The modern colonial era is associated with the “westernization” of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Less frequently noticed has been traffic in the other direction, as Eastern, and especially Indian, religious culture penetrated Europe and the Americas. The Transcendentalist writers of early nineteenth-century New England warmly welcomed the translations of Hindu texts that derived from British scholars in colonial India. At his cabin on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau remarked, “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous … philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita … in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.”31 Since then, many Americans and Europeans have embraced elements of the universal and inclusive Hindu philosophical system known as Vedanta, and far more have practiced the physical and mental disciplines of yoga, both of which derive from ancient India.

A seminal moment in the coming of Indian spirituality to the United States occurred in Chicago during September 1893. The occasion was the World’s Parliament of Religions, an interfaith gathering that drew representatives from many of the world’s religious traditions. The man who made the most vivid impression at the conference was a handsome thirty-year-old Hindu monk known as Swami Vivekananda. Appearing in an orange robe and a yellow turban and speaking fluent and eloquent English, he had only recently arrived from India, where he had received an excellent European education as well as a deep immersion in Hindu philosophy and practice.

In his initial speech to the parliament on its opening day, Vivekananda began by addressing his audience as “sisters and brothers of America.” The intimacy of his greeting alone prompted prolonged applause. “I am proud,” he continued, “to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance…. We accept all religions as true.” He concluded with a plea that the parliament might mark the end of sectarianism, fanaticism, and persecution “between persons wending their way to the same goal.”

In further speeches at the parliament and in subsequent travels around the country, Vivekananda expressed the major themes of his modernized Vedanta outlook: that all human beings possess a divine nature; that awakening to that nature can be pursued through a variety of paths; and that spiritual practice and realization are far more important than dogma or doctrine. He argued that the disciplines of the mind and body that derived from Hindu tradition represented a psychological, experimental, and almost scientific approach to spiritual development and certainly did not require “conversion” to an alien faith. On occasion, he was sharply critical of Christian missionaries for their emphasis on conversion. “The people of India have more than religion enough,” he declared. “What they want is bread.” He described England as “the most prosperous Christian nation in the world with her foot on the neck of 250 million Asiatics.”

Vivekananda emerged from the parliament a sensation and a celebrity, widely acclaimed but also widely criticized. His critique of Christian missionaries offended many. More conservative Christians objected to his assertion of the equality of all religious traditions. “We believe that Christianity is to supplant all other religions,” declared the leading organizer of the parliament.

Vivekananda’s time in the United States represented India speaking back to the West. After a century of European missionary activity and colonial rule in his country, he was declaring that India could offer spiritual support to a Western world mired in materialism and militarism. He proclaimed, “The whole of the Western world is a volcano which may burst tomorrow…. Now is the time to work so that India’s spiritual ideas may penetrate deep into the West.”32

And so he established a number of Vedanta Societies, some of which have persisted to the present day. In exposing Americans to Indian spirituality, Vivekananda’s followers did not seek converts, but invited participants to apply Vedanta principles and practices within their own religious traditions. They also spoke about Jesus with great respect and displayed his image along with that of the Buddha and various Hindu sacred figures. In the early twentieth century, these Vedanta centers attracted a modest following among Americans who were disillusioned with the superficiality of modern life as well as with the rigidity of Christian doctrine and the many divisions and conflicts among Christian churches. In the 1960s and later, interest in Eastern religion exploded in the West as hundreds of Indian teachers arrived, many of them bearing the same universal message that Vivekananda had presented in Chicago. The growing numbers of Americans who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” are following in the path of that orange-robed monk.

Question: What accounts for the appeal of Vivekananda’s message, and what accounts for opposition to it?