VEDANTA IN AMERICA: Where We've Been and Where We Are
Pravrajika Vrajaprana
Pravrajika Vrajaprana is a nun of Sarada Convent, Santa Barbara at the
Vedanta
Society of Southern California; she is the author of Vedanta: A Simple
Introduction. This article originally appeared in the February, 2000 issue of
Prabuddha Bharata.
"In order to promote the kingdom," writes Paul Knitter—former Divine Word
missionary and current professor of theology at an American Catholic
university—"Christians must witness to Christ. All peoples, all
religions, must know of him in order to grasp the full content of God's
presence in history.…But in the new ecclesiology and in the new model for truth,
one admits also that all peoples should know of
Buddha, of
Muhammad, of
Krishna."1
Welcome to America as she stares down the face of the new millennium and welcome
to an America whose religious face has been profoundly transformed in recent
years.
Even thirty years ago it would have been inconceivable for a Christian
missionary—speaking from his own experience—to say, "It can be said that the
goal of missionary work is being achieved when announcing the gospel to all
peoples makes the Christian a better Christian and the Buddhist a better
Buddhist."2
While the words bear an unmistakable Vedantic ring, having them intoned
by a Christian missionary and theologian is nothing less than astonishing. It is
here, in the realm of attitudes and ideas, that we can see Vedanta's
transformative effect on America most clearly, for it is not an exaggeration to
assert that the Vedanta movement has played a significant role in the religious
transfiguration of the American landscape. This transformation is all the more
remarkable considering how small the Vedanta movement is when compared to other
religious movements in the West.
Were we to assess Vedanta's impact on the West by looking for large numbers
attending Vedanta Societies, we would certainly be disappointed. Yet before we
succumb to hand wringing over numbers, let us remember that Swami Vivekananda's
mission in the West was to spread ideas, not churches. In this mission—the
spreading of ideas and the changing of attitudes—the Vedanta movement has
succeeded quite well. Though our numbers are small, the impact of Vedanta in
America has unquestionably been pronounced. Concerning the Vedanta movement in
the West, American historian Carl Jackson wrote: "Few other religious bodies of
such Lilliputian size have equaled the movement's impact or historical
significance."3
How did this happen? Through the dissemination of ideas via the world's
intelligentsia.
While Eastern ideas had already appeared on Western shores via Emerson,
Thoreau, Whitman, and other Transcendentalists, the rivulet
of Eastern thought became a robust river only with the arrival of
Swami
Vivekananda in 1893. The Vedanta philosophy which had been exposed only
to the select few suddenly became available to a much larger audience.
Swami Vivekananda traveled widely and spoke frequently; his talks were widely
reported and avidly discussed in all segments of the population. He managed to
be both a philosophical topic and a trendy news fad. After Vivekananda
left the country, interested students formed groups which continued to study and
practice Vedanta. Yet these groups had much less influence on society than the
social and intellectual lions of the day; it was their interest that continued
to spread Vedanta's influence far and wide long after Vivekananda's American
sojourn had ended.
A look at Josephine MacLeod—an American disciple of Swami Vivekananda and a
connoisseur of the elite—provides us with a fascinating example of how the
Vedanta ball kept rolling in the West. A true world citizen, Josephine MacLeod's
sole ambition was to spread Vivekananda's message wherever she went. Her modus
operandi was to collect influential people and feed them Vivekananda's ideas,
peppered with her own infectious enthusiasm. Sri Ramakrishna's great disciple,
Swami Shivananda, told her: "It is for this work Swamiji has left you still in
the world—and making you to scour round the world in search of great men."4
Romain Rolland was one such trophy. Considered the greatest living French writer
of his day, Rolland won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915. Interestingly,
it was via another one of Josephine MacLeod's trophies—Dhan Gopal Mukherji—that
Rolland became interested in Sri Ramakrishna. Meeting Mukherji in America,
Josephine MacLeod inspired him to write about Sri Ramakrishna, pouring into him
her wealth of knowledge and zeal. The direct consequence of her efforts was
Mukherji's book on
Sri
Ramakrishna, The Face of Silence, which was chosen by the League of
Nations as one of the best forty books of 1926 and was also selected for the
International Library of Geneva.
Discovering Sri Ramakrishna via Mukherji, Romain Rolland became fascinated by
Mukherji's subject. Rolland's interest was conveyed by Mukherji to Josephine
MacLeod who promptly sent Rolland books on Sri Ramakrishna and Swami
Vivekananda, followed by her own visits to Rolland's home in Switzerland. The
happy result of her blitzkrieg was the publication of The Life of Ramakrishna
and The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel. Because of Rolland's
immense stature, the books were widely read by the general public and translated
into several foreign languages.
One of the people who read Rolland nearly twenty years later was the famed
American author Henry Miller, who read Rolland's works while crossing the
American continent. "Now that the trip is over," Miller wrote in The
Air-Conditioned Nightmare, "I must confess that the experience which stands out
most strongly in my mind is the reading of Romain Rolland's two volumes on
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda."5
Known primarily for his steamy novels and censorship battles, one would expect
Miller to be the last person to find inspiration in Sri Ramakrishna and Swami
Vivekananda. Yet not only was he inspired, he also ended up inspiring others by
bringing Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda to the public's attention.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare opens with a "Citation from Swami Vivekananda,"
consisting of two long quotations which absorb almost one full page. Throughout
the book Miller mentions both Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Referring
to Sri Ramakrishna as "the very incarnation of love and wisdom," he adds several
pages later: "I was full of Ramakrishna on leaving Pittsburgh. Ramakrishna who
never criticized, who never preached, who accepted all religions, who saw God
everywhere in everything: the most ecstatic being, I imagine, that ever lived."6
In another portion of the book Miller quotes Romain Rolland's Life of
Vivekananda for nearly one full page and writes of Swamiji's triumph at the 1893
Parliament of Religions.7 In the book Miller also bemoaned the fact that Sri
Ramakrishna was virtually unknown in America: "Ramakrishna—probably not one out
of a hundred thousand ever heard of that name, nor are they apt to as long as
they live."8 Miller's statistics are probably not far from the mark, yet today
there are prominent devotees who, had it not been for their study of Henry
Miller, would never have discovered Sri Ramakrishna.
Miller's pan-American trek brought him directly to Swami Prabhavananda—the
founder of the
Vedanta Society of Southern California. Miller met the swami only once,
but he "left a great impression on my mind."9 The same swami profoundly
influenced three other prominent cultural icons—Aldous Huxley,
Christopher Isherwood, and Gerald Heard—who themselves passed on
Vedanta's ideas to countless numbers of people.
Meeting Swami Prabhavananda in Hollywood in those early years was, as
Christopher Isherwood later related, "a contact which had far-reaching effects
on the lives of all three of us."10 All three men were well-known, prominent
intellectuals who wrote about the matters that interested them. Because of their
intellectual standing, what interested them became a matter of interest to a
large segment of the population: while not everyone can be a genius or social
luminary, there are legions of those who appreciate and follow the interests of
those who are. "The growing audience for mystical ideas…[was] further widened by
the publications of well-known authors like Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and
Christopher Isherwood," American historian Hal Bridges wrote.11
Huxley was, along with Heard and Isherwood, an initiated disciple of Swami
Prabhavananda; again, like Heard and Isherwood, he was a regular contributor to
the Southern California Vedanta journal Vedanta and the West. Huxley wrote
thirty-one books, sixty-five stories and innumerable articles—Vedantic themes
appearing in many of them. Even his novels were created as vehicles for
expressing his philosophy. The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley's best-known
philosophical work, was published in 1944 to critical acclaim: The New York
Times deemed it a "masterpiece." For over a half-century it has continued to
reach an extraordinarily wide audience, the book's appeal lying as much in its
vast sweep as in its suggestion "that the end of human life is contemplation, or
the direct and intuitive awareness of God."12
While Gerald Heard was celebrated in his day, today he has fallen into literary
oblivion. Yet during his heyday in the 40s and 50s, he was widely read,
publishing more than forty-seven volumes of writing, many of them directly
concerned with Vedanta. Indeed, it was Gerald Heard's direct influence that
brought Dr. Huston Smith to Vedanta, and it was through his guidance that
Dr. Smith met Swami Satprakashananda in St. Louis.
An octogenarian, Huston Smith today continues to actively support Vedanta
activities. In recent years he has been called both "the world's greatest
authority on world religions" and a "media star." Dr. Smith is probably best
known as the author of The World's Religions (previously entitled The
Religions of Man) which also has a separate incarnation as The Illustrated
World's Religions. Over two million copies of the various editions have been
sold since its 1958 publication; it has been translated into fourteen languages.
Considered the standard by which to judge other texts on world religions, The
World's Religions is one of the most frequently assigned books for college-level
classes on religion. In every edition of this book, Sri Ramakrishna is both
mentioned and quoted. In The Religions of Man, Smith says that Sri Ramakrishna
was "the greatest Hindu saint of the nineteenth century."13
Over the years, Dr. Smith has had several television series on world religions;
the latest and most popular being The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith, a
five-part series that consisted of Bill Moyers's televised interviews with Dr.
Smith. One of the many satisfactions of viewing The Wisdom of Faith was to see a
photograph of Swami Satprakashananda taking up the entire television screen
while hearing Huston Smith's voice in the background speaking of how much he had
gained from his association with the Swami. In the television series Smith
clearly emphasized how much he had gained spiritually from the Vedanta movement
in general and Swami Satprakashananda in particular. On Christmas Eve, for
example, Smith and his family would attend a local Christian church for the
family worship. Once home however, Dr. Smith would leave for the Vedanta
Society to hear Swami Satprakashananda speak on the message of Christ. That,
Smith remarked—while millions of television viewers listened—was where he got
his spiritual sustenance.
It's essential to keep in mind that while only a handful of people out of the
millions of viewers would remember the name "Swami Satprakashananda" or perhaps
even "Vedanta," the effect of programs such as these hasn't been so much to
bring people to Vedanta's doorstep as to normalize it in the American context.
Swami Vivekananda was the first and—up to this point at least—the only Vedanta
bombshell; since his time the changing of the American religious outlook has
been gradual and incremental. The effect of all these books, magazine articles,
and television appearances has not been to bring the American masses to their
local Vedanta Societies but to broaden Americans' personal outlook regarding
spirituality.
Let us now return our gaze to Hollywood: Of the Huxley-Heard-Isherwood
triumvirate, it was Christopher Isherwood who was the most intimately connected
with the Vedanta movement, remaining so throughout his long life. Whereas Huxley
later became sidelined by promoting psychedelics for nirvana and Heard slipped
into cultural obscurity, Isherwood used his considerable literary gifts to bring
Vedanta to the public eye. Not only was his book Ramakrishna and His Disciples
published by one of America's foremost publishers, Simon and Schuster, but his
literary collaborations with Swami Prabhavananda—which provided elegant
translations of Hinduism's basic texts—reached a vast audience.
The Song of God:
Bhagavad-Gita; How to Know God: The
Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali; and
Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination are the best-known
Prabhavananda-Isherwood collaborations. For many years each title was available
in a mass-market edition by a major publisher, thus making the books widely
available to the general public. "A distinguished literary work" is how Time
magazine characterized the Prabhavananda-Isherwood Bhagavad-Gita which has sold
over one million copies since its 1944 publication. It is the only
Prabhavananda-Isherwood title still available in the mass-market edition; today
the book is still widely used as a college text and—unlike most other Vedanta
books—remains available in general-audience bookstores.
In 1996, the New York Times Book Review created a list of the century's most
influential writers; both Huxley and Isherwood were featured on that list, as
was another world-famous American writer deeply influenced by Vedanta: J.D.
Salinger.
Salinger brings our discussion to America's Eastern seaboard where Swami
Nikhilananda was drawing New York's intellectual crème de la crème.
In the 50s Salinger gave a copy of his best-selling book Franny and Zooey to his
mentor Swami Nikhilananda; within the book was Salinger's inscription—words to
the effect that he "was able to circulate the ideas of Vedanta only through the
medium of such stories as these."14 Salinger's later short stories are
Vedanta-drenched: one story describes Swami Vivekananda as "one of the most
exciting, original, and best-equipped giants of this century." The story's
protagonist further declares: "My personal sympathy for him will never be
outgrown or exhausted as long as I live, mark my words, I would easily give ten
years of my life, possibly more, if I could have shaken his hand or at least
said a brisk, respectful hello to him on some busy street in Calcutta or
elsewhere."15
To continue our New York discussion, we need to backtrack into the 40s to meet
the luminaries that graced Vedanta's intellectual milieu. Heinrich Zimmer,
one of the century's most prominent religious philosophers, was but one of the
stellar personalities attending the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center. Zimmer's
interest in Indian philosophy effectively changed the way that many Westerners
looked upon the East. In his monumental opus, Philosophies of India, Sri
Ramakrishna figures prominently and is frequently cited. Not only is he quoted
frequently, he is quoted at length: some of Sri Ramakrishna's quotations run
into several pages. By the end of the volume, one has read a significant
selection of Sri Ramakrishna's words from Swami Nikhilananda's translation of
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
It is a testament to the intellectual eminence of New York's
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center that a man of Joseph Campbell's rarefied caliber
would spend several years helping Swami Nikhilananda in his translation of the
Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in addition to spending years assisting him in his
four-volume translation of the Upanishads. In fact, as President of the
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York for some years, Campbell was a
pivotal figure in the Center itself.
There are few intellectual giants whose names can truly be called "household
words," but
Joseph Campbell was "the rarest of intellectuals in American life," K.C.
Cole of Newsweek wrote. "A serious thinker… embraced by the popular culture."16
Campbell was considered the world's greatest authority on mythology and
folklore, and throughout his copious writings we find Sri Ramakrishna quoted on
a regular basis. On occasion the quotations are lengthy, sometimes quite brief.
What is important, however, is that no reader of Joseph Campbell can escape Sri
Ramakrishna. Very few twentieth-century thinkers have had the power of
attraction Campbell possessed, thus making his influence more profound than
those who quoted Sri Ramakrishna more often or at greater length.
It should be mentioned at least in passing that other prominent intellectuals
also served to bring Vedanta's ideas into America's public domain: the
historians Arnold Toynbee and Will and Ariel Durant; the sociologist Pitirim
Sorokin; the great psychoanalyst and philosopher Carl Jung; the Trappist
monk and author Thomas Merton. All these luminaries and others that
remain unmentioned contributed to opening the American religious mind to the
ideas that Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda propounded. Most of the
intellectuals mentioned above are now long gone though their imprint on American
culture remains.
Where does that leave us today?
An obvious contrast between today and a few decades ago is that we no longer
have within the Vedanta ranks the social and intellectual powerhouses that we
once had. Sorokins and Huxleys and Campbells, sad to say, do not grow on trees.
This is not to say that we lack extraordinarily intelligent, dedicated
individuals whose contributions are noteworthy in various fields of endeavor.
Our movement is blessed with many of a very high caliber. Yet despite their
brilliance, they are not in the position of spreading ideas through the force of
their prestige and personality.
America is vastly differently—for good or for ill—from the country that nurtured
Vedanta's earlier intellectual czars: whereas Vedanta used to be one of the few
Eastern religions available in America, Vedanta is now one relatively small
group in a flood of many. Since the 60s a deluge of Hindu gurus has come
and gone, some leading such ignoble lives that even the word "guru" carries a
hint of the pejorative. Major news magazines routinely equate
Hinduism with "New
Age" religion—i.e., bereft of intellectual moorings and plain common sense.
Because Hinduism was taken up ignorantly and nonchalantly by many as a 60s fad,
Hindu philosophy has yet to regain its earlier intellectual standing.
Recent years have seen the meteoric rise of Buddhism, a spiritual path
not associated with religious or cultural trappings, thus enabling noncommitted
Christians and Jews to maintain their traditional identity while following
helpful Buddhist spiritual practices. The fact that Vedanta offers equally
priceless wisdom is, unfortunately, unknown. As importantly, Buddhism has
world-renowned spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat
Hanh whose exemplary lives and well-publicized teachings have attracted
millions of Westerners. The Buddhist nun Pema Chödron, famed for her
down-to-earth practicality and humor, has also enjoyed singular success in the
West. Buddhist books, available from any bookstore anywhere in the country and
published by America's largest publishers, have also spurred the growth in
American Buddhism.
By contrast, while several Vedanta centers continue to publish Vedanta books and
import and distribute books published by the Ramakrishna Order, the reality of
today's publishing world dictates that the vast majority of these books will not
reach the general public. They will be available in Vedanta bookstores in
Vedanta centers for Vedanta devotees. Market-driven publishers offer what will
predictably turn a profit; a little-known brand of Hindu philosophy doesn't
place dollar signs in corporate eyes.
Further, today's American bookstores are dependent upon mammoth book
distribution centers for their books; these distributors stock all the major
publishers and most of the medium-sized ones. Small publishing houses (i.e., the
ones that publish Vedanta books) can ill afford the huge discounts that these
mega-distributors demand.
Is Vedanta's view from America bleak then? Not at all. Vedanta's presence
remains vibrant in cities where Vedanta Societies actively participate in
interreligious dialogue as well as in places where they are actively
participating in school, college and university outreach. Still, in a vast,
highly populated country, we're only referring to approximately twenty Vedanta
Societies and another small group of nonaffiliated centers.
How, then, do we spread the ideas that were once spread by the intelligentsia?
Through Vedanta's continuing work with interreligious councils, through
pro-active work with educational facilities, and especially through the great
democratizing force of the Internet.
Can't find any Vedanta books in your local bookstore? No problem—you can find
them on the Internet. And, happily, Vedanta books aren't just listed on Vedanta
sites. They're on the web sites of the world's largest online booksellers:
amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, among others. Out of curiosity I booted up
the amazon.com site to look up Swami Shraddhananda's book Seeing God Everywhere.
Not only was it there, it carried beneath it a glowing review:
An engaging, thought-provoking, spiritual text This book is an especially
enriching, spiritual text. Its message spans all religions and cultures, and
offers thought-provoking insights. Extremely easy to read and understand, you'll
find it difficult to put down. The spiritual exercises at the end of the book
are especially helpful for those seeking to establish a closer relationship to
God.
The review was voluntarily submitted by a person completely unknown to Vedanta;
amazingly, upon inquiry I discovered that the review's author was a Catholic
deacon!
While bookstore sales of Vedanta books are not what they were in previous years,
the online sales have grown tremendously. There's no doubt that this trend will
only increase.
No Vedanta Center within 1000 miles of your home? Not to worry: there are
Vedanta sites online which will provide not only fine reading material but also
a forum where people can submit questions to monastics. One recent inquiry from
South Carolina is as follows:
At church we're studying Swami Prabhavananda's The Eternal Companion … the term
"discrimination" confuses us. What exactly does it mean? Does he mean
discernment between those things that lead to self-realization and those that
don't?
To have a Vedanta book studied in a Christian church in a conservative state
like South Carolina is enough to make one's head spin. But this e-mail in itself
tells what progress Vedanta has made in this country.
There are numerous Internet inquiries requesting information on the Vedanta
Center closest to the person's home and also requests for more information on
Vedanta literature. All in all, the information revolution has had an extremely
positive effect in bringing Vedanta's message to a wider audience.
This only goes to show that where there's a will there's a way—particularly
where God is concerned! We've always heard that the Lord does his own
work; today the work is progressing in ways that would have been inconceivable
to us mortals even a decade ago.
The future, then, seems to bode well. As long as we remain true to Vedanta's
timeless ideals, all we have to do is perform our work as best we can. The rest,
as we can see, the Lord will take care of in his own way and in his own time.
References
1. No Other Name? (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1985), p. 222.
2. Ibid.
3. Vedanta for the West (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1994), p. 108.
4. Pravrajika Prabuddhaprana, Tantine: The Life of Josephine MacLeod (Dakshineswar,
Calcutta: Sri Sarada Math, 1990), p. 203.
5. Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New York: New Directions, 1945),
p. 18.
6. Ibid., p. 26; p. 31.
7. Ibid., pp. 46-48.
8. Ibid., pp. 164-65
9. Letter of Henry Miller to Ursula Bond, June 16, 1962; archives of the Vedanta
Society of Southern California.
10. Hal Bridges, American Mysticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 87.
11. Ibid., p. 74.
12. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1st Harper Colophon ed., 1970 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1944), p.294.
13. Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 26.
14. From a lecture given by Dr. Sumitra Menon in the Santa Barbara Temple, Feb.
24, 1991 on J.D. Salinger and Vedanta.
15. "Hapworth 16, 1924," The New Yorker, June 12, 1965, p. 6. This short story
later appeared in The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, 2
vols., 1974.
16. Thomas Walsh, ed. Contemporary Authors: New Revised Series, 147 vols.
(Detroit: Gale Research, 1990) vol. 28, p. 93.
Copyright
Vedanta Society of Southern California. Reprinted with permission.
