May 19, 2010

WE ARE ALL HINDUS NOW : NEWSWEEK COLUMNIST

Posted by The Himalayan Voice:
[The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names." A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me."]

By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK 

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that's the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity. 
The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names." A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me." Americans are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life"—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of Americans call themselves "spiritual, not religious," according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005. Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American propensity for "the divine-deli-cafeteria religion" as "very much in the spirit of Hinduism. You're not picking and choosing from different religions, because they're all the same," he says. "It isn't about orthodoxy. It's about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great—and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that's great, too." Then there's the question of what happens when you die. Christians traditionally believe that bodies and souls are sacred, that together they comprise the "self," and that at the end of time they will be reunited in the Resurrection. You need both, in other words, and you need them forever. Hindus believe no such thing. At death, the body burns on a pyre, while the spirit—where identity resides—escapes. In reincarnation, central to Hinduism, selves come back to earth again and again in different bodies. So here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we're burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. "I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection," agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard. So let us all say "om."

By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK 
Published Aug 15, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/212155

b) THE CLASH OF THE YOGIS

Do the Hindu roots of yoga matter?

I don't care much for bland spirituality, so at yoga class I generally tune out the prelude, when the teacher reads aloud—as is the custom—an inspirational passage on which to meditate. Recently, though, I was startled to attention when the teacher chose a paragraph on compassion from the Dalai Lama's bestsellerThe Art of Happiness. Hold on a minute, I thought. Isn't the Dalai Lama a Tibetan Buddhist? And isn't yoga a Hindu practice? And haven't Buddhists and Hindus been at war over land and gods for thousands of years? The Dalai Lama may be regarded throughout the world as a holy man, but downward dog is not his expertise.
Sixteen million Americans practice yoga, according toYoga Journal, and in 2008 we spent nearly $6 billion on classes and stretch pants. Yet aside from "om" and the occasional "namaste," Americans rarely acknowledge that yoga is, at its foundation, an ancient Hindu religious practice, the goal of which is to achieve spiritual liberation by joining one's soul to the essence of the divine. In its American version, yoga is a mishmash: Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, 12-step rhetoric, self-help philosophies, cleansing diets, exercise, physical therapy, and massage. Its Hindu roots are obliterated by the modern infatuation with all things Eastern—and by our growing predilection for spiritual practices stripped of the sectarian burdens of religion. Americans' naive but characteristic conflation of Eastern religions isn't new; in 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Bhagavad-Gita (which is Hindu scripture) "the much renowned book of Buddhism." Lately, though, that muddle is less innocent. Some of yoga's best-known—and most entrepreneurial—purveyors concede they've consciously separated Hinduism from yoga to make it more palatable. "The reason I sanitized it is there's a lot of junk in [Hinduism]," explains Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru whose latest book, co-written with Marianne Williamson and Debbie Ford, is The Shadow Effect. "We've got to evolve to a secular spirituality that still addresses our deepest longings … Most religion is culture and mythology. Read any religious text, and there's a lot of nonsense there. Yet the religious experience is beautiful." Generically spiritual yoga may be fine for most Americans—preferable, even, for those who desire the benefits of meditative exercise without any apparent conflict with their own religious beliefs. But for some American Hindus, it amounts to a kind of ethnic cleansing. In The Washington Post's On Faith blog (to which I contribute), the pediatric urologist Aseem Shukla last month tangled with Chopra over the whitewashing of yoga. Shukla, who is also the head of the Hindu American Foundation, believes that if he doesn't help his American-born children feel good about their religion, no one will. And so he says, loudly and often and to anyone who will listen: "Yoga originated in Hinduism. It's disingenuous to say otherwise. A little bit of credit wouldn't be a bad thing, and it would help Hindu Americans feel proud of their heritage." In all religions, heartbreak and enmity lie in this struggle between those who want to unify and transcend, like Chopra, and those who want to protect their tradition's unique identity and character, like Shukla. My friend the Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero has just written a book called God Is Not One, which argues that the good in any religion (e.g., yoga) necessarily comes with the bad (caste systems). By seeing religion as a single, happy universal force, we blind ourselves to tensions of great consequence to individuals and to history. "America," he says, "has this amazing capacity to make everything banal. That's what we do. We make things banal and then we sell them. If you're a Hindu, you see this beautiful, ancient tradition of yoga being turned into this ugly materialistic vehicle for selling clothes. It makes sense to me that you would be upset." But, Prothero points out, Chopra has a point. The American creative, materialistic, pluralistic impulse allows religion here to grow and change, taking on new and unimagined shapes. "You can't stop people from appropriating elements in your religion," Prothero adds. "You can't stop people from using and transforming yoga. But you have to honor and credit the source." Prothero's bottom line is also my own. You can read from the Dalai Lama in yoga class. You can even read from the Sermon on the Mount. But know where yoga came from and respect those origins. Then, when you chant "om," it will resonate not only in the room but down through the ages.

By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK 
Published May 13, 2010
From the magazine issue dated May 31, 2010