The Buddha's Midwife: Paul Carus and the Spread of Buddhism in America

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Between the Parliament of Religions which met in Chicago in 1893 at the time of the Columbian Exposition, and World War I, Asian religions and philosophies made a significant impact on the United States, causing a profound change in thinking about them, including their relevance to the present. More so than any other religion, Buddhism became a crutch for those who, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, became disillusioned with Christianity's claim to superiority over all other faiths. As Buddha's midwife, Paul Carus (1852-1919), editor of The Open Court and The Monist journals, published by the Open Court Publishing Company in Illinois, not only brought elements of Buddhist thought to the United States through his writings and translations, he also facilitated the role of numerous philologists, historians, and philosophers to do the same. Like so many intellectuals at the time, Carus was seeking a path from the older theologies into a new secular world and its uncertain future. This book was written to recount one of the principal contributors to the spread of Buddhist thinking in American thought and culture.