Gurus in America

3. MAHARISHI MAHESH YOGI: Beyond the TM Technique

THREE M A H A R I S H I M A H E S H Y O G I Beyond the TM Technique C Y N T H I A A N N H U M E S NINETEENTH-CENTURY Hindu Renaissance leaders openly offeredVedantic wisdom to the West. Western Transcendentalists, Unitarians, and Spiritualists offered their own wisdom and, enjoying the dialogue, picked and chose which aspects of Oriental thought they wished to appropriate to fold into what they deemed to be a “universal religion,” the essence of which could be discerned in religions throughout the world. Much like Romantic philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation Movement, has preached that there is an Absolute Being that is the source of all life, all intelligence, and all creativity.1 This Being may be discovered by any and all through a wide variety of religious and spiritual programs. Western appropriation of Vedanta continues today, intersecting and at times lending itself to the service of interested New Age dabblers. Paul Heelas explains that the central tenet of the New Age affirms that a significantly better way of life is dawning; its lingua franca is “Self-spirituality,” requiring that each individual make contact with the spirituality that lies within.2 In contrast with its precursors—the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Romantic appropriators of Hinduism and other Oriental faiths—Heelas notes that the New Ager has become “detraditionalized,” that is, not locked into a specific religious or spiritual heritage: New Agers are averse to traditions, with their dogmas, doctrines and moralities.Yet New Agers continually draw on traditions—shamanic to 5 5 Buddhist. The solution to this seeming paradox lies with the fact that New Agers are perennialists. . . . Having little or no faith in the external realm of traditional belief, New Agers can ignore apparently significant differences between religious traditions, dismissing them as due to historical contingencies and ego-operations. But they do have faith in that wisdom which is experienced as lying at the heart of the religious domain as a whole.3 New Agers emphasize “spiritual technologies” that can be drawn out of the perennial wisdom found sporadically in various traditions.4 They employ them selectively in service of all manner of goals, for among all but the purists (i.e., those who might reject anything deemed “unspiritual”), most New Age adherents incorporate all human desires holistically. Thus, all human impulses, including sexual gratification, materialist pleasures, friendship and companionship , unity with nature, and the quest for enlightenment, are ennobled and divinized as aspects of the great cosmic unity. Maharishi’s movement can be credited with furthering many of these New Age beliefs, but I argue that its ultimate rejection of alternative spirituality and insistence on maintaining the purity of Vedic knowledge situate Mahesh Yogi and his movement securely in the folds of what most would call Hinduism. American Hindu transplants manifest themselves in a variety of ways, some of which can be elucidated by adapting categories suggested by Jan Nattier in her study of American Buddhism.5 Nattier explains that in general, Buddhism has been taken in by America in one of three ways: as import, as export, and as baggage. By Import Model, Nattier refers to the type of Buddhism espoused by those who have sought out the faith, either by journeying to Asia and then returning with it, or by reading Asian books and then adopting concepts. Export Buddhism, contrarily, is disseminated through missionary activities whose impetus comes from outside, and thus includes the practices of Asian religious evangelists. Baggage Buddhism is simply brought to the United States as part of the cultural practice of Asian immigrants. Nattier reports that American Buddhists of the Import variety fall into a specific demographic constituency: they tend to be well educated, financially comfortable, and overwhelmingly European American. Nattier thus sees Import Buddhists as members of an “Elite Buddhism,” whose most striking feature is its emphasis on meditation, but whose distinctiveness is “not its heavy emphasis on meditation but its scanting of other aspects of traditional Buddhism ,” such as monasticism and “activities that are best described as “devotional .” Nattier concludes, “Elite Buddhists, many of them still fleeing the theistic traditions of their youth, have little patience with such practices.”6 This particular spin reveals Elite Buddhism to be not simply an Asian religion transplanted to a new environment; rather, Nattier explains, Elite 5 6 G u r u s i n A...