This chapter reframes Anagarika Dharmapala and early “Buddhist mission” as a gendered and racialised project of modernity rather than a straightforward story of religious transmission. Taking the mid-twentieth-century shift from orientalist knowledge about Buddhism to organised Buddhist “mission” (dharmadūta) as its opening scene, it traces how Sri Lankan actors cast missionary work as a masculine endeavour that could counter Christian models while claiming moral superiority over them. The chapter then follows how Dharmapala helped stabilise a specifically male-centred imaginary of Buddhist revival through the Maha Bodhi Society’s intertwined programmes of preaching and education, including schools for boys, training infrastructures for bhikkhus, and the ideal of an international Buddhist “brotherhood.” Against this backdrop, it examines the making of “perfect men” through Dharmapala’s flexible mobilisations of Bodhisattva ideals and Aryan racial-religious mythologies—concepts that shaped nationalist hierarchies and sidelined women. Finally, the chapter turns to “racialised charisma,” analysing how Western fascination with Dharmapala’s appearance, voice, and comportment produced an exoticised and sexualised public figure, and how later insinuations about his sexuality functioned as colonial tactics of delegitimation as well as sites of ongoing political contestation.