Quest Magazine

Mind Science: An East-West Dialogue

By The Dalai Lama et al. Ed. Daniel Goleman and Robert A. F. Thurman
Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1991. Paperback, xi + 137pages.

This slender bur comprehensive volume, covering the proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Mind/Body Medical Institute of Harvard Medical School and Tibet House, presents a dialogue between knowledgeable Eastern and Western experts seeking to understand each other's point of view. Although published in 1991, it is still new because it cuts right to the core issues of its compelling topic.

Perhaps because Herbert: Benson, a neuroscientist and medical doctor, for some twenty years has been studying the Tibetan gTum-mo meditative practice (the ability of meditating monks to use their own body heat to dry the wet sheets covering them in freezing weather), and Daniel Goleman, a renowned psychologist, has been studying eastern meditative practices for some thirty years, their long experience with Eastern mysticism has left them with a deeper understanding of Eastern mind-science than Christopher deCharms was able to garner in his brief year at Dharmsala (Two Views of Mind, reviewed in the July-August 2000 Quest).

Robert Thurman contributes an extraordinary chapter on Tibetan psychology, which he subtitles "Sophisticated Software for the Human Brain." Howard Gardner, an esteemed researcher of human intelligence, provides a thoughtful response to Thurman in the following chapter, "Cognition: A Western Perspective."

The Dalai Lama in his opening chapter, "The Buddhist Concept of Mind," offers insight into the nature of mind as understood by his tradition. I-Ie suggests that Buddhism could serve as a bridge between radical materialism and religion, because Buddhism belongs to neither camp. From the radical materialists' viewpoint, Buddhism is an ideology that accepts the existence of mind and is thus a faith-oriented system like other religions. However, since Buddhism does not accept the concept of a creator God but emphasizes instead self-reliance and the individual's own power and potential, other religions regard Buddhism as a kind of atheism. Since neither side accepts Buddhism as belonging to its camp, Buddhists have an opportunity to build a bridge between the two.

-Alayne O’Reilly

May/June 2001

Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History

Ed. Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Paperback, hardback, xvi + 416 pages.

The relationship of Americans with the great religions of Asia has been a long and complex one. From the earliest days of the Republic, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and other Eastern faiths have been understood, or misunderstood, in a variety of ways. They have served as the bizarre and exotic subjects of tales told by adventurous clipper ship sailors and as the heathen objects of high-minded if sometimes narrow-minded missionary endeavor by the nation's numerous churches.

At the same time, the faiths of the East have often been idealized by intellectuals who were looking for alternatives to down-home religions but usually knew little about them except what was to be garnered from translations of the sacred texts. Understandably, sons of the Enlightenment such as Franklin and Jefferson most admired Confucianism, which fit their image of a deistic religion of reason and common sense, whereas Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, touched by Romanticism, preferred the warm pantheistic glow they felt in the Brahman Oversoul of Hinduism. Something of all these inconsistent: perceptions still linger in America's collective picture of the religions of the East.

Tweed and Prothero's anthology contains texts, some of them previously little known, illustrating such perspectives and much more. It carries us from those first encounters through the experience of Asian immigrants to America beginning with the Chinese of Gold Rush days in California, through the counter-experience of American converts to the foreign faiths, and down to the pluralistic present. This documentary history is remarkably comprehensive of the range of relationships illustrated; there are texts from the great 1893 and 1993 Parliaments of the World's Religions, texts from the internment of largely Buddhist Japanese Americans during World War II, texts relating to the zoning difficulties Asian temples have recently encountered in some communities. There is transplanted Asian philosophy; there arc fascinating accounts of the rituals as well as the doctrine taught in Hindu and Buddhist temples; there are texts from those who have bitterly opposed the Asian "invasion" of America. It's all there, and fascinating reading it is for anyone with any interest in the extraordinary American subculture here unveiled more fully than ever before in all its dimensions.

Many Theosophists will certainly be interested in the book. Both of the editors have impressive credentials in Theosophical history. Stephen Prothero is author of The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott, and Thomas Tweed's The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912 presents important insights on Theosophy's role in this encounter. One is somewhat disappointed, then, that the present work offers little more by or about Theosophists than a passage from Olcott's Old Diary Leaves reporting his and Helena Blavatsky's taking pansil, or formally becoming Buddhists (but in a nonexclusive Theosophical sense, of course), in Ceylon in 1880, together with a short selection from his Buddhist Catechism. Something from William Q. Judge or Katherine Tingley, to mention only American Theosophists, showing how this literature helped popularize such Eastern spiritual concepts as karma and reincarnation in the West, might also have been appropriate.

However, one can always quibble about what might have been added or left out in any anthology. It is Prothero and Tweed who have actually done the work, and their book is as good as it gets (or now, and probably for a long while to come. Asian Religions in America is highly recommended to all lovers of Asian religion, of cross-cultural spiritual adventure, and of America's wonderful diversity of faith.

-ROBERT ELLWOOD

July/August 2000

God in Concord: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Awakening to the Infinite

By Richard Geldard
Burdett, NY: Larson. 1998. Hardcover, 192 pages.

Geldard describes the essential Emerson as a spiritual teacher who outgrew his birth tradition's image of God and blazed a trail toward new worlds of transformative mystical experience and social possibilities. More than an essayist and American philosopher, he was, in Emerson's own words, "an endless seeker with no past at my back," who struggled to express, as Geldard says, "what it means to be a human being and, given that, how we are to conduct our lives."

An ethical dimension is inherent: within Emerson's speeches and essays. Geldard captures the inner vision that attracted the Sage from Concord and explains that this vision apprehended One Mind as the whole reality. He describes the Transcendentalist as a genius who remained a vulnerable, private human being. Emerson's intuitive insight awakens the infinite inside others and ignites their aspirations to embody divinity. Geldard's earlier works include The Vision of Emerson and The Esoteric Emerson.

-DANIEL ROSS CHANDLER

July/August 2000

Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism

By Phyllis Cole
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hardcover, 370 pages. 

For generations, scholars have recognized an influence by Mary Moody Emerson upon her impressionable nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, without examining its importance. Cole's sophisticated scholarship culminates in an extraordinary landmark biography describing a remarkable woman in New England intellectual cultural history. Aunt Mary emerges as a writer, thinker, and spiritual seeker, a self-taught woman who thought independently and communicated her philosophy through brilliant conversation. Cole's biography confirms that her thought and language was assimilated discreetly by Emerson throughout his life and became the intellectual context in which the Sage of Concord developed his philosophical and aesthetic principles.