Two Swamis in America

Comparing Vivekananda and Chinmayananda

Ashwin Ramaswami

Exactly one hundred years after Swami Vivekananda gave his iconic “Sisters and Brothers of America” speech at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, Swami Chinmayananda was slated to speak in Chicago at the 1993 Parliament of World Religions to follow in Vivekananda’s footsteps.^[1] Unfortunately, Chinmayananda never actually made it, as he died two weeks before the scheduled date of that speech.^[2] The stories of Vivekananda and Chinmayananda are interesting not only for their similarities -- both were Indian gurus who taught Advaita Vedanta in America -- but their differences. Since Vivekananda’s journey, many dozens of gurus have come to America, gradually transforming the mindset of the American people about spirituality and guruhood from the Orient. Chinmayananda is on the tail end of this long tradition of gurus who traveled to America to impart spiritual guidance to those who sought it.

Vivekananda and Chinmayananda have strikingly similar approaches towards grounding their ideas in both science and rationality to make them more palatable to their American audiences. However, each guru faced a different reception of their strategy. While Vivekananda often faced a hostile environment that associated him with Oriental tropes, Chinmayananda faced a more receptive audience that was not only more familiar with gurus and Hindu concepts, but more open to look beyond the scientific mainstream to consider his ideas. Additionally, while Chinmayananda was able to tailor his teachings both to white Americans and the transnational Hindu diaspora, Vivekananda had to speak to a less heterogeneous audience at a time when transnationalism was far more limited and incipient. These differing conditions greatly affected how Chinmayananda and Vivekananda were received in America, how they crafted their messages, and what they accomplished.

Deployment of rationality

In this section, I examine Chinmayananda and Vivekananda’s approaches towards topics in Vedanta philosophy in order to show how both swamis couched their concepts in the language of science and rationality. Even if their concepts were not scientific in the modern sense, the language of science could give them greater persuasive potency and legitimacy.

Reincarnation is a common theme in Hindu belief, in which individuals are reborn after their death in a manner consistent with the good deeds and bad deeds that they have accumulated throughout their previous and current lives. Both swamis explain this concept using the language of science and rationality. Vivekananda repeatedly refers to this concept as the “theory of reincarnation,” thus couching this concept in the language of science.^[3] Vivekananda also writes that while “[m]odern scientific men hold that [past experience] belongs to the body,” the “Yogis hold that it is the experience of the mind”^[4] -- thus characterizing the difference between “scientific men” and “Yogis” as merely a difference in types of scientific thought, rather than the latter being completely outside science. Half a century later, Chinmayananda explains reincarnation in similar terms, describing how “[e]xamples are often noticed … to prove this great THEORY OF REINCARNATION” and that the West has yet to discover “this great and self-evident LAW OF LIFE.”^[5] He even implies that Vedanta has a superior claim to rationality than the scriptures of the West: in the future, “the West will come to rewrite its Scripture under the sheer weight of observed phenomena.”^[6] According to Chinmayananda, Hindu theories such as reincarnation, which are already based on “observed phenomena” such as those desired by science, are so scientific that their scientificity may even be beneficial for the West’s own religious traditions to emulate.

Another concept that exemplifies both gurus’ shared scientific approach is their exposition of the Vedantic idea of Karma Yoga, the idea of performing work without attachment or expectation for its rewards. Vivekananda describes this concept as the “theory of non- attachment,” which is presented as a theory that follows from the observation that “we cannot do good without at the same time doing some evil, or do evil without doing some good.”^[7] Vivekananda also describes the theory of non-attachment as superior to a competing Jain theory of total nonviolence, which is distinguished by being “very logical.”^[8] Thus, for Vivekananda, logical soundness is a desirable quality for a theory, and theories must be employed to express or overcome some evidence that is observed about the world. Chinmayananda treats this concept similarly: in his commentary on the Bhagavad Geeta, Chinmayananda exhorts readers to “act with perfect detachment,” assuring readers that “the logical and scientific exposition of this theory is so complete that, no student … can discover in it any loopholes for hesitation or doubt.”^[9] Chinmayananda is so confident in the soundness of the theory of Karma Yoga that he challenges the inquiring Western mind to try to poke loopholes, futile though the effort would be.

It is important to note, however, that the scientific exposition of both Vivekananda and Chinmayananda does not necessarily meet the standards for what modern science considers “scientific.” A crucial aspect of scientific theories is falsifiability, or the ability to be disproven through evidence. In philosopher of science Karl Popper’s words, a theory is non-scientific if it is “not refutable by any conceivable event.”^[10] A theory must not only be successful at explaining for observed phenomena, then, but openly accept its own limitations and admit it could be superseded by a more sound theory in the future; in other words, “[i]rrefutability is not a virtue of a theory ... but a vice.”^[11] When Chinmayananda describes Karma Yoga as “so complete” without “any loopholes”^[12] and characterizes Vedanta as a “pure science” with “answers to all possible intellectual questions,”^[13] and when Vivekananda introduces concepts such as the “Absolute Truth,”^[14] it is evident that the swamis do not intend their theories to be falsifiable and malleable in the sense of standard scientific theories; they are expounding absolute and self-evident truths, after all!

However, this fact does not appear to make much of a difference to the ideas’ impact, perhaps because rigorous scientific treatment is not necessary to appear scientific. A 2018 National Science Foundation report found that nearly two-thirds of Americans do not fully understand the scientific process;^[15] the state of America in 1892, at a time when the theory and philosophy of science itself was less developed, would likely show far more ignorance about the scientific method. Additionally, the use of science to bolster religious or faith-based claims appears to have been a common technique in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both within and without the United States. Jeffrey Mullins writes how in the 1830s, both proponents and opponents of the Second Great Awakening “utilized the language of scientific rationalism” to support their views.^[16] In Groovy Science, Kaiser and McCray write about how the 1960s counterculture embraced the title concept as “a kind of secularized, quasi-spiritual quest” that would aid them in the “search for ‘authenticity’, ‘self-actualization,’ and sustainable self-sufficiency.”^[17]And Lise McKean writes of how the Gayatri Parivar, an early twentieth-century spiritual movement in India, displayed a “cultic treatment of science and technology” by prominently featuring “laboratories” with scientific equipment in which “spiritual scientists conduct experiments, diagnose … physical maladies, and prescribe the appropriate spiritual remedy.”^[18] In all these instances, science and rationality could serve as a legitimator for spiritual concepts that would usually require only articles of faith, especially for concepts that may seem unfamiliar or foreign.

Reception in America

While both swamis crafted their arguments in the language of science and rationality, each was met with different reactions upon arriving in America. While Vivekananda often had to contend with Oriental tropes, where audiences would project their own ideas of the Orient to prejudge him, Chinmayananda faced a more charitable reception due to the public’s increasing familiarity with Eastern spirituality by the mid-twentieth century. In this section, I examine newspaper articles at the time to compare each swami’s reception.

Vivekananda was received with Oriental tropes that served both to ridicule the immediate fact of his appearance and origin and to avoid engaging with his ideas in the long term. One journalist describes Vivekananda, relatively charitably, as an “orange-clad messenger from the East” and “master of the mysterious samadhi.”^[19] Others describe his disciples as merely “charmed by his Oriental headgear,”^[20] or, even worse, having been “mesmerised … into his creed” due to his “‘large, lustrous eyes.’”^[21] These fantastical descriptions of Vivekananda evoke the notion of aesthetic Orientalism, which Priya Srinivasan characterizes as the “imagined exoticism of Indian goods and bodies” with her exposition of the “Oriental dancing girl.”^[22] As Srinivasan also argues, though, aesthetic Orientalism is “always in dialogue with the political,” with political Orientalism being employed to “keep at bay the racialized bodies that demystify the Oriental object, philosophy, or body.”^[23] In this case, political Orientalism allowed many Americans to avoid substantively engaging with Vivekananda’s ideas through failing to look past his origins. One journalist who attempts to explain Vivekananda’s philosophy takes as a given that “the Hindoo … is like a child in his philosophy.”^[24] The only way to “demystify” the Oriental object would have been to engage with Vivekananda’s philosophical concepts more seriously.

Thus, even when Vivekenanda expounds reincarnation in scientific and rational terms, it can be summarily dismissed as “quaint oriental ideas about the reincarnation of dudes.”^[25] And even though Vivekananda conceived of Vedanta as a universalistic path that others could follow without giving up their religion -- “The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian”^[26] -- he would regardless be criticized for “execut[ing] a flank movement” to thwart Christianity and convert Christians. Perhaps most intriguingly, one journalist criticizes Vivekananda for having “broke caste” by “having eaten with the proscribed classes … drunk forbidden food.”^[27] Thus, Vivekananda is “an Indian without caste, of all human conditions the most wretched.”^[28] As Edward Said puts it, this viewpoint demonstrates the archetypal “exteriority … that the Orientalist … makes the Orient speak,”^[29] where an American journalist believes he is more authoritative a source on caste than Vivekananda himself, enough to render a judgment on behalf of all Hindus!

Rather than the Oriental suspicion with which Vivekananda was often treated, Chinmayananda faced a more charitable and open reception to his philosophic thought. When Chinmayananda first came to the United States in 1965 to lecture in Honolulu, Hawaii, the newspapers local simply describe him as a “Hindu philosopher from Bombay, India” who delivers lectures about “Scientific Study and Contemplative Life” and later addresses classes at the University of Hawaii’s School of Religion.^[30] Other articles about his talks elsewhere in the country describe how Chinmayananda is an “internationally recognized scholar of Vedanta”^[31] who “[i]mparts [w]isdom”^[32] to his audience, encouraging them to engage in an “open and scientific approach”^[33] to the study of his teachings. Although the word “swami” may evoke the idea of a “real wierdo [sic],” one journalist described, “one gets over the ‘initial shock’ and begins to realize what an intellectual he truly is.”^[34] Unlike Vivekananda, Chinmayananda was easily able to overcome the Oriental baggage of being an Indian swami in America, being generally regarded as a philosopher and a scholar who had genuine contributions to offer.

This stark difference might have been because Chinmayananda had the benefit of dozens of teachers who came before him. Between 1922 and 1945, Philip Deslippe maps over 2,000 lectures and classes given by twenty-seven different yoga teachers, in over ninety cities throughout the United States.^[35] These early yoga teachers were evidently successful, due both to their longevity and their ingenuity in combining Indian yoga practices with American philosophical practices such as New Thought in order to create a distinct “American Hinduism” by “tell[ing] Americans what they would like to hear.”^[36] It appears that these teachers’ skill in adapting their practices to American thought allowed them to not only be considered just as never-before-seen Oriental newcomers as Vivekananda was, but to transcend this categorization and become mainstays of urban elite life as yoga classes began routinely being taught in the “Main Street” hotels of the typical large American city.^[37] Considering the history of American yoga teachers who preceded him, Chinmayananda’s use of rational and scientific language understandable to Americans, combined with his ability to adapt teachings for America (he is noted for his “facility with American slang”^[38]), may have been especially successful in this light.

Additionally, the counterculture movement likely had a significant positive impact on the reception of Chinmayananda’s teachings. The counterculture movement, which gained strength in the 1960s, involved a “rejection of institutional religion, a questioning of Christian values” and an “affirmation of the possibility of new religious meaning.”^[39] Certainly, such an attitude would entail far more openness towards beliefs and practices inspired by the East than in the past. Thus, when Chinmayananda characterizes Americans as a “confused generation,” the journalist interviewing him agrees that that characterization may be true, “ever since Lennon and his buddies from Liverpool followed the Maharishi back to India” -- alluding to the Beatles’ infamous association with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.^[40] In addition, what may have given Chinmayananda a singular appeal at the time is his focus on discipline, giving some respite from the countercultural norm. “If you are looking for shortcuts to spiritualism or instant psychedelic happenings,” he told students at Stanford, “DON’T COME TOMORROW.”^[41] His teachings, he said, were “meant for the energetic and the alert, willing to go through self-discipline.”^[42] Thus, by rejecting the most controversial part of the countercultural triad of “mystical experience, hallucinogenic drugs and Asian religion,” Chinmayananda offered a perhaps welcomed corrective of discipline in place of the counterculture’s emphasis on drugs.^[43]

Transnational legacies

By their very fact of coming from India to America, both Chinmayananda and Vivekananda worked with inherently transnational and globalist projects in mind, and their legacies have not only affected America and India, but have had an impact worldwide. In this section, I examine how the circumstances of each swami’s time affected their differing transnational legacies: Vivekananda’s Vedanta Societies and Chinmayananda’s Chinmaya Mission centers.

One of Vivekananda’s goals was to create a universal religion that would accept “the whole world of religions” as the “same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.”^[44] Joining a Vedanta Society did not necessarily entail conversion; several of Vivekananda’s closest followers held Vedanta to be compatible with their existing religious beliefs, as it left people “free to worship in whatever form we choose.”^[45] The American Vedantin Christopher Isherwood wrote that although “[t]here will always be those … who prefer Sanskrit to English chants,” the point of Vivekananda’s universal religion was that “just as Jesus … has lost much of his specifically Jewish character, so the figure of Ramakrishna will gradually become less and less specifically Indian.”^[46] Vivekananda’s stated vision allowed the Vedanta Societies to be tailored toward audiences that were “predominantly white … and prosperous looking,”^[47] both avoiding conflicts in principle with Americans’ existing values and pushing back on the Oriental narrative that Vivekananda had to contend with upon arrival. Black Americans or immigrant South Asian laborers do not appear to have joined the Vedanta Societies in large numbers, perhaps because this was an elite activity and only those elites with “education, wealth, and opportunity” may have been “open to new and foreign ideas” -- or even had the leisure time to pursue them in the first place.^[48] One magazine in 1928 jokes, “Follow these swamis an’ yogis … an’ you’ll find yourself at once in the very heart an’ center of the leisure class.”^[49]

Vivekananda’s creation of Vedanta Societies represent his harnessing of an incipient transnationalism to realize his belief of exchange of ideas between East and West -- a belief that a “little of it [Western materialism] … is good for us [India], and a little spiritualisation is good for the West.”^[50] Vivekananda relied on the railways and the international postal system to talk with his followers in the United States, London, and India,^[51] and this transnationalist collaboration, between the Ramakrishna Mission he founded in India, the Vedanta Societies he founded in the West, and the American followers who followed him back to India, all contributed to further the ideals of his universalist movement. Although he was limited by the fact that globalization was still incipient compared to the modern day, the growing power of globalization played an important role in both furthering and itself shaping the ideas of Vivekananda’s transnationalist movement. His disciple Sister Nivedita, drawing inspiration from global capitalism, believed that “the time had come when nations were to exchange their ideals, as they were already exchanging the commodities of the market.”^[52] Additionally, Vivekananda and his disciples may have played a pathbreaking role in future transnationalist collaboration of spiritual ideas between India and America. As Gwilym Beckerlegge notes, while Vivekananda “anticipated the gurus of global Hinduism of the 1960s and subsequently,” several of his closest followers also “prefigured the Americans and Europeans who made ‘the journey to the East’” later in the twentieth century.^[53]

        By the 1960s, however, advances in technology led to two key developments -- the growth of the Hindu diaspora in America and development of air travel around the world -- that gave Chinmayananda a singular opportunity to harness a far more fully developed transnationalism for his own goals. While Vivekananda only visited the United States twice, and traveled to a handful of other countries outside of India, Chinmayananda traveled between India and America dozens of times and was able to fly for lecture tours around the world. Chinmayananda’s ability to tailor his appeals to the Hindu diaspora greatly affected the differing nature of the institutions he created.

It was in 1965, the same year that Chinmayananda first came to America, that the Hart–Celler Act was passed in Congress, which unleashed a modern surge of Indian immigration to the United States. The presence of the Hindu diaspora, who were both more integrated in their communities and more familiar with Hindu spirituality, helped make Chinmayananda’s lectures possible and a success. For example, in Pennsylvania, a (presumably Indian-American) G. Kris Kapoor was described as “instrumental in bringing Chinmayananda” to lecture there.^[54] Chinmayananda also explicitly tailored his talks to help Hindus, especially diasporic Hindus, better understand their own religious and cultural practices, being of the opinion, “[l]et us convert Hindus to Hinduism, then everything will be all right.”^[55] His organization Chinmaya Mission thus established Balavihar classes, weekly sessions that would teach children of all ages about Hindu culture, religion, and philosophy. “I can be proud of Indian culture,” one student said of the Balavihar program; and another student said it let him combine aspects of “American culture” and “Indian culture” because, as an Indian-American, it is “hard to know where you fit in.”^[56] Additionally, by adapting its teachings to family-friendly programs and summer camps for all ages, Chinmaya Mission Balavihar goes one step beyond mere intellectual dissemination of Vedanta to cultural and language programs as well, all which help with a religion-centric identity formation.^[57] A newspaper in New Jersey describes how children from the local Balavihar “will perform ‘Rama Goes to the Forest’ from the Ramayana and two dances, the Slokam and Padam.”^[58] Balavihar classes thus allow for the transmission of what Amy Bhatt discusses as “the cultural stuff from India” that is “vital to immigrant community building” among the South Asian diaspora.^[59] Thus, unlike Vivekananda’s small, white and elite Vedanta Societies that solely focused on propagating Vedanta, Chinmaya Mission centers serve additional roles among the middle-class Hindu diaspora to help with identity formation and cultural transmission.

The contrast between both swamis’ legacies is best illustrated by the impact of post-1965 immigration on Vedanta Societies. As Hindus familiar with Vivekananda and Ramakrishna have sought to join the Vedanta Societies, bringing with them their own rituals and forms of worship, they have faced pushback from the existing white membership. One member complained that they could not relate to the “pujas to many Gods and Godesses [sic]” and warned that accepting these new rituals would diminish white membership of Vedanta Societies to a “few American women in saris and dots on their foreheads.”^[60] The American Vedantin Karl Whitmarsh, however, argues for a more conciliatory approach: although “[s]ome are resentful” that “Indian norms are displacing the Western-based culture” of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, the Society should adapt to meet the needs of their new population.^[61] He argues that perhaps Indian-Americans, like other immigrants, will eventually “blend into the American melting pot” and that “Western-born swamis” will usher in “uniquely Western forms of Vedanta.”^[62] This internal conflict faced by Vedanta Societies not only highlights their unique historical significance of being a white American group aimed at universalism, representing a significant departure from traditional Hindu forms of ritual and worship, but the potential for the Hindu diaspora to contribute to novel forms of transnational American Vedantism, in addition to its existing engagement with organizations such as Chinmaya Mission.

Conclusion

        Perhaps it is telling that Chinmayananda sought to follow Vivekananda’s footsteps to speak at the 1993 Parliament of World Religions, but died right before being able to do so. The two swamis, however similar their spiritual ideologies, had their legacies both constrained and shaped by their vastly different receptions on the ground in America. After all, the impact of a leader is dependent on who makes up their followers and works for their movement. While Vivekananda had to contend with Orientalism and skepticism when creating his pioneering transnationalist and universalist project, Chinmayananda was able to use the presence of the Hindu diaspora to appeal to a new type of audience and create a different type of legacy.

Nevertheless, both Chinmayananda and Vivekananda were singularly able to harness their circumstances in order to accomplish the transnational projects that they believed needed to be done. In this way, they both follow and innovate in a tradition of swamis who traveled between India and the United States to offer spiritual hope and guidance to those who sought it, as well as accomplish legacies of social and cultural change.