Olcott, Blavatsky and Sumangala Found a Society

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Buddhist Theosophical Society was founded in Colombo, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1880 by Henry Steel Olcott, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, together with Helena Blavatsky and the Buddhist monk Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala. Olcott, an American who had formally converted to Buddhism, brought the Theosophical Society's own organizing energy to a specifically Buddhist revival project on the island, working alongside Sumangala, an established Sinhalese Buddhist monastic scholar whose participation gave the new Society genuine standing within Ceylon's own Buddhist monastic establishment rather than treating it as an outsider's initiative alone.

The Society's central strategy was building Western style Buddhist schools across the island, modeled directly on the Christian mission schools that had until then dominated colonial education in Ceylon, an approach that met Christian missionary education on its own institutional terms rather than simply protesting it from outside, treating education itself as the ground on which a Buddhist revival would either succeed or fail against an already established colonial school system.