This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Anagarika Dharmapala was born David Hewavitarne in Colombo in 1864 and took the title Anagarika, homeless one, as a lay renunciant rather than a fully ordained monk, a documented early identity distinct from the institutional campaigner his first article introduces already engaged at Bodh Gaya in 1891. His path toward that campaign ran through the Theosophical Society, whose founders Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott drew him into organized Buddhist revival work in Ceylon before Bodh Gaya became his cause.
In 1893 he traveled to Chicago to represent Buddhism at the World's Parliament of Religions, a documented international appearance distinct from the campaign for Buddhist control of the Mahabodhi Temple that occupies his first article. His address there introduced an American and European audience largely unfamiliar with Buddhism to its teachings directly from a Buddhist voice rather than through missionary or scholarly intermediaries, a documented act of representation distinct from the lawsuit and publicity campaign he pursued afterward through the Maha Bodhi Society.
That the same reformer remembered for a decades long legal and publicity campaign to reclaim Bodh Gaya had, two years before founding the society behind that campaign, already stood before an international audience in Chicago as one of the first Buddhists to represent the tradition on a global stage, marks Dharmapala's 1893 appearance as a documented case where his international reputation was established before his best known institutional campaign had even begun.