Rajiv Malhotra2013-05-23T10:00:24-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=rajiv-malhotraCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rajiv MalhotraGood old fashioned elbow grease.Tibetan Uprising Day Reminds Ustag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28432052013-03-12T09:06:08-04:002013-05-12T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/
Even as desperate self-immolations among Tibetans still living in Tibet have increased in the past few years, there seem to be no signs whatsoever of China relenting on its cultural genocide there. At a time when movements like the Arab Spring get mainstream media attention, it is unfortunate that the struggle of the Tibetans seems to be slipping from public consciousness.
Unlike the hot spots of the Middle East, Tibet lacks a natural resource like oil that powerful nations would fight over. The peaceful nature of the Tibetan struggle, unlike agitations in the Islamic world, has certainly generated goodwill for the Tibetans. But since they do not pose a security threat to the rest of the world as exporters of terror or nukes, it seems safe to simply look the other way. China's growing clout and persistence has gradually worn down the uprising, and Tibetans' support base among Western leaders is muted. Tragically, today's youth in the West seem generally less passionate to get involved than the youth of the 60s.
One wonders what lies in store for this movement. With the Dalai Lama aging, the Chinese know that time is on their side and are willing to wait it out. Without a new Tibetan leader of comparable charisma, they hope to accentuate internal clashes among rival Tibetan groups, offer carrots to some ambitious leaders, and use classic divide-and-conquer tactics to finish off the movement. Meanwhile, in Tibet, the land and sacred geography are being rapidly turned into secular tourist attractions under the ultimate control of the communists, and repopulated by the ethnic Han Chinese. Tibetan culture is becoming transformed by China, and "digested" into Mandarin identity.
While this should be a concern for the entire world, India and the U.S. should worry the most. India's mightiest rivers (Brahmaputra, Ganga and Indus) all originate in Tibet, and China has started an ambitious project of rapidly building at least 20 hydroelectric dams in Tibet, each with the potential to divert water away from India and into China. Quenching China's thirst will come at the expense of India where droughts will result in many areas. I had predicted this scenario many years ago before it was fashionable to consider it, but only recently has this suddenly become a hot topic.
Tibet is also the military base for China's nuclear arsenal aimed at India, giving China the ability to reach India within minutes from launch. Tibet is the route through which the China-Pakistan links are transporting military and other goods through modern highways, railroads and pipelines. This enables China to gain access to the Indian Ocean ports that are located in Pakistan, and Pakistan gets instant assistance from China in any conflict with India. Indeed, if Tibet could be neutral, autonomous and demilitarized, the India/Pakistan security situation would have the potential to be more easily resolved as a bilateral rather than trilateral one.
For the United States, China is its main rival and competitor in all spheres, a fact known and understood to both. While China has never hid its intentions, the U.S. has lacked a determined plan to address this. Tibet is China's path for the critical trade routes of the Indian Ocean, the Central Asian oil and gas reserves, and the rich ASEAN countries to the south.
As an example of its myopic foreign policy, the U.S. isolated Myanmar for many years on the grounds of human rights violations, which hurt mostly the poor people of Myanmar rather than the military junta. This played right into the hands of the Chinese. Had the improvement of human rights been the honest motive, the U.S. would have adopted similar measures against China where the human rights violations have been on a far larger scale. Myanmar was simply an easy target to get rid of American guilt and to show muscle. Thus China got a decade of monopoly in Myanmar which it used to solidify long term strategic control over Myanmar's resources and privileged access routes to the Indian Ocean. Tibet is again strategically located to make this possible.
The Tibetans themselves can also do much more than they have. For one thing, they must urgently initiate the rise of a new face on the world stage under the mentoring of the Dalai Lama. The Karmapa is one such young, charismatic leader with a deep grounding in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and sharp intellect. Unfortunately, he remains largely confined in India. According to some sources, the Indian government is unsure if he a Chinese plant -- like a Manchurian Candidate. This matter needs to get urgently resolved rather than after the Dalai Lama is gone from the scene. It is best to let the next generation of leadership become active internationally, and be tested in all respects while the Dalai Lama is able to mentor and watch over the transition.
We should not count on a change of heart among the next generation of Chinese. For China has done a good job in its education system to indoctrinate its youth to view Tibet as an integral part of China, and to demonize the independence movement as a conspiracy by hostile foreign powers with the top Tibetan leaders as co-conspirators.
The odds against Tibet are indeed heavy on such a loaded chessboard. But many other struggles also seemed hopeless in the past. I wish the Tibetan movement finds new champions among the youth of all countries.]]>The Hijacking of Whartontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28144212013-03-07T15:25:32-05:002013-05-07T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/Wharton to un-invite Narendra Modi to the Wharton India Economic Forum shows that the ideals, ethics and independence of Wharton Business School are getting hijacked.
Modi is a controversial political leader in India, who nonetheless has had enormous success in the economic and social development of his state of Gujarat. He was invited be a keynote speaker at the prestigious annual student-run event on business opportunities in India. But suddenly the university pulled the plug on the invitation, under pressure from ideologues that are far removed from the world of business, and are hostile to free enterprise and globalization which is the bread and butter of Wharton's program.
I am no fan (or opponent) of Modi. What concerns me is the violation of important principles and due process. Such intrusions are reminiscent of the way the British East India Company operated in Indian affairs, supporting one Indian raja (ruler) against another, often citing "human rights violations" as its excuse. It was through these strategic interventions, and not through a conventional military invasion, that they ended up stitching together the world's biggest colonial empire.
Today, India has a functioning democracy that has elected Modi three times, as well as a legal system whose Supreme Court set up a special investigation team into the allegations against Modi. The Supreme Court investigation resulted in no charges being filed against him. Yet, these findings are apparently insufficient for Wharton, which, citing the concerns of three Indian professors, withdrew Modi's invitation. Ironically, these Indian professors specialize in scholarship criticizing colonialism, not realizing that now they are serving similar American policies on interventions in India. They are extreme leftists when it comes to protesting against imperialist interventions in places like Iraq, Libya, Syria and other failed states. But they switch sides when it comes to India, and play the same role for America in undermining India's sovereignty as the sepoys did. (The sepoys were Indian soldiers serving the British army to fight against other Indians.)
Prior to this episode, American business schools had been largely free of such politicking, had enjoyed autonomy within their universities and were viewed as good revenue generators for the universities. The jealous humanities departments often hold business schools in mild contempt, trivializing their pragmatic approach as "unintellectual." This distance between business schools and humanities worked out well for India. Business school students have been spared the brainwashing by humanities discourse that routinely paints India as a basket case ridden with caste, cows, dowry, slums and other scourges, ripe for rescue by Western interventions. Rather, the research emanating from business schools, authored by a young breed of Indian professors, has focused on the strengths and potentials of Indian society. This is why Wharton's Modi saga signals a potential loss of autonomy and political neutrality for business education in America.
Though American universities are amongst the best in the world, there also exist many compromised academics that promulgate theories on India which are racist, colonial and downright inimical to India's interests. Many naïve Indian donors have unwittingly sponsored such scholars. My earlier book, Invading the Sacred, analyzed how certain professors at top American schools view Indian culture as oppressive and destructive, using outmoded theories; my next book, Breaking India, exposed the nexuses between such academics and civic groups that are promoting separatist identities and schisms in India. I analyze the long-term trend that I have called "breaking India," in which many colonized Indian intellectuals are funded to dish out divisive and biased materials on India. Such meta-narratives can put Indian business leaders on the defensive in their international negotiations.
Wharton should not have capitulated to political petitions from persons outside of the business world. It ought to have turned this into an opportunity to debate Modi, and confront him on the controversies that swirl around him. That would have been true to the spirit of intellectual freedom. Universities are not known to shy away from controversial figures, and students are supposed to learn multiple sides of complex issues. This was meant to be a business students' forum that has been organized entirely by students for several years. Most of them will have careers involving non-Western countries with controversial leaders and circumstances. They are better off being taught to think for themselves rather than running away from complexity or letting others make decisions for them.
It is important that Indians must ask the following questions: Why did Wharton's decision-makers not rely on Indian democracy and India's legal system as the most important criteria for an Indian leader's legitimacy? Are the future business leaders being taught the lesson of succumbing to political pressure without doing thorough due diligence of their own? Have the professors behind the ambush done a disservice to American businesses by snubbing the chief minister of a state that is the most sought after destination by multinationals for their Indian manufacturing hubs? Modi's long list of endorsements from global business leaders seems to have been overruled easily by three angry professors. Why did their opinions prevail over all others, when their main competence is in English and postcolonial theory, not business?
Importantly, Modi's popularity is largely due to the fact that businesses consistently rate him the most corruption-free leader in India. The same cannot be said of many other leaders who've graced the auditoriums of Wharton in previous years, and who will be honored at this year's event. Indeed, many Indians have speculated that it is his refusal to be bought off by vested interests that makes him a target of the political-intellectual mafia.
If Wharton wishes to boycott Indian leaders and parties that have well-established roles in prior communal violence, it must undertake a systematic analysis of the hard facts, namely, that many Indian leaders who enjoy great respect in U.S. have unclean hands in this regard.
American business school students and their alumni have an opportunity to refashion the discourse on India. Business schools generally have been friendly to Indian students. Wharton, for example, is known to be the "brownest of the ivies" and admits hundreds of Indians every year. But business schools exist within the "ecosystem" of other disciplines, and these are likely to exert their ideological agendas.
For Indian alumni and students, this event should be a wake-up call to lead rather than follow the agenda on India. Indians have enough clout in business circles to not take this quietly. Otherwise be prepared for lobbying to impose U.S. trade sanctions on the grounds of human rights violations! That is a card that U.S. leaders periodically like to show Indian leaders. Unlike the Chinese who thumb their noses, and give their own reports of US human rights violations back to the Americans, Indian leaders have not shown the spine when pressured.
This unfortunate episode isn't good for overall U.S.-India relations and the perception of the United States in India. In recent opinion polls in India, Modi emerged as a top choice for the next prime minister. Americans should introspect that they applaud democracy on the one hand, and undermine fair democratic outcomes on the other. Meanwhile, the Indian sepoys are gleefully playing a double role -- presenting themselves as representatives of India while undermining it; and facilitating American interventions in India while claiming to be experts on postcolonial studies.]]>Response to WSJ Op-Ed Calling For Bible Education In Public Schoolstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27925522013-03-03T02:35:48-05:002013-05-02T05:12:02-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/Public Schools Should Teach the Bible: Westerners cannot be considered literate without a basic knowledge of this foundational text. While I certainly support the idea that students should be better informed about world religions, I vehemently oppose giving special preference to the Bible over other faiths.
The WSJ op-ed's argument is that America is a Western nation with the Bible as its foundation. This is a racist assumption which ignores that for most of its 10,000 year history America was unknown to Europeans and was inhabited by the Native Americans, originally from Asia. OK, I agree that today we are where we are, and must deal with the practical reality that Europeans dominated this land for the past few centuries after "emptying" it of the natives -- a euphemism for getting rid of them by various means. But the very same pragmatic view also suggests that by 2050, whites (i.e. people of European or "Western" descent) will be less than half the population of America. Going forward, we are not going to be a Eurocentric nation, but a microcosm of the world's diverse peoples. The premise of being a Western nation must be re-examined.
The majority of the world's population is neither European nor Christian. In a global society, our future generations must be better equipped to deal with the diverse religions and cultures of all nations abroad and of all citizens at home. Inevitably, a white kid in the next generation will have "non-Westerners" in her life -- as classmates, doctors, colleagues at work, bosses, business suppliers, customers, or even as spouse. "Western" chauvinism is rapidly becoming obsolete, being often a politically correct substitute for "white Christian" supremacy.
A better idea is to teach the world's great classics that ought to be selected for their value as sources of ideas and inspiration. Why not also teach Patanjali's yoga text, Buddha's and Gandhi's philosophies, the world's first and still most comprehensive grammar (of Sanskrit) written by Panini prior to the time of Jesus, and a whole library of such great non-Western texts. Aryabhatta's famous mathematics and astronomy influenced later European developments. Kautilya's political thought anticipated Machiavelli and other Europeans by more than a millennium. Bharata's multi-volume natya-shastra must be appreciated alongside the Greek writings on aesthetics.
T.S. Eliot, one of America's foremost thinkers, was a Sanskrit scholar all his life, and remarked that compared to the Sanskrit classics the greatest Western philosophers "look like schoolboys." Indeed, the library of major works from India alone is far greater than the Greek and Roman classics combined, and one must add to this the classics of other civilizations such as China. My point is that we must raise kids to be world citizens with a broad foundation of the greatest ideas from every corner.
The WSJ op-ed is also plain wrong in citing that the movie Star Wars was inspired by the Bible. In fact, Infinity Foundation sponsored a research book in the 1990s that traced Ramayana (a Hindu text) as the source which had inspired George Lucas. Lucas acknowledges that he got his ideas from Joseph Campbell who had interpreted Indian narratives as a student of Sanskrit and Hinduism. The book that came out of this project, titled, The Jedi in the Lotus, gives details of how various characters and stories from Ramayana were incorporated into Star Wars.
The authors of the WSJ op-ed want to play the game: "XYZ would not have existed in America without the influence of the Bible." But by the same token, I would point out that Christopher Columbus would not have found America had he not been sent by Queen Isabella of Spain to look for a sea route to India. India and China were known as the centers of world manufacturing and as the source of goods that were highly sought after in Europe. But once the Ottoman Empire captured the land routes from Asia to Europe, these Asian goods became very scarce in Europe. Queen Isabella invested in a risky venture with a huge potential payoff - finding a sea route to import Indian goods and thereby bypassing the Ottomans. Thus, India is the reason for the existence of what later became the United States of America. Certainly, this bit of history should be taught in every American school.]]>Dharma and the new Popetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27556832013-02-24T22:20:02-05:002013-04-26T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/
Specifically, it would be a watershed event if the new pope would reorient the Church's policy towards other faiths, and implement this change in the structure and practice of the Church.
Thus far, the most generous official posture of the Vatican towards non-Christians has been laid down in the "Lumen Gentium," a doctrinal statement emerging from the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). This document, now part of the official teaching of the Church, makes a rather grudging and highly qualified concession to other faiths. It says that God is the Savior who wills that all men be saved, and then it makes the following patronizing statement: "Those also can attain to salvation who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience."
This statement has not improved interfaith relations on the ground, for three reasons. Firstly, Lumen Gentium does not recognize non-Abrahamic faiths such as Hinduism to be worthy of respect as equals; it merely recognizes that all men as individuals do have conscience. Also, it presupposes the Christian view that the human condition requires "salvation."
Secondly, the teachings of the Second Vatican Council suffered a big setback when Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict) issued an updated doctrine called "Dominus Jesus." This edict clarified that the "truth of other religions" was limited compared to Catholicism, and no others could be considered on par with it. This rejection of genuine pluralism implies that other faiths can help prepare a person up to a point only, while the Church alone can fully implement religious truth, its doctrines taking precedence over all others wherever there is discrepancy. This posture allows many churchmen to speak from both sides of their mouths. It means that other faiths' legitimacy depends on the extent to which they can be mapped onto Catholic dogma about the nature of the human problem ("sin") and the nature of the solution ("salvation through Jesus"). (See my earlier blog, "Tolerance isn't good enough.")
Thirdly, there is no Church mandate or structure in place that would allow for such a significant change of attitude. Such a shift would have to entail, among other things, the denunciation of aggressive and manipulative missionizing of the sort that tells people they are "going to hell" if they are not Christians. (According to many Catholic views, some of them still held, all one billion Hindus and Buddhists -- yes, even Gandhi and the Buddha and all the dharma saints and sadhus, parents, ancestors and children -- have followed a "false" faith, the consequence of which is eternal damnation in hell's inferno.) The new pope should reject the right and competence of any religious body to pass such sweeping judgment on other faiths.
The theological basis for the dramatic change I seek would lie in directly addressing the problem to which my work repeatedly calls attention: the "history centrism" which leads the Abrahamic religions to claim that we can resolve the human condition only by following the lineage of prophets arising from the Middle East. All other teachings and practices are required to get reconciled with this special and peculiar history. By contrast, the dharmic traditions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism -- do not rely on history in the same absolutist and exclusive way. This dharmic flexibility has made a fundamental pluralism possible which cannot occur within the constraints of history centrism, at least as understood so far. (See my book, Being Different, for a detailed explanation and comparison of Abrahamic history centrism and dharmic approaches.)
While I recognize that the centrality of revelation through history is a core value in the Abrahamic faiths, I would point out that not only does it cause problems for non-Abrahamic faiths, but among the Abrahamic traditions as well. Their respective rival claims cannot be reconciled as long as they cling to a literal account of the Middle Eastern past, an insistence that this past is absolutely determinative of religious truth.
This is a very serious and complex conversation that needs to start in order to bring a new level of interfaith collaboration, one that moves beyond rivalry and platitudes. The new pope could champion such a conversation. What I would like to see is that the Catholic Church advance its ideas towards what may be considered as Vatican III, rather than regress backwards and retreat from the beginning that was made in Vatican II and slide into the doctrine of Dominus Jesus.
The next pope will need to have not only the skills of a corporate turnaround executive who can implement deep administrative reform, but also those of a "big thinker" -- someone with theological vision, in-depth appreciation of other faiths, and the courage to re-examine long held attitudes in his Church.
In my view, such a person will not be identified on the basis of the identity politics and ethnicity issues that the media is currently promoting. As an Indian, I am by convention a "person of color," yet it matters not whether the new pope is black, brown, white, red or yellow of skin. What does matter is that he should undertake house cleaning on such issues as punishing sex abusers and corrupt churchmen, and bringing diversity of theological perspective more than diversity of ethnic identity.
Of course, I support the recent galvanization of victims' groups, concerned citizens and the legal community to demand accountability for the notoriously opaque Church governance. It is good that individuals with purportedly divinely ordained authority are finally being taken to task by ordinary humans seeking dignity and reason. But I am disappointed that the demands have focused on internal and administrative changes only.
If the Vatican would drop claims of exclusivity over religious truth, and reexamine dogmas such as the Nicene Creed, it would pressure other denominations of Christianity to follow suit. The Vatican, after all, is the single largest corporate institution of any religion in the world. The moral pressure on others would be huge if the Pope were to champion a new world order among all faiths in earnest, and not as a gimmick to increase his own flock. Once Christendom becomes genuinely pluralistic, Islam and other exclusivist religions would be under pressure to follow suit. The leader of the Catholic Church can thus change the world.
Being realistic, however, I do not expect to see a Gorbachev-like new pope who would challenge the Vatican as radically as Gorbachev challenged the Soviet empire. But let this historic opportunity not get lost. The conversation must begin.
If anyone questions the propriety of my raising this issue on the grounds that I am an outsider to the Catholic Church, let me simply say that as a world citizen I am a stakeholder in the outcome of this process. I do not think the Vatican can continue to operate with respect and legitimacy if it fails to attend to voices such as mine.]]>What Indian Americans Can Learn During Black History Monthtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26331462013-02-08T11:49:22-05:002013-04-10T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/
Gandhi's non-violent struggle later inspired the young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who studied Gandhi's civil disobedience approach known as satyagraha, and visited India in 1959 for a month. The details of this trip are memorably recounted in his essay, "My trip to the land of Gandhi", published in Ebony magazine in 1959. Martin Luther King Jr. had this to say about the reception he received:
"Since our pictures were in the newspapers very often it was not unusual for us to be recognized by crowds in public places and on public conveyances [...] Virtually every door was open to us. We had hundreds of invitations that limited time did not allow us to accept. We were looked upon as brothers with the color of our skins as something of an asset. But the strongest bond of fraternity was the common cause of minority and colonial peoples in America, Africa and Asia struggling to throw off racialism and imperialism".
The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., too, has had recurring contact with India in all the years of his active career. In one trip he spent six months in India prior to the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.
Recently, in 2008, on the occasion of Gandhi's 60th death anniversary, he delivered the memorial lecture in New Delhi where he remarked, "One can argue that Mahatma Gandhi, known as Bapu (father) to his compatriots, was the spiritual godfather of these world-class figures (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela) who changed the world."
Today, as Indian Americans have become established successfully in their newly adopted country, it is easy to forget the importance of these bonds. We must remember that the 1965 Immigration & Nationality Act which opened the door for large numbers of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, was enacted against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the changes in attitude that it created. This reversed the previous system that was designed to maintain the European racial composition of the United States.
Immigrants from India tended to be well-educated, middle-class professionals seeking prosperity, and they hit the ground running to seize the opportunities. Because most Indian Americans arrived after the Civil Rights Act, they did not experience the indignities suffered by African Americans, and because they belonged to the post-Independence generation of India, they hadn't experienced life under colonial rule either. Professional success came relatively quickly to many Indians and this dulled the impetus to appreciate the benefits of a strong collective identity.
The long list of successful Indian Americans is impressive indeed, but it has made many too self-centered and single-minded in economic pursuits. Success has led to the myth that "becoming American" makes a collective identity irrelevant. Few Indian leaders have studied the history of immigration and identity formation of other minorities in America. They are confused about what the hyphenated identity as "Indian-Americans" means, and what their unique American journey and cultural background could contribute to the fabric of this country.
The recent unceremonious dismissal of Citigroup CEO, Vikram Pandit, despite his stellar record, should cause Indian Americans to do some soul searching. Sadly, Pandit found himself without allies on his own board of directors to defend him as one of their own. In fact, none of the board members was close enough to him to even give a hint that he was about to get fired. When he arrived at the fateful board meeting, he had no clue of what was in store for him.
Moreover, this shocking episode went un-scrutinized by our community that feels uncomfortable addressing its vulnerability for being "different." Individual success, based solely on merit, has surely taken us a long way in America. The playing field is level enough to advance up to a point, but without the anchor and security of a collective voice, high-achieving Indians will remain the solitary outsiders, easy to bring down.
What does all this have to do with African Americans, one might wonder? My response is that they have deep memory and understanding of building community organizations in America. Black churches have historically played a strategic role in building a positive selfhood and collective consciousness, and today there are numerous African-American civic organizations with depth and maturity to secure their position. Unlike the case of Indian immigrants, theirs has not been a quick-success journey, but a long, hard one with many valuable lessons learned along the way.
The Reconstruction era after the emancipation of slaves had offered many lessons to African Americans. Ostensibly, it was to be a period when blacks and whites would together rebuild the South, share political power and rehabilitate the former slaves. Indeed, many blacks attained prominent positions, and two blacks were elected as senators. So they felt little need to build separate institutions, imagining that the American melting pot would suffice. The advances made during the Reconstruction, however, proved to be short lived. Soon there was a backlash against blacks and the nation entered the era of Jim Crow laws and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Freedom from slavery did not mean that whites accepted blacks as true equals in jobs and power. Equality had its limits, especially at times when whites faced economic distress.
It was after this experience that a new kind of African-American leadership emerged with a focus on building a resilient, independent identity with its own institutions. Unified action was encouraged. This groundwork ultimately led to the American Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, just as Gandhi's struggle took nearly half a century of strenuous work before culminating in India's independence. The African-American experience shows us that there is no substitute for grassroots community building and activism, an endeavor that Indian Americans have barely begun. Whether African Americans, Jewish Americans, Hispanic Americans or Muslim Americans, the importance of investing in robust civic organizations based on a solid definition of one's distinct identity has been indispensable in America.
Without such bottom-up community building, we can expect to see more Vikram Pandits, easily booted out. Or, as I wrote in my blog last week, there will be more Bobby Jindals willing to whitewash their ethnicity in order to get ahead. African Americans provide the experience we need for building a distinct identity in this country. Dr. King said it best: "The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community."]]>The Whitewashing of Bobby Jindaltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25887002013-01-31T09:57:32-05:002013-04-02T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/
A likely presidential contender in 2016, Jindal played his card as a person of color. Referring to the string of offensive remarks and gaffes made by Republicans against women, minorities and the middle class, Jindal declared: "We've got to stop being the stupid party". Neglecting people of color was a big reason for losing elections, he claimed, implicitly positioning himself as the solution. But does Jindal truly speak for any community of color, or is this just another round of creative political opportunism? Most Indian-Americans have been dismayed to see that he has done nothing for our community, while soliciting us for campaign funds. He had morphed at an early age into exactly the kind of candidate that the people of his southern, conservative state would elect.
When minorities in America break racial, ethnic or religious barriers it is assumed that they pave the way for future generations. Their communities celebrate their victories, believing that they too will be the beneficiaries of those accomplishments. In the case of Jindal, however, it's dawned on our community that it is we who are being "stupid" for supporting him. For one, Jindal never loses an opportunity to downplay and deny his Indian and Hindu roots, unlike African-Americans or Hispanics who upon entering powerful positions remain fully anchored to their respective communities, crediting those communities for the nurturing they provided. It is indeed amazing that many Indian-Americans continue to applaud and support Jindal, imagining that he opens doors for us.
My blog last week talked about the way many Indians in the West allay their "difference anxiety" (as minorities) by assuming a "whitewashed" identity where differences are minimized. America's history is the story of new waves of immigrants struggling to enter whiteness, which denotes not race alone but the status of full-fledged insiders in the power structure. The definition of who is white has changed over time. The Irish, Poles, Greeks, Italians and Jews "became white" after much struggle.
Whiteness may have expanded in scope over time, but rejects those, like Hindu-Americans who fall outside the Judeo-Christian religious group. Can the Hindu-American remain a Hindu and "become white"? To address this question, Khyati Joshi's book, "New roots in America's Sacred Ground", provides empirical data to prove that there is religious bias facing Indian-Americans on account of being Hindu. In other words, Hinduism is seen by most Americans as a marker of non-white ethnicity. This should be enough impetus for Indian-Americans (the vast majority of whom are Hindu) to claim a separate identity that is distinct, not white or black, not Judeo-Christian, and yet wholly American.
The example of Jindal demonstrates the pressure to capitulate for the sake of political ambition. Jindal couldn't change his color, but he converted his religion to become less different from the dominant white Christians of his party. His personal narrative amplifies his conversion to Roman Catholicism, even though he was raised Hindu by immigrant parents who were very active leaders in the local Hindu temple in Louisiana. He feels no qualms in making statements hurtful to the sentiments of the community from which he derives his "minority" card. In a piece some years ago, he said when asked about his conversion: "the motivation behind my conversion, however, was my belief in one, objectively true faith (Christianity). If Christianity is merely one of many equally valid religions, then the sacrifices I made, including the loss of my family's peace, were senseless". Presumably the conversion of his Hindu Punjabi wife to Roman Catholicism some years later occurred by her having coincidentally the exact same epiphany as he did.
To those of us Indian-Americans who are unwilling to obliterate our identity and get "digested" into the whitestream, Jindal is no trailblazer. He does not speak for us and merely uses his Indian-American status to gain leverage with Republicans who must now present a more inclusive face in order to remain relevant. His life underscores the fact that America has a long way to go before Indians and Hindus can project openly and without negative consequences the full range of their cultural and religious identity.
Carving a distinct non-white Indian identity is also hampered by the trajectory followed by many Indian-Americans in the humanities, who prove their competence by promoting mainly European epistemological categories which nowadays means "theories" of culture, textual analysis, etc. that have been accepted by the Anglo-American academy as a part of the "canon of theories" in use. The Hindu equivalent of such theories would be the vast and sophisticated range of "siddhantas". But these are simply ignored in modern/postmodern studies, trivially dismissed, or mapped/co-opted into trendy new theories owned by Western experts or their whitened Indian followers. This new kind of colonization is being celebrated as "theory power." I call it epistemic arrogance. Harvard University's Homi Bhabha is a role model hoisted by the American establishment for young Indian-Americans in English Departments and Postcolonial Studies to emulate. He has proven himself as having the "white gaze". This is the liberal path to becoming white, just as Christianizing was Bobby Jindal's biblical path to whiteness. One may think of these paths as left-wing and right-wing whiteness, respectively.
At the height of the Jim Crow era, African-Americans saw in their midst, the phenomenon of "passing", where lighter skinned blacks would assume a semi-white racial identity in order to avoid the restrictions and prejudices of a segregated South. "Passing" was viewed as offensive, an attempt by some blacks to take the short-cut to racial parity rather than pitch in and do the hard work of achieving equality for the entire community including those unable and unwilling to "pass." In 2013, Bobby Jindal doesn't need to scrub off his color. Converting his religion, accent, ideologies and loyalties has sufficed. His brown skin merely positions him to take advantage of America's changing demographics. Jindal shows that in America, Hindu-Americans continue to feel the pressure to pass.]]>Difference With Mutual Respect: A New Kind of Hindu-Christian Dialoguetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11655892011-12-27T13:14:46-05:002012-02-26T05:12:01-05:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/earlier blog, I introduced the concept of mutual respect and why it is superior to the patronizing notion of "tolerance" that is typically celebrated at interfaith events. My recent book, "Being Different" (Harpercollins, 2011), is entirely about appreciating how traditions differ from one another rather than seeing them as the same. In parallel with these works, I have been in conversations and debates with numerous thinkers of traditions other than my own.
One such dialogue has been with Father Francis Clooney, a noted Jesuit theologian and a leading professor of Religion at Harvard. Clooney not only took a good deal of time in 2010 to read through my entire manuscript and write me his useful comments, he and I have also responded to each others public talks over the years and argued online. There have been agreements and disagreements, but always with mutual respect. I wish to reflect on how this experience relates to my overall approach to interfaith dialogues.
Chapter one of my book is titled "The Audacity of Difference," and it cites numerous examples to show that most religious leaders feel more comfortable publicly taking the position that various traditions are the same as each other (even though in private teachings to their followers they emphasize their own side's distinct advantages). I coined the term "difference anxiety" to refer to the anxiety that one is different from the other -- be it in gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion or whatever else. The opposite of difference anxiety is difference with mutual respect, the posture I advocate for dialogue.
This is not merely a shift in public rhetoric, but requires cultivating comfort with the infinitude of differences built into the fabric of the cosmos. The rest of my book explains several philosophical foundations of the differences between the dharmic traditions (an umbrella term for Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism) and the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
There are multiple audiences I wish to debate using this book, including those Hindu gurus who preach that all religions are the same, and many westerners who adopt an assortment of eastern spiritual practices in combination with their own Judeo-Christian identities and who blur differences or wish them away. I also respond to complaints that the acknowledgment of differences will lead to mutual tensions rather than mutual respect.
In response to my recent talk at University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth), Francis Clooney made some interesting observations mostly (but not entirely) in agreement with my approach to difference. (See the video below.)
What particularly struck me from his talk and our subsequent conversation was his observation that most of his readings of prior Hindus have shown them to be either dismissive of Christian theology's positions, trivializing of its important differences, or reducing the differences to modern politics, rather than uncovering the deep structures from which the differences emanate. He also accepts my book's emphasis that many Sanskrit terms cannot be simply translated into western equivalents.
We also disagreed on several points. For instance, Clooney views inculturation as a positive posture of Christian friendship toward Indian native culture by adopting Indian symbols and words, whereas I find it to be often used as a mean to lure unsuspecting Indians into Christianity by making the differences seem irrelevant.
The significance of such an approach to dialogues is not dependent upon whether both sides agree or disagree on a given issue. In fact, I do not consider it viable to reconcile the important philosophical differences without compromise to one side or the other. Rather, the significance here is that we are comfortable accepting these differences as a starting point, which is more honest than the typical proclamations at such encounters where differences are taboo to bring up.
This approach to difference opens the door for any given faith to reverse the gaze upon the other in dialogue. Given the west's immense power over others in recent centuries, the framing of world religions' discourse, including the terminology, categories and hermeneutics, has been done using western religious criteria combined with subsequent western Enlightenment theories. In my book, I refer to this as "Western Universalism" and feel that this artificial view of non-western faiths has been assumed as the "standard" space in which all traditions must see themselves, leading to difference anxieties, and hence to the pressure to pretend sameness.
My hope is to hold more such dialogues with experts from as many other traditions as I can, and be able to freely share both areas of agreement and disagreement without pressure or guilt.
Hindu cosmology has naturally led me to this comfort with difference: The entire cosmos and every minutest entity in it is nothing apart from the One, i.e. there is radical immanence of divinity such that nothing is left out as "profane." Hence, unity is guaranteed by the very nature of reality, eliminating the anxiety over difference at the very foundations. In fact, the word "lila" represents the profound notion that all these differences are forms of the One, and that all existence is nothing apart from divine play, the dance of Shiva.]]>Dharma Is Not The Same As Religiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8753142011-06-14T13:05:53-04:002011-09-26T15:22:09-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/Sanskrit-English Dictionary lists several, including: conduct, duty, right, justice, virtue, morality, religion, religious merit, good work according to a right or rule, etc. Many other meanings have been suggested, such as law or "torah" (in the Judaic sense), "logos" (Greek), "way" (Christian) and even 'tao" (Chinese). None of these is entirely accurate and none conveys the full force of the term in Sanskrit. Dharma has no equivalent in the Western lexicon.
Dharma has the Sanskrit root dhri, which means "that which upholds" or "that without which nothing can stand" or "that which maintains the stability and harmony of the universe." Dharma encompasses the natural, innate behavior of things, duty, law, ethics, virtue, etc. Every entity in the cosmos has its particular dharma -- from the electron, which has the dharma to move in a certain manner, to the clouds, galaxies, plants, insects, and of course, man. Man's understanding of the dharma of inanimate things is what we now call physics.
British colonialists endeavored to map Indian traditions onto their ideas of religion so as to be able to comprehend and govern their subjects; yet the notion of dharma remained elusive. The common translation into religion is misleading since, to most Westerners, a genuine religion must:
1) be based on a single canon of scripture given by God in a precisely defined historical event;
2) involve worship of the divine who is distinct from ourselves and the cosmos;
3) be governed by some human authority such as the church;
4) consist of formal members;
5) be presided over by an ordained clergyman; and
6) use a standard set of rituals.
But dharma is not limited to a particular creed or specific form of worship. To the Westerner, an "atheistic religion" would be a contradiction in terms, but in Buddhism, Jainism and Carvaka dharma, there is no place for God as conventionally defined. In some Hindu systems the exact status of God is debatable. Nor is there only a single standard deity, and one may worship one's own ishta-devata, or chosen deity.
Dharma provides the principles for the harmonious fulfillment of all aspects of life, namely, the acquisition of wealth and power (artha), fulfillment of desires (kama), and liberation (moksha). Religion, then, is only one subset of dharma's scope.
Religion applies only to human beings and not to the entire cosmos; there is no religion of electrons, monkeys, plants and galaxies, whereas all of them have their dharma even if they carry it out without intention.
Since the essence of humanity is divinity, it is possible for them to know their dharma through direct experience without any external intervention or recourse to history. In Western religions, the central law of the world and its peoples is singular and unified, and revealed and governed from above.
In dharmic traditions, the word a-dharma applies to humans who fail to perform righteously; it does not mean refusal to embrace a given set of propositions as a belief system or disobedience to a set of commandments or canons.
Dharma is also often translated as "law," but to become a law, a set of rules has to be present which must: (i) be promulgated and decreed by an authority that enjoys political sovereignty over a given territory, (ii) be obligatory, (iii) be interpreted, adjudicated and enforced by courts, and (iv) carry penalties when it is breached. No such description of dharma is found within the traditions.
The Roman Emperor Constantine began the system of "canon laws," which were determined and enforced by the Church. The ultimate source of Jewish law is the God of Israel. The Western religions agree that the laws of God must be obeyed just as if they were commandments from a sovereign. It is therefore critical that "false gods" be denounced and defeated, for they might issue illegitimate laws in order to undermine the "true laws." If multiple deities were allowed, then there would be confusion as to which laws were true.
In contrast with this, there is no record of any sovereign promulgating the various dharma-shastras (texts of dharma for society) for any specific territory at any specific time, nor any claim that God revealed such "social laws," or that they should be enforced by a ruler. None of the compilers of the famous texts of social dharma were appointed by kings, served in law enforcement, or had any official capacity in the state machinery. They were more akin to modern academic social theorists than jurists. The famous Yajnavalkya Smriti is introduced in the remote sanctuary of an ascetic. The well-known Manusmriti begins by stating its setting as the humble abode of Manu, who answered questions posed to him in a state of samadhi (higher consciousness). Manu (1.82) tells the sages that every epoch has its own distinct social and behavioral dharma.
Similarly, none of the Vedas and Upanishads was sponsored by a king, court or administrator, or by an institution with the status of a church. In this respect, dharma is closer to the sense of "law" we find in the Hebrew scriptures, where torah, the Hebrew equivalent, is also given in direct spiritual experience. The difference is that Jewish torah quickly became enforced by the institutions of ancient Israel.
The dharma-shastras did not create an enforced practice but recorded existing practices. Many traditional smritis (codified social dharma) were documenting prevailing localized customs of particular communities. An important principle was self-governance by a community from within. The smritis do not claim to prescribe an orthodox view from the pulpit, as it were, and it was not until the 19th century, under British colonial rule, that the smritis were turned into "law" enforced by the state.
The reduction of dharma to concepts such as religion and law has harmful consequences: it places the study of dharma in Western frameworks, moving it away from the authority of its own exemplars. Moreover, it creates the false impression that dharma is similar to Christian ecclesiastical law-making and the related struggles for state power.
The result of equating dharma with religion in India has been disastrous: in the name of secularism, dharma has been subjected to the same limits as Christianity in Europe. A non-religious society may still be ethical without belief in God, but an a-dharmic society loses its ethical compass and falls into corruption and decadence.
]]>The Importance of Debating Religious Differencestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8617892011-05-14T15:37:41-04:002011-09-26T15:26:47-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/I want all the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. --Gandhi
In most liberal circles, discrimination on account of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and race is rightly denounced. Human diversity is not only widely accepted in these domains but also celebrated. Of course, the journey is by no means complete, and it has been long and tough for those who pioneered it. In my own work, I'm inspired by feminists who courageously challenged masculine paradigms on gender, African-Americans who heralded their unique culture and identity rather than becoming subsumed as subordinates or an exotic addition to a "universal" culture, and leaders of the gay rights movement who undermined the prevailing hegemony on sexual orientation.
In each of the examples above, alternate perspectives challenged head-on the dominant discourse, categories and frameworks that were well entrenched as normative and "universal."
But in interfaith discussions, we still shy away from making similar bold challenges to the established worldview. Rather, what is frequently espoused is the mere "tolerance" of other religions. In an earlier blog I explained the important distinction between tolerance and mutual respect, and the need to advance from the former to the latter. Mutual respect requires appreciation of what makes other faiths distinct from one's own; anything less is empty rhetoric. Such an approach compels thinkers to uncover differences, take honest risks and reject the politically correct but eventually unproductive stance that "all religions are the same." Indeed, my own experiences with the Jewish community, as recounted in an earlier blog, have shown that many cultural misunderstandings can be resolved through the forthright articulation of religious differences.
Many of my writings explore this huge resistance in the public square to uncovering and embracing religious differences. I use the term "difference anxiety" to describe the psychological distress that stems from viewing differences as problematic rather than natural. There are deep-rooted reasons for this anxiety, a topic I explore in detail in my forthcoming book, The Audacity of Difference. Suffice it is to say here that any productive interfaith dialogue must first acknowledge and accept the distinctiveness of the spiritual, cultural and historical matrix of each civilization,and challenge the Western penchant for claiming universalism for itself.
China and the Islamic world offer counter-examples to the claim that globalization must mean Westernization. Weming Tu of Harvard makes the point that Chinese civilization has its own paradigm for modernity based on Confucianism, and that this is not contingent on China's Westernization. Islam, too, has its own alternative worldview including a distinct theology, sociology and political framework.
A resistance to articulating and understanding differences, religious and otherwise, also comes from many Indians who are remarkably Eurocentric in their views. One hears many modern Indians ask: Aren't we all really "the same"? What's wrong with a "universal" point of view? Isn't it wonderful that millions of Westerners practice yoga, and Indian cuisine has gone global? Additionally, fashionable academic constructs such as "post-modern," "post-racial," "post-religious" and "post-national" seem to announce the arrival of a flat, secularized world that is not differentiated by peoples' histories, identities and religious points of view.
My own enthusiasm to this confluence of cultures is balanced by the fact that this fusion does not always preserve diversity and is often inequitable. What remain intact are many structures that support power and that privilege the mythological, historical and religious beliefs of the West.
I use the term "digestion" to describe the widespread dismantling, rearrangement and assimilation of a less powerful civilization into a dominant one. Like the food consumed by a host: what is useful gets assimilated into the host while what does not fit the host's structure gets eliminated as waste. The West superimposes its concepts, aesthetics, language, paradigms, historical template and philosophy, positioning these as universal. The corresponding elements of the digested civilization get domesticated into the West, ceasing to exist in their own right. The result is that the consumed tradition, similar to the food, ceases to exist whereas the host gets strengthened. In harvesting the fruits of other civilizations, the West has often destroyed their roots, thereby killing their ability to produce more bountiful harvests. Native Americans and European pagans are among numerous examples of such previous digestions into the modern West.
This process is often rationalized as the inevitable "march of civilization," with the West positioned as the center of the world and the engine driving it forward. The non-Western civilizations are considered relevant only as sources "discovered" by the West (as in "our past") or as theaters in which the West operates ("our civilizing mission") or as threats to Western interests ("our frontiers").
Every civilization deserves a seat at the table as an equal and as the subject rather than only as the object of inquiry. Every religion and its assumptions, must like all other areas of human knowledge be subject to critique on a level playing field. None, however powerful and well-funded, ought to be exempt from scrutiny or be privileged to set the terms. In the realm of interfaith gatherings, we need forums where non-Christians may challenge the "universal" concepts being applied to all world religions, in the same manner as women, African-Americans and homosexuals have already achieved in their respective domains. I predict that in five years there will be such mainstream inter-religious discourse in which it will no longer be considered too controversial to challenge one another audaciously in the quest for honest understanding.
The Audacity of Difference uncovers several profound metaphysical distinctions between dharmic and Western assumptions. This is not about superiority or inferiority but about positioning religious differences as humanity's multifaceted experience and a shared resource.
]]>Gandhi's Dharma and the Westtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8595172011-05-11T07:13:53-04:002011-07-11T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/sva-dharma ("my dharma") using a few key Sanskrit words that do not have an exact English equivalent. One of these is satya, his practice of truth. Unlike truth in the Western sense, satya is not an intellectual proposition but a way of life which has to be actualized and embodied directly by each person. There is no place for the reification or codification of satya, because truth is not held in some book or set of laws; it lives in oneself, and cannot be separated from oneself. This philosophical distinction is at the heart of Gandhi's dharma.
He insisted that satya-graha, or "truth-struggle," is a civil disobedience method that has to be individually lived, as opposed to being theorized or institutionalized. Later, this method inspired the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement in the U.S. as well as revolutions in South Africa, Poland and elsewhere. He not only advocated a sustainable society, he lived sustainably. The Gandhi library in Delhi contains the sum total of all of his personal belongings: his glasses, a pair of sandals, a pen and a few dhotis.
Another fundamental component of his dharma is captured in the term ahimsa, which is translated too simply as "nonviolence" but is not the same as the common idea of "pacifism." It is much larger. Himsa means harming, and ahimsa means non-harming. Harming the environment is himsa, as per the very deep dharmic idea that all nature is sacred. Harming animals is also himsa, and so vegetarianism is an important quality of ahimsa. Gandhi argued that vegetarianism has a lower impact on the environment than a meat diet, and hence a vegetarian society is more eco-sustainable than a carnivorous one. The modern eco-feminism movement was galvanized by Gandhi's ideals brought to America in the 1960s.
To achieve ahimsa requires enormous activity, including confrontation, such as he used while challenging the mighty British Empire that caused himsa on a large scale. Paradoxically, it takes a fighter to actualize ahimsa. Gandhi was such a fighter. He is falsely depicted as "passive" and non-threatening. In fact, he was audacious, outspoken (what we today call "politically incorrect"), and refused to be appropriated by anyone.
Ahimsa also applies to cultures taken as a whole. Cultural genocide is the systematic and complete elimination or suppression of the native religion, language, dress, way of life, customs and/or symbols of one people by another. Even though the people in question might be given material benefits through humanitarian aid, education and medical facilities, it is still himsa if there is systematic destruction of their identity, sense of history, ideas of ancestry and relationship with nature. This kind of himsa goes on today under the name of "development." In the United Nations laws of genocide, the phrase "cultural genocide" was dropped from the earlier drafts.
Gandhi fully understood cultural violence and often talked about it. He believed that cultural difference is not to be erased but celebrated, another old dharmic idea. The universe is built on diversity. In fact, that is what the word "uni-verse" means: the many-in-one. Every species has sub species and sub-sub species and this nesting of diversity goes on and on. Cultural homogeneity is therefore unnatural and unfeasible. There should not be one single religion or way of life. Everyone should have his or her own sva-dharma depending on personal circumstances and tendencies.
Gandhi fought against cultural colonization as much as against its material and political manifestations. Although he was not against Christianity (and in fact often quoted Jesus), he opposed Christian missionaries in India. He said they should only do selfless work and not convert people. If they desired to run a school or hospital, or give the poor food, these things should not become a tool for conversion.
Embodying the principle of diversity, he wore a traditional dhoti, went barefoot and bare-chested and felt comfortable sitting on the floor. Even when he went to England in 1931 and King George V held a reception in his honor at Buckingham Palace, he wore the same frayed sandals that carried him on his famous march of civil disobedience to defy the British law banning Indians from making salt. He spoke in simple village language and lived with the poorest people, accentuating his different aesthetics from the elites.
Yet another Sanskrit term that Gandhi emphasized was svadesi, meaning "from the soil," a native product, similar to the "buy local" movement which is now fashionable in the West. The preference for local production and seasonal eating was based on the ideal of ahimsa. Svadesi is better for the environment and for the health of individuals because they are acclimatized to local things and have a relationship with the natural setting in which they live. Svadesi entails eating locally grown food, wearing locally made clothes and, where possible, buying locally made goods. He produced his own cloth, milked his own goat, etc.
He advocated a dharmic society based on traditional decentralized governance built from the bottom-up at the village level. This conflicted directly with the top-down British system. Western approaches to human rights also operate in a top-down power structure in which the political activists, aid workers and NGOs with access to global media and funding are positioned as agents, and take "the burden" and responsibility of others' agency upon themselves. This approach is incompatible with the ideal of empowering the people for their own truth-struggle.
Ahimsa is not something merely to be talked about or legislated; it must be lived by every individual. This requires bottom-up social activism whereby the people themselves embody the change they want to see in the world. Hence, one must have a functional, sustainable society in which the people at the bottom are free to embody their satya. It was for this reason, and not just as an end in itself, that he demanded swaraj or self-rule from the British.
Self-rule is thus much more than mere political independence and involves both "freedom to" and "freedom from." In the West, freedom is conceived as freedom to own a car, to travel, to shop, to speak. In other words, it is extroverted. But such a pursuit does not produce freedom from anger, or from desire, jealousy, habits and compulsions. In the latter notion, one is free from the conditioned self or ego. Gandhi always worked toward personally embodying this state of freedom from internal and external dependencies.
He frequently explained that there was indeed a deep ideological clash of civilizations between Britain and India. The unsustainability of British industrialization was prominent among his concerns, making him arguably the first modern proponent of sustainability. He was troubled that the ever increasing consumption in an industrial economy depletes the natural resources and destroys the self-sustaining villages which comprise India's social fabric.
When he turned his attention to the British way of life, criticizing its exploitative practices, hierarchies and industrial consumerism, he was "reversing the gaze" -- quite provocatively -- on another civilization. In the dharma traditions, this kind of informed analysis of another worldview is called purva-paksha. His short book Hind Swaraj (Indian Self-Rule), published a century ago, is a magnificent example of purva-paksha directed toward the British Empire. It examines colonialism from an Indian perspective, including criticism of those Indian elites who had joined hands with the British.
He took the Bhagavad Gita's notion of kurukshetra (battlefield) and lived his dharma in terms of the battles to be fought. Unfortunately, after his death, many of his ideas were translated so completely as to lose their original nuance of meaning. In this way, Gandhi has been domesticated, replaced with "Gandhism." Many so-called "Gandhians" do not embody the truth-struggle and are part of centralized power structures. This is himsa to Gandhi.
]]>Dharma's Good News: You Are Not a Sinner!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8549042011-04-29T12:43:41-04:002011-06-29T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/
I try to look surprised, and respond by saying, "I was never condemned to begin with!" My young, charming guests usually get thrown off. They expect me to claim that I have already been saved, and their training has equipped them with the rhetorical skills to assert that their ability to save me is superior to my present faith. I usually find them taken by surprise by my posture that I do not need to be saved in the first place.
Christian salvation is a solution to the problem of Eternal Damnation caused by Original Sin. But that problem does not exist within the dharma traditions. Imagine someone asking you if you have been pardoned from your prison sentence, and you respond by saying that you were never condemned for any crime and, hence, such a question is absurd. The implication here is that for a dharmic person to say he has been saved would imply that he accepts Christianity's fundamental tenet that every human is born a sinner and remains so until he surrenders himself to Jesus Christ. Even when the church acknowledges other faiths as having merit, no other path can substitute for Jesus when it comes to being saved.
The closest the dharmic traditions come to salvation are the concepts of moksha in Hinduism and nirvana in Buddhism, both of which can be loosely translated as "liberation." But there are crucial differences between dharmic liberation and Christian salvation.
Receiving assurance of salvation is the key moment in the spiritual life of most Christians. It comes as a gift of grace and its source lies outside the individual. It does not come as a result strictly of merit, spiritual practice, prayer or asceticism. Although these may be helpful in its attainment, and even necessary in many denominations, they are not sufficient in and of themselves. That's because the potential to achieve salvation is not innate in us.
In Jewish and Christian traditions, death is the consequence of sin. The freedom of the soul in Christianity entails, in the End of Time, the freedom of the body as well: There will be a resurrection of the dead in a "glorified" physical form, and the boundary between heaven and earth will be erased or made permeable. For most people, the full realization of this salvation can come only after death.
Dharmic liberation, on the other hand, can be achieved here and now in this very body and in this very world. Moksha is similar to salvation insofar as it is concerned with freedom from human bondage; but the nature of this bondage is quite different. Moksha really refers to living in a state of freedom from ignorance, pre-conditioning and karmic "baggage." According to the Bhagavad Gita, the state where one is desire-less, ego-less and beyond the drives of human nature is the first major milestone; it opens the door to further evolution and eventual liberation in the fullest sense.
Salvation, on the other hand, does not entail expanded awareness or consciousness, esoteric/mystical knowledge or physical practices (though these may attend it). Nor is it necessarily derived from complete renunciation, as is the case in Buddhist nirvana. It can be experienced only by surrendering to the will of God, and God here is specifically the God of the Bible.
There is yet another state described in Sanskrit which has no equivalent in Christianity. One who has attained moksha may choose to remain in the world and continue to do spiritual work -- that is, free from past actions (i.e., karmic bondage) and yet active in the world. This person is called jivanmukta. He (or she) can, at will, either turn away from the world or turn toward it and deal with it without being touched or limited by it. The Buddhist equivalent of a jivanmukta is a bodhisattva.
The New Testament calls this "being in the world, but not of it." There is an opening here for a potential development of a Christian jivanmukta, and St. Paul says several things about himself that would indicate he had at least tasted this state, as had other Christian saints. But the important thing is that there is no word for it in biblical metaphysics; that's because the state was not examined, understood or cultivated through systematic techniques. The words "saint" and "prophet" do not suffice, nor even does "mystic." When Christians experienced such a state, it was not as a result of following a yoga-like systematic process; neither was it seen as bringing salvation. Hence such a person would still be, according to the Vatican document Dominus Jesus, "in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation."
As the evangelists leave my home, I always hope our conversation has challenged their assumptions about the people they are preaching to, and that perhaps they will re-examine the idea that all people outside of their church are in a state of spiritual deficiency. But until they do, I will continue to welcome them into my living room, offer them chai and share with them the good news that there is no such thing as Original Sin. We are all originally divine.
]]>How Evangelists Invented 'Dravidian Christianity'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8416062011-03-29T13:03:31-04:002011-05-29T05:12:01-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/
In south India, a new identity called Dravidian Christianity is being constructed. It is an opportunistic combination of two myths: the "Dravidian race" myth and another that purports that early Christianity shaped the major Hindu classics!
The discredited Aryan race theory was discussed in my previous blog. Its counterpoint is the "Dravidian" race theory. Both constructs are equally damaging and have been proven false. The "Dravidians," the theory goes, were the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and were driven to southern India by the invading, lighter skinned and racially different "Aryans."
While there is no mainstream "Aryan" political party in India, the Dravidianization of mainstream identity in the southern state of Tamil Nadu keeps the pernicious pair alive. The Aryan/Dravidian constructs are mutually dependent, and have been very successfully used to generate conflict, including violence (as in Sri Lanka in recent years).
The Dravidian race theory originated in 19th century European scholarship when colonial and evangelical interests used linguistics and ethnic studies to formulate imaginary histories and races. While European scholars were busy appropriating the Sanskrit classics as the heritage of Europeans, British linguists Francis Ellis and Alexander Campbell worked in India to theorize that the south Indian languages belong to a different family than the north Indian ones. Meanwhile, another colonial scholar, Brian Houghton Hodgson, was promoting the term "Tamulian" as a racial construct, describing the so-called aborigines of India as primitive and uncivilized compared to the "foreign Aryans."
But it was a scholar-evangelist from the Anglican Church, Bishop Robert Caldwell (1814-91), who pioneered what now flourishes as the "Dravidian" identity. In his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Race, he argued that the south Indian mind was structurally different from the Sanskrit mind. Linguistic speculations were turned into a race theory. He characterized the Dravidians as "ignorant and dense," accusing the Brahmins -- the cunning Aryan agents -- for keeping them in shackles through the imposition of Sanskrit and its religion.
His successor, another prolific missionary scholar, Bishop G.U. Pope, started to glorify the Tamil classics era, insisting that its underpinnings were Christianity, not Hinduism. Though subsequently rejected by serious scholars of Tamil culture, the idea was successfully planted that Hinduism had corrupted the "originally pure" Tamil culture by adding Sanskrit and pagan ideas.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of Tamil leaders began to embrace the Dravidian identity. This evolved into Tamil chauvinism that was initially secular and not religious. It was fed by the theory that in the Indian Ocean there once existed a lost continent called Lemuria (similar to the Atlantis myth), the original homeland of the Dravidians. Accounts glorifying Lemuria were taught as historical fact under British rule, because this exacerbated the regional faultlines. After India's independence, Dravidian identity entered politics, and now dominates the state's power structure.
The Dravidian identity is now being increasingly Christianized. A new religion called "Dravidian Christianity" has been invented through a sudden upsurge of writings designed to "discover" the existence of quasi-Christianity in Tamil history prior to the coming of the "Aryan" Brahmins. The project is to co-opt Tamil culture, language and literature and systematically cleanse them of Hinduism. Christian interpretations and substitutes are being injected into the most cherished symbols, artifacts and literary works of Tamil Hindu culture.
The preposterous claim is that Tamil classical literature originated in early Christianity. The Tamil classical tradition consists of two great components: an ethical treatise called Thirukural (abbreviated Kural, authored by the great sage Thiruvalluvar), and a sophisticated Vedanta philosophical system called Saiva Siddhanta, which traces its origins to the Vedas and was nurtured by many Tamil savants over the centuries. Dravidian Christianity appropriates both these foundational works, attributing them to Christian influence. To make this credible, the pre-Christian date for Kural has been replaced by more recent dates.
The narrative used is that St. Thomas, the apostle, visited south India and taught Christianity to the great sage, Thiruvalluvar, who was inspired by Christianity, but did not capture St. Thomas' message accurately. This is often portrayed in recently published paintings showing the sage sitting at the feet of St. Thomas, taking notes. Sanskrit is downgraded as a language created by St. Thomas to spread the Christian message to the uncivilized north Indian races.
The Indian church has periodically announced archeological "discoveries" to back the visit of St. Thomas to south India, but none of them have been verified by professional archeologists. Even the famous Jesuit archeologist, Father Heras, dismissed the so-called discovery of Thomas' tomb in Chennai.
Western churches send billions of dollars to Tamil Nadu, the epicenter of the project to harvest Indian souls. While the sheer scale of intellectual fraud and prejudice is breathtaking, the church's political clout has enabled it to permeate university research, education, museums, politics and film. The state government is even supporting the production of an epic feature film on St. Thomas that will popularize this myth.
The Dravidian Christianity movement has organized an entire series of international conferences over the past decade, where its scholars make outlandish revisions to Indian religious history. They claim that the Bhagavad Gita, Tamil classics and even Sanskrit originated after Christ and under the influence of Christianity. The crackpot Lemurian theory pops up as well. A 2005 conference in New York had the theme, "International Conference on the History of Early Christianity in India." Senator Hillary Clinton greeted it with the message:
"I am confident that the breadth of resources presented during the conference will shed light on the impact of Christianity on medieval and classical India and its effects on the cultural and political climate of India..."
Dravidian Christianity has penetrated high places. For instance, Marvin Olasky, an advisor to President George W. Bush, declared that "the two major denominations of Hinduism -- Vishnu-followers and Shiva-followers -- arose not from early Hinduism but from early Christian churches probably planted by the apostle Thomas in India from AD 52 to 68." He goes on to explain to his American readers how Christianity brought many key notions into Hinduism.
In Breaking India, I demonstrate how an influential nexus of Christian funded institutions and scholars, often supported by western governments, are indulging in large-scale manipulations similar to those in colonial times. Meanwhile, in one of Chennai's most prominent public places stands a magnificent statue of Bishop Robert Caldwell, the icon who gave the Tamil people their "true history."
]]>European Misappropriation of Sanskrit led to the Aryan Race Theorytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8373762011-03-21T00:24:59-04:002011-05-25T18:40:24-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/noble or pure. For example, the famous Buddhist Four Noble Truths are described as the Four Arya Truths or catvāri āryasatyāni in Sanskrit. Arya does not refer to a race, but a cultural quality venerated in Sanskrit texts.
German nationalism turned this word into a noun, "Aryan," and capitalized it to refer to an imagined race of people that were the original Sanskrit speakers who had composed its great texts. Early romantic claims that Indians were the ancestors of the Europeans were gradually replaced by the new myth that a race called "Indo-Aryans" was the common ancestors to both. Their origin was thought to be in the Caucasus Mountains, hence the term "Caucasian." Later, the "Indo" was dropped and the white Aryan Race Theory emerged. Thus, from the European desire to be seen as the inheritors of the Sanskrit civilization, the notion of a European super-race was born, with Germany as its highest manifestation.
How did this come about? In the late 1700s, European identity was shaken when scholars discovered that Sanskrit was closely related to the European languages, though much older and more sophisticated. At first, this discovery fed European Romantic imagination, in which India was glorified as the perfect past. Herder, a German Romanticist, saw Europe's "discovery" of India as a "re-discovery" of its own foundation. India was viewed as Europe's mother civilization by Frederick Schlegel in Germany and by Voltaire in France. William Jones, a British colonial administrator, considered Sanskrit the most marvelous product of the human mind. Sanskrit and Indology entered most major European universities between 1800 and 1850, challenging if not replacing Latin and Greek texts as a source for "new" ideas. Many new disciplines were shaped by the ensuing intellectual activity, including linguistics, comparative religion, modern philosophy and sociology.
With European nations competing among themselves for civilizational legacy, many rival theories emerged regarding the origins of the original Sanskrit speakers and their civilization. German nationalists found in the affinity between Sanskrit and German the possibility of a newly respectable pedigree vis-à-vis the French, and claimed the heritage of the treasure trove of Sanskrit literature to bolster their cause. The British interpreted India and Sanskrit in a manner that would strengthen their own role as empire-builders, with India as the jewel in the crown. Because Indians were not participants in European forums, there was widespread plagiarism of Indian texts, as well as much distorted interpretation.
By "becoming" the Aryans, Europeans felt that they were the rightful custodians of the massive corpus of Sanskrit texts that were generating new breakthroughs in the humanities and liberal arts. Germans took their newly adopted Aryan identity to extremes, and most of the influential European thinkers of the time colluded. Their racist theories often had an anti-Semitic dimension, seeking to reconstruct the Bible in Aryan terms. Ernest Renan, a philologist and Hebrew scholar, drew sharp distinctions between Semitic and Aryan languages and peoples. He proposed that though Aryans began as polytheists they were later transformed into Christian monotheists, and that Semitic peoples comprised an entirely different (and inferior) civilization. Adolphe Pictet, a Swiss linguist and ethnographer, was fully committed to the notion of European Aryans who were destined to conquer the world being blessed with "innate beauty" and "gifts of intelligence." He separated Jesus from Judaism, and turned him into the Aryan Christ.
The nascent discipline called "race science" was reinforced by such ideas. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, a French diplomat, philosopher and historian argued in his hugely influential Essay on the Inequality of Human Races that Adam from the Bible was the "originator of our white species." He wrote of the "superiority of the white type and within that type of the Aryan family." His thesis on India claimed that white Aryans had invaded India and subsequently began to intermarry with the local population. Realizing the danger of intermarriage, the Aryan lawgivers invented the caste system as a means of self-preservation. India was held up as an example of how interbreeding with an inferior race could bring about the decline of a superior one. Hitler's idea of "purifying" the Aryans was born out of this, and it culminated in the Holocaust.
Houston Chamberlain was a British historian whose magnum opus, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (written in German), also projected Aryan-Germans as the most evolved among Aryan races. He introduced Christian, scientific and philosophical arguments to lend credibility and explained the benefits that Christianity would derive by supporting German racism. Anthropologist Kenneth Kennedy concludes of Gobineau and Chamberlain, that they "transformed the Aryan concept, which had its humble origins in philological research conducted by Jones in Calcutta at the end of the eighteenth century, into the politics and racial doctrines of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich."
In 2007, I played a role in a historic milestone when I was invited to address the first Hindu-Jewish Summit. I spoke on the Aryan myth and the suffering that it had inflicted on both religious communities. Contrary to earlier apprehensions of some Hindus that this was a "risky" topic to bring up, the head of the Jewish delegation, Rabbi Rosen, member of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel's Commission for Inter-religious Dialogue, was very impressed. The Jewish delegation decided to appoint a team of scholars to study the issue and the references I had supplied. As a result, at the following year's Summit, a joint declaration was signed, which included the following language from my draft:
"Since there is no conclusive evidence to support the theory of an Aryan invasion/migration into India, and on the contrary, there is compelling evidence to refute it; and since the theory seriously damages the integrity of the Hindu tradition and its connection to India; we call for a serious reconsideration of this theory, and a revision of all educational material on this issue that includes the most recent and reliable scholarship."
Today, the Western mainstream has made special efforts to remove the notion of an Aryan race from the vocabulary and the public psyche. However, as my recently released book, Breaking India, explains, the damage in India has worsened. The Dravidian Race Theory was formulated by British missionaries in the 1800s in parallel with the Aryan theory, and it divides the peoples of India into racial categories of "Aryans" and "Dravidians." Western scholars and institutions continue to support Dravidian racism, which is dependent upon acceptance of the Aryan race construct. In a future blog I will explain how Christian missionaries are now exploiting these dangerous constructs.
]]>Tolerance Isn't Good Enough: The Need for Mutual Respect In Interfaith Relationstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7922392010-12-09T07:24:22-05:002011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/inferior. In religious circles, tolerance, at best, is what the pious extend toward people they regard as heathens, idol worshippers or infidels. It is time we did away with tolerance and replaced it with "mutual respect."
Religious tolerance was advocated in Europe after centuries of wars between opposing denominations of Christianity, each claiming to be "the one true church" and persecuting followers of "false religions." Tolerance was a political "deal" arranged between enemies to quell the violence (a kind of cease-fire) without yielding any ground. Since it was not based on genuine respect for difference, it inevitably broke down.
My campaign against mere tolerance started in the late 1990s when I was invited to speak at a major interfaith initiative at Claremont Graduate University. Leaders of major faiths had gathered to propose a proclamation of "religious tolerance." I argued that the word "tolerance" should be replaced with "mutual respect" in the resolution. The following day, Professor Karen Jo Torjesen, the organizer and head of religious studies at Claremont, told me I had caused a "sensation." Not everyone present could easily accept such a radical idea, she said, but added that she herself was in agreement. Clearly, I had hit a raw nerve.
I then decided to experiment with "mutual respect" as a replacement for the oft-touted "tolerance" in my forthcoming talks and lectures. I found that while most practitioners of dharma religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism) readily espouse mutual respect, there is considerable resistance from the Abrahamic faiths.
Soon afterwards, at the United Nation's Millennium Religion Summit in 2000, the Hindu delegation led by Swami Dayananda Saraswati insisted that in the official draft the term "tolerance" be replaced with "mutual respect." Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), who led the Vatican delegation, strongly objected to this. After all, if religions deemed "heathen" were to be officially respected, there would be no justification for converting their adherents to Christianity.
The matter reached a critical stage and some serious fighting erupted. The Hindu side held firm that the time had come for the non-Abrahamic religions to be formally respected as equals at the table and not just tolerated by the Abrahamic religions. At the very last minute, the Vatican blinked and the final resolution did call for "mutual respect." However, within a month, the Vatican issued a new policy stating that while "followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation." Many liberal Christians condemned this policy, yet it remains the Vatican's official position.
My experiments in proposing mutual respect have also involved liberal Muslims. Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, in a radio interview in Dallas, I explained why mutual respect among religions is better than tolerance. One caller, identified as a local Pakistani community leader, congratulated me and expressed complete agreement. For her benefit, I elaborated that in Hinduism we frequently worship images of the divine, may view the divine as feminine, and that we believe in reincarnation. I felt glad that she had agreed to respect all this, and I clarified that "mutual respect" merely means that I am respected for my faith, with no requirement for others to adopt or practice it. I wanted to make sure she knew what she had agreed to respect and wasn't merely being politically correct. The woman hung up.
In 2007, I was invited to an event in Delhi where a visiting delegation from Emory University was promoting their newly formed Inter-Religious Council as a vehicle to achieve religious harmony. In attendance was Emory's Dean of the Chapel and Religious Life, who happens to be an ordained Lutheran minister. I asked her if her work on the Inter-Religious Council was consistent and compatible with her preaching as a Lutheran minister, and she confidently replied that it was. I then asked: "Is it Lutheran doctrine merely to 'tolerate' other religions or also to respect them, and by respect I mean acknowledging them as legitimate religions and equally valid paths to God"? She replied that this was "an important question," one that she had been "thinking about," but that there are "no easy answers."
It is disingenuous for any faith leader to preach one thing to her flock while representing something contradictory to naive outsiders. The idea of "mutual respect" poses a real challenge to Christianity, which insists that salvation is only possible by grace transmitted exclusively through Jesus. Indeed, Lutheran teaching stresses this exclusivity! These formal teachings of the church would make it impossible for the Dean to respect Hinduism, as opposed to tolerating it.
Unwilling to settle for ambiguity, I continued with my questions: "As a Lutheran minister, how do you perceive Hindu murtis (sacred images)? Are there not official injunctions in your teachings against such images?" "Do you consider Krishna and Shiva to be valid manifestations of God or are they among the 'false gods'?" "How do you see the Hindu Goddess in light of the church's claim that God is masculine?" The Dean deftly evaded every one of these questions.
Only a minority of Christians agree with the idea of mutual respect while fully understanding what it entails. One such person is Janet Haag, editor of Sacred Journey, a Princeton-based multi-faith journal. In 2008, when I asked her my favorite question -- "What is your policy on pluralism?" -- she gave the predictable response: "We tolerate other religions." This prompted me to explain mutual respect in Hinduism wherein each individual has the freedom to select his own personal deity (ishta-devata, not to be confused with polytheism) and pursue a highly individualized spiritual path (sva-dharma). Rather than becoming defensive or evasive, she explored this theme in her editorial in the next issue:
"In the course of our conversation about effective interfaith dialog, [Rajiv Malhotra] pointed out that we fall short in our efforts to promote true peace and understanding in this world when we settle for tolerance instead of making the paradigm shift to mutual respect. His remarks made me think a little more deeply about the distinctiveness between the words 'tolerance' and 'respect,' and the values they represent."
Haag explained that the Latin origin of "tolerance" refers to enduring and does not convey mutual affirmation or support: "[The term] also implicitly suggests an imbalance of power in the relationship, with one of the parties in the position of giving or withholding permission for the other to be." The Latin word for respect, by contrast, "presupposes we are equally worthy of honor. There is no room for arrogance and exclusivity in mutual respect."]]>A Hindu View of 'Christian Yoga'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7785012010-11-08T20:33:06-05:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Rajiv Malhotrahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/
Yoga's metaphysics center around the quest to attain liberation from one's conditioning caused by past karma. Karma includes the baggage from prior lives, underscoring the importance of reincarnation. While it is fashionable for many Westerners to say they believe in karma and reincarnation, they have seldom worked out the contradictions with core Biblical doctrines. For instance, according to karma theory, Adam and Eve's deeds would produce effects only on their individual future lives, but not on all their progeny ad infinitum. Karma is not a sexually transmitted problem flowing from ancestors. This view obviates the doctrine of original sin and eternal damnation. An individual's karmic debts accrue by personal action alone, in a separate and self-contained account. The view of an individual having multiple births also contradicts Christian ideas of eternal heaven and hell seen as a system of rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Yogic liberation is here and now, in the bodily state referred to and celebrated as jivanmukti, a concept unavailable in Christianity and in an afterlife somewhere else. Ironically, the very same Christians who espouse reincarnation also long to have family reunions in heaven.
Yogic liberation is therefore not contingent upon any unique historical event or intervention. Every individual's ultimate essence is sat-chit-ananda, originally divine and not originally sinful. All humans come equipped to recover their own innate divinity without recourse to any historical person's suffering on their behalf. Karma dynamics and the spiritual practices to deal with them, are strictly an individual enterprise, and there is no special "deal" given to any chosen group, either by birth or by accepting a system of dogma franchised by an institution. The Abrahamic religions posit an infinite gap between God and the cosmos, bridged only in the distant past through unique prophetic revelations, making the exclusive lineage of prophets indispensable. (I refer to this doctrine elsewhere in my work as history-centrism.) Yoga, by contrast, has a non-dual cosmology, in which God is everything and permeates everything, and is at the same time also transcendent.
The yogic path of embodied-knowing seeks to dissolve the historical ego, both individual and collective, as false. It sees the Christian fixations on history and the associated guilt, as bondage and illusions to be erased through spiritual practice. Yoga is a do-it-yourself path that eliminates the need for intermediaries such as a priesthood or other institutional authority. Its emphasis on the body runs contrary to Christian beliefs that the body will lead humans astray. For example, the apostle Paul was troubled by the clash between body and spirit, and wrote: "For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:22-24).
Most of the 20 million American yoga practitioners encounter these issues and find them troubling. Some have responded by distorting yogic principles in order to domesticate it into a Christian framework, i.e. the oxymoron, 'Christian Yoga.' Others simply avoid the issues or deny the differences. Likewise, many Hindu gurus obscure differences, characterizing Jesus as a great yogi and/or as one of several incarnations of God. These views belie the principles stated in the Nicene Creed, to which members of mainstream Christian denominations must adhere. They don't address the above underlying contradictions that might undermine their popularity with Judeo-Christian Americans. This is reductionist and unhelpful both to yoga and Christianity.
In my forthcoming book, The Audacity of Difference, I advocate that both sides adopt the dharmic stance called purva-paksha, the practice of gazing directly at an opponent's viewpoint in an honest manner. This stance involves a mastery of the ego and respect for difference, and the hope is that it would usher in a whole new level of interfaith colaborations.
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