Being Different

Mahatma Gandhi articulated his 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.

Published: May 11, 2011

By assuming the mantle of the originators and bearers of universal truths – both sacred and secular – the West has often embarked on and justified programs, missions and schemes to bring the rest of mankind around to its own worldview. I use the metaphors of “tiger” and “deer” to illustrate the process of what I call the “digestion” of one culture by another, carried out under the guise of a desire to assimilate, reduce differences and assert sameness. The key point being made is that the digested culture disappears. This digestion is analogous to the food consumed by a host, in that what is useful gets reformulated into the host’s body, while that which doesn’t quite fit the host’s structure is eliminated as waste.

Just as the tiger, a predator, would, the West, a dominant and aggressive culture dismembers the weaker one – the deer – into parts from which it picks and chooses pieces that it wants to appropriate; the appropriated elements get mapped onto the language and social structures of the dominant civilization’s own history and paradigms, leaving little if any trace of the links to the source tradition. The civilization that was thus “mined” and consumed gets depleted of its cultural and social capital, because the appropriated elements are then shown to be disconnected from and even in conflict with the source civilization. Finally, the vanquished prey – the deer – enters the proverbial museum as yet another dead creature (i.e. a dead culture), ceasing to pose a threat to the dominant one.

Such cultural appropriation may at first appear as the meeting of equal cultures; however, while at the level of popular culture it may be so, at the deeper levels, where the core assumptions of a civilization reside, the playing field is tilted. After being digested, what is left of a civilization is waste material to be removed and trashed. While the “tiger” or the host (the West) is strengthened, the living identity of the “deer” disappears forever. The prey is thus lost, its generative capacities gone. Eventually, to take the metaphor further, the entire species of “deer” gets rendered extinct, thereby diminishing the diversity of our world.

There are several examples of civilizations becoming digested by some other civilization. Many symbols, rituals and ideas came to Christianity from the so-called pagans (pre-Christian Europeans), but these pagan faiths were demonized and destroyed in the process. Native Americans gave numerous riches to the European colonizers – including potatoes, tomatoes, material wealth, fertile lands – but these original discoverers and citizens of the Americas lost their own way of life, and have ended up in museums as exotic artifacts, or as drunken people living on isolated reservations. Egyptian civilization was digested into Greece, and before that some of the African civilizations had been digested into Egypt. In each case, the side getting digested was compromised, marginalized and eventually ceased to be a living, thriving civilization. Today, before our very eyes, Tibetan civilization is being digested into China by a very aggressive and deliberate strategic plan.

Digestion has often started off as a “romance” for the prey, sometimes with good intentions. This is why one has to develop a wide angle view of history and not limit oneself to a small slice of it. For instance, in the late 1700s, Herder and other Europeans were called Romanticists and they loved everything Indian and considered India as their ancestral homeland. But what happened to that movement? Unfortunately, most scholars have discussed the romantic stage only, and failed to examine why this romance was short lived. The Romanticists served as “good-cops” who (like the enzymes in the digestive tract) loosened the subject matter and made it more user-friendly and generically accessible by the mainstream. This was followed by the “bad-cops” who dismissed dharma rather aggressively. In Herder’s time the chief bad-cop was Hegel who had extensive debates with the Romanticists, using them to deliver translations and interpretations of Indian classics from which he digested selectively and excreted (rejected) what did not fit his new formulations. After Hegel, a whole movement sprang up across Germany, England and France to actively digest from the Sanskrit classics into numerous European fields of knowledge. By the mid 1800s, they felt they had mined dharma enough and started to down-size Sanskrit studies gradually, and by early 20th c. Sanskrit was rapidly declining in European universities. The love affair lasted for roughly a century.

All along, there were European good-cops in India, such as the “White Mughals” described in the book by William Dalrymple with that title. These Englishmen wore Indian clothes, adopted Indian names and lifestyles, married Indian women and often sided with the Indians in their disputes with Europeans. This syndrome was an exact replica of the good-cops of the 1600s in America, who were whites abandoning the European “settlements” to live with the Native Americans in the “frontier” – they, too, married native women, learnt their language and style of hunting and living. The good-cops sometimes even took up arms to help the Native Americans fight against white aggression. But in the end all such good-cops dissipated in front of the much tougher bad-cops: The good-cops of the American frontier either withered away or slipped out of sight when the going got tough, or they were bought off by white Americans to return home, or they made some excuses to convince the natives to accept whatever “deal” was available from the bad-cops because defeat was inevitable. They were simply not as invested in native culture as the natives were. The romance was a phase in their lives that they could easily leave behind, and many of them became wealthy and popular icons in the Wild West literature – sort of like the Indiana Jones character in the movies today. I am convinced that the experience of Englishmen in the American frontier in the 1600s and 1700s later played out on Indian soil in the colonial era. Many of them spent their entire lives appreciating dharma, eventually to remap it onto Western frameworks in the name of spreading “universalism”.

To avoid misunderstandings that I am blaming all Westerners, I wish to clarify that the syndrome being mentioned does not exist in every single Western scholar or journeyman who ventures into Indian spirituality. Indeed, many have been extremely sincere in their pursuit and been able to transcend the boundaries and identities as Westerners. Some of the finest contributions to Indology and the revival of Indian spiritual traditions has been the work of such Westerners. The dynamics being discussed do not require every Western’s participation or even most Westerners. Like all trends and fashions, a small number of influential leaders can make a big difference.

There have been numerous such periods of “romance” with Indian spirituality, but each time short lived. All this is detailed in my forthcoming U-Turn book. I show that the same cycle (of romance-digestion-rejection) has repeated many times. The 1960s new age hippie movement was of this kind. It led to numerous parts of dharma getting digested – yoga, meditation, feminine divinity, vegetarianism, animal rights, etc. At first it seemed to be a genuine love for India, but in the long run it was unsustainable. It turned into another large-scale mining expedition to hunt and mine for what could be sent back home to the West as original “discoveries” by the Western intermediaries. In the process, the source traditions got erased. For instance, Indian gurus of the 60s were held larger than life in the USA, but their clout lasted only for one generation. Today, white gurus, many of whom were followers of the Indian gurus, have taken over as the new icons, and are producing new formulations for digestion into Western frameworks. This digested version is more popular because it is seen as part of Western history with the new Western gurus seen as the pioneers. The good-cops found careers as the new gurus.

I want to differentiate between this kind of digestion and the way Greek civilization has been assimilated into “Western” classics without losing track of the sources. While many Indian thinkers, texts and ideas got digested into so-called “European Enlightenment”, and the Indian sources got replaced with Western ones, the same is not true of Greek civilization. It is fashionable in intellectual circles and in the academy to study and cite Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and numerous other great classical thinkers of Greece, who are now regarded as a part and parcel of the “West”. But in classical times, the Greeks did not see themselves as a part of Northern European culture and referred to the northerners as the Occidental “other”, while Europeans referred to the Greeks as part of the “Orient”.

Here lies the difference between Indian and Greek civilizations’ respective relationship with the West: When the modern West was formulated, Greece was included as a part of it. Hence, there has been no need to replace Greek sources with other Western substitutes – the Greeks got reclassified as Western Classics. But when India was mined for source materials, it remained the non-Western other in Western eyes. India was too different, too far, and too massive to be included within the West. Hence, Indian sources of valuable knowledge were mapped on to Western substitutes. This is why the academy today does not teach Kapil, Bharat, Kautilya, Bharthrhari, Panini, Patanjali, Nagarjuna, Shankara, Abhinavagupta, and dozens of other great Indian thinkers on par with Greek thinkers. The Greeks are part of the West’s imagined selfhood while the Indians are not. Therefore, I use the term “assimilation” to describe the experience of appropriating Greece, contrasted with digestion. The assimilation was not destructive of the Greek sources. The book explains this distinction further.

It is important here to appreciate that India as a land and people are to be left behind, while India’s knowledge systems are attractive for digestion. To try and digest a billion Indians into the West would destroy the purity of what it means to be the West. This is how prior digestions of others have worked: the people got genocided (Native Americans) or enslaved (Africans) or colonized (Indians), while at the same time whatever was considered valuable in them was separated (often by good-cops) and digested. Hypothetically, had India been adjacent to Europe and with a small population, the case would have been made to admit them as Westerners and treat their great classics on par with Greek classics. But this would be impractical under the actual circumstances and any attempt would endanger the separate identity of the West as such.

While there is a combination of romance and frenzy to appropriate the “useful” and saleable elements from the prey, what causes the erasure of the source can be a combination of factors. Some of these factors are as follows:

The source tradition is simply neglected, while resources to research and propagate the knowledge are allocated to spread the Westernized version of the digested knowledge.Here the destruction is a passive process, by atrophy and not by hostility.

The appropriation results in the claim that the new digested version in the Western framework is superior, and supersedes the source version, thereby making the source redundant and obsolete.

The next generation of students and scholars gets mis-educated through textbooks and coursework that privileges the new dominant view.

There can be the explicit rejection of the Indian source as flawed. Common flaws that are cited include: that dharma is world-negating and other worldly, making it incapable of progress and advancement; that the dharma’s DNA is characterized by abuses like caste, male domination, and other social abuses.

Repeated negative “branding” is used systematically to instill a fear of guilt by association with such a damned culture. Consequently, Indian youth want to shun any links with such an identity. This further causes a drop in funding of Indian traditions, and in the quality/quantity of students available to pursue careers in such a classical tradition.

I also want to point out that Indian civilization did spread across much of Asia, but in a manner that is different from imperialism, colonialism or conquest. While many Asian nations sent their brightest students to places like Nalanda university in India to bring back knowledge (in the same manner as students today are sent to the US Ivy Leagues), this knowledge transfer was never imposed or pushed from the Indian side. At a time when India had the material resources and power to do so, it never tried to appoint governors or tax collectors in another country, or to replace their names, language and identity with its own. In other words, there was no attempt to digest others or harm their own national identity.

I will now address the issue that is commonly raised, namely, that every culture has borrowed from others, and hence the same kind of digestion is being done by everyone. Why am I making a big deal out of the digestion of Indian civilization into the West, some people ask? My response is that there is a difference between digestion and assimilation. Most examples that people cite are about assimilation, not digestion, because the source tradition does not get destroyed during the process. When there is an asymmetry of power between the parties involved in the exchange, the implications of exchange are shaped by this power equation. For instance:

Native Americans also borrowed many things from the white settlers – horses, liquor, guns, for instance. But the natives lacked the power to destroy the white culture. The borrowings in the reverse direction had an entirely different implication.

One can cite examples of Indians learning from Westerners and assimilating these ideas as part of Indian thought. However, India did not take over the global language, institutional apparatus, discourse and grand narrative of history. Indian siddhantas (philosophical theories) did not assume the status of universalism in the same manner as European thought did. Hence the implications of Indian assimilations are not the same as those of digestion by the West.

When women entered the American workforce in the 1960s, men had the power, and the women’s imitation of men at work was not because women were digesting men. Women did not have the power to do so. Hence, while there was women’s mimicry of men, it was not a case of digestion. In fact, one could argue that for a certain period of time, the women were the ones being digested into the man’s world.

Secondly, it is incorrect to say that I oppose all the other kinds of assimilation from being the subject of scholarship. The fact is that the history of ideas as written by Western historians is filled with how the West influenced others, rarely the other way around. In fact, even since Hegel, world history has largely been depicted as the story of what the West did to itself and to others, as though the non-West lacked agency. Therefore, it should not be seen as a problem if some works like mine focus on the flow of influence in the opposite direction. I do not oppose works that bring out assimilations (and even digestions) in which the West is not the predator. Let many directions of research flourish and interact. I cannot imagine trying to dominate the discourse on the history of ideas, but merely wish to add one more dimension to it, and my work should not be over interpreted or over generalized. In other words, there is no implication in my theory of digestion of India into the West that other trajectories and flows of influence have not existed or that those trajectories do not matter.

Writers of African, Native American, European Pagan, and Tibetan traditions have written on their respective experiences in a similar fashion. Modern Islamic and Chinese scholars have been writing on their traditions’ unacknowledged contributions to the West and to the world. I see nothing wrong with an Indian wanting to do the same for India.

In Being Different, I discuss that large aspects of today’s global culture are in fact founded on the values and beliefs that emerged under Western domination of the world in the past 500 years, and these in turn are founded on the values and beliefs that emerged from the unique historical and religious experience of the peoples of European origin. This is why the popular view that the world is flat is only partially correct, for much of this “flatness” is in fact the result of the West digesting other civilizations.

The motive for my writings is not to oppose cross-cultural interactions and exchanges, but quite the opposite. The mutual borrowings are desirable and inevitable. My hope is that by examining the processes in greater depth than they have been examined, my work shall help in the following ways:

Westerners contemplating a journey into Indian traditions would benefit from knowing upfront the tradeoffs that they are likely to face – such as the challenge to Judeo-Christian history centrism and claims of exclusivity.

Gurus as suppliers of knowledge would become more savvy and responsible to counsel their Western followers on such matters. They would deal with the Western sense of historical identity that is installed through education and mass culture. In other words, gurus should stop assuming that their Western students come like a clean slate free of collective identity fixations. They must do purva paksha (gazing at the West) to better understand their client base’s pre-conditioning that would have to be addressed.

Writers and thinkers on both sides of the exchange would be able to better differentiate between two ways of harvesting the fruits of another civilization: (a) by nurturing the roots, or (b) by trashing the roots.

The upside of all this would be that more and better quality of cross-cultural exchange would take place in an atmosphere of inter-cultural ahimsa, non-harming. Being Different is the cultural equivalent of biodiversity. It seeks to stop the atrophy of any endangered civilization.

Published: March 12, 2012

When I first moved to the United States 4 decades ago, I was struck by the efforts made by individuals, civic societies and the American government to instill in Americans a strong historical identity. Secular American society is filled with historical societies, with practically every American town engaged in the recording, analysis and preservation of past events, whether significant or not. National monuments of patriotic historical events dominate state capitals. Similarly, genealogy is a thriving discipline in the West with both amateurs and professionals engaged in the collection and recording of family and community histories. And New York City’s parades by various ethnicities show the importance given to incorporate every minority’s sense of history into the overall historical American tapestry.

In comparison, I’d come of age in India with relative indifference to the knowledge of the past exploits of the Punjabi jati, my community by birth. There was none of the preciseness that characterizes the collection of dates, names, record of past events, genetic analysis and family stories and occupies so many individuals and institutions in the West. Instead, my questions about the past were usually answered by a broad, big picture rendition of family lore, an emphasis on a few impactful events and a casual disregard for dates, timelines and other such literal details that are usually important in historical compilations. Part fact, part embellishment, what counted of the retelling was the lesson from the past that needed to be conveyed.

Not surprisingly, as I began my study of cultures, I realized that this secular preoccupation in the West too has its roots in Judeo-Christian traditions.  The distinct attitudes toward history described above of Westerners and Indians have been shaped by the markedly different approaches of knowing the divine between the Judeo-Christian and Dharmic faiths. As I explain in my latest book Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (HarperColins 2011), in the Judeo-Christian traditions, the reliance on one or more historical events is crucial to the knowledge of God, to spiritual life and to salvation. Revelation comes from a transcendent God who personally intervenes at a specific place, point and set of circumstances to “save” mankind and offer the truth. The bedrock of such religions is therefore this historical event and leads to an almost obsessive compilation and study of historical details of such interventions, making them what I call “history-centric”. The Dharmic faiths in contrast, do not depend on literal historical events in the same manner. They posit that truth can be found not only externally, but also within, by each person, in every given age or time. With everyone endowed with the potential of achieving in this very life, the state of sat-chit-ananda or blissful knowledge of and unity with God, there have emerged numerous techniques such as yoga, meditation etc., shorn of any historical grand narratives, timelines or institutional authority, to discover the truth. This approach, quite different from history-centrism, is one that I call the path of embodied knowing.

While there is much merit to the investigation, recording and analysis of past events, in the realm of religion, there are serious problems with the attempt by institutional authorities to precisely pin down and historicize sacred stories. For one, many of the critical claims asserted as fact and central to salvation – the virgin birth, crucifixion and resurrection in Christianity for example – simply cannot be verified. (Nor do they constitute scientific claims because they are not falsifiable either.) Additionally there are several contradictory claims of these events producing conflicts both within religions and among rival ones, leading to disastrous events on the ground.  A clash of civilizations could be viewed as really a clash of the official and non-negotiable historical accounts of competing faiths.

Attempts to transform a particular culture’s sacred myths into historical fact and then universalize this also appears to be blatantly ethnocentric.  In the case of Judaism and Christianity, God played favorites, “choosing” them (of course) – Israel and the Church respectively – to become the recipient of His largesse.  While anointed thus by the divine, the sacred literature of all other cultures is dismissed, quite self-servingly, as pre-historic mythology. Myth, a word that is evocative of the imaginary, the fictional and the fantastical (but not fact), then becomes the weapon with which rival spiritual traditions are delegitimized. The Judeo-Christian roots of the view that history and myth are mutually exclusive are evident in one of the letters to early Christian congregations in the New Testament which asserts: “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of His majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).

Dharma traditions, however, deal with their past through neither history alone nor myth alone, but through “itihasa”.  Truth and not mere history is the concern of itihasa. Itihasa, combines history and myth. Truth is not dependent or contingent upon history; rather, history is a manifestation of it. The dharmic relation between history and myth is thus not at all comparable to the Western relation between truth and fiction.  Most Hindus tend to view the past events in their traditions in a fluid manner. Time after all recurs in endless cycles. Historical narratives play a role especially to the beginner on the spiritual journey, but to the dharma practitioner, it is the virtues illustrated in the narratives and not the literal facts that are paramount.  Sri Aurobindo emphasizes the point that while convinced of the historicity of Lord Krishna, His historical significance is superseded by the values or the bhavas (attitudes) that His life conveys.

Because the study of itihasa is intended to bring about a change within and to ultimately transcend space and time itself through Yoga, Indians by and large do not feel the pressure to present their myths as absolute history and exhibit a casualness to the details of the lives of even their most cherished avatars and saints.  Indians then are unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the powerful apparatus and elaborate processes at work in the transformation of Western myths into hard and literal facts. The attempt to then universalize this history and impose a monoculture on the entire world is the “Western Universalism” that I decry in Being Different. In the book, I further explore the difference in the attitudes toward the past between the Dharmic and Judeo-Christian traditions.

Published: March 8, 2012

The world is in a time of transition. Globalization, increasing movement of people across national boundaries, environmental challenges, religious conflict, emerging economies and a multi-polar world all demand shifts in thinking to resolve age-old human dilemmas and problems.

Many of the solutions offered for resolving today’s challenges, seem tired, dated and inadequate. They and the institutions created to propagate them stem primarily from the worldview of the West, which has been dominant in world affairs for almost half a millennium. This worldview in turn has been profoundly shaped by the history, myths, intellectual traditions and religious beliefs particular to Europe and America.

As the pendulum swings once again towards Asia and emerging economies and powers stir and find their cultural voices, we stand at a moment of opportunity. Many of us could be dismissive of the world’s diverse voices as we are wont to do – especially when they challenge long-held beliefs. Or we could admit new paradigms, disruptive as they may be to the privileged position of the West, yet promising in their ability to shape the world anew not only for the benefit of Westerners, but for all humanity.

One of the old paradigms which we have all heard is presupposed in the phrase “good news” used by Christians. (The phrase “good news” is a literal translation of the word gospel, which refers to the accounts of Jesus’s life in the bible.) The Christian Good News is usually associated with the saving acts of God through the sacrifice on the cross of his only son, Jesus Christ, for the atonement of the sins of humanity. Yet Hindus find such atonement unnecessary. For man is not inherently sinful, but divine. And we, every one of us, is endowed with the same potential as Jesus, to uncover this divinity within ourselves in the here and now – without the need for someone else’s past sacrifice. To explain this empowering idea I have coined the term, “Hindu Good News”™

Such glad tidings are only a glimpse into the Hindu Good News™, which exalts man’s own potentialities, emphasizes the essential unity of God, man and the cosmos, and insists that diversity rather than uniformity are the truest understanding of reality. Some of the key promises of such a worldview include the following:

– There is no such thing as Original Sin in the typical Christian sense. We are all originally divine as described by the Sanskrit term, sat-chit-ananda

– Historical prophets and messiahs do not control access to spiritual truth, as in Christianity and most Abrahamic religions. Yoga and related spiritual practices allow us to achieve a state of freedom from history – including historically shaped communal identities, races, bloodlines, and claims of religious exclusivity based on some unique historical event. In other words, we are not dependent on historical prophets, or the institutions of power that evolved based on them.

– There is no fundamental conflict between dharma and science, nor has there been any in the past in the dharma traditions.

– There need be no fear of “chaos” as in much Western cosmology and myth. What is often considered chaotic in the negative sense is merely the natural and normal manifestation of reality. It is only the limits of human cognition that misinterpret nature’s complexity, viewing it as fearful and evil, and worthy of annihilation.

– A blissful human life is possible while remaining respectful of nature. Nature need not be ravaged in order to “advance” and “progress” – indeed our own evolution would be hastened without the violation of the web of interconnectivity that sustains us.

– There is no need for any centralized religious authority whatsoever to advance us to our ultimate potential. One may experiment and discover one’s own path using the discoveries and tools of past exemplars as guidelines.

– Mutual respect among all faiths and traditions is a matter of principle in Hinduism, not a bow to “political correctness” or a grudging necessity imposed from without. It goes far beyond mere “tolerance” for others who follow different paths. We reject claims of exclusiveness and mandates to convert others to one’s own religion.

Published: March 6, 2012

The word “dharma” has multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is used. These include: conduct, duty, right, justice, virtue, morality, religion, religious merit, good work according to a right or rule, etc. Many others 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 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.

Published: March 5, 2012

Indian scriptures talk of balancing chaos and order, while Western mythologies depict the two locked in a zero-sum battle in which order must triumph, writes Rajiv Malhotra.

In the Vedas and Upanishads, and in the vast canon of classical writings in Sanskrit, the search is always for balance and equilibrium with the rights of chaos acknowledged. In the creation stories in Genesis and in the Greek classics, there is a constant zero-sum battle between the two poles in which order must triumph…. This structure underlies much of Western culture and psychology….

Prajapati begets a universe

In Vedic literature, numerous stories recount the creator Prajapati’s efforts to beget a universe that would hold the two forces of order and chaos in equilibrium. His first attempt results in a creation which is insufficiently differentiated (jami), as it possesses too much order. This precludes integral unity because there are no sufficiently distinct components to cohere in the first place. They are undifferentiated and simply merge into each other, a state the Pancavimsa Brahmna refers to as a ‘nightmare’.

The second attempt at creation yields a universe which is too fragmented or chaotic (prthak, nanatva). When entities in the universe are too individualist, scattered, separated or different from each other — prthak, they cannot connect. What is desired is a creation which possesses a measure of distinction and individuality but avoids the quality of jami — i.e., it would be interconnected yet circumventing the equally undesirable state of prthak.

Ideal creation

Prajapati recognises that all life should be situated between these opposing excesses of too much identity differences and too much homogeneity. Ultimately, he succeeds in producing just such a universe. He does so through the power of resemblance, known as ‘bandhuta’ or bandhu…. The Vedas abound in attempts at finding connections among the numerous planes of reality. This serves as a cardinal principle of all Vedic thought and moral discourse.

Hinduism weaves multiple narratives around the central motif of cooperative rivalry between order (personified as devas) and chaos (personified as asuras). A key narrative shared by all the dharma traditions — the ‘churning of the milky ocean,’ or ‘samudra-manthan’ — shows the eternal struggle between two poles. The milky ocean is the ocean of consciousness and creativity, which is to be churned in order to obtain amrita, or the nectar of eternal life.

Two opposing sides are needed for churning. Curiously, both sides have a common father: Kashyapa (literally ‘vision’). The asuras’ mother is Diti (divided, limited), and so the asuras are the offspring of limited vision. The devas spring from Aditi (limitless), and they thus embody higher vision. The asuras usually have more brute strength, but both the power and strength of the asuras as well as the higher vision of the devas are needed for the churning. The to-ing and fro-ing between these archetypes is never-ending and also symbolises the spiritual struggles within the individual.

Delicate equilibrium

The devas grab the tail, the asuras, the head, of the cosmic serpent, using it as a rope which they wind around a mountain that serves a churning stick. They engage in a tug of war, pulling back and forth to churn the primordial ocean. The dualism is between knowledge and ignorance, though the latter should not be mistaken for sin or damnation. Asuric tendencies are not considered permanent essences but inner qualities that emerge at a given point in time. Their mutual tension does not get resolved with one side defeating the other, and their stalemate produces all sorts of wondrous and beneficial objects before open conflict breaks out over questions of priority in partaking of the nectar of immortality.

Significantly, nectar is produced only after a pot of poison emerges from the ocean — demonstrating yet again the interdependence between good and bad. The story points the way to the transcendence of both order and chaos, which are brought into delicate equilibrium and ultimately subordinated to spiritual realisation….

Crossovers and collusions

Some of the principal Vedic divinities, especially Agni, Soma and Varuna, are asuras who have crossed over to the side of the devas at the behest of Indra but who still retain their ambivalence and sinister aspects. At the end of the annual cycle — around the time of the new year festivals — the asuras are believed to return temporarily to their demonic status. Society, at the time, dissolves into chaos (as depicted playfully during the festival of Holi) before the ordered cosmos is renewed again.

In the co-operative rivalry between devas and asuras, the asuras often seem to be winning; there are frequent indications that the deepest knowledge and most exceptional powers are safeguarded by extremely ambivalent figures belonging to the camp of the asuras.

Such recurrent crossovers, collusions, and reversals serve to overturn and undermine the Western attitude towards chaos, which is dualistic and exclusivist: order versus chaos, insider or outsider, and so on.

Published: February 29, 2012

For over a decade, I have used interfaith exchanges as opportunities to introduce the concept of mutual respect and why it is superior to the patronizing notion of “tolerance” that is typically celebrated at such events. 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 to read through my entire manuscript and write to me many useful comments, he and I have responded to each other’s public talks over the years and argued online. There have been agreements and disagreements, but with mutual respect. I wish to reflect on how this experience relates to my overall approach to interfaith dialogues.

Chapter 1 of my book 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.

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, or trivializing of the important Hindu/Christian 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 by evangelists as a positive posture of Christian friendship towards 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.

Published: January 20, 2012

In the fashionable search for sameness in all religions, Holy Spirit in Christianity is often equated with Shakti or kundalini in Hinduism. However, these terms represent different, even incompatible cosmologies.

Early Vedic literature describes a supreme being whose creative power (Shakti) manifests the universe. Shakti is subsequently systematized as the Universal Goddess with sophisticated theology and worship. She is the matrix and primordial material substance of the universe, its consciousness and power, and the agency differentiating all forms.

In Christianity, though the Holy Spirit is also “within” the human, there is a strong emphasis on the descent from above or outside. Furthermore, unlike Shakti, the Holy Spirit is not seen as the essence of human selfhood (“soul”) or the essence of the cosmos.

Christianity assumes an inherent dualism between God and creation. This necessitates historical revelations along with prophets, priests and institutions to bring us the truth. But Shakti, being all-pervading, obviates dependence on these; its experience can be discovered by going within through yoga. Since the universe is nothing but Shakti’s immanence, nearly every Hindu village worships its own form of the Goddess as the deity. Eco-feminism is built into the cosmology.

Shakti is always available to be experienced in our physical body as a series of currents, with seven focal points called chakras. A powerful concentration of Shakti known as kundalini lies dormant at the base of everyone’s spine. Numerous spiritual techniques can arouse kundalini and channel it upward through the chakras, awakening one into unity consciousness.

The human body is conceived differently in Christianity: on the one hand created in the image of God, yet it is also the means of transmitting original sin and lays a person open to “evil spirits.”

In Hinduism, the guru helps awaken the disciple’s kundalini and integrate the experience into ordinary life. The experience is not interpreted through a specific history as in Christianity. Kundalini-like manifestations have occurred sporadically among Christians, but mainstream churches treat them as aberrations and even as the work of the devil. Those who have such experiences are conditioned to doubt their own sanity and are often regarded as mentally ill and even institutionalized.

In Hinduism, there is no evil spirit or demonic Shakti. Rather, Shakti encompasses all polarities, being simultaneously one and many, light and dark, supportive and violently transformative; both sides of such pairs must be integrated in spirituality. Hinduism easily embraces the fierce, dark Kali alongside the nurturing Parvati. Christianity’s emphasis on good/evil dualism results in fear of possession by evil spirits. This is often projected onto heathen or pagan religions, and particularly onto Kali, whose aesthetics shock Westerners. The name of Jesus is sometimes invoked, or a Bible kept on hand, to get rid of such evil spirits.

Hinduism sees that any negative effects of kundalini awakening stem from the individual’s preconditioning and nature, and not from evil spirits. Electricity is a helpful analogy. Neither inherently good nor evil, each electrical mechanism responds according to its own qualities. Yogis have fearlessly experimented with kundalini just as scientists do with electricity.

Shakti is explicitly feminine and has myriad representations. The Holy Spirit has also at times been conceived as female, yet, Christianity’s most prominent female figure, the Virgin Mary, is not identical with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit mysteriously incarnates Jesus in Mary’s womb, but this experience is exceptional and is impossible in other humans (whereas Shakti can be experienced by everyone). There are no spiritual practices designed to elicit Mary’s experience in all Christians, except metaphorically.

Many cross-cultural experts draw a parallel between kundalini awakenings and the phenomena associated with Pentecostal worship. Like shaktipat, or guru-awakened kundalini, Pentecostal experiences can involve extreme bodily responses triggered by a charismatic leader. However, to contain the risk of heresies, these experiences are carefully coded within the context of the historical struggle for salvation from sin that is available only by the grace of Jesus. Unlike Shakti, the Holy Spirit is not experienced as one’s inner essence manifesting through personal yoga but as an external and transcendent force invoked by communal prayer. Pentecostals are especially alert to the danger of evil spirits, and warn against any spiritual experience coming from a non-Christian, making a Hindu guru especially suspect.

Many Westerners have appropriated aspects of the Hindu Goddess to address issues within Christianity, in particular its patriarchy, institutions, weak ecological base and absence of yoga. While this is laudable, great care must be taken that core Hindu notions such as Shakti are not imported as mere “add-ons.” Dissecting the tradition into separate parts and digesting them selectively distorts the source. Shakti cannot be domesticated.

The authentic acceptance of Shakti and kundalini by Christians is much more daunting and would entail rejecting centuries of Church inquisition against pluralistic manifestations of the divine. It would involve reinventing Christianity with the Goddess accessible directly as the Supreme Being. This would rekindle memories of paganism, polytheism and chaos.

Published: 2011