Australian Traditionalism and Architecture

A new article examines the activities of the Australian Traditionalist architect Adrian Snodgrass (1931–2025), see photo (from about 1957). It is Amit Srivastava, Peter Scriver, Cole Roskam and Anna Dearnley, “Beyond Sydney School: Australian Architects and the Encounter with Asia (1950s–1980s),” Architectural Theory Review (2026), available here (open access).  

Snodgrass was a member of a small Traditionalist group led by Harold Stewart (1916–1995), a poet, that met in a Sydney bookshop in the 1950s, mentioned in an earlier post here and discussed in Peter Kelly, Buddha in a Bookshop (2007), for which see post here. 

The article identifies Snodgrass as a Traditionalist, but does not investigate his Traditionalism beyond noting that his “exposure to these [Traditionalist] theorists provided an intellectual framework that his contemporaries, including [Alan] Gilbert and [Peter] Muller, would encounter through their friendship with him.” Gilbert and Muller, both architects, are also discussed in the article; it is not clear to what extent they were also Traditionalists. The article focuses on the travels of the three men and on their architecture.

Snodgrass traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1957 together with Barry Windsor (1930–1994), another Australian who was in contact with the Sydney group, and was presumably to some extent also a Traditionalist, at least in 1957. They found their way to Kataragama, a pilgrimage site for Buddhists as well as Hindus, where they joined a small Hindu group known as Kutti Kuttam (the Council of Cubs) because all its members were given animal names. Snodgrass became Punaikutti Swami (kitten) and Windsor became Narikutti Swami (young jackal). Kutti Kuttam followed Yogaswami (1872–1964), a Jaffna-born guru who had been inspired in his youth by Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Most of its six members were Westerners.

Windsor remained in Ceylon for the rest of his life, but Snodgrass traveled to Japan with Stewart in 1963 and joined a Pure Land Buddhist group in Kyoto connected to Bando Shojun (1932–2004), a professor at Otani University, where he was ordained a priest. He then returned to Australia in 1975, completed a PhD, and spent the rest of his life as an architect, lecturer in architecture and religious studies at the University of Sydney, and writer on Asian art. His best known book was The Symbolism of the Stupa (1985), which starts with a reference to “the traditional Indian view,” footnoted to René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Mircea Eliade. He remained a Traditionalist, then. Together with Gilbert and Muller he established Regional Design and Research, which “represented the practical application of principles that Snodgrass had explored philosophically, Gilbert had developed ethnographically, and Muller had implemented through site-specific practice.” Gilbert worked on hotel design in Hong Kong, Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as in mainland China. Muller's sites included the Bali Oberoi and the award-winning Amandari Resort in Bali. What these all had in common was that they provided international standards of comfort combined with distinctive local character.

The article concludes that 

What began as individual journeys of discovery by emerging architects seeking alternatives to modernist orthodoxy through sustained Asian engagement evolved into a collective reconsideration of possible alternative cultural and philosophical approaches to contemporary architectural design in what was already becoming an increasingly transnational world of practice.

What evolved into this reconsideration and various architectural projects also began as Traditionalism, and passed through Hindu and Buddhist practice on the way.

This post draws also on 

• Glen Hill, “Vale Adrian Snodgrass 1931–2025,” Architecture, Au 23 April 2025, available here
• Ramana Hridayam, “Swami Narikutti or Barry Owen Windsor (1930-1994),” available here  
• The swamis of the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order, The Guru Chronicles, The Making of the First American Satguru (Kapaa, Hawaii: Himalayan Academy, 2011)

More on the history of the esoteric-exoteric distinction

The Swiss scholar Urs App, in his The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), gives an early instance of the esoteric-exoteric distinction that I missed in my book Western Sufism. The esoteric-exoteric distinction is, of course, central to René Guénon's Traditionalism.

In Western Sufism, I identified the analysis of Chinese religion of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) as an early example of universalism (WS, pp. 92-93), but failed to note that some of Ricci’s colleagues were adding an esoteric-exoteric framework to their understanding of Japanese religion. At abut the same time, another Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), interpreted the Buddhist doctrine of the “two truths” into something approaching the esoteric and the exoteric, starting a tradition of interpretation of Japanese religion that leads us to Leibniz and then perhaps to John Toland (1670-1722), whose definition of esoteric and exoteric in Clidophorus (1720) I emphasize in Western Sufism.

According to App, Valignano first made a distinction between the gonkyō (権教, Sanskrit saṁvṛti-satya, provisional or mundane, approximately exoteric) and the jikkyō (実況, Sanskrit paramārtha-satya, ultimate, approximately esoteric) in his Sumario de los errores del Japon (Summary of the Errors of Japan) of 1556.  He made the same distinction again in his Catechismus christianae fidei, in quo veritas nostrae religionis ostenditur, et sectae Iaponenses confutantur (Catechism of the Christian Faith, in which the truth of our religion is shown, and the Japanese sects are refuted) of 1586, which then became standard reading in a 1593 re-edition. 

Ricci did not make Valignano’s distinction, but João Rodrigues (1561-1633) did, and in this was followed by Niccolò Longobardi (1559-1654) in his Trattato su alcuni punti della religione dei cinesi (Treatise on Some Points of the Religion of the Chinese). Longobardi was cited by Leibniz in his Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois (Discourse on the natural theology of the Chinese, 1716) as writing that the Chinese 

have two kinds of doctrine: a secret one that they regard as true and that only the learned understand and teach encoded in figures [symbols]; and the vulgar one which is a figure of the first and is regarded by the learned as false in the natural meaning of the words (cited in App, p. 144). 

Longobardi, then, may have been a source for Leibniz’s one-time friend Toland.

One further update. In Western Sufism, I identify the French Protestant scholar Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) as the first person to identify Sufism, along with Buddhism, as a form of Spinozism in 1702 (WS, p. 103). App notes that an opponent of Bayle’s, the Swiss protestant theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736 ), in fact made the same connection in the case of Buddhism, though not of Sufism, rather earlier, in 1688 (App 150-151).

Traditionalism and Early Music

A new article has just been published on Marco Pallis (1895–1989), the leading Buddhist Traditionalist, and his involvement with music, especially with the revival of “early music” by Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) and Mabel Dolmetsch (1874–1963). It is David R. M. Irving, “Esoteric Elements in the Early Music Revival: Marco Pallis, Traditionalism, and the Dolmetsch Circle, from Haslemere to the Himalayas,” Acta Musicologica 96, no. 1 (2024): 38-58.

Irving, as the title of his article suggests, argues that the esoteric milieu in general, and Traditionalism in particular, was more important for the Early Music revival than is generally appreciated. Traditionalism was certainly important for Pallis and his understanding of music, as well (of course) as his understanding of Buddhism and Tibet, and Pallis was, as Irving shows, important for the Dolmetsches. The article also shows the importance of the Arts and Crafts Movement and William Morris (1834–1896), which connects with Traditionalism through the person and work of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947).

A fascinating and beautifully written article that casts light on an aspect of Traditionalism that has so far been only little studied.

More on E. F. Schumacher

A new article has clarified the spiritual and intellectual biography of E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977), author of Small is Beautiful (1973) and so one of the inspirations of major parts of the contemporary green movement. It is by Robert Leonard, an economist who has worked on Schumacher for some time: “The Traditionalist Path of an Economic Heretic: E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed,” Temenos Academy Review 26 (2023), pp. 193-206.

Leonard removes any perplexity by carefully tracing Schumacher’s conversion from Nietzsche and socialism to Gurdjieff and Buddhism, and then to Catholicism, and makes clear the importance to him of Traditionalism and his major work’s debt to A. K. Coomaraswamy. It also clarifies the timing. Schumacher discovered Traditionalism in the early 1950s through a Buddhist friend, Edward Conze (1904-1979), and taught an adult education course on the Perennial Philosophy at the University of London in the late 1950s. In the 1960s he then moved towards Christianity, finally converting to Catholicism, a move out of step with Traditionalist norms. He retained, however, his agreement with the Traditionalist analysis of modernity, which he described in 1976, the year before his death, as a “great deviation from the universal tradition of mankind into a gross form of materialism.”

Leonard also makes clear that the absence of Traditionalism and metaphysics from Small is Beautiful was a tactical choice on Schumacher’s part. He aimed to inspire practical action, not religious commitment. This was sensible, as his attempts at explaining the esoteric and religious underpinnings of his economic and social convictions were rarely well received.

American Jews and Sufism

Quite a lot of Traditionalists have been Jewish, perhaps disproportionately, just as quitea lof of American Sufis have been Jewish, and quite a lot of American Buddhists, too. A new book, Emily Sigalow's American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change (Princeton University Press, 2019), asks why. her book and its implications for Sufism are discussed in a post on the sister of this blog, at "American Jews, Buddhism, and Sufism."

Traditionalist Representations of Buddhism

A 2008 article I have just found: Richard K. Payne, "Traditionalist Representations of Buddhism," Pacific World, Third Series, no. 10 (Fall 2008), pp. 177-223.

In this article, Payne introduces Tradiitonalism for those who do now know it, and then looks at representations of Buddhism by Frithjof Schuon, Julius Evola, Marco Pallis, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Mircea Eliade, and Huston Smith. He argues that their representations are inevitably dated--given that scholarship has moved on since they wrote--but that that their work should not be dismissed, because of "the depth of influence of the Traditionalist understandings of religion and of Buddhism" (p. 208). He understands Traditionalism as "a dogmatic core belief that provides a systematic hermeneutic" (p. 203), and concludes:

There are two important aspects of Buddhist doctrine that the Traditionalist interpretations overcode, recreating Buddhism in the model of Traditionalist presumptions regarding the nature of human existence, the world, and the path/goal. One is the interpretation of Buddhist ontology within a Neoplatonic framework as simply another instance of a hierarchy of truths. The other is the interpretation of awakening within a Perennialist framework as simply another instance of a single and universal category of mystical experience. Because both Neoplatonism and Perennialism function almost pre-reflectively in American popular religious culture these two acts of overcoding Buddhist doctrines are usually invisible (pp. 208-09).

German Swami: Buddhism in Sri Lanka

"German Swami" was Peter Joachim Schoenfeldt (1907-84). He spent time in mystical circles around the poet Stefan Georg in Berlin in the 1930s, grew interested in Buddhism, and traveled to Sri Lanka in 1936. He became Buddhist as Nyanakhetto, and was later ordained as Swami Gauribala Giri.

By 1971, German Swami had a circle of followers in Sri Lanka that included the former American Beatnik poet Alan Marlowe, and the former Sri Lankan actor Manik Sandrasagra. They were all reading the Traditionalist classics--Coomaraswamy, Guénon, and Schuon. This orientation did not last, however.

While visiting the US with the Sri Lankan president in 1981, Manik Sandrasagra went to Bloomington to meet Schuon. When he heard of this, however, German Swami summoned him back to Sri Lanka. In Sandrasagra's words,

When I returned I asked him why. His response was “You need to be turned off from traditionalism.” He then showed me an article by Schuon that was titled ‘The Problem of Sexuality’ and asked “Do you have a problem with sexuality? Is there a problem with sexuality?” He then smiled and stated in Tamil the famous Yogaswami dictum “Oru Pollapum Illai” meaning ‘Not one problem exists’.

Read more at http://www.sundaytimes.lk/070916/Plus/plus00011.html