God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  37. Personal interview with John Berthrong, May 27, 2009.

  38. Confucius, Confucian Analects: The Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1971), 67–68.

  39. Analects 2:11.

  40. Novak, World’s Wisdom, 129.

  41. The Doctrine of the Mean 13, quoted in Tu Weiming, Confucian Thought, 59. See also Analects 14:28.

  42. Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region,” in his What Are People For?: Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 85, 78.

  Chapter Four: Hinduism: The Way of Devotion

  1. F. Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), 2.300.

  2. “Hindu Demographics,” Hindu American Foundation, http://www.hinduamericanfoundation.org/resources/hinduism_101/hinduism_demographics.

  3. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “Hindooism” back to 1829, more specifically to Henry Barkley Henderson, The Bengalee: Or, Sketches of Society and Manners in the East (London: Smith, Elder, 1829), 46. Hinduism scholars typically trace this term to roughly the same period. In An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), Gavin Flood reports that “the ‘ism’ was added to ‘Hindu’ around 1830” (6). But an online search turns up two usages of “Hindooism” (both religiously inflected) in the 1790s. The earliest, a reference to “the superstitions of Hindooism,” occurs in Robert Nares, ed., The British Critic (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1793), 18. The other comes in The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine (1798): 516, edited by the famed evangelist George Whitefield. “Hindooism” occurs dozens of times in the first decade of the 1800s, and over a hundred times between 1810 and 1819. Although the gestation of this term has usually been foisted on Orientalists, all four of these publications are religious rather than philological. This term seems to be a coinage not of Orientalists but of Christian missionaries.

  4. Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, June 17, 1845, in Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 6 vols., (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), 3:290.

  5. Erlendur Haraldsson, “Popular Psychology, Belief in Life After Death and Reincarnation in the Nordic Countries, Western and Eastern Europe,” Nordic Psychology 58, no. 2 (2006): 171–80; Humphrey Taylor, “The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans,” Harris Interactive, February 26, 2003, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?pid=359.

  6. Highly regarded books that mistakenly refer to moksha as salvation include Flood, Introduction to Hinduism 13; Michaels, Hinduism: Past and Present, 24; and Carl Olson, The Many Colors of Hinduism: A Thematic-Historical Introduction (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2007), 8. Unfortunately, scholars also refer to sin in the Hindu context, often as a translation for the Sanskrit term papa. In The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty states that she will translate papa as “evil” rather than “sin” (7), but she and others use the term sin routinely nonetheless. This category is too freighted with Christian theological assumptions about creation, the Fall, and redemption to be usable in this way.

  7. J. A. Dubois, Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), 331.

  8. December 11, 2000. Dozens of other New Yorker cartoons explore the humorous possibilities of life as a Hindu holy man. In one, a mountaintop guru tells a backpacker, “You do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around—that’s what it’s all about” (November 22, 1999).

  9. The Brahmanas lie closer to the Vedas and the Aranyakas to the Upanishads. Like the Vedas, the Brahmanas are ritual texts, though their preoccupation is how to do ritual in general rather than how to perform a specific sacrifice. The Aranyakas are far more philosophical, devoting scant attention to the ritual dimension.

  10. Siân Miles, ed., Simone Weil: An Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 92.

  11. Sunil Sehgal, Encyclopedia of Hinduism (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 1999), 2.477.

  12. Shankara, Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1978), 41.

  13. Robert E. Van Voorst, Anthology of Asian Scriptures (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000), 34.

  14. Another story in the Upanishads—from Patrick Olivelle, trans., Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 46—gives voice to the preference of philosophical Hindus for the one over the many, and to the wider Hindu tendency to see unity in diversity. In the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, a student named Vidagdha Sakalya inquires of the great sage Yajnavalkya about the mathematics of divinity:

  “Tell me, Yajnavalkya—how many gods are there?”

  “Three and three hundred, and three and three thousand.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

  “Six.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

  “Three.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

  “Two.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

  “One and a half.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “but really, Yajnavalkya, how many gods are there?”

  “One.”

  And when he is asked what this One is, Yajnavalkya says breath, and Brahman and beyond.

  15. J. N. Fraser and K. B. Marathe, The Poems of Tukaram (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1909), 114–15.

  16. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Shiva: The Erotic Ascetic (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 262-63, 268-69.

  17. For a spirited argument that Tantrism stands at the center of Hindu life rather than its periphery, see David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in Its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).

  18. Diana L. Eck, Dars´an: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 3. The centrality of sight in devotional Hinduism, and of darshan in puja, is underscored by the way in which an inanimate image of a god is transformed ritually into a living god itself. This happens when the priest either places the eyes (almost always impossibly large) into the statue or paints them onto its face. From this moment onward, the deity is considered to be alive, and in need of round-the-clock attention—waking, washing, clothing, and feeding—from the priest.

  19. “Sita Sings the Blues,” Reel 13 Blog, http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/watch-sita-sings-the-blues-online/347/.

  20. “The Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama,” National Theatre, http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=1217.

  21. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1898), chapter 52, Project Gutenberg EBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p6.htm.

  22. This epithet is common. One early source is David A. Curtis, “The Martin Luther of India,” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine 4, no. 6 (1878), 657–61.

  23. Prema Kurien, “Mr. President, Why Do You Exclude Us from Your Prayers?: Hindus Challenge American Pluralism,” in Prothero, Nation of Religions, 119–38.

  Chapter Five: Buddhism: The Way of Awakening

  1. Majjhima-nikaya, quoted in Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (New York: Grove Press, 1974), 109.

  2. Jack Kerouac, Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (New York: Viking, 2008), 58.

  3. This phrase is used in “The Power of Ideas,” the second episode in the BBC television series “The Story of India” (http://www.pbs.org/thestoryofindia/), which first aired in the United States in January 2009.

  4. Majjhima-nikaya, quoted in Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 12.

  5. Only about three million Americans self-identify as Buddhists, but a recent survey found that about
12 percent of U.S. citizens—roughly 25 million people—say that Buddhism has had a significant influence on their religious or spiritual lives. See Robert Wuthnow and Wendy Cadge, “Buddhists and Buddhism in the United States: The Scope of Influence,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 3 (2004): 361–78.

  6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 16; Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin, 2006), 83.

  7. Unfortunately, many scholars continue to refer to both “sin” and “salvation” in a Buddhist context. In a particularly egregious example, the Encyclopedia of Living Faiths (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1959) refers to Buddhism as “the gospel of salvation” (“The Buddha,” 216).

  8. This practice is sometimes referred to as anapanasati, or “breath mindfulness.” For an elegantly simple description see, Ajahn Sumedho, “Watching the Breath (nâpânasati)” and “Effort and Relaxation,” in his Mindfulness, The Path to the Deathless: The Meditation Teaching of Venerable Ajahn Sumedho (Morristown, NJ: Yin Shun Foundation, 1999), 23–24, 28–32. My colleague Diana Lobel reminds me that a Christian parallel to the body breathing on its own can be found in the nineteenth-century Russian book The Way of a Pilgrim, whose anonymous author finds the Jesus prayer starting to pray itself through him, even in his sleep.

  9. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead, 2005), 119.

  10. Novak, World’s Wisdom, 74.

  11. Kerouac, Wake Up, 30. I refer here to the Buddhist term tanha (which literally means “thirst”) as “craving” rather than “desire,” in part because I have been convinced by the American Buddhist and psychotherapist Mark Epstein that what Buddhism is trying to overcome has less to do with wanting than with wanting in a desperate sort of way. “The problem is not desire,” writes Epstein in Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), “it is clinging to, or craving a particular outcome” (41). Epstein is most creative in reinterpreting the Middle Path as cutting between “the right-handed path of renunciation and monasticism in which sensory desires are avoided and the left-handed path of passion and relationship in which sensory desires are not avoided but are made into objects of meditation” (40). Desire, in short, can be a teacher. And its core instruction that there is always a gap between longing and satisfaction.

  12. Cheri Huber, Trying to Be Human: Zen Talks, ed. Sara Jenkins (Murphys, CA: Keep It Simple Books, 2006), 17.

  13. Kerouac, Wake Up, 7.

  14. Sumedho, Mindfulness, 15, 40.

  15. Haraldsson, “Popular Psychology,” 171–80. Figures are higher in Iceland (41 percent) and lower in Italy (18 percent), while 27 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation. See, e.g., Taylor, “Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans,” http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?pid=359.

  16. Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 45.

  17. i, F.O.A.: Full on Arrival (n.p.: n.p., n.d.), 24.

  18. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1891), 1.424.

  19. Robert A. F. Thurman, “Tibetan Buddhism in America: Reinforcing the Pluralism of the Sacred Canopy,” in Prothero, Nation of Religions, 94.

  20. Quoted in Dalai Lama, Essential Teachings, trans. Zélie Pollon (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995), 52.

  21. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2004), 103. During their life together, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky made a promise that Ginsberg described as “a mutual Bodhisattva’s vow.” According to Ginsberg, they promised “that neither of us would go into heaven unless we could get the other one in” (Winston Leyland, ed., Gay Sunshine Interviews [San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1978], 1.109–13).

  22. Epstein, Open to Desire, 188.

  23. Pat Byrnes, New Yorker cartoon, January 15, 2001, http://www.cartoonbank.com/2001/Are-you-not-thinking-what-Im-not-thinking/invt/120275.

  24. Nagarjuna quoted in Nancy McCagney, Nâgârjuna and the Philosophy of Openness (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 34.

  25. Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Heart Sûtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 57.

  26. Pema Chodron, The Pema Chodron Audio Collection: Pure Meditation, Good Medicine, From Fear to Fearlessness (Louisville, CO: Sounds True, 2005).

  27. i, F.O.A.: Full on Arrival, 47.

  28. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, ed. Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 83.

  29. Thurman, “Tibetan Buddhism in America,” in Prothero, Nation of Religions, 105. In this same essay, Thurman makes a persuasive argument against equating the Tibetan situation with the church/state marriages of medieval Europe (97–99).

  30. Thurman, “Tibetan Buddhism in America,” in Prothero, Nation of Religions, 114–16.

  31. On Western (mis)interpretations of this text, see Bryan J. Cuevas, The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), esp. 5–14.

  32. I am borrowing here from my colleague David Eckel, who has lectured on these themes in my courses.

  33. Novak, World’s Wisdom, 103.

  34. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 46.

  35. Dalai Lama, Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama’s Heart of Wisdom Teachings, trans. Thupten Jinpa (Boston: Wisdom, 2005), 126.

  36. Nagarjuna quoted in The Central Philosophy of Tibet: a Study and Translation of Jey Tsong Khapa’s Essence of True Eloquence, trans. Robert A.F. Thurman (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), 152.

  37. John Updike, The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (New York: Knopf, 2003), xv. Updike is speaking here not of Buddhism but of his own writing.

  Chapter Six: Yoruba Religion: The Way of Connection

  1. I am grateful to my colleague David Eckel, who came up with core concepts for this course, and to my teaching assistant Kevin Taylor, who helped to bring these concepts alive in the classroom.

  2. Keywords in Yoruba religion change from country to country and language to language. Here I use Yoruba terms (minus diacritical marks) unless I am referring to a specifically Brazilian or Cuban symbol.

  3. Proverb quoted in Joseph M. Murphy, “Òrìs¸à Traditions and the Internet Diaspora,” in Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey, eds., Òrìs¸à Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 482.

  4. On Yoruba-derived traditions as “rhizomes,” see James Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 274–80. Note, however, how closely the roots and shoots of rhizomes (such as ginger) are connected to one another—so close that even Matory compares the Yoruba and Candomble traditions to “Siamese Twins” (72).

  5. Quoted in Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 10.

  6. Debray, God: An Itinerary, 57.

  7. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), 5.

  8. Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 6.

  9. Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 38. Of course, this is not an exact comparison. As Jacob Olupona reminds me, Oshun by no means relies (as Ginger does) on her male friends to make things happen, and our plans succeed only with her blessing.

  10. Are orishas gods? Some resist referring to orishas as divinities, perhaps because they do not want to taint Yoruba religion with the stigma of polytheism. I see nothing wrong with polytheism, but I refer here to
orishas as orishas, leaving open the question, contested among the Yoruba themselves, of whether this tradition is monotheistic or polytheistic.

  11. Here I call the orishas by their most popular Yoruba names. The messenger god Eshu, who is known in Brazil as Exu, Cuba as Elegba, and Haiti as Legba, I refer to here simply as Eshu, unless I am invoking specifically Brazilian, Cuban, or Haitian circumstances.

  12. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 5. There is also some controversy about the ways and means of Olodumare. In Olodumare, God in Yoruba Belief (London: Longmans, 1962), E. Bolaji Idowu argues that this High God is anything but remote. Convinced that orishas are manifestations of Olodumare, Idowu describes Yoruba religion as “diffused monotheism.” Idowu, an ordained minister who led the Methodist Church Nigeria for over a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, has been criticized, however, for reading too much of Christianity and its monotheistic imperative into Yoruba religious traditions. For a concise discussion of Idowu, his “highly theological” Ibadan School of interpretation, and his supporters and detractors, see Jacob K. Olupona, “The Study of Yoruba Religious Tradition in Historical Perspective,” Numen 40, no. 3 (1993): 246–47.

  13. Wande Abimbola, “Gods Versus AntiGods: Conflict and Resolution in the Yoruba Cosmos,” Dialogue & Alliance 8, no. 2 (1994): 76.

  14. BioDun J. Ogundayo, “Ifa,” in Encyclopedia of African Religion, eds. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 1.331.

  15. William Bascom, The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1969), 90. On Oshun, see also Joseph M. Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds., Ò.s.un Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2001).

  16. Jacob K. Olupona, “Imagining the Goddess: Gender in Yorùbâ Religious Traditions and Modernity,” in Dialogue and Alliance 18, no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2004/05): 71–86. See also Diedre Bádéjo, Osun Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power and Femininity (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996).

  17. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 13.

  18. On this incident, which the Cuban newspaper Diario de la Marina called “an act of Providence,” see Miguel A. De La Torre, Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 197.