The Parliament Its Organizers Did Not Quite Expect

Some of the Parliament's Christian organizers had hoped the comparison would work in Christianity's favor: put the world's religions side by side before an American audience and let the superiority of the gospel speak for itself. Vivekananda's reception alone complicated that hope, but he was not the only delegate who left an impression the organizers had not planned for. Soyen Shaku's and Anagarika Dharmapala's presentations of Buddhism, and Virchand Gandhi's of Jainism, introduced American audiences to traditions most attendees had never encountered in person, let alone heard defended by their own adherents rather than described by missionaries or scholars writing about them from outside.

The effect compounded. Interest generated at the Parliament fed directly into the early spread of Buddhist and Hindu teaching in the United States, Vivekananda's own subsequent lecture tours chief among them, in ways the organizers had not designed the event to produce. Several participants and observers later wrote candidly that the Parliament had complicated rather than confirmed the assumption of Christian superiority it had been partly built to demonstrate, an outcome that did not stop the event from being judged, then and since, a genuine success on its own newer terms: not a contest with a declared winner, but the first large public demonstration that traditions could occupy the same room without either merging or fighting.