God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (25 page)

Another modern Hindu multiculturalist was Ramakrishna (1836–86), who pushed the unity of all religions beyond theory to practice. Like Roy, Ramakrishna was a Brahmin from Bengal, but his interests ran to mysticism more than social ethics. Ramakrishna began his spiritual life as a Kali devotee. He later had visions of Krishna and Jesus and practiced his own versions of Christianity and Islam. While reason had convinced Roy of the unity of all religions, for Ramakrishna it was experience. He knew all religions were different paths up the same mountain because he had traveled those paths himself and seen with his own eyes that each converges at the same peak.

Ramakrishna’s most famous pupil, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) came to the United States as a representative at the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893. There he spoke against Christian missions and for the unity of religions with a combination of learning and humor (not to mention an elegant Irish brogue picked up at missionary school) that shocked and delighted his American audiences. He also spoke of Hinduism as a world religion deserving of the same respect as Judaism and Christianity. In 1894 in New York City he established the Vedanta Society, which in the early twentieth century was the largest and most influential Hindu organization in the United States.

All of these men were influenced by Hinduism’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy, whose emphasis on the one over the many led them, first, to collapse Hinduism’s many gods into one Brahman and, then, to collapse the world’s many religions into one religion. Their influence can be seen today in best-selling books on religion by Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong.

A second impulse of the Indian Renaissance had a very different vision of India’s religious character. Here the key figure was Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83), who was born into a Brahmin family in Gujarat and raised a Shaivite. Skepticism about the propriety of worshipping the Shiva linga launched him, first, into life as a sadhu and, later, a career as a Hindu reformer—the “Martin Luther of India.”
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Through the Arya Samaj, which he established in Bombay in 1875, he joined Roy and Ramakrishna in championing monotheism. But his distinctive emphasis was on purifying Hinduism by returning to the Vedas. He rejected the epics as myths and scorned popular practices such as puja and pilgrimage as superstitious. Saraswati matters today because of his aggressive nationalism. While Roy and Ramakrishna championed the unity of all religions, and did so in English, Saraswati attacked Christianity and Islam and championed Hindi as the national language.

Hinduism Today

When I was in college and graduate school, my professors told me that Hinduism was a tolerant faith, ever absorbing foreign religious influences rather than seeking to exterminate them. It was this tradition, I was told, that gave us the maxim “Truth is one, the sages call it by different names.” And its greatest exemplar was Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who in the spirit of Roy, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda labored not only for Indian independence but also for a multireligious India of Hindus and Muslims and Christians and more.

In addition to these multiculturalists, however, Hinduism has its militants—heirs not of Gandhi but of Saraswati. Critics call them fundamentalists, and Indian youth now call them “fundos.” They call themselves champions of Hindutva (“Hinduness”) who see India not as a multireligious nation but as a Hindu state that should be governed in the Hindi language and in keeping with Hindu beliefs and practices.

Giving the lie to the observation of American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that “there is no touch of sectarianism” in Hinduism, these Hindu nationalists are sectarian to the core. Like America’s Moral Majority, a largely Protestant group that tried to reach out to Catholics and Jews, Hindutva advocates claim to represent not only Hindus but also Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists. But there is no doubting their opposition both to the secular values of India’s Congress Party and to the Islamic values of India’s Muslim minority, who from the Hindutva perspective are the illegitimate heirs of foreign invaders of the Hindu holy land.

Political Hinduism of this right-wing sort goes back to Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, but it did not become a force in Indian politics until the 1980s. Today this marriage of nationalism and fundamentalism, often advanced in the name of Rama and at the expense of Muslims, Christians, and secularists alike, is represented by groups such as the RSS, or Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (est. 1925), the VHP, or Vishva Hindu Parishad (est. 1964), and the BJP, or Bharatiya Janata Party (est. 1980). The BJP ran India’s central government at the turn of the twenty-first century and remains a major force in Indian politics at both the national and state levels.

Although Hindu nationalism was not manufactured for export, it has found a foothold in both Europe and the United States, notably in some American chapters of the Hindu Students Association. A more militant form of the tradition also took hold in Sri Lanka where Hindu Tamils employed suicide bombers in a decades-long civil war that ravaged this island nation for over a quarter century beginning in 1983. But for the most part Hindus in the diaspora gravitate toward the multicultural impulse of modern Hinduism now associated first and foremost with Gandhi. If we divide contemporary Hindus, as sociologist of religion Prema Kurien has done, into “militant nationalists” and “genteel multiculturalists,” almost all of my Boston University students fall into the latter camp.
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Hindus gained a foothold in the diaspora through organizations such as Vivekananda’s Vedanta Society and the Self-Realization Fellowship of Swami Yogananda, whose
Autobiography of a Yogi
(1946) became a countercultural hit in the 1960s. Their religion first became visible in the West through the charismatic gurus who flocked to Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Today it has set up shop in yoga studies throughout the West. Nonetheless, the heart and soul of Western Hinduism resides in the temples dedicated to Vishnu, Shiva, the Great Goddess, and Ganesh that now punctuate the skylines of almost all European and American cities. In these temples, the ancient beliefs and practices of India continue to push up through the various geological layers we call Hinduism, and devotees continue to call on the gods of their choosing to bring them happiness in this life and release from samsara in the world beyond.

Chapter Five
Buddhism

The Way of Awakening

Buddhism begins with a fairy tale. Unlike
Cinderella
or
Rocky
, however, this is no underdog fantasy of someone who has nothing and gains the whole world. In fact it is just the opposite—a story of someone who has everything and decides to give it all away.

It begins with a prince in a palace and a dim and distant sense that something has gone awry. The prince’s name is Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Shakyamuni (“Sage of the Shakya Clan”). The time is the sixth century
B.C.E.
—the Axial Age of Confucius in China, Cyrus the Great in Persia, and Pythagoras in Greece. The place is Lumbini, the Bethlehem of Buddhism in the foothills of the Himalayas in what is now southern Nepal.

This prince’s mother had died as he was taking his first breaths, so in his bones he knows suffering, but his father sees to it that life in the palace is whisked clean of dissatisfaction. Shortly after Siddhartha was born, a soothsayer had prophesied that he would be great in either politics or religion. His father was religious, but he was a practical man too. Determined to raise a Napoleon rather than a Mother Teresa, he went to great lengths to shield his son from anything that might upset his soul and set him to wandering.

Now a young man, this coddled prince enjoys what by all appearances is a life of champagne and caviar. Like Muhammad and Confucius, he lost a parent as a boy, but he has a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, and a beautiful son. All this beauty, however, cannot stop questions from bubbling up. He starts to ask himself, “How did I get here?” And then he looks at the roads radiating out from his palace and for the first time allows himself to imagine where they might lead.

This future Light of Asia informs his father that he wants to see the real world. His father reluctantly agrees to send him on a tour outside the cozy confines of his sheltered life but orchestrates things as carefully as advanced planners for a prime minister’s visit to Paris. The Champs-Élysées has been swept of homeless people, foreign minstrels, and other unpleasantness. But on this tour the Buddha-to-be sees a sick person. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his life he has been shielded from sickness). His charioteer tells him, “A sick person. Each of us falls ill. You and I alike. No one is exempt from sickness.” On his second tour, orchestrated in even greater detail by his father, Siddhartha sees an old man. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life he has been shielded from old age). His charioteer tells him, “An old person. Each of us gets old. You and I alike. No one is exempt from old age.” On his third tour, Siddhartha sees a corpse. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life he has been shielded from death). His charioteer tells him, “A dead person. Each of us dies. You and I alike. No one is exempt from death.” On his fourth and final tour, Siddhartha sees a wandering holy man. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life, which has included encounters with all sorts of beautiful and wealthy and powerful people, he has never seen such a man). His charioteer tells him, “A sannyasin, a wandering ascetic who has left behind spouse and family and job and home in search of spiritual liberation.”

These four sights bring on the most momentous midlife crisis in world history. Looking at his life though the prism of the suffering of sickness, old age, and death, Siddhartha decides that there must be more to human existence than profit, power, pleasure, and prestige. So at the age of twenty-nine he vows to “go forth from home to homelessness.”
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The next day, in an event now celebrated as the “Great Departure” (and reenacted in ordination ceremonies the world over), Siddhartha allows his spiritual desires to override the duties of filial piety. He says good-bye to his father and wife and son, walks out of his palace one last time, rides to the border of what would have been his vast inheritance, shaves his head, takes off his fine clothes, and puts on the life of a wandering holy man.

In the Western religions, wandering typically arrives as punishment. It is the spanking you get after you eat the apple or kill your brother. But for Siddhartha wandering arrived as opportunity. For years he meandered around North India, studying with various yogis, experimenting with various body austerities, and otherwise searching for a solution to the problem of human suffering. As he whittled his body down to skin and bones—the opposite of the big fat plastic “Buddhas” of Chinatown fame—his renown as an ascetic grew, but his ability to focus on his spiritual goal diminished. The more he disciplined his body, the more often and more desperately it cried out for food and sleep. So he left his teachers and fellow students and decided to strike out on his own. Forging a “Middle Path” between hedonism and asceticism, he vowed to eat and sleep just enough to solve the problem of suffering.

At the age of thirty-five, after six years as a renunciant, he sat cross-legged under a tree in Bodhgaya in North India and vowed not to get up until he had stolen the secret of our everlasting wandering from rebirth to rebirth. Sensing trouble, Mara, the demon of sense pleasures, sent a Bangkok of distractions his way, but the Buddha-to-be would not be stirred by such trivialities. After forty-nine days, awakening came upon him. In one of the great moments in world history, he saw that all things are impermanent and ever changing. He saw how we suffer because we wish the world were otherwise. And through these insights he saw his suffering itself wander away. From that point forward he was the Buddha, which, like the term
Christ
, is a title rather than a proper name. In this case the title means not messiah but “Awakened One.”

After his Great Awakening, the Buddha had a crisis of conscience. He knew that what he had achieved he had achieved alone, by his own effort, on his own merit, and through his own experience. He knew that words fail. So how could he possibly teach what he had learned to others? Wouldn’t any instruction he might offer be misunderstood? How could he speak without disturbing the silence out of which his awakening had come? So this newly minted Buddha considered withdrawing entirely from the world of speech and society. He returned to his itinerant life, wandering in silence for days. He finally decided, however, to try to help others see what he had seen, experience what he had experienced, so that they, too, might escape from “this sorrow-piled mountain-wall of old age, birth, disease, and death.”
²

In a deer park in Sarnath, outside of Varanasi in North India, he found five fellow travelers who had turned their backs on him after he had decided to embark on the Middle Path. “Turning the wheel of dharma,” he delivered to them his first sermon: Buddhism 101. At the heart of this sermon were the Four Noble Truths, which compress the problem, solution, and techniques of Buddhism into this quick-and-easy formula: life is marked by suffering; but suffering has an origin; so it can be eliminated; and the path to the elimination of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. Whether these five holy men were converted by his person or by his words is not known. But after the Buddha gave this pathbreaking sermon, each of them decided to join his
sangha
, or community, and the Buddhist mission was on.

For the next forty-five years, the Buddha wandered around the Indian subcontinent, turning the wheel of dharma and gathering monks and nuns into a motley crew of wandering beggars. Together they bore witness to what has been described as “history’s most dangerous idea”—that human beings can solve the human problem on our own, without recourse to God or divine revelation.
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In this way, Buddhism, the most psychological of the great religions, joined Platonism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Daoism as one of the great innovations of the Axial Age.