Their teachings have quietly influenced generations of artists and intellectuals
by Jeffery D. Long, Phd
While the ramakrishna mission and the Vedanta Society of the West are often regarded as more or less the same thing, they are not. The RK Mission is focused on India, and primarily devoted to education, healthcare and poverty relief. The Vedanta Society is located mainly in more affluent nations. Its focus is on spiritual instruction. The extent of its influence is quite staggering when one looks beyond the membership of the Vedanta centers in, for example, the United States, and to the transformations in the culture of America that can be traced back to these centers. Certainly, Hindu teachers from lineages other than that of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda have also exerted an influence on American culture. But a number of Hindu influences in American culture do have a clear Vedantic provenance—such as the inclusion of Vedantic themes in the popular Star Wars films.
Americans are largely unaware of the extent to which various Hindu philosophies, including Vedanta, have come to permeate their culture, particularly movies, music, and so on. As religion scholar Vasudha Narayanan noted: “Americans may not know it, but they’ve long been embracing Hindu philosophy.” Why is this the case?
Answers to this question are complex and include reference to such unpleasant realities as racism and religious bigotry, as well as the deliberate appropriation of Hindu ideas and practices by some who then pass those ideas and practices off as their own, as can be observed in some quarters of the global yoga community.
In the case of Vedanta in particular, though, there is another aspect of this phenomenon of unconscious Hindu influence that is worth mentioning. Throughout its existence, but especially in the early and middle portions of the twentieth century, the Vedanta Society in America has been a magnet for intellectuals and artists: people who today might be dubbed cultural “influencers.” It is not the case that these individuals nefariously passed off Vedantic ideas as their own. They were, in fact, all quite open about their Vedantic allegiances.
However, given that the Vedantic ideals which they held dear came to permeate all of their work, indeed their entire approach to life, it was inevitable that others who enjoyed their work picked up on certain themes and concepts without grasping that these themes and concepts were Vedantic in origin.
Major intellectuals and artists who were drawn to Vedanta, and whose work later came to influence others who were less directly connected with it, include such luminaries as Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith. Isherwood and Huxley were both initiated into Vedanta by Swami Prabhavananda, their guru and founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, which remains an important hub of the Vedanta movement in America today. Salinger and Campbell, on the other hand, were both close to Swami Nikhilananda of the New York Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, while Smith had a connection to the Vedanta Society of St. Louis, Missouri.
All these men were influential writers who had a considerable impact upon the generations that followed them—particularly the generation that came of age during the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s, which was a period of especially strong Hindu influence in America. Isherwood, Huxley and Salinger were novelists whose books were infused with Vedantic themes, though not always explicitly about Vedanta, due to which their readers were not always aware of the origins of these appealing ideas. Campbell and Smith were scholars of religion who were similarly influential.
None of these figures made any secret of their Vedantic affiliations. Isherwood, in fact, jointly authored several translations of important Vedantic texts with his guru, including the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras. Huxley presented Swami Vivekananda’s ideas about universal religion in his groundbreaking The Perennial Philosophy. And while intensely private, Salinger permitted the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York to release his correspondence with Swami Nikhilananda after his death, allowing the world to see the closeness of his relationship with his guru.
A particularly strong example, though, of how Vedantic influence passed incognito from one of these major figures to the wider public is in the relationship between religion scholar Joseph Campbell and film director George Lucas. Campbell was quite close to the Vedanta Society. Indeed, he aided Swami Nikhilananda in his translation of the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita into English as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. The influence of Vedanta pervaded his scholarly works to such a great degree that Pravrajika Vrajaprana has written that “no reader of Joseph Campbell can escape Sri Ramakrishna.”
One of these works by Campbell was a book on archetypal images and narrative themes in traditional mythologies called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. A young George Lucas read this book and became determined to create a great American epic myth in film. The result was Star Wars, with a huge, multi-generational following in America. In popularity, the Star Wars films are comparable to the music of the Beatles—another conduit through which Hindu ideas have come to pervade Western society.
By serving as a magnet for intellectuals and artists—people in a position to influence the ideas, morals and ways of life of millions of Americans—the Vedanta Society has exerted a massive, albeit largely unknown, influence upon Western culture. It is an influence on the world as a whole that is difficult to calculate or quantify, going, as it does, beyond mere numbers of formal adherents and extending into cultural attitudes and dispositions. The indirect influence of serious Vedanta practitioners with wide cultural reach has shaped American society in ways that are often unrecognized, either in India or the West. This influence is nevertheless real, and an important part of the story of America.
About the Author
Jeffery D. Long, PhD, is the Carl W. Zeigler Professor of Religion, Philosophy, and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, USA. He specializes in the religions and philosophies of India. This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of Prabuddha Bharata.