Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
UNITED STATES, May 27, 2010: [HPI note: This thought-provoking essay from Philip Goldberg refers to the debate between Aseem Shukla and Deepak Chopra on the Washingon Post, which you can read here .]
Aseem Shukla, in his essay, “The Theft of Yoga,” lamented that the phenomenal popularity of yoga has been achieved at a cost, namely its disconnection from the tradition that gave it birth. “Yoga originated in Hinduism,” he wrote, starting a debate with Deepak Chopra.
None of this is new. About 200 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s greatest homegrown philosopher, read the first translations of Hindu texts to land in Boston Harbor. While he made explicit his debt to Vedic philosophy, he blended those ideas with other ingredients in his Transcendentalist stew, and the individual flavors are not always easy to identify. That kind of adaptation has been going on ever since. The first Indian-born guru to grace our shores was Swami Vivekananda, the star of the landmark Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893. In the face of attacks from Christian leaders, Vivekananda patiently explained and fiercely defended Hinduism. But, when he created an organization to carry on his teachings, he named it the Vedanta Society, not the Hinduism Society. It was an accurate term, since Vedanta was the component of Hinduism that he emphasized, but it was also an expedient one, since it did not carry religious baggage that might cause people to think he was out to convert them. [HPI note: To contextualize those times, it is good to point out that a religion with no goal of converting others was something unknown to Vivekananda’s audience.]
A few decades later, Paramahansa Yogananda made similar choices. He named his organization the Self-Realization Fellowship, not the Hindu Fellowship. Then came the perfect storm of the Sixties, when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (with the help of the Beatles) ushered Transcendental Meditation into the mainstream and convinced scientists to study the practice. His organization was an educational non-profit, not a religious one, and his rendering of Vedanta was called the “Science of Creative Intelligence.”
Like those three seminal figures, virtually every guru and yoga master who came to the West made similar adaptations. They expounded one component of Hinduism or another, but in a universal context. They offered a spiritual science — a science of consciousness, if you will — and not a religion as such. Therefore, Americans used the teachings on their own terms, whether religious or secular.
From the perspective of Hindus who are proud of their great heritage, such choices are unfortunate. Advocates like Dr. Shukla are doing exactly what ought to be done to rehabilitate the image of Hinduism, and I for one hope they succeed. At the same time, we probably would not be having this conversation at all if the influential gurus had not made the choices they did. How many Americans would have taken up meditation or yoga if those practices had been offered to them as Hinduism?