How not to study Eastern Religions:

Western Esotericism in the making of modern Hinduism

International Association for the History of Religions
Toronto
Aug 15-21, 2010

1. In my talk today, I will try to convince you of a seemingly ironic proposition:

A proper study of Eastern religions in our 21 st century, science-and-technology driven

globalized era requires that we pay serious attention to the 19 th century revival of the occult,
spiritualism and theosophy in America and Britain in the aftermath of the Age of the
Enlightenment. Modern Asian religions are best understood as the inheritors of the
Theosophical Enlightenment in the West that sought an alternative to the supernaturalism of
Christianity and the materialism of modern science by updating the Western esoteric
tradition of natural magic with a dose of Eastern wisdom traditions on the one hand,
combined with a generous helping of scientific empiricism on the other.

2. Even though this thesis is as relevant to modern Buddhism, as it is to Hinduism, I will limit myself to
Hinduism alone. [For those interested in Buddhism, I recommend the work of Donald Lopez Jr.,
especially his recent book Buddhism and Science, and to the writings of David McMahan). So when I
speak of Eastern religions, I will be largely referring to neo or modern Hinduism that began to
acquire its current contours by the late 19 th century. When I speak of the Western Esoteric
tradition, I will be largely referring to the Theosophical Society founded by Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky and her theosophical twin, Colonel Henry Olcott in NYC in 1875 and headquartered in
Adyar, India since 1882. TS is recognized as the single most important force for revival of esoteric
tradition in the West. And when I speak of the esoteric, I will generally mean an element of
discourse characterized by motifs of a hidden truth visible only to those who can decipher the
correspondences that exist between the holistic unity between the material and the spiritual
aspects which are supposed to exist a unified whole, made up of one non-matieral, spiritual
substance. (I am following the ideas of von Stuckrad and Antonie Favire).
3. I am going to convince you that unless you bring the partly Hinduized and partly scientized
worldview of the theosophists into the scholarly debates over how Orientalists invented Hinduism,
you cannot begin to make sense of the two features of Hinduism which are gaining more and more
prominence as India is emerging as a significant global power:
 The first is the JAGAT GURU –or the World Guru—COMPLEX. By which I mean a
deep-seated sense of the superiority of Hindu spirituality and wisdom, sometimes
verging on triumphalism, over the crassly materialistic civilization of the West. This
sentiment is routinely expressed by public figures and politicians and is widely
shared by ordinary people. [
  The second is Vedic Scientism, by which I mean appropriating modern sciences to
proclaim the validity of the spirit-centered, vitalistic and cyclic cosmology that is
embedded not just in Sanskritic texts like the Bhagvat Gita and Patanjli’s yoga sutras
but also in the purnas and tantras. The genius of Hindu spirituality is supposed to
allow the mind to see the realties behind the phenomenal world and grasp the
natural laws that regulate them. Modern natural sciences are supposed to be only
now catching up with what Hindu sages had seen in their mind’s eyes many
millennia ago. This belief, again, is quite widespread : it is commonplace to have
astrologers and tantrics come on TV and pronounce most seriously that there is no
conflict between science and what is written in the shastras! Even Hindu terrorist
organization Sanatan Sanstha professes to spread “scientific spiritualism as per
Hindu dharma which is all inclusive and most tleratnat… we are dreaming of an India
that will show the path of peace to the world..”

[ Of course there is a lot more to traditional religiosity than these two traits that I have picked out:
ordinary everyday Hindus, including highly educated scientists, engineers, teachers and other
profesionals, for example, continue to worship and do the rituals without needing any justification
from nationalism or science: tradition and faith are reasons enough. Yet, the two features that I
have mentioned are important as they are actively promoted by nearly all the dominant institutions
and have come to form the cultural commonsense of educated, upwardly mobile classes). ANY
THEORY THAT CLIAMS TO explain the colonial “invention” of Hinduism must be able to provide an
adequate explanation of how Hinduism found the peculiar variety of holistic science.

OK. BACK TO MY THESIS: What I am saying is that these key features of the collective self-identity
of modern Hindus cannot be understood without taking into account how Theosophy
simultaneously borrowed from Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts, and left its uniquely new-Agish
and scientistic signature on how these texts are understood by Hindus and Buddhists themselves.
modern Hindus and Buddhists themselves. Modern theosophy and modern Hinduism have co-
evolved by providing intellectual justification for each other. The big difference: Western Esoterics
turned to Eastern sacred texts and traditions in order to subvert and overcome their Judaeo-
Christian heritage, while Hindus have used the overtly anti-Christian writings of Theosophists to
bolster their Hindu tradition, and to cultivate national pride in them.

4. If my thesis is correct, then the Edward Said-inspired paradigm of Orientalism that continues to
dominate postcolonial scholarship turns out to be a paradigm of how NOT to study Eastern religions.
The Orientalist paradigm is flawed, I will argue, because it is haunted by the specter of
Christianity: all the religions of the once-colonized peoples – Hinduism, Buddhism and even Islam –
are declared to be “inventions” ultimately modeled on the Judeo-Christian preconceptions about
what a religion ought to be like. This paradigm which grants Christianity, the religion of imperial
powers, all the creative power to invent other people’s religions after its own image has little or no
room for those varieties of Orientalism like Theosophy which were stridently anti-Christian,
militantly anti-imperialist and ardently Hindu – at least Hindu wannabes -- in their beliefs and life-
styles. Because of the single-minded obsession with knowledge serving the ends of power, post-
 Saidian theorists have glossed over such affirmative orientalisms as merely a kinder-gentler
version of the more patronizing variety that was directly allied with the Empire.

It will be the burden of this lecture to that modern Hinduism is not so much a Semitification, as an
occultization, or a New Age-ification of traditional dharma. It is not the Judaeo Christian
assumptions of the British and German Orientalists, but rather the deeply anti-Christian perennial
philosophy that have left the deepest mark on how modern Hindus understand their own faith.

5. [So let us get into the nitty gritty]As I mentioned before, Blavatsky and Olcott founder the TS in
1875. By 1879 they had set sail for India, and by 1882, they had settled in their new HQ in Adyar, in
southern India. (The TS still stands today where it was built more than a century ago.) After initial
hiccups, the theosophists found their calling in, [quote] “arousing Indians to a sense of greatness of
their own religion, re-organizing Indian life on dharmic lines and checking the influence of Christian
missionaries [end quote]. {this quote is from D.S. Sarma who wrote a book on Hindu renaissance in
XXX].
The rest of the story is well known. Let me give you a very brief summary of what the Blavatsky-
Olcott twinset, followed by Annied Besant, managed to achieve. Blavatsky got herself into deep
trouble when her magic tricks were exposed and she left India for Britain where she wrote her
Secret Doctrine. Colonel Olcotta, established a name for himself as the White Buddhist who sought
to bring back the pure and pristine Buddhism as he understood it, back to Sri Lanka and India. He
also made important contributions to the Indian renaissance, founding schools for dalits, promoting
Sanskrit revival. Annie Besant, the evangelist-turned freethinker and socialist-turned theosophist,
became the President of TS after the death of Olcott. Celebrated as Sarva Sukla Sarawati, or the All
White Goddess of Wisdom by her Hindu admirers, Besant was to India what Olcott was to Sri Lanka:
she emerged as a fiery Indian nationalist who sought to revive all things Hindu. [she was the bane of
reformers. ]
6. Theosophists came to India at a very crucial point. A Hindu awakening had been gathering force all
through the 19th century: The educated classes in India had absorbed theories about their so-called
Aryan heritage and the Vedic Golden Age popularized by the first generation of British and German
Orientalists. This had given them the self-confidence to seek reform and revitalization of their
society through a re-awakening or a renaissance of their great Vedic Aryan heritage.

The problem, however, was that by the end of the century, the old Orientalist admirers of
India’s classical civilization had more or less disappeared. The Fort Williams College, the fabled
“Oxford of the East” which had sponsored translations of Bhagavat Gita, the Laws of Manu, the Rig
Veda, Puranas and other sacred books by scholars of the caliber of William Jones, Henry
Colebrooke, Charles Wilkins and others associated with the Asiatic Society had closed its doors way
back in 1828. The Orientalist experiment in respect and empathy for India’s classical age had been
to the cold utilitarian scrutiny of James Mill and the Anglicists who held Indian traditions – past and
present – in contempt and who wanted to see them replaced by Western learning. The 1857
rebellion by Indian sepoys intensified the drive toward Anglicization. By this time, the German
Romantics’ love affair with India’s great Aryan past had taken a nationalistic and racialist turn – a
 turn to which Theosophy contributed. All this had left Indian reformers in a rather vulnerable
position, They found themselves exposed to the full blast of the Anglicizing zeal of the British
empire, coupled with the evangelizing zeal of the missionaries.
Theosophists provided invaluable boost in morale and self-confidence at a time when the
embattled Hindu reformers and nationalists had no one to speak for them: they filled the vaccum
left behind by the decline of the first generation of Orientalists. But theosophists did something that
no other Orientalist had done before: they approached Hinduism not as something to study in the
libraries, but they became Hindus and Buddhists. [all academic Orientalists –including such great
admirers of Vedanta as Friedreich Shlegel, Schopenhauer and Max Muller -- remained rooted their
Christian faith. WILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT HINDUS NOT JUST AS TRSNALTORS, BUT AS SPIRITUAL
MASTERS. SPEECHES OF Olcott and Besant, they spoke like orthodox Brhamins – to the vast despair
of dalit reformers.

Secondly and more importantly, they saw Hinduism as the rational religion of the future. Unlike
the British and German romantics who largely consigned India’s Vedic Golden Age to humanity’s
childhood which had been surpassed by the philosophical, religious and scientific developments in
the West, Theosophists saw Hinduism as the harbinger of a new age that will resolve the chasm
between religion and science that had opened up after the Enlightenment. By holding up Hinduism
as the religion of a better future for the entire humanity, Theosophists were turning the tables
against the legitimacy of the British Raj which rested upon the claims to bring the fruits of their own
Western-Christian civilization – scientific rationality, individualism and respect for law – to the
heathens. To promote Hinduism as an antidote to Christianity, as Theosophists did, was therefore
inherently subversive of the British Raj.
Finally, theosophists did not look down upon folk mythologies, beliefs and rituals that ordinary
Hindus cherished. Unlike the Orienatlists before them, theosophists extended their admiration
beyond the great Sanskrt texts to include Puranas, epics and folk mythologies. HPB was the first to
find scientific wisdom in the mythology of the Puranas : she was the first to interpret the 10 avatars
of Vishnu as presaging the evolution of biological species. [ a new rage for finding science in most
unlikely places]

7. It was not surprising that Indians – at least the upper caste Hindus – responded to theosophists
with great enthusiasm. Historians have described a “mania for theosophy” especially in Southern
India which attracted the largely Brahmin elite of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists and public
intellectuals: Both Gandhi and Nehru were influenced by Theosophy, Gandhi calling it the “purest
form of Hinduism.” Other notable Hindu nationalists like Dayananda Saraswati and Vivekananda saw
it as a competitor for followers and as we shall see, incorporated theosophical ideas in their version
of modern Hinduism even as they denounced Blavatsky and Olcott as frauds.
CULTICI MILIEU: Moreover, nearly all the founding fathers of modern Hinduism, especially
Vivekananda and before him, Keshub Chunder Sen and most well knonw of all, Gandhi, participated
in the cultic milieu in the US and UK.
 It is fair to say that theosophy was an important presence in India’s political and intellectual life
in the late to early 20th century.

8. Please place a book mark here in your minds: I will come back to theosophy when I look at India’s
Jagat Guru and Vedic science complexes. I am going to switch gears to academic studies of
Hinduism.
9. There is only one word to describe the place of theosophy in the postocolonial, post-Orienatlist
Hindu studies: AMNESIA.
10. This literature is totally silent on the lively dialogue with TS: no mention of the influence of
Theosophy or the cultic milieu:
11.
12. SEMITIFICATION OF HINDUISM:

Theosophy is a case of AFFRIMATIVE ORIENTALISM which

- offered a sympathetic and non-reductive knowledge, promoted classical and vernacular

langugages…
- wished Indians to find an indigenous identity in the modern world (Kopf) ie, become modern
without ceasing to be Indians, modernize from within their own culture, … change
themselves according to their own value system… /kopf’s thesis

But, it is not possible to modernize without adopting Western values because modernity is
intrinsically bound up with the European Enlightenment. Thus despite the claimed cultural and
political neutrality and their apparent sympathy with the local, “affirmative essentialists were STILL
involved in Europeanization of the Orient and even when they appeared to promote the vernacular
and the indigenous, their methods, goals and underlying values presupposed the supremacy of
European culture.”

SUPREMACY OF *** WHICH*** ELEMENTS OF EUROPEAN CULTURE???: Its Judeao-Christian religion.

Orientalists smuggled in J-C assumptions about what a religion ought to be like and that is why they
ended is up SEMITIFYING HINDUISM:

“the notion of a Hindu religion, I wish to suggest was initially invented by Western Orienatlists basing
their observations upon a JC understanding of religion. … .p. 90. What we call Hinduism is reflects the
colonial and JC presuppositions of the Orientalists who first coined the term…p. 100 [this simply
leaves out the TS who were vehemently anti-Christian, and anti-monotheistic]

In what precise ways is H a JC invention?

Orientalists, being Christian, were used to

  sacred texts as essential locus for religion, so they privileged e.g. dharamshastra over oral and
vernacular texts.
 Powerful church – linked Brahmincal texts and ideology with Hinduism in toto,
 Historical figures: historicity of incarnations.

Lorenzen: