From Two Schools to One Hundred Ninety Four

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's school building campaign grew at a striking pace: from two Buddhist schools with a combined 246 children when Olcott arrived in 1880 to 194 schools with 15,490 children by 1899, a nineteen year expansion that took the Society from a small founding initiative to a genuine parallel education system operating across the island. That growth gave Ceylonese Buddhists an alternative to Christian mission schooling for the first time in generations, built and run on specifically Buddhist educational terms rather than through the Christian institutions that had previously held an effective monopoly on Western style schooling.

The Society continues today as the Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society, carrying the same name and the same educational mission into the present, more than a century after Olcott, Blavatsky and Sumangala first brought Theosophical organizing methods to a Buddhist revival project that outlived all three of its founders and grew into one of the lasting institutional legacies of nineteenth century Ceylon's own Buddhist revival movement.