No Marc, Fogel's "awakening" was a reaction to the awakening. The Reactionaries don't propose reforms at all, but reactions. They want to take us back (at least) to before the last crisis, to Hoover's ideology-- if not back to the Dark Ages, or maybe something akin to the Third Reich.

The true awakening wants to take us forward, by advocating reforms that will improve quality of life and bring peace to all species, sexes and races. It too is spiritually (if not religiously) based; for the first time a true American spiritual awakening, and far less dependent on the authority, dogma and structure of traditional religion.

It is ideological, and non-partisan (unless that be Green)

Marc and Eric, the future of the 4thGA will witness the rise of fundamentalsm. Fundamntlis will emerge as the dominant culture of the next steady state high which could begin as early as 2019. Some time ago, when I was doing some research on religion in America I happened to come accross two women who were working together in what they claimed to be a "healing ministry." One was a Roman Catholic Charismatic Nun and the other was a through going "New Ager" and devotee of Eckankar and other cults. After careful study I came to the conclusion that they were etically identical. It may come as a shock to the both of you, but I also see the two of you as etically idential as well. Now back to the races. DMMcG

Hold on there; keep your powder dry on that starting gun...

I don't know what etically means, and I would wager the monkee on my back that the fundies don't know either. All I know for sure is that I sure as hell ain't no fundie. What is your definition of fundamentalism, David? Let's see if it is one both Marc and I would claim as our own religion. Now wouldn't that be something?

A fundamentalist can be defined by contrasting him with a saint. This is how the saying goes-a fundamentalist concerns himself with the sins of others; the saint concerns himself with his own sins. Now which one would you rather trust?

On 2002-06-22 14:25, DMMcG wrote:
Marc and Eric, the future of the 4thGA will witness the rise of fundamentalsm. Fundamntlis will emerge as the dominant culture of the next steady state high which could begin as early as 2019... DMMcG

If you knew how to move your ears, DMMcG, you could massage those hemorhoids. Fundamentalism is for people who are constipated at both ends. Fundamentalism will live on, though, just like Guinea worms.

In its simplest form, I am looking at spiritual fundamentalism within the context of the of being "counter-cultural" to the 3rdGA modernism of the New Frontier steady state high ca. 1946-1968. This counter culture vigorously manifested itself during the Spiritual Warfare phase of the 4thGA (New Age Awakening ca. 1968-1986), when Eastern style mysticsm, intrest in the occult, and wicca comingled with the Moral Majority. By the beginning of the cultural warfare phase of the 4thGA (Millenial Unraveling ca.1986-2001) the process contined in a more subtle but more politically profound ways in new age therapies (I consider Bill and Hillary to have been the first New Age 1st couple, but I don't know for sure since Ron and Nancy were from California and used astrology) and a Christian Coalition (of course Ron, Gnewt and George III all profited from this group). In general its what I have been calling the "country and westernization" of Republican politics which really began in earnest with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. HTH DMMcG

At the onset of the counter-cultural fundamentalism of the 2ndGA during the culturally modernist Bonaparte steady state high ca. 1801-1819 when Americans mapped their religious world they divided it (in descending order) into Christian, Jewish, Mahometon (Muslim), and pagan. The category pagan, or heathen, included an enormous variety of religions, including the native traditions of Africa (Hamitic) and the Americas (Asianic). It also included the religions that originated in East (Asianic) and Central(Indo-European) Asia. During the spiritual warfare phase of the 2ndGA (Transcandental Awakening ca. 1819-1837) Confucians and Hindus appeared prominently on most Americans map of the religious world. Buddhisms Central Asian origin and Asian history in general remained unclear to most interpreters; Taoism, Shinto, Sikhism, and Jainism were even more remote, only barely visable in the religious landscape. Prior to this, during the actual warfare phase of the 1stGA (Common Sense crisis ca.1776-1801), in 1784, hero archetype Jedidah Morse, a Congregationalist minister and founder of American geography, published "Geography Made Easy". Whether or not geography was easy as Morse had suggested, some literate Americans in the former British colonies began to get a sense of the vast global landscape that lay around them. Also in 1784, hero archetype Hannah Adams, a modernist opponent of Morse, published the first edition of her survey of the religious world, and hero archetype Sir William Jones and twelve other British Gentlemen in colonial India established the Asiatik Society of Bengal, whose publications would provide literate Americans with the results of the first Western scholarship about Asia. Most important, in 1784, the 'Empress of China', set sail from New York harbor bound for Canton, and the 'United States' anchored off Pondicherry, thereby initiating systematic trade with China and India. (more later) DMMcG

During the Bonaparte High ca.1801-1819, the culturaly Neo-Classical steady state of the modernist 1stGA, Americans began to write Oriental tales, stories set in the exotic East, the nations first genre of religious fiction. Toward the end of the high, conservative Protestants like the Baptist and artist archetype David Benedict and the Congregationalist artist archetype Charles A. Goodrich published book-length interpretations of Asian religions. But Unitarians, the liberal Congregationalists who rejected the doctrined of Calvinism, and deists, Enlightenment rationalists who excised the supernatural from religion, were the most sympathetic interpreters in this period, even if no American would convert until the next. Among the Unitarian interpreters of Asia were hero archetype Hannah Adams and nomad archetype Joseph Priestly, who, in 1799, wrote one of the first systematic comparisons of world religions published in Americs, "A Comparison of the institutions of Moses with Those of the Hindoos and other Ancient Nations." Unitarian magazines, like the "Christian Disciple" (1813-23) and its successor the "Christian Examiner" (1824-69), published interpretations of Asian rligions in this high, as did the "Monthly Anthology" (1803-11) and the "North American Review" (1815-1940). Among American deists who read who read about Asia were prophet archetype Benjamin Franklin, nomad archetype John Adams, and hero archetype Thomas Jefferson, although President Adams probably had te most serious interest. Franklin tried his hand at writig an "Oriental tale" in 1788. Adams and Jefferson, like Frankin and most rationalists of the period, especially admired the naturalistic philosophy and ethical emphasis of Confucianism. In that Chinese tradition they found a historical instance of the "natural religion" they had sought, a tradition free from the intolerance and superstition they saw in the supernaturalist traditions of the West. (more later) DMMcG

Americans at home also could encounter Asian religions in the reports sent back by European colonial representatives in Asia, and the journal published by the Asiatik Society of Bengal, "Asiatik Researches" (1788-1839). Hannah Adams read "Asiatik Researches", and so did other intellectuals at home. Still other American readers encountered reprints from "Asiatik Researches" in American or European magazines, like the "Edinburgh Review" (1802-30). Western scholarship about Asia continued to develop in the years ahead, and three decades after the founding of the Asiatik Society of Bengal a French university establihed the first chairs in Sanskrit and Chinese. Americans would not follow European scholars' lead until the cultural warfare phase of the 2ndGA (Romantic Unraveling ca. 1837-1857), when a few Bostonans would establish the American Oriental Society in 1842. Even before then, however, many American readers were influenced by the emerging European scholarship. (more later) DMMcG

The 2ndGA also saw the first face-to-face meetings with Asia and Asians, led by those who were involved in international trade. The effects of those contacts were immediate and enduring all along the eastern seaboard, as elite Americans decorated their homes with artifacts from Asia, especially China. In one of those seaports, Salem, men who had traveled to Asia had already founded the East India Marine Society during the actual warfare phase of the 1stGA in 1789. Ans as entries from a member's diary show, the Society's parades and museum offered residents who could not travel abroad a glimpse of things Asian. Americans who did journey abroad, travelers and missionaries, encountered followers of Asian religions directly, and they sent back reports for readers at home. Using the available sources to guide their interpretations, travelers like Amasa Delano wrote accounts of teir journeys and the peoples and religions they met. While the travelers had been motivated by curiosity or lured by profit, other Americans began to go abroad to save souls. Roman Catholics had sponsored missions in Asia since the first contacts in the early Renaissance, and they began systematic efforts to convert Asians after the Portuguese reached India during the Habsburg High in 1498. For the next two and a half centuries, Catholic missionaries sent back descriptions of the religions they encountered in China, Japan, India, the Americas, and elsewhere. Those accounts provided Europeans with enduring impressions of those taditions, and Catholic missionaries continued to be quoted in American books and magazines into the middle of the nineteenth century. European Protestant missionaries got a later start, in the first decade of the eighteenth century while expressing the fundamentalist culture of the Presbyterian Awakening during the Hanoverian steady state high ca. 1701-1727. Protestant missionaries continued to prosytalize with vigor for the next two centuries. The Danes, Germans, and English sent back reports from India and elsewhere, and some of those missionary narratives reached American audiences. Sparked by evangelical fervor and inspired by European examples, during the late Bonaparte steady state high ca. 1801-1819, American Protestants sent their own missionaries to Asia, first to India and Burma. Toward the end of the spiritual warfare phase of the 2ndGA (Transcendental Awakening ca. 1819-1837), they began to preach the gospel in China, following paths that the British had cleared. The "Missionary Herald" and similar magazines printed reports from mission fields, interpreting the Asian religions missionaries encountered and exhorting American readers to support the cause. As you might expet, the tone of most of those letters and articles was not very sympathetic. Filled with pity and driven by conviction, most Protestant missionaries of the 2ndGA left home to save the unconventional heathens, who, they believed, otherwise were condemned to eternal torment. It is not surprising, then, that their reports from the mission field emphasized Asians' impoverished religious condition--and the need for continued evangelization. (more later) DMMcG

If some Americans at home had literary and artifactual encounters with Asia, and sailors and missionarie met others abroad, few had interpersonal contacts with Asians on American soil before the end of the spiritual warfare phase of the 2ndGA (Transcendental Awakening ca. 1810=1837). Legends assert that the Chinese discovered the West Coast of North America in 459, but reliable historical evidence suggests that the first Asians landed in the late eighteenth century. One report claims that three Chinese crewmen (Ashing, Achun, and Accum) from the ship 'Pallas' were stranded in Baltimore harbor in 1785, and in the next decade a few Chinese servants sailed into San Francisco Bay on 2 February 1848 (the irst Asian setlers on record) but only forty-three Chinese immigrants lived in America before 1850. This was a period,then, of mapping, and of some initial meetings. Aian migration would become iportant only after the onset of the cultural warfare phase of the 2ndGA (Romantic Unraveling ca. 1837-1857). (more later) DMMcG

The Romantic Unraveling ca.1837-1857 ushered in a new era in America's engagement with Asian religions. During the late 1st and early 2ndGA, only the most intrepid Asians made the eastward passage to the United States and very few Americans grappled with the beliefs and practices of Asian religious traditions. But, during the ninty-two year period from the onset of the cultural warfare phase of the 2ndGA in 1837 to the end of the cultural warfare phase of the 3rdGA in 1929, that is to say, during the five turnings of the Romantic unraveling, Nationalist crisis, Hohenzollern high, Unitarian Awakening and New Freedom unraveling, meetings between Americans and Asians, Christians and Sikhs, Jews and Hindus became more common. Isolated contacts, in short, yeilded to repeated encounters. During the same five turnigs between 1837 and 1929, Americans encountered Asians and their religions not just abroad but at home, not just in books but face to face. As Asians came to the United States by the hundreds of thousands they radically transformed the American religious landscape. They built temples and worshipped their Buddhas and gods there. Thanks to the efforts of a few pioneering Hindu and Buddhist missionaries, some non-Asian Americans in this period began to embrace the East-West encounter as opportunity rather than danger. Some converted; many more sympathized. But Americans' encounters with Asians and their religions were not always friendly. Many Americans, mostly from the fundamentalist culture of the 2ndGA saw Asian immigration as a threat to Christianity and the American way of life. Some of these fundamentalists responded to that perceived threat with hatred and violence. But Asian immagrants and their children persisted in their religious practices. In the process both the United States and Asian religions were radically transformed. (more later) DMMcG

Pioneering Transcendentalists such as prophet archetype Ralph Waldo Emerson, who came of age during the spiritual warfare phase of the 2nd GA encountered Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism in books. In 1834 he had settled in Concord MA and formed a circle including prophet archetype A.B. Alcott, prophet archetype Margaret Fuller, nomad archetype Thoreau, Prophet archetype Jones Very, and Prophet archetype Hawthorne. As prophet archetype Diana Eck says in her 2002 book entitled " A New Religious America", "Emerson met the Hindu tradition and its philosophies the same way I did as a college--in Hindu texts. He was an undergraduate at Harvard when he was introduced to Hindu literature through his aunt, [arist arcetype] (sic) Mary Moody Emerson. As early as the 1820s, Emerson began to write about India in his journals. His early entries expressed his astonished disaproval of the "goddery" and the "ostentatious ritual of India."...By the 1830s Emerson had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, the "Song of God," which revealed to him a more exalted view of Hiduism. He wrote, "I owed--my friend and I owed-- a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Geeta. It was the first of books, it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."...Emerson's younger friend Henry David Thoreau also participated in the "Easting" spirit of the mid--nineteenth century. Throeau developed some familiarity with the texts to which he had access--a copy of William Jones's translation of the "Laws of Manu", "Vishnu Purana, loaned by Emerson, who had borrowed it from the library of Boston's Athenaeum, copies of H.H. Wilson's translation of the "Vishnu Purana," and a copy of Rammohan Roy's translation of the Upanishads. When he built his cabin at Walden Pond in the outskirts of Concord. Thoreu clearly had the Bhagavad Gita with him. He wrote from his retreat in 1845, "In the mrning, I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmological philosophy of the Geeta..in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial." He marveled at both the physical and mystical connections between his beloved Walden and the holy Ganges, as bid blocks of ice from the pond he called "God's Drop" were cut and hauled up to the train tracks that skirted Walden, sent by rail into Boston, and by ship to India. Some say Thoreau's interest in yoga practice and his self-image as a kind of yogi on the shores of Walden was simply a literary self-presentation, a faddish device. But a few scholars, more familiar with the Indian literature Thoreau knew, see Thoreau as findig in Yoga-which he understands generally as contemplative practice--a confirmation of his own ecstatic,mystical experience. Thoreau was not a Hidu. In fact, he insisted, "I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another...I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exageration--bigotry." Even so, he found illumination in the India he came to know in his imagination and states of consciousness. "Farthest India is nearer to me than Concord & Lexington," he wrote, referring to the India he had found echoed within his own soul." (Eck ANRA .pp 94-96) (more later) DMMcG

Pioneering Transcendentalists such as prophet archetype Ralph Waldo Emerson, who came of age during the spiritual warfare phase of the 2nd GA encountered Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism in books. In 1834 he had settled in Concord MA and formed a circle including prophet archetype A.B. Alcott, prophet archetype Margaret Fuller, nomad archetype Thoreau, Prophet archetype Jones Very, and Prophet archetype Hawthorne. As prophet archetype Diana Eck says in her 2002 book entitled " A New Religious America", "Emerson met the Hindu tradition and its philosophies the same way I did as a college--in Hindu texts. He was an undergraduate at Harvard when he was introduced to Hindu literature through his aunt, [arist arcetype] (sic) Mary Moody Emerson. As early as the 1820s, Emerson began to write about India in his journals. His early entries expressed his astonished disaproval of the "goddery" and the "ostentatious ritual of India."...By the 1830s Emerson had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, the "Song of God," which revealed to him a more exalted view of Hiduism. He wrote, "I owed--my friend and I owed-- a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Geeta. It was the first of books, it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."...Emerson's younger friend Henry David Thoreau also participated in the "Easting" spirit of the mid--nineteenth century. Throeau developed some familiarity with the texts to which he had access--a copy of William Jones's translation of the "Laws of Manu", "Vishnu Purana, loaned by Emerson, who had borrowed it from the library of Boston's Athenaeum, copies of H.H. Wilson's translation of the "Vishnu Purana," and a copy of Rammohan Roy's translation of the Upanishads. When he built his cabin at Walden Pond in the outskirts of Concord. Thoreu clearly had the Bhagavad Gita with him. He wrote from his retreat in 1845, "In the mrning, I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmological philosophy of the Geeta..in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial." He marveled at both the physical and mystical connections between his beloved Walden and the holy Ganges, as bid blocks of ice from the pond he called "God's Drop" were cut and hauled up to the train tracks that skirted Walden, sent by rail into Boston, and by ship to India. Some say Thoreau's interest in yoga practice and his self-image as a kind of yogi on the shores of Walden was simply a literary self-presentation, a faddish device. But a few scholars, more familiar with the Indian literature Thoreau knew, see Thoreau as findig in Yoga-which he understands generally as contemplative practice--a confirmation of his own ecstatic,mystical experience. Thoreau was not a Hidu. In fact, he insisted, "I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another...I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exageration--bigotry." Even so, he found illumination in the India he came to know in his imagination and states of consciousness. "Farthest India is nearer to me than Concord & Lexington," he wrote, referring to the India he had found echoed within his own soul." (Eck ANRA .pp 94-96) (more later) DMMcG

As I have already said, the turn of the spiritual and cultural warfare periods of the 2ndGA (ca.1837) marked the beginning of face to face encounters between Asians and Americans. In 1841 prophet archetype Edward Salsbury, "the father of American Oriental Studies," began teaching Sanskrit at Yale University. One year later, Salisbury and other Orientalists organized the American Oriental Society, and the Transcendentalist periodical "The Dial", edited by Emerson 1842-1844, began to publish "Ethnical Scriptures," a series of translations of Asian scriptures. In 1844, "The Dial" launched the American conversation about Buddhism when it published a translation by prophet archetype Elizabeth Palmer Peabody of portions of the "Lotus Sutra". Meanwhile, in the same turning, the annexation of California and the discovery of gold on John Sutter's sawmill in 1848 pulled Chinese "forty-niners" from their homes in search of happiness in Gam Saan or Gold Mountain. Later on, during the actual warfare phase of the 2ndGA (Nationalist Crisis ca. 1857-1871), large numbers of Japanese immigrants migrated to the West Coast of the United States,when the Japanese economy spiraled downward in the crisis aftermath of the ouster of the Tokugawas and the restoration of the Meiji government in 1868. Neither Asian immigrants nor their religions received warm welcomes. Chinese immigration precipitated a West Coast debate about the character and destiny of America comparable only to the slavery debate on the Eastern Seaboard. A minority of 1stGA cultural modernists argued for what the African-American intellectual and nomad archetype Frederick Douglas described as a "composite nation." But after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 (built largely with Irish and Chinese labor), most 2ndGA cultural fudamentalists fell in behind the sentiments and slogans of nativist groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League. Anti-Chinese riots left death tolls of twenty-eight in Rock Springs Wyoming in 1855 and twenty-one dead in Los Angeles in 1871. The violence continued on into the culturally fundamentalst steady state phase of the 2ndGA (Hohenzollern High ca.1871-1893), with thirty-one Chinese killed during the Snake River Massacre in Oregon in 1877. Throughout the high, motivated by a combination of economics, race, and religion, anti-Chinese nativists denounced the Chinese as cheap labor, "chinks", and "heathen." Although Protestant missionaries as a rule embraced Asian immigrants on the theory that they would soon "bow at the same altar as our own countrymen," most Americans saw things differently. Noting low rates of conversion to Christianity in American Chinese communities, the "San Francisco Chronical" mocked the missionaries as naifs out of step with the public, while raising the spector of Caucasian conversion to Confucianism. But not all Americans were hostile to Asian culture during the Hohenzolern high. "The Light of Asia" a poetic life of Buddha by the artist archetype Englishman Sir Edwin Arnold became a bestseller in America after its publication in 1879. However, hero archetype Bret Harte's less lauditory poem, "The Heathen Chinee," published in 1870, was widely quoted from San Francisco to New York City. By 1880 over 100,000 Chinese called the United States home. The Japanese came next, and in greater numbers since they made their way in force to Hawaii in the 1880s. Between 1885 and the Asian Exclusion Act promulgated during the cultural warfare phase of the 3rdGA (New Freedom Unraveling ca. 1912-1929) in 1924, 200,000 Japanese arrived in Hawaii(which became a United States territory in 1900) and 180,000 came to the continental United States. Among the latter group were Dr. Shuye Sonoda and the Reverend Kakuryo Nishijima of Kyoto Japan. Practitioners of Jodo Shishu (True Pure Land) Buddhism, they became, upon their arrival in San Francisco during the spiritual warfare phase of the 3rdGA 1899, the first full-time Buddhist missionaries to the United States. "This starling fact--a religion without God--was noted with some alarm in a news item in the "San Francisco Chronical" when the very first Japanese Buddhist teachers, Dr. Shuje Sonada and the Reverend Kahuryo Nishijima, arrived in the U.S. in 1899 to minster to the Japanese immigrant community. The reporter, having interviewed and photographed the two teachers, wrote, "They wiil teach that God is not the creator, but the created; not a real existence, but a figment of the human imagination, and that pur Buddhism is a better moral guide than Christianity." This was, no doubt, interpreted with less nuance than it might have been, but it put forward in journalistic fashion a theological matter that has been a stumblin block for many Westrn theists in their approach to Buddhism. The very idea of a religion with no God makes for a rocky start in the nation that now prints "In God We Trust" on its coins and pledges "One nation under God, indivsible..." Nearly one years later the Japanese Buddhist descendants of those first teachers in San Francisco weighed in on the school prayer issue with a resolution that even now alarms those who understand religion in presumed Christian categories. It says, in part: "Prayer, the key religious component, is not appicable in Jodo Shin Buddhism which does not prescribe to a Supreme Being or God (as defined in the Jdeo-Christian tradition) to petition or solicit; and allowing any form of prayer in schools and public institutions would create a state sanction of a type of religion which believes in prayer and 'The Supreme Being' would have the effect of establishing a national religion and, therefore, would be an assault on the religious freedom of Buddhists. (ANRA pp.151-152) (more later) DMMcG

Central Asian Indo=European speakers came later and in much smaller numbers than the East Asian Chinese and Japanese. Although there are accounts of Indian immigrants marching in a Fourth of July parade in Salem, Massachustts in the 1850s, Central Asian immigration did not reach significant numbers until the early years of the spiritual warfare phase of the 3rdGA (Unitarian Awakening ca.1893-1912), when fewer than 7,000 arrived. Most were unskilled laborers from the Punjab region. Although Central Asian immigrants were called "Hindoos" few actually practiced Hiduism. Approximately 10 percent were Muslims, and the overwhelming majority were Sikhs. Sikhs distinguished themselves from other Hindu believing immigrants by wearing turbans and by refusing to shave or to cut their hair. They too built places of worship. Americas first Sikh gurdwara or temple was built in Stockton, California at the very end of the Unitarian Awakening in 1912. Because virtually all Sikh migrants were men, they were forced to marry outside the faith. Many wed Mexican-American Catholics. Their families practiced a fascinating creole of Sikhism and Spanish-style Catholicism. (more later) DMMcG

Throughout the culturally fundamentalist Hohenzollern high ca. 1871-1893,the "Chinese Question" continued to rage. The answer to this question many nativist newspaper editors argued was to cut off immigration from China. The political result of this lobbying effort being The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And given the success of this anti-Chinese campaign, it is not surprising hat nativists responded to Japanese and East Asian immigration with similar bravado. Those who had previously warned their fellow Americans about the "Yellow Peril" now feared a tsunami of "Japs" and an invasion of "Ragheads." Once again, violence broke out. And once again legislators heeded the cries of the rioters rather than the immigrants' anguish. But not all Americans treated Asians and their religions with scorn during the high. Nomad archetypes Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, cofounded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Both Blavatsky and Olcott converted to Buddhism in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1880, and three years later the Episcopol bishop (consecrated in 1891)and hero archetype Phillips Brooks remarked that " a large part of Boston prefers to consider itself Buddhist rather than Christian." In some early versions of her 1875 edition of "Science and Health with key to the Scriptures, Christian Science founder and nomad archetype Mary Baker Eddy quoted approvingly from the Bhagavad Gita. (more later) DMMcG

During the spiritual warfare phase of the 3rdGA (Unitarian Awakening ca. 1893-1912), in 1902 hero archetype Thomas Edison , an early member of the Theosophcal Society, produced a documentary film called "Hindoo Fakir" in 1902. Three years later, modern dance pioneer and nomad archetype Ruth St. Denis brought Hinduism to the stage when she played the title role in "Radha: The Mystic Dance of the Five Senses." Lafacidio Hern, who sympathized with but never converted to Buddhism, moved to Japan, took a Japanese name (Yakkumo Koizumi), and became citizen. He was later buried in a Japanese Buddhist monestary. While a few Americans alit on Asian soil during the period, Asians put down religious roots in the United States. Those roots were fertilized by asian missionaries to America. As I have already shown, the seminal event took place in 1893 when Hindu, Zen, and Theraveda Buddists missionaries came to Chicago as delegates to the world's Parliment of Religions. (more later) DMMcG

Also as we have already seen, Swami Vivekananda was the Hindu delagate from India, Anagarkira Dharmapala from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) represented Theravada Buddhism and Soyen Shaku was a Rinzai Zen Master from Japan. All three men traveled the United States following the Parliament. Dharmapala had little success transplanting his Maha Bodhi Society to America, but, as I have shown, Vivekananda's Vedanta Society thrived in American soil. Under the leadership of Swami Abhedanda and Swami Paramanarda, Vedanta spread during the spiritual and cultural warfare phases of the 3rdGA (ca.1893-1929) to New York, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles. By the end of that time, however, Vedanta had to compete with a new form of American Hinduism, the Kriya Yoga of Swami Paramahansa Yogananda, who arrived in America as a delegate to the International Congress of Religious Liberals held in Boston during the cultural warfare phase of the 3rdGA in 1920. He stayed on as the leader of the Self-Realization Fellowship. Unlike Dharmapala, Vivekanada, and Yogananda, Soyen Shaku chose to send teachers rather than build institutions. One of his students, prophet archetype D.T. Suzuki came to America at the age of twenty-seven during the spiritual warfare phase of the 3rdGA in 1897 to work with the hero archetype Buddhist sympathizer Paul Carus at Open Court Publishing in LaSalle, Illinois that had become a forum for discussion of religion and ethics. "Soyen Shaku's voice continued in converstation through his association with Paul Carus, a frethinker who pioneered in making the intellectual connections of religion and science, which he published in a journal called The Open Court. Through Soyen Shaku, Carus made his most important contact with the Buddhist world--the young D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) who translated Soyen Shaku's parliament address into English. In the late 1890s, at the urging of Carus, D.T. Suzuki agreed to come to America and work with Carus at the headquarters of The Open Court in LaSalle, Illinois. Suzuki was not yet tirty. He spent more than a decade in Illinois, working on a translation of the "Tao Te Ching" and translations of Mahayana Buddhist texts. "My decision to write in English originated as a result of my many coversations with Dr. Paul Carus," he reflected later in life. "My conviction gradually emerged that Westerners did not understand Buddhism." In the course of this long apprenticeship, Suzuki also became the first real cultural translator of the Zen tradition. D.T. Suzuki's name is so familiar now that it is easy to forget just how groundbreaking his achievement as a Buddhist pioneer in America really was." (more later) DMMcG

?He was the first to put Zen Buddhism into the idioms and ideas of the west, producing more than twenty books in all. He was not a meditation master, but he was steeped in the traditions, arts, and culture of Japanese Zen and is sometimes called ?the first patriarch of American Zen.?
Eventually Suzuki married an American woman, a Radcliffe graduate, Beatrice Erksine Lane, who worked at his side in both the U.S. and Japan until her death in 1939. Suzuki?s longest sustained period in America was in the 1950s when, throughout his eighties, he lectured at the Claremont Colleges in California and then at Columbia University. He had many Western students, like Alan Watts, who wrote that he ?had to get out from under the monstrously oppressive God the Father,? and Philip Kapleau, who eventually went to Japan to undertake meditation practice and wrote the classic Three Pillars of Zen. Psychologists such as Erich Fromm and Karen Horney attended his lectures, leading to the first major conference on Zen and psychoanalysis in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1957. In that same year, Suzuki also came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an extended visit with the Zen philosopher Shinichi Hisamatsu, who taught for a short time at Harvard Divinity School. This visit marked the beginning of the first Buddhist center in Boston, the Cambridge Buddhist Association. All the while, Suzuki was writing books that people bought and read?Essays in Zen Buddhism, Zen and Japanese Culture, An Introduction Zen?and articles about him were published in such popular magazines as Vogue and The New Yorker. All this contributed to a growing ?Zen boom? in intellectual circles. In the last few years of his life Suzuki lived in Japan, where he died in 1966.? (ANRA pp.186-187).
But Nativism once again reared its ugly head, during the cultural warfare phase of the 3rdGA (new freedom unraveling ca. 1912-1929). In 1917 the United States Congress resolved the ?Hindoo?? by creating a ?barred zone? that effectively banned immigration from central and south east Asia. Toward the end of the new freedom unraveling, congress finished the job by passing the immigration act of 1924, which added the Japanese to the list of excluded Asians. In so doing the supporters of this legislation martialed support from devotees of both the 2nd and 3rdGAs in the same way that the promulgation of ?the 16th (Federal income taxes), the 17th (popular election of senators), the 18th (prohibition), and the 19th (women?s suffrage) amendments to the constitution? were the products of the same confluence and corralation of forces. (Fogel p.30)
At the beginning of the actual warfare phase of the 3rdGA (New Deal Crisis ca. 1929-1946) in 1929, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore arrived in Los Angeles for a lecture tour when immigration officials insulted him. Angelinos, full of the Libel of Catherine Mayo?s ?Mother India? published in 1927 and the silver-screen images of the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu, treated him with suspicion. Rather than suffer their indignities, Tagore cancelled his tour and left the country abruptly. But not before getting in a parting shot. ?Jesus could not get into America,? Tagore remarked, ?because?he would be Asiatic.? Tagore was not the only ?Asiatic? to endur the slings of public policy and the arrows of public opinion during the cultural warfare phase of the 3rd GA. In lawsuits in 1922 and 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that neither the Japanese nor Asian Indians were by law ?white? persons eligible for citizenship. Thus, in 1924 the Asian exclusion act effectively cut off immigration from Asia. As Tagore was to discover it was difficult for Hindu and Buddhist teachers even to visit the United States, let alone settle there. And it was nearly impossible for Lay people to make the passage through Angel Island. (more later) DMMcG

After the Asian Exclusion Act became law at the end of the New Freedom Unraveling, it ushered in a period of quiescence in the history of Asian religions in the United States. In the period of exclusion, that will last throughout the New Deal Crisis and most of the New Frontier High until 1965, the Chinese population fell, the Japanee population stagnated, and Central Asian immigration shrank to almost nothing. Buddhsn, Hinduism, and other Asian religious traditions were set adrift. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed in 1943 and the Luce-Celler Bill of 1946 lifted India out of the Asiatic Barred Zone, immigration quotas for the Chinese and Central Asians were so miniscule (roughly 100 per year for each group) that this legislation did little to reverse the demographic slide started in 1924. As the Chinese who remained in the United States moved from rural to urban areas,and from small cities to big ones, many previously thriving Chinatowns declined, and many Chinese temples shut down. Inside the Japanese-American community, the Nisei generation rose to prominence. In its rush to the mainstream, this American-born and English-speaking cohort was more likely tan the Japanese-born Issei generation to neglect the faiths of their fathers and mothers. Holding fast to te religion of your Asian ancestors became far more than a threat to your American identity during the New Deal Crisis. It became a threat to your freedom. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, one of the first groups to be rounded up were Buddhist priests of Japanese descent. Before, during, and after the era of incarceration in wartime internment camps brought on by prophet archetype Prsident Roosevelt's Exeutive Order 9066 of 1942, many Buddhists stopped practicing their faith for fear of being labled anti-American. Others converted to Christianity in a show of patriotism. In 1944, leaders of the Buddhist Mission of North America--with forty-four temples in the early 1940s it was te largest buddhist group in the United States during this period--met in the Topaz camp in Arizona and voted to rename their organization the Buddhist Churches of America. Their point was as plain as it was poignant: Japanese-American Buddhism was American Buddhism, and it deserved a place alongside Christianity at the table of American faiths. The actions of Congress and the orders of President Roosevelt had a chilling effect on immigrant Buddhism and Hinduism between 1924 and 1965. But those same actions and orders provided an opportunity for non-Asian Americans to assume leading roles in the unfolding saga of Asian religions in America. In fact, Buddhism and Hinduism refused to fade away in this era because of the efforts of a handful of Asian-born teachers, on the one hand, and a small but influential group of their non-Asian converts and sympathizers on the other. Consider the course of Buddhism in this period of exclusion. While Chinese temples shut down and the Buddhist Churches of America fought a war of attrition , Buddhism survived. And at least in its Zen form, it prospered among a new crop of "White Buddhists," introduced in America by Rinzai Zen master Soyen Shaku at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Zen carved out a place for itself in many American cities in the twentieth century. After Rinzai Zen reformer Soyen Shaku contributed the first American book on Zen, "Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot" in 1906, Nukariya Kaiten, a Soto Zen priest and a Harvard lecturer, contribted the second, "Religion of the Samurai", in 1913. After these books came a series of Zen centers, attended almost entirely by the non-Asian converts and sympathizers who were buing Zen books. The peripatetic Nyogen Senzaki established Zen centers in San Francisco in 1925 and Los Angeles in 1931. Shigetsu Sakak, also known as Sokei-an, incorporated the Buddhist Society of America (later renamed the Firts Zen Institute in America) in New York City in 1931. Meanwhile, as we have already seen, D.T. Suzuki kept Zen on the minds of fashionabl elites on the two coasts through a combination of lectures, books, and interpersonal contacts. His two series of "Essays in Zen Buddhism, published in London in 1927 and 1933, were the most influential Zen texts in America in this period. Larggely because of Suzuki's efforts, Zen emerged after the New Deal Crisis as the Asian religion of choice among non-Asian Americans. W.Y. Evans-Wentz introduced a generation of Americans to the Vajrayana ("Diamond Vehicle") Buddhism of Tibet upon the publication of his "Tibetan Book of the Dead" in 1927, but there were few Tibetan teachers around to transform whatever interest that book generated into serious practice inside Tibetan Buddhist communities. Dwight Goddard, author of the "Buddhist Bible in 1932 and founder of the Followers of Buddha in 1934, tried to bring the rigors of Buddhist monasticism to the heartland of america, but his experiment failed. At least in this period, Americans were not prepared to do their Dharma before dawn. (more later) DMMcG

DMMcG, I am familar with your work through this website as well as unpublished lecture material. You have concluded that fundementalism is on the rise as being the alternating counter culture into being the culture (modernism vs fundementalism). As i believe you have said fundementalism in all it's extreme forms of any kind can be dangerous wither it is Islamic terrorist networks or "Bible Tumper Extremists" who also are willing to kill for their cause (example- bombing of abortion clinics). If fundementalism will be the culture of the upcoming present, does this mean that we are coming back into an age of extreme tension between religions traditions even within the same faith. For example, tension between Protestants,and Catholic. Vatican 2 did alot in beginning of bringing the traditions to better tolerace and openess concerning each other. A more recent event of growing unification is the statement agreed upon by the Lutheran and Catholic church concering sactification and grace and the contining unifying of the episciplains and Lutehrans cerning the sharing of clergy. If we are headed into a time of swinging back into fundementalism as the culture, co this mean that all the unifyiing between these traditons within the christian faith will fall apart? Will we then be further from coming back together as the one Church because everyone will be to busying being fundementalist catholics, fundementalist lutehrans, fundementalist "born againers...?" To me, fundementalism allows little room for unification. Any comment on what to expect as a woman pre-seminarian student in this time of rising fundementalism? Is there any hope for Christian unification in light of the East mets West phenominum about which you speak?

Bernadtte75--stay tuned! DMMcG

During the culturally modernist New Frontier steady state high of the 3rdGA ca. 1946-1968, the "Beat Generation" embraced Zen ( and other forms of Buddhism, including the "mind only" teachings of the Yogacara school of Mahayana) as an alternative to what it saw as the stultifying and hypocritical, Judeo-Christian orthodoxy of nomad archetype Eisenhower's America. Thanks to the efforts of the Beats, Zen principles of freedom , naturalness, silence, and spontaneity made their way into American music, dance, painting, and literature. Hero archetype John Cage's "4'33," an avant-garde celebration of the chance sounds ever erupting out of silence (first performed in 1952), was informed by Zen, as was hero archetype Jack Kerouac's "Dharma Bums", which became upon its publication in 1958 as sure a symbol of hipster status as te white T-shirt or the artist archetype James Dean scowl. Although Rinzai Zen dominated in this period, Soto Zen (which emphasized seated meditation over against the koan) also had a presence, most notably in the form of the San Francisco Zen Center, established by Shunryu Suzuki-roshi in 1961. No longer widely denounced as a heathen religion, Buddhism had become (once again, and not for the last time) trendy. "Zen Buddhism," "Time" magazine announced in 1958, "is growig more chic by the minute." While Zen thrived at least toward the end of the high, Sikhism and Hinduism barely survived. Sikhs, who did not win non-Asian converts until the late 1960s, could not justify establishing a second American temple until the late 1940s, when they bought a Japanese Buddhist temple in El Centro California (emptied, ironically, by wartime circumstances), and converted it into a gurdwara, or temple. As we have seen, Swami Vivekananda and his followers had established Vedanta societies in key American cities early in the century, but during the high many folded and others barely hung on. Meanwhile, a spate of Euro-American gurus like "Oom the Omnipotent" (a.k.a. Pierre Bernard) gave Hiduism a bad name. Not long after Swami Paramahansa Yogananda imported to America the kriya yoga teachings of the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India (established 1917), his Self-Realization Fellowship (S.R.F.) passed te Vedanta society as the most influential Hindu movement in the country. In 1937, "Self-Realization" magazine reported that over 150,000 had been initiated into Yogananda's quick and easy path to God-consciousness--the "airplane route" in Swami-speak- but Yogananda's death i 1952 devastated the S.R.F., which has not yet bonced back to its peak strength of an estimated 150 American centers. (more later) DMMcG

American impresions of Asians and Asian religions improved somewhat during the high. The Chinese enjoyed a brief era of respect between the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Communist victory in China in 1949, but for much of the period they were viewed with suspicion or contempt. Prophet archetype Mohandas Gandhi, by contrast, emerged as an international and American hero--a "Mahatma" or Great Soul-- in the years leading up to Indian independence in 1947. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama earned the respect of Americans and te cover of "Time" for his Gandhian perseverance before and after the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1959. Finally, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ascended to the to the status of "Guru to the Stars" after bringing his Hindu-based (but ostensibly nonrelgious) technique of Transcendental Meditation to the United States in 1959. By reinforcing longstanding American stereotypes about the inscrutable spirituality of Asian holy men, Gandhi, the dalai Lama, and the Maharsishi helped set the stage for the eastward turn of the late sixties and early seventies. Things would be far easier in Los Angeles for martial artist Bruce Lee than they had been for Rabindranath Tagore in 1929. (more later) DMMcG