Editing Maha Bodhi Society (section)

== Foundation and Bodh Gaya ==
The Mahabodhi temple, where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, had been out of Buddhist hands for centuries. According to the sources used here, a Saiva mahant took up residence at Bodh Gaya in 1590, and the site was thereafter administered by his lineage as a Hindu place of worship.<ref name="ober23">Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, chs. 3–4. Chudal dates the abandonment of the temple by Buddhists to "sometime in the 14th century" (Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2015). "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal". ''European Bulletin of Himalayan Research'' 46: 62–87).</ref> After a pilgrimage there, Dharmapala founded the Society in 1891, with Sumangala (Sumangalacharya) as its president; its stated aims were to restore the temple to Buddhist control, to revive Buddhism in India, to print Buddhist literature, and to train missionaries.<ref>Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन ''Nivedan'' [Statement] (Marathi). Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali, p. 103 (read from the page image; the founding year and the president). The list of aims is from Chudal (2015) and Ober (2023). Kosambi writes "Dharmapal", the son of a rich Sinhalese trader, and does not equate him with any other Dharmapala.</ref> Geary and Mukherjee describe a dispute over the temple with the Giri mahants in which the colonial state was hesitant and cautious.<ref>Geary, David, & Sraman Mukherjee (2017). "Buddhism in Contemporary India". In: Jerryson, Michael (Ed.), ''The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism''. Oxford University Press, ch. 2: 36–57, pp. 43–44. Doyle (2003), "Liberate the Mahabodhi Temple!", is the lead for later Dalit activism at Bodh Gaya and was not examined.</ref> Kosambi, who reached Bodh Gaya in February 1902, found the temple compound in the mahant's monastery with Hindu image worship going on, heard from students that a Buddhist monk named Dharmapala was in litigation with the mahant, and was told by a monk there to learn Pali in Ceylon and to apply to the Maha Bodhi Society in Calcutta.<ref>Kosambi (1924), ''Nivedan'', pp. 83–88. Whether the monk of the lawsuit is Anagarika Dharmapala is not stated on the pages.</ref>

The Society was not the first Buddhist voluntary association in colonial India. Ober identifies the Chittagong Buddhist Association (1887) as the first such body, four years earlier, and Kripasaran's Bengal Buddhist Association (Calcutta, 1892) followed the Society by a year.<ref name="ober23" /> Ober also shows that the Panchama free schools of Henry Steel Olcott's Theosophical Society in Madras seeded the Sakya Buddhist Society (pp. 135–143; see [[Tamil Buddhist Movement]]).