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5.
American Strains of Asian Religion in the Twentieth Century
The pervasive presence of Asian religion
in the bohemian underground in the US after World War II was unparalleled in avant-garde and existentialist Paris during the same period. Anti-clericalism-hostility
to priests and church hierarchy-has been entrenched among the European
intelligentsia since the Enlightenment, partly because the Roman
Catholic Church was once an active force in politics and economics
and, in the period of the Papal
States, was a nation in its own right.
The defiant rejection of organized
religion by Beat poets and artists was a substantial part of their
legacy to the 1960s counterculture. Their hip appropriation of Asian
thought is illustrated by the title of Jack Kerouac's 1958 autobiographical
novel, The Dharma Bums (dharma is a Hindu and Buddhist term for natural truth or right living).
Though most of the Beats merely dabbled in Asian religion, they
borrowed enough to help their second-generation fans critique Western
intellectual assumptions. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the other Beats
who drifted to San
Francisco
in the fifties learned about Zen Buddhism from the poet Gary Snyder,
a rugged, Thoreau-style naturalist from Oregon who would later live in a monastery in
Japan. (A leading character in The Dharma Bums is based on Snyder.) Buddhist
references percolated from the Beats into anti-academic poetry of
other schools from the fifties to the early seventies.
A Zen Institute was established in
New York in 1930; San Francisco's Zen Center began in 1959. But American interest in
Zen was primarily stimulated by two non-fiction writers, Daisetz
T. Suzuki (1870-1966), a Japanese Buddhist scholar, and Alan Watts
(1915-73), who was born in England. In the 1950s, Suzuki lectured extensively
on Mahayana Buddhism in the US, including as a visiting professor at Columbia University. Watts was an Anglican priest with a master's
degree in theology who had had an interest in Asian thought and
culture since adolescence. His first book on Buddhism, The
Spirit of Zen, was published in 1936 after he had met Suzuki
in London earlier that year. Watts was Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University near Chicago during World War II and then moved to the West Coast, where he taught at the
School of Asian Studies in San Francisco and joined the Los Angeles Vedanta Society,
devoted to Vedanta Hinduism. Watts'
many books, such as The Way
of Zen (1957) and Psychotherapy
East and West (1961), were widely available
as vividly bound paperbacks in the sixties. Though Watts
has sometimes been dismissed as a popularizer, I can attest that
his comparative studies of Asian and Western culture had a great
impact on me as a student. In 1966, he spent several days at my
college, where he lectured on "Narcotics and Hallucinogenic Drugs"
and "Differing Views of the Self and Its Relation to Nature."
It was Watts' reference to "cosmic consciousness" in
his 1962 book, The Joyous
Cosmology, that
put it into the cultural atmosphere of the time. The term had been
coined by a Canadian psychiatrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, in a very
odd, spiritualistic book, Cosmic
Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901). While
superintendent of an asylum for the clinically insane, Bucke had
begun to question the standard categories of Western logic and science.
In 1894, he read a paper called "Cosmic Consciousness" to a meeting
of the American Medico-Psychological Association in Philadelphia. In his book, Bucke attempted to fuse Asian
and Western religion by juxtaposing somewhat quirky profiles of
figures like Buddha, Jesus, Dante, William Blake, and Walt Whitman.
Such extraordinary individuals, Bucke felt, exuded a palpable magnetic
aura because they had attained spiritual illumination.
The Hinduism of the American 1960s
had several sources. Allen Ginsberg modeled his prophetic persona
on Blake as well as on visionary rabbis in his own Jewish tradition.
Though introduced to Buddhism by Gary Snyder, the gay, bookish Ginsberg
had none of Snyder's athletic asceticism. Chatty and omnivorous,
Ginsberg celebrated appetite and excess in food and sex. By the
sixties, he had transformed himself into a genial Hindu guru. Playfully
brandishing finger-cymbals and a squeezebox and sometimes dressed
in Hindu robes, the bearded Ginsberg was a constant, mantra-chanting
presence at major demonstrations. He turned political theater into
vaudeville-much like the Yippies, who nominated a pig for president
in 1968.
Hinduism had had an organized basis
in the US since the 1890s, following the visit of
Swami Vivekenanda, a disciple of the legendary Indian spiritual
leader, Ramakrishna, to the Parliament of Religions at the World's
Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Vivekenanda (1863-1902) founded
the American Vedanta Society in New York City, from which numerous branches opened around
the country. Until after World War II,
however, American interest in Hinduism was mainly confined to urban
centers and was connected in the popular mind with kooks, charlatans,
and Hollywood actors. Aldous Huxley, who had moved to
California, studied Vedanta Hinduism with Swami Prabhavananda
in the 1940s and was a member of the Los Angeles Vedanta Society.
Another British expatriate, Christopher Isherwood, edited a book
about the Society, Vedanta
for Modern Man (1951). The openly gay Isherwood, whose
autobiographical Berlin Stories
about decadent 1930s Germany inspired I Am a Camera and Cabaret, had converted to Hinduism after moving to Los
Angeles.
The groundwork for the Asian trend
of the American sixties was probably laid by Paramhansa Yogananda
(1893-1952), the first yoga master to teach full-time in the West.
Born in Bengal, Yogananda established the international
headquarters of his Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1925. He lectured to packed audiences,
including at Carnegie Hall, and met President Calvin Coolidge at
the White House. His Autobiography
of a Yogi (1946) had an enormous impact, not least for the numinous,
Christlike cover photo of the white-robed, boyishly beardless guru
with long hair flowing over his shoulders. The Director of Forest
Lawn Memorial Park, where Yogananda was buried, stated in an affidavit
that there was "no physical disintegration" in his body twenty days
after death, "a phenomenal state of immutability."
A singular figure of lesser influence
was "Avatar" Meher Baba (1894-1969), who arrived in the US in 1952 and opened a center in South Carolina. Baba was an author and teacher born to
a Zoroastrian family in India. Mute from the 1920s on, perhaps as the
result of being struck on the head years earlier, he communicated
by smiles, gestures, and an alphabet board. He worked with the poor
and insane in India in the forties. Baba's sometimes nebulous
philosophy of "spiritual value" and world harmony, resembling that
of Yogananda, prefigured New Age. In the sixties, he strongly condemned
the use of LSD and other drugs as a route to enlightenment.
The major Asian cult of the sixties
was Transcendental Meditation, founded in India as the Spiritual Regeneration Movement
by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1957. The Maharishi brought TM to Hawaii in 1959, from which it spread to North America and Europe. His practice of deep relaxation, whose
aim is "bliss," was based on ancient Vedic literature that he claimed
to have learned from his master, Shri Guru Deva. At the start, TM had more cult-like characteristics, such as a personal secret
mantra imparted by master to student. The Maharishi was at times
accused of claiming godlike powers. By the mid-seventies, TM was more professionally organized as a business, with certified
trainers teaching the system at stress-relief centers throughout
the US. In 1974, TM bought the campus of a Presbyterian college in Iowa and opened the Maharishi University of
Management. TM currently
claims five million followers worldwide. Deepak Chopra, the New
Age motivational speaker and best-selling author who became a media
star through his visibility on Oprah Winfrey's TV
show, was a disciple of the Maharishi but broke with him and TM in 1993.
Several cults caused much public concern
in the sixties and seventies because of their hold on young people.
The Hare Krishna movement-the International Society of Krishna Consciousness,
which claims to have been founded in the sixteenth century-is still
in operation, with headquarters in Mayapur, India. Its followers became notorious for their
shaved heads, saffron robes and beads, and aggressive behavior on
street corners as they sang, shook rattles and tambourines, and
pushed pamphlets. Their ascetic founder, Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977),
had begun preaching in India in the 1950s and moved to New York in 1965. There he wrote books and conducted
mass chanting of Hindu phrases in Tompkins Square Park-provocative activity at the time. In 1966,
he began publishing Back to
Godhead magazine and incorporated his organization, which required
disciples to renounce meat, alcohol, gambling, and extramarital
sex. He then took the Society to San
Francisco,
where it drew an enormous hippie following, particularly among those
addicted to drugs. His disciples carried the message to London and Berlin; at the Society's peak, there were 108
centers worldwide. The movement won much publicity at the 1970 release
of George Harrison's song, "My Sweet Lord," with its "Hare Krishna"
refrain. The Hare Krishnas were pursued with huge fanfare by Ted
Patrick, a "deprogrammer" who forcibly rescued young people from
cults and returned them to worried parents. A former staff member
for then-Governor Ronald Reagan in California, Patrick inaccurately warned that the Krishnas were a cult as dangerous as Charles Manson's.
The Divine Light Mission was brought
to the US in 1971 by thirteen-year-old Maharaj Ji,
whose father had founded the organization in India in the 1920s. Its Sikh and Hindu philosophy
required vegetarianism, celibacy, and meditation. American hippies
searching for gurus in India in the sixties had appealed to Maharaj
Ji, who claimed to be the successor of Jesus and Buddha, to visit
America. The Divine Mission's Denver commune would become its world headquarters:
it claimed 480 centers in thirty-eight countries. By 1973, there
were thirty-eight ashrams in the US with 40,000 followers. The organization
began to unravel later in the seventies when Maharaj Ji's taste
for luxury cars and mansions was exposed. When he married, he incurred
the wrath of the Divine Mission's power behind the throne-his mother,
who returned to India and tried to supplant him with his brother.
As the Hindu boom subsided in the seventies,
neo-Christian sects like Jim Jones' People's Temple rose to prominence. The Children of God,
founded in 1968 as Teens for Christ by "Moses" David Berg in Huntington Beach, California, were negligible in number but came to
public attention when they loudly prophesied that the US would be destroyed by Comet Kohoutek in
January 1974. The group continues under the name "The Family" and
is regularly excoriated by conservative Christian watchdog groups
for its practice of free love (called "Flirty Fishing") as well
as its heretical beliefs that Jesus was sexually active and that
God is a woman.
The most important neo-Christian sect
of the seventies was the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification
of World Christianity, founded by the Reverend Sun Myong Moon in
Seoul in 1954. Missionaries of the Unification
church were at work in the US from 1959 on, but there was little publicity
until Moon arrived in 1971. Moon was born into a farming family
in North Korea in 1920. He was raised by Confucian principles
until his parents became Presbyterians in 1930. In 1935, Moon claimed,
Jesus appeared in a vision to summon him to ministry. Because of his staunch anti-communism (he had been imprisoned by Korean
Communists), he was welcomed by Republican legislators in the US
and was hosted
by President Richard Nixon in the White House.
In 1981, however, Moon was charged with tax evasion and would eventually
spend thirteen months in prison.
Though massive advertisements for the
Unification Church still appear in major world newspapers,
the zenith of Moon's organization was 1982, when he sponsored a
mass wedding of 2,075 couples in Madison Square Garden. The grooms wore badges declaring "World
Peace Through Ideal Family," upholding
conservative family values against the sexual anarchy of the psychedelic
sixties and disco seventies. However, most Americans, as evidenced
by the slang term "Moonies" for its members, continue to regard
the Unification Church as just another Asian cult. Moon's Christian
theology is unorthodox: he preaches, for example, that Jesus was
illegitimate, the product of an affair between Mary and her cousin's
husband, Zachariah.
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