God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (53 page)

32
. Analects 1:12.

33
. John Naish, “Why Confucius Matters Now,” Times Online, April 25, 2009, http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article6160664.ece.

34
. Personal interview with John Berthrong, May 27, 2009.

35
. Chenyang Li, ed.,
The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender
(Chicago: Open Court, 2000).

36
. Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary,” http://www.chinarice.org/madmans-diary.pdf.

37
. Personal interview with John Berthrong, May 27, 2009.

38
. Confucius,
Confucian Analects: The Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean
, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1971), 67–68.

39
. Analects 2:11.

40
. Novak,
World’s Wisdom
, 129.

41
.
The Doctrine of the Mean
13, quoted in Tu Wei-ming,
Confucian Thought
, 59. See also Analects 14:28.

42
. Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region,” in his
What Are People For?: Essays
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 85, 78.

Chapter Four: Hinduism: The Way of Devotion

1
. F. Max Müller,
Chips from a German Workshop
(London: Longmans, Green, 1867), 2.300.

2
. “Hindu Demographics,” Hindu American Foundation, http://www.hinduamericanfoundation.org/resources/hinduism_101/hinduism_demographics.

3
. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “Hindooism” back to 1829, more specifically to Henry Barkley Henderson,
The Bengalee: Or, Sketches of Society and Manners in the East
(London: Smith, Elder, 1829), 46. Hinduism scholars typically trace this term to roughly the same period. In
An Introduction to Hinduism
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), Gavin Flood reports that “the ‘ism’ was added to ‘Hindu’ around 1830” (6). But an online search turns up two usages of “Hindooism” (both religiously inflected) in the 1790s. The earliest, a reference to “the superstitions of Hindooism,” occurs in Robert Nares, ed.,
The British Critic
(London: F. and C. Rivington, 1793), 18. The other comes in
The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine
(1798): 516, edited by the famed evangelist George Whitefield. “Hindooism” occurs dozens of times in the first decade of the 1800s, and over a hundred times between 1810 and 1819. Although the gestation of this term has usually been foisted on Orientalists, all four of these publications are religious rather than philological. This term seems to be a coinage not of Orientalists but of Christian missionaries.

4
. Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, June 17, 1845, in Ralph L. Rusk, ed.,
The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, 6 vols., (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), 3:290.

5
. Erlendur Haraldsson, “Popular Psychology, Belief in Life After Death and Reincarnation in the Nordic Countries, Western and Eastern Europe,”
Nordic Psychology
58, no. 2 (2006): 171–80; Humphrey Taylor, “The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans,” Harris Interactive, February 26, 2003, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?pid=359.

6
. Highly regarded books that mistakenly refer to moksha as salvation include Flood,
Introduction to Hinduism
13; Michaels,
Hinduism: Past and Present
, 24; and Carl Olson,
The Many Colors of Hinduism: A Thematic-Historical Introduction
(Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2007), 8. Unfortunately, scholars also refer to sin in the Hindu context, often as a translation for the Sanskrit term
papa
. In
The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty states that she will translate
papa
as “evil” rather than “sin” (7), but she and others use the term
sin
routinely nonetheless. This category is too freighted with Christian theological assumptions about creation, the Fall, and redemption to be usable in this way.

7
. J. A. Dubois,
Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India
(London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), 331.

8
. December 11, 2000. Dozens of other
New Yorker
cartoons explore the humorous possibilities of life as a Hindu holy man. In one, a mountaintop guru tells a backpacker, “You do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around—that’s what it’s all about” (November 22, 1999).

9
. The Brahmanas lie closer to the Vedas and the Aranyakas to the Upanishads. Like the Vedas, the Brahmanas are ritual texts, though their preoccupation is how to do ritual in general rather than how to perform a specific sacrifice. The Aranyakas are far more philosophical, devoting scant attention to the ritual dimension.

10
. Siân Miles, ed.,
Simone Weil: An Anthology
(New York: Grove Press, 2000), 92.

11
. Sunil Sehgal,
Encyclopedia of Hinduism
(New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 1999), 2.477.

12
. Shankara,
Crest-Jewel of Discrimination
, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1978), 41.

13
. Robert E. Van Voorst,
Anthology of Asian Scriptures
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000), 34.

14
. Another story in the Upanishads—from Patrick Olivelle, trans.,
Upanishads
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 46—gives voice to the preference of philosophical Hindus for the one over the many, and to the wider Hindu tendency to see unity in diversity. In the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, a student named Vidagdha Sakalya inquires of the great sage Yajnavalkya about the mathematics of divinity:

“Tell me, Yajnavalkya—how many gods are there?”

“Three and three hundred, and three and three thousand.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

“Thirty-three.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

“Six.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

“Three.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

“Two.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

“One and a half.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

“One.”

And when he is asked what this One is, Yajnavalkya says breath, and Brahman and beyond.

15
. J. N. Fraser and K. B. Marathe,
The Poems of Tukaram
(Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1909), 114–15.

16
. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty,
Shiva: The Erotic Ascetic
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 262-63, 268-69.

17
. For a spirited argument that Tantrism stands at the center of Hindu life rather than its periphery, see David Gordon White,
Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in Its South Asian Contexts
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).

18
. Diana L. Eck,
Dars´an: Seeing the Divine Image in India
, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 3. The centrality of sight in devotional Hinduism, and of
darshan
in puja, is underscored by the way in which an inanimate image of a god is transformed ritually into a living god itself. This happens when the priest either places the eyes (almost always impossibly large) into the statue or paints them onto its face. From this moment onward, the deity is considered to be alive, and in need of round-the-clock attention—waking, washing, clothing, and feeding—from the priest.

19
.
“Sita Sings the Blues,
” Reel 13 Blog, http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/watch-sita-sings-the-blues-online/347/.

20
. “The Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama,” National Theatre, http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=1217.

21
. Mark Twain,
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
(Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1898), chapter 52, Project Gutenberg EBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p6.htm.

22
. This epithet is common. One early source is David A. Curtis, “The Martin Luther of India,”
Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine
4, no. 6 (1878), 657–61.

23
. Prema Kurien, “Mr. President, Why Do You Exclude Us from Your Prayers?: Hindus Challenge American Pluralism,” in Prothero,
Nation of Religions
, 119–38.

Chapter Five: Buddhism: The Way of Awakening

1
.
Majjhima-nikaya,
quoted in Walpola Rahula,
What the Buddha Taught
(New York: Grove Press, 1974), 109.

2
. Jack Kerouac,
Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha
(New York: Viking, 2008), 58.