The Oriental Monk Goes Virtual

Jane Naomi Iwamura delivers an enormously important and insightful examination of America's fascination with Asian religions in her book Virtual Orientalism. With careful and detailed analysis, Iwamura offers a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in the media. The book argues that the mass awareness of Asian religions by most Americans has been ushered in by the advent of visually oriented mass media. The visual element creates a kind of virtual existence, where "orientalized stereotypes begin to take on their own reality and justify their own truths" (6). This, Iwamura argues, is a new kind of orientalism, a concept she calls virtual orientalism. At the center of her analysis is what Iwamura calls "the Oriental Monk," a figure who is now ubiquitous in American popular culture. The Oriental Monk is represented as a mysterious, otherworldly Asian sage who passes his Eastern wisdom to his dedicated, Western male pupil. Importantly, the icon is not so much about Asian religions as it is about Americans. Iwamura tells us that the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a "figure of translation"—a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities and modes of being; he is a figure upon whom "we project our assumptions, fears and hopes" (4).

In clear and stunningly elegant prose, Dr. Iwamura provides a genealogy of the Oriental Monk through three key figures: D. T. Suzuki and the 1950s Zen boom; the Yogi Maharishi Mahesh and his celebrity followers in the 1960s; and Kwai Chang Caine in the popular 1970s television series, Kung Fu (starring David Carradine). The media representations of Suzuki, the Maharishi, and Kwai Chang Caine reflect distinct moments in mass media and in American social and political history.

Iwamura argues that the popular narrative and image of the Oriental Monk merge in the 1950s through the representative figure of D. T. Suzuki, the Japanese Zen scholar who travels to the United States. Suzuki makes his media debut through the venue of fashion magazines. Harper's Bazaar and Vogue feature full-page photographs and articles on Suzuki, portraying him as an engaging, yet enigmatic, figure. "Suzuki and Zen," Iwamura maintains, "became objects of a certain style"—that of both the glamorous elite and the countercultural Beat Generation. Glamorous and hip, Suzuki and Zen are reduced to style, something that can be easily consumable and can be donned or doffed without threatening American values and ways. It is as a stylized religion that Zen becomes acceptable to the American audience.

The second example of the Oriental Monk is the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the leader of the transcendental meditation (TM) movement in the 1960s that attracted a celebrity following, including the Beatles and actress Mia Farrow. Celebrity is key to the making and unmaking of the Mahesh as an Oriental Monk. Not only do celebrities legitimate the Maharishi and the TM movement, but "the spectacle of celebrity spiritual seekers lends a hyperreal dimension to America's understanding of Asian religions as these media engagements surreptitiously offer the sense of a more direct encounter" (18). Unlike the overwhelmingly positive accounts of Suzuki, the Maharishi Mahesh is presented in mixed light by the media. To those who cast the Maharishi positively, he conforms to the paradigm of the Oriental Monk—otherworldly, exotic, and modest. Those who are critical of the Maharishi do so because he strays from the Oriental Monk paradigm. The Mahesh is perceived to be at once too worldly—reveling in his celebrity attention and wealth (68)—and too Western—suspiciously adept at using modern technology for propaganda. The case of the Mahesh illustrates how the legitimacy of Asian spiritual figures are judged by the rubric of the Oriental Monk icon.

Finally, Iwamura turns to the fictional character Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu as the third moment in the development of the Oriental Monk icon. Dubbed as the first "eastern Western," Kung Fu follows the wanderings of Kwai Chang Caine, a biracial (Chinese and white) Shaolin monk, in the late-nineteenth-century...