The 'Irish Buddhist' U Dhammaloka, until recently lost to history, was
ordained in the Burmese tradition probably in the 1880s. One of the
earliest Western Buddhist monks, he was a Buddhist revivalist celebrated
throughout South and East Asia in the early 1900s. Dhammaloka was a
working-class Irishman with limited formal education but he was an
effective orator and a tireless campaigner; for Buddhism and temperance,
against Christianity. Remarkably, U Dhammaloka was the only foreign
Buddhist to speak, alongside Shimaji Mokurai and other prominent
Japanese Buddhist clerics and intellectuals, at the founding of the
'International Young Men's Buddhist Association' in Tokyo in 1902. Who
was U Dhammaloka, why did he go to Japan in 1902, what impact did the
Japanese visit have on his subsequent activities in South-east Asia -
and what are Dhammaloka's links with San Francisco?