Editing Tamil Buddhist Movement (section)

== Origins, 1892–1903 ==
Thass's turn to Buddhism followed a career in caste politics in the Nilgiris and Madras. In April 1892 he attended the Madras Mahajana Sabha, where, by his own later account in the ''Tamilan'', an item on the "Parayar problem" was struck from the agenda and a speaker told him that Siva and Vishnu were not the gods of his community. Gajendran Ayyathurai reads the episode as the point at which Thass concluded that the caste and the casteless had no common identity.<ref name="ay11">Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2011). ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India''. PhD dissertation, Columbia University, pp. 22–24 (reading Thass's retelling in the ''Tamilan'' of 21 October 1908). Aloysius dates an earlier memorial of the Nilgiris Dravida Mahajana Sabha to the Congress to 1891 (Aloysius, G. (1998). ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism''. New Age International, pp. 55, 195–196).</ref>

In July 1898 Thass and P. Krishnaswami, delegates of "Paraiah" committees in Madras, sailed with Colonel H.S. Olcott of the Theosophical Society to [[Sri Lanka|Colombo]], where Thass took the five precepts from the monk Sumangala at Maligakanda. Aloysius, who draws on Olcott's diary and on Thass's own account, stresses that the initiative lay with the delegates, and he notes that not every founding member of the new society took the precepts.<ref name="al98">Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 50–55, 58. The editor of Olcott's diary remarked that the delegates' Buddhist ancestry had not been proved (p. 51 n. 4). Aloysius and later writers date the founding of the Sakya Buddhist Society to 1898; some sources give 1899 (and the Maha Bodhi Society's Madras branch 1898 or 1900), and the dates of Thass's turn to Buddhism vary between 1890, 1898, and 1899.</ref> The Sakya Buddhist Society, founded in Madras on his return, was the first institution of the movement; its relations with Thass's own life and writings are treated in the biography of [[Iyothee Thass]].

The Madras branch of the Maha Bodhi Society, the organization that Anagarika Dharmapala had founded in 1891, was a second and separate body. Aloysius says that the effort to open it began in 1898 at the initiative of Singaravelu, although he also states that the Society opened a Madras branch in 1900, and he lists Singaravelu and Narasu among its early lecturers.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', p. 58 and n. 27. The identification of Aloysius's "M. Singaravelu Chettiar" with the communist Singaravelu (see below) is Aloysius's own gloss.</ref> Kosambi's memoir of 1903 names a Professor Lakshminarasu Naidu, probably Narasu, as the president of the Madras Maha Bodhi Sabha and Singaravelu as its secretary, and it shows the Sabha and Thass's followers as two groups that did not get on.<ref name="nive">Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन ''Nivedan'' [Statement] (Marathi). Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali, pp. 110–117. The pages do not name Narasu or Thass in full, and both identifications are inferences. See also Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, pp. 135–143.</ref> Thass criticized the Madras members of the Society in 1911, and the quarrel between the Society and Narasu, described below, ended in a lawsuit.