British Crown 2358 [A.B.]-1815 [A.C.]’, it is an early example of AD parallelly dating a history list in Buddha years and Christian years. The history list’s form further solidifies in notebook 38, dating to around 1916 but apparently filled in until at least 1926, with a list already very similar to the ‘master’ list but beginning only with A.B. 1. Covering seven large pages, it proceeds mostly per decade, many lines empty, and ends with a few of AD’s life events and the last line at 2500 A.B. and 1956 A.C.

Across pages and pages, these lists consist overwhelmingly of lines empty except for dates, suggesting how the list form preceded its contents. Rather than starting with data, composing the history lists was a form of iterative practice beginning with the formation of a temporal repository on the page(s) successively to be filled in. Dating from 1932, the year before Dharmapala’s historical ‘master’ list in notebook 55, the notebook titled TIT BITS contains what appears to be work in progress immediately preceding the later list. Spread across eight pages are different versions of mostly empty chronology.⁷¹ First, Dharmapala begins with ‘Buddha Year’ one dated to the Buddha’s enlightenment at age 45, reverting the count to year one for ‘1. Convocation’, the first Buddhist Council convened upon the Buddha’s passing, then proceeding by steps of 50 years, abbreviated as ‘B.E.’ (presumably: Buddha Era) and ‘A.C.’ (presumably: After Christ) all the way up to the year 1992 of the Gregorian calendar. The list next reverts again to the same count, proceeding mostly by decade from the Third Buddhist Council at Patna in 235 onwards. This is followed by yet another count, now centred on the birth of Jesus as ‘A.C. 1’, arranged with either 644 or 654 ‘A.B.’ (presumably: ‘After Buddha’), proceeding by decade and otherwise mostly empty over five pages up to A.B. 2500 and A.C. 1956.

The changing iterations of Dharmapala’s engagements with history show his construction of mātikā/matrices as forms preceding content. While some of his lists follow conventions of Buddhist vernacular histories, arranged by names (such as of disciples), the structuring principle of the yearly number employs the ‘empty time’ format of science in colonial modernity. As Sebastian Conrad has stressed, however, such appropriations depended on local actors.⁷² Dharmapala’s use of this format points to his agency in relation to global circulations of temporal regimes and technologies. Just as in Buddhist philosophy, the matrix list allowed for the analytical operation of vibhaṅga, organising, taking apart and reordering the world and its entire history, or at least that which he deemed relevant. Within the epistemic space of the encounter of ‘world religions’ in colonial modernity, Dharmapala employed the history list to make strategic claims using the ‘scientific’ dating of its ‘origins’ through recourse to textual scholarship. As Steinmetz, Simon and Postoutenko have argued, all ‘regimes of historicity’ always entail ‘temporal comparisons’, which in AD’s case was the immediate comparison to Christianity and Islam as well as to European philosophy and colonialism, which became points of data within the matrix of history structured by Buddhism.⁷³

Woven into the enormity of history covered in Dharmapala’s successively expanded historiographic lists, however, was another set of temporal relations: the autobiographical. The notebooks contain a string of lists indexing the main events in the history of the MBS, likely written in preparation for editorial articles on the society’s history published in its journal.⁷⁴ The autobiographical is inseparable from organisational history here, showing how closely Dharmapala saw his own life entangled with that of the MBS. In turn, this meant that he often adopted an abstract perspective on his own life, titling autobiographical lists in the third person, such as in notebook 6 (late 1910s) ‘Table of Events re the life of Anagarika Dharmapala’, or ‘Chronological Table of Sri Devamitta Dharmapala’s life’ in notebook 25 dating from the very last year of his life.⁷⁵

Dharmapala’s historiographic lists reveal his intense occupation with the history of Buddhism in relation to other religions, to European colonialism and to his own life. The list form, here, connected the ancient Buddhist historical tradition to the modern temporal regime of the ‘empty time’ of colonial science. But the recurring close entanglement between the abstraction of the totality of history with the particularity of the Anagarika’s own life, the enmeshment of history with autobiography, also points to list-making as an emotional practice. Perhaps listing gave Dharmapala a sense of sovereignty over his own life, down to the level of the body,⁷⁶ and of history in general. The ontic power of the list form as a matrix able to envelop and (re)arrange the whole world and vast depths of time is on full display.

At the same time, however, Dharmapala’s emotional relation to history, and particularly to his own life, was complex. In an autobiographical reflection in notebook 53, Dharmapala looked back with troubled emotions on the previous decades of his life. Probably dating to around 1919, the text describes that he ‘gave all my best days’ for worldly concerns, but that the ‘BuddhaGaya Crusade was a fruit less attempt. from 1893 to 1910. loss of time, indescribable sufferings, unnecessary litigation, ending in humiliation and expulsion. I look back with sorrow on the loss of precious time’. The practice of listing, and in particular the history lists, performed emotional work in relation also to such frustrations, solidifying a sense of purpose and achievement inscribed into the retrospective gaze, stabilising his sense of self in the form of a struggling religious reformer.

Shifting coordinates: Diagrams and the spatiality of lists

The previous sections have explored how the list form itself, before or beyond its contents, constitutes ontic and emotional practices. Lists have different orientations in space and time, as Young argued. At the same time, the practice of list-making can help an author orient themselves in their life. In this final section, I want to probe further by focusing on the spatiality of lists. Across the notebooks, Dharmapala’s thinking shows a strong visual dimension. Often, his notes appear together with visual elements, such as sketches of human figures or architectural layouts. Some lists take on spatial arrangement for the sake of organising data, becoming diagrams, such as a family tree of ‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ ethnicities connected to the same ‘Aryan’ origin,⁷⁷ lists of Pali concepts organised into clusters and hierarchies, elaborate visualised Buddhist cosmologies,⁷⁸ anatomical lists,⁷⁹ or circular lists of months and seasons by the Gregorian or South Asian Buddhist calendars.⁸⁰

These are only some examples of lists in which the spatial arrangement on the page is a key aspect of their content. The list form, its visual formatting and spatial way of organising data, is a complex interaction between the constituent elements of information, the space of the page (and the notebook) and the thinking practices happening both on the side of the author and through the act of listing itself. This points directly to the world-making power of the list as generative matrix, of list-making as a practice of presencing and of drawing out relations. Simultaneously, the aspect of the list as emotional practice becomes clear here by integrating the position of the (authorial) self in the visual coordinates of the landscapes opened up, navigated or claimed through listing.

We have seen how the historiographic list allowed Dharmapala to posit himself and his movement within the totality of a history structured by Buddhism but formatted in the ‘empty time’ of colonial modernity. The occurrence of many maps sketched in the notebooks likewise implies a cartographic relation that AD established between the world and himself, typically related to topics of high emotional intensity for him. Sometimes, this included present-day events such as World War I.⁸¹ At other times, it related to the histories with which AD was occupied. For example, notebook 30 (dating to around 1918 and containing mostly notes on Pali texts) includes a stylised map showing Sri Lanka—a place of continued emotional identification for Dharmapala—placed in between England on one side and Japan on the other, clearly indicative of the larger coordinates of AD’s life connected to both places across the vast distances of his travels and works.

Spatial coordinates, finally, also appear in a tantalisingly direct way across a number of the notebooks. Sometimes in corners or on the margins, other times centrally on the pages, is the recurring element of the diagram of four cardinal directions. While in a few instances, it is formatted with North facing upward,⁸² at most other times, the diagram lists the points of the compass with East facing up.⁸³ An entry dated October 28, 1917, in notebook 6 explains this spatial arrangement. It deals with the canonical text of the Buddhist sigālovādasutta, the ‘Discourse to Sigala’, which contains a code of discipline for lay Buddhists formatted by the four cardinal directions, beginning with the East and supplemented by the two directions down and up.⁸⁴ Dharmapala repeats this, lists the directions with their ethical obligations and draws a diagram recapitulating the information.

However, notebook 62, seemingly predating the essay on the sigālovādasutta, gives another explanation for drawing coordinates starting with the East: as the Buddha is said to have faced the rising sun while he sat in meditation gaining Enlightenment, Buddhist temples in South Asia have traditionally been built facing East. Likewise, in the story of the spread of Buddhism to Sri Lanka recorded in the dīpavaṃsa, the monk Mahinda arrived in the East of the ancient Sinhalese capital.⁸⁵ Dharmapala’s notes, lists and drawings show that these coordinates were on his mind, exemplifying once more how he drew on the Buddhist tradition as well as on Orientalist scholarship and colonial science. As the map sketches locating India and Sri Lanka between England and Japan, between the colonial West and the far East, indicate, visual coordinates and cartography were entangled with Dharmapala’s own trajectories and his position vis-à-vis colonialism and the place of Buddhism as a quintessentially ‘Eastern’ religion in the world. His tactics were those of entanglement, epistemological and other, as he had succinctly phrased already in an earlier notebook, dated May 9, 1904: ‘There is West in the East’.⁸⁶

Conclusion

This article has focused on the many lists that Anagarika Dharmapala composed in his notebooks. I have discussed list-making as a cultural technique integral both to colonial modernity and science as well as to the South Asian Theravada Buddhist tradition. Among the many different kinds of lists scattered across the notebooks, I have shown how some of them exhibit the importance of the list form over its contents, particularly in connection to temporalities (the historiographic list) and spatialities (the diagram). At various points in my analysis, I have argued that list-making must also be seen as an emotional practice, both in how it expresses particular emotions as well as in how it performs an interrogation and management of the emotions of the author. The lists, and by extension the notebooks themselves, need to be considered as vital parts in Dharmapala’s thinking processes, as crucial sites in the constitution of the self. As Downes, Holloway and Randles summarised: ‘people make things, and things make people’.⁸⁷

Lists as matrices format units of information, performing an analytical operation based on the breaking up, vibhaṅga, of larger phenomena. Gethin argued that in the Buddhist context, the potential for lists to produce new configurations, growing from the generative power of the list as mātikā/mātṛ/mother, constitutes a profound lesson about the ever-changing nature of reality.⁸⁸ It seems this resonated with Dharmapala, especially in his profound engagement with Pali Buddhist literature. Elsewhere, however, his lists point in a different direction. Breaking up the colonial present into its constituent parts, integrating it into the larger matrix of South Asian Buddhist history, mapping South Asia and Sri Lanka not just in relation to the imperial metropolis but also to equidistant other parts of the world—all this must also be seen with regard to Dharmapala’s anti-colonial critiques and his search for different alternative futures. Such futures could be composed from the constituent elements of the past and the present once these are laid out and analysed using the list and its heuristic potentials. Emotions are integral to this operation, showing faith, narrating pride, generating hope, but also reflecting on struggles, frustrations and anxieties. Anagarika Dharmapala’s lists thus reveal themselves as integral to his coming to terms with history and the colonial present, sustaining an existence for himself and a future for his projects.

Acknowledgements

This research was enabled by the gracious archival access offered by the Maha Bodhi Society of India. In particular, I am indebted to the MBSI general secretary Bhante P. Seewalee Thero, and to Bhante R. Sumiththananda and Lobzang Namgail at the MBSI Anagarika Dharmapala Museum in Sarnath, as well as to Bhante K. Medhankara Thero of the MBSI Kolkata. I want to thank Margrit Pernau, Diego Calderara, Deborshi Chakraborty, Martin Hamre, Hatem Hegab, Anab Jafri, Piotr Kardynal, Sarah Stradling, Gayatri De Souza and Eve Tignol for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this text. Finally, I am grateful to the editors of the journal and to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback and assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Anagārika (‘homeless one’) is a title reflecting Dharmapala’s itinerant lay Buddhist lifestyle. Dharmapāla (‘protector of the teaching’) was his chosen religious name. I refer to him as the Anagarika, as Dharmapala or as AD.

2. Ceylon is modern-day Sri Lanka.

3. Among others, see Sarath Amunugama, ‘A Sinhala Buddhist “Babu”: Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) and the Bengal Connection’, Social Science Information 30, no. 3 (1991): 555–91, https://doi.org/10.1177/05390189103000300; Michael Roberts, ‘For Humanity. For the Sinhalese. Dharmapala as Crusading Bosat’, The Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 4 (1997): 1006–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/2658297; Kahawatte Siri Sumeda, Anagarika Dharmapala: A Glorious Life Dedicated to the Cause of Buddhism (Sarnath: Isipatan Deer Park, 1999); Torkel Brekke, ‘Anagārika Dharmapāla and the Politics of Religion’, in Makers of Modern Indian Religion in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2005): 86–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/019925236X.003.0005; Bhikshu Sangharakshita, Anagarika Dharmapala: A Biographical Sketch and Other Maha Bodhi Writings (Ledbury: Ibis Publications, 2013); Steven Kemper, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Sarath Amunugama, The Lion’s Roar: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Making of Modern Buddhism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

4. Notebook 20, for example, includes an inventory list of ‘Clothes left with Bhawani at 4A College Square [Calcutta]’, signed and dated ‘Devapriya 23/5/’. In a different notebook from the same year (1932), however, AD complains that ‘I have no associate, and none to assist me as an amanuensis to write any letters’: Notebook TIT BITS: 3–4. Note: while some few notebooks include handwritten page numbers, most do not. I give page numbers where available.

5. Nearly all notebooks in the Sarnath collection bear handwritten numbers ranging between 6 and 144. This suggests the existence of more notebooks than currently made available to me.

6. I personally counted 263 separate lists, though questions of missing notebooks or the inclusion of the diaries would likely drive this figure up even higher.

7. Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 440.

8. I use the term ‘colonial modernity’ to refer to the period of colonial rule roughly from the mid nineteenth century onwards, in which discursive, social, cultural and political formations seen as typical for modernity in and beyond Europe were not just exported but constituted globally: see Tani E. Barlow, ‘Introduction: On “Colonial Modernity”’, in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1997): 1–20.

9. Including especially Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thera, but also Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera. The latter famously ‘won’ the 1873 Panadura debate between Buddhist and Christian orators, with Dharmapala aged nine sitting in the audience: Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 66. On Hikkaduwe Sumangala, see Anne M. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010); see further Elizabeth J. Harris, Theravada Buddhism and the British Encounter: Religious, Missionary and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka (London: Routledge, 2006).

10. As Roberts encapsulates in the religious figure of the ‘crusading Bosat’ (Bodhisattva): Roberts, ‘For Humanity’, 1017–19.

11. Programmatically formulated as ‘active externalism’ in Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/58.1.7; for a recent overview, see Ann Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).

12. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles, ‘A Feeling for Things, Past and Present’, in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, ed. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 8–23; 9.

13. Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Inventories’, in Information: A Historical Companion, ed. Ann Blair et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021): 527–29.

14. Liam Cole Young, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017): 18.

15. U. Kalpagam, Rule by Numbers: Governmentality in Colonial India (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

16. For a similar case, see Margrit Pernau, ‘Fluid Temporalities: Saiyid Ahmad Khan and the Concept of Modernity’, History and Theory 58, no. 4 (2019): 107–31, https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12138.

17. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): 80; Young, List Cultures, 24.

18. One such grammar list, titled ‘Pali Grammar’ in notebook 62, likely dating from around 1908 and 1909, lists grammatical categories in vernacular and English terminology with added question marks indicating his ongoing engagement with the language.

19. Such as notebook 25: 149; notebook 53; notebook 62: 54; notebook 101; notebook 102; notebook 108.

20. Such as notebooks 53 and 38.

21. TIT BITS: 2.

22. Ibid., 4; also, ‘The garage may be used to hold carpentry class. Gardening, Drawing should be taught’.

23. Notebook 15.

24. Such as in notebook 15: ‘To beautify the place where grandfather’s stupa stands; Visit the stupa in the Borella Cemetery ✓; Get the Dhamma Cetiya Inscription from Kalyana tissa Thero; To put a roof to the seat at above Avenue; Prepare Grandfather’s half tone photo; Anuradhapura land photo; Prepare an Album showing the different properties belonging to the Foster Fund ✓; Publish an Aryan Name book’.

25. Such as notebook 43: 1; TIT BITS: 30. Many more examples abound.

26. Notebook 109.

27. Such as: ‘Statement of Allowances Paid to Anagarika Dharmapala by the Firm of H. Don Carolis & Sons [his father’s company] Which Had Been Spent for the Good of the MB Society’, ‘Properties in Charge of the Trustees’, notebook TIT BITS: 11, 119; ‘Expenses in Honululu’, notebook 109; ‘Anagarika Dharmapala’s Contributions [to the MBS]’, notebook 20.

28. Such as ‘Statement Showing the Receipts of My Allowance from Home’, notebook 101.

29. Such as ‘Mrs Mary Foster’s Endowment’, ‘Expenses of the MBS’, ‘M.B.S. Investments’, notebook 25: 9, 18–19, 134; ‘MBS Financial Statement’, notebook 55: 9–59.

30. Young, List Cultures, 33.

31. Notebook 43: 55–58.

32. ‘Books in the sack’, a majority of an unnumbered and untitled notebook in the Sarnath collection, probably dating from around 1910.

33. ‘Maha Bodhi Library Books Missing’, notebook 62: 140.

34. Such as a list of ‘Enemies’ and ‘Persecutors’ of Dharmapala, organised by country (Ceylon, Burma/Myanmar, Arakan/Rakhine in Myanmar, India, Japan, Siam/Thailand), notebook 6; ‘Enemies of the MBS’, notebook 25: 68–69; or ‘Some Public Enemies’, notebook 109.

35. Notebook TIT BITS: 46.

36. Notebook 43: 83–85.

37. Notebook 6.

38. ‘Opium’, notebook 43: 110.

39. Notebook 62: 123–24.

40. Notebook 6.

41. Notebook 20.

42. Both, notebook 58.

43. Notebook 6.

44. The list ranges from ‘Sankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Kabir, Nanak,…Allah, Jesus, Moses, Jehova, Mohammat, Paul, David,…’ to ‘Besant, Gandhi, Vivekananda, Tilak’: notebook 43: 64–65.

45. Elsewhere in notebook 6: 53, and more.

46. ‘Aryan religions (Buddha dharma Brahma dharma Vaishnáva dharma Jaina dharma Ahimsá dharma), religions that lead to hell (Sákta dharma Saiva dharma Mahamadiya dharma Christ[i]an dharma Pañcamakāra dharma)’: notebook 43: 44.

47. Notebook 62: 99–106.

48. Both, notebook 6.

49. ‘Asoka, Assakaṇṇa, Capaka, Nāga, Punnāga, Vakula, Cūta, Panasāsana, Sàla, Kakudha, Sahakāra, Karavīra, Ajjuna’, notebook 43: 81.

50. Notebook 6.

51. Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette has worked extensively on list-making in South Asian philosophical traditions (personal communication). His monograph on taxonomies in the ‘gnostic yogas’ is forthcoming.

52. For an overview and analysis, see Russell Webb and Bhikkhu Nyanatusita, ed., An Analysis of the Pali Canon and A Reference Table of Pali Literature (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 3rd rev. ed., 2011 [1975]).

53. ‘One estimate puts the number of verses of the Tipiṭaka at around 590,000; the total number of lines at 2,000,000; the total number of characters at 24,000,000; the total number of pages between 12,000 and 50,000 depending on the publisher and typesetting’: Matthew Meghaprasara, New Guide to the Tipiṭaka: A Complete Reference to the Pāli Buddhist Canon (New York: A Sangha of Books, 2013): 1.

54. Rupert Gethin, ‘The Mātikās: Memorization, Mindfulness and the List’, in In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, ed. Janet Gyatso (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992): 150.

55. Meghaprasara, New Guide, 366.

56. Webb and Nyanatusita, Pali Canon, 28.

57. Gethin, ‘Mātikās’, 155.

58. Ibid., 161.

59. For an introduction and translation, see U. Thittila, The Book of Analysis (Vibhaṅga): The Second Book of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka (London: Luzac, 1969).

60. Ervin Malakaj, ‘Affected Lists: Ferdinand Karsch and the Matter of Frustration in Early Sexological Writing’, in Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century, ed. Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu and Petra McGillen (Berlin: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, forthcoming).

61. Ibid., 4.

62. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220; 220, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2012.00621.x.

63. Marcelo J. Borges, ‘Narratives of the Self’, in Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, ed. Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Peter N. Stearns (London: Routledge, 2020): 99–113; 101.

64. Michael Roberts, ‘Himself and Project. A Serial Autobiography. Our Journey with a Zealot, Anagarika Dharmapala’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 44, no. 1 (2000): 113–41; 121.

65. Ibid., 132–33.

66. His younger brother, Edmund, would die in prison in November 1915.

67. Notebook 55: 111–85.

68. Young, List Cultures, 33–34.

69. For example, a list from the dīpavaṃsa enumerates the disciples who brought the Buddha’s teachings to Sri Lanka: ‘Buddha, Upali, Dasako, Sonako, Sabbakami, Sano Sambhuto, Moggaliputta’: notebook 20; repeated in notebook 62: 373; on the chronicles of Sinhalese history, see Steven Kemper, The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

70. It begins in 8000 B.C. with ‘Early civilization of the Nile Basin’ and mostly covers events in Europe.

71. Notebook TIT BITS: 93–101; page 95 contains unrelated notes on political constituencies in India.

72. Sebastian Conrad, ‘“Nothing Is the Way It Should Be”: Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century’, Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 3 (2018): 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244316000391; see also Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

73. Willibald Steinmetz, Zoltán B. Simon and Kirill Postoutenko, ‘Temporal Comparisons: Evaluating the World through Historical Time’, ‘Temporal Comparisons’, Time & Society 30, no. 4 (2021): 447–61; 455, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x211029262.

74. An early example in notebook 104, dated May 30, 1904, begins ‘1891 May 31—MBS founded; 1892 ''—MBJ [Maha Bodhi Journal] founded’ and continues to 1903.

75. Notebook 25: 146–47.

76. Notebook 62 contains several anatomical lists of the human body, including a ‘Table of Time needed for normal digestion’ on page 77. Later in the same notebook, we find a list of foods and their nutrient elements, closing with recommended foods for indigestion (191–92).

77. Notebook 62: 32.

78. Such as in notebook 53.

79. Notebook 62: 281.

80. Notebook 2: 72; notebook 62: 173.

81. Notebook 53, for example, includes a map sketching the Dardanelles front; notebook 102 contains an apparently related list on the ‘Gallipoli Evacuation’, listing the counts of killed/wounded/missing soldiers.

82. Notebooks 20, 30, 59: 26, 77.

83. Notebooks 6, 20, 40, 43, 62.

84. For a translation, see John Kelly, Sue Sawyer and Victoria Yareham, ‘DN 31, Sigalovada Sutta: The Buddha’s Advice to Sigalaka’, Access to Insight, 2005, accessed May 30, 2023, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.31.0.ksw0.htm.

85. Notebook 62: 203, 373.

86. Notebook 104; a three-page essay in notebook 6 argues a similar point, stressing that ‘If Asia ceases to exist great will be the loss to France, England, Holland, and Russia. …Asia gave Europe a religion and a morality’.

87. Downes, Holloway and Randles, ‘A Feeling for Things’, 9.

88. Gethin, ‘Mātikās’, 165.