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Edwin Arnold

Edwin Arnold

1832 CE–1904 CE · Modern · Gravesend, Kent

June 10, 1832 – March 24, 1904

Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) was an English poet and journalist whose 1879 narrative poem The Light of Asia presented the life and teaching of the Buddha to a wide Western readership. Hugely popular in Britain and America, the poem did much to stimulate sympathetic Western interest in Buddhism, though it is a literary and devotional retelling shaped by Victorian sensibilities rather than a scholarly or doctrinal account. Arnold was a poet and populariser, not a practitioner or teacher within any Buddhist tradition. He died in 1904.

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Stop 1 of 3Born

Gravesend, Kent

What they did here

DOCUMENTED: born in 1832; educated at Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

About Gravesend, Kent

Gravesend, in Kent, England, was the birthplace, in 1832, of Sir Edwin Arnold, the poet and journalist whose epic poem 'The Light of Asia' (1879) presented the life and teaching of the Buddha to a wide Victorian readership and helped shape Western interest in Buddhism.

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Edwin Arnold’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Across the traditions

In the same tradition

B. R. Ambedkar

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Edwin Arnold’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Buddhist world

Works

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