American Veda: Beatles, Yoga, Meditation

Philip Goldberg, 5/14/13; Jen B., Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly

American Veda: The Beatles to Yoga and Meditation

American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

Om (aum) symbol flag (Vedic Hinduism)

This paperback has a 4.6 out of 5 stars with 236 ratings. Huston Smith wrote the foreword. It's a fascinating look at India’s remarkable impact on Western culture.

This eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta (the best of the ancient Vedas or "Knowledge Books") and the mind-body methods of yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape of the U.S.

US yoga today: selfies and butt-pants (lol)

What exploded in the 1960s, following the Beatles' trip to India for an extended stay with their new guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, actually began more than 200 years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge -- as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics -- from Asia.

• American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (Philip Goldberg)
• Hinduism in America: A Convergence of Worlds (Jeffery D. Long)

The first translations of Hindu and pre-Hindu (Brahminical) texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau (On Walden Pond), Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed India’s “science of consciousness” and wove it into the fabric of their lives.

Trump meditates on "om" syllable.

Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda (World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893) and Paramahansa Yogananda (Self Realization Fellowship) came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), jazz musician John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Harvard Prof. Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them.

The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos.

Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms.

Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses.

The insights of India’s sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americans—and continue to do so every day. Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.” More

Chinese discovered America (video)

CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Xochitl, Wisdom Quarterly; Sarah Todd (tricycle.com); Rick Fields

The splendor and sophistication of ancient China's walled civilization (Linc060/flickr)

(FA) Documentary about the Chinese discovery of America, with written recorded documentation in China and anthropological evidence in America, long before European explorers. This "shocking" was revealed by Rick Fields in How the Swans Came to the Lake

Buddhists in early America

Sarah Todd, Editorial Assistant (Tricycle.com)

Editor in chief James Shaheen recommended Rick Fields’ How the Swans Came to the Lake, which offers an in-depth history of Buddhism’s role in American life. Originally published in 1981 and last updated in 1992, Swans is a (mostly) current and always relevant look at Buddhism’s roots.

 

In a culture saturated with pop-Eastern philosophy -- toy Buddha car accessories, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Tao of [Physics and] Pooh, the now-discontinued “Om” fragrance by Gap -- it’s clear that Buddhism has secured a place in the imagination of the American public.

 

In warm, witty prose Fields takes on the question of why and how this came to be. He begins by tracing the development of America’s understanding of Buddhism, illuminating the way that misconceptions and poor translations caused even great Western thinkers to misunderstand basic [tenets] of practice.

(AHB) A Buddhist monk arrived in California/Mexico 1,000 years before

"Who Really Discovered America?" Did numerous explorers discover the "New World" long before Christopher Columbus staked a claim for Europe in 1492? No less than a dozen cultures have tales of these adventurers woven into their histories, but they are noticeably absent in American history books. This documentary explores the possibility that the Chinese, Japanese, Polynesians, Norse, Welsh, Irish, Ancient Hebrews, and the Solutreans all made it to the Americas earlier than Columbus. Rebuild the ships, trace the routes, test the artifacts and analyze blood evidence to finally learn the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of all time -- who really discovered America?

The USA is only a small part of America

From the 18th-century scholar and linguist William Jones, who understood Asian culture’s potential to offer the West an “Oriental renaissance” but “either did not know or did not accept the Buddhist’s version of the origin of their own religion,” to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote alarmingly of “This remorseless Buddhism…threatening with death and night,” Westerners often misunderstood Buddhism as a primitive form of nihilism.

Nonetheless, Fields points out that many artistic and intellectual movers-and-shakers of early America had more in common with Buddhists than they themselves may have known. Henry David Thoreau’s experiment on Walden Pond was focused on mindful sitting in nature that sounds much like Buddhist meditation; he himself wrote, “I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.” And what else is Walt Whitman’s expansive embrace than a celebration of the interconnectedness of all beings, one of the central Buddhist understandings? First, America became ripe for Buddhism; then came the ambassadors.

 

The Western interpreters of Eastern Buddhism rose to prominence in the form of Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky, spiritualists who eventually forsook their preoccupation with the afterlife to, as Blavatsky said, “point the way eastward.” Olcott sought to bring Buddhism to the public and “unite Buddhists under a common banner,” writing a book of Buddhist catechisms that was translated into nearly every European language... More

• VIDEO: Forbidden Archeology (suppressed evidence) 
• Secrets of the Ancient Mexicans: the Olmecs (BBC)
• New History of Humanity (scientific discoveries) 

(History) America was full when Italian Colombus arrived on Spanish ships

When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, unknown to him he was on islands located between two huge land masses now known as North America and South America. It was teaming with huge civilizations rivaling any in the world at the time. There were thousands of smaller First Nations and tribes. According to recent estimates, the population may have exceeded 100 million people from Alaska and Greenland in the north, to the southern tip of South America. In proto-Canada, most people lived along the coast or along major rivers.

Ancient Maya: First American Buddhists

BOOK: How the Swans Came to the Lake:
A Narrative History of Buddhism in America

(Shambhala Publications, 492 pp., 1986)

WISDOM-BOOKS.COM SYNOPSIS: Far more than a history of Buddhism's arrival and growth in America -- a development which led to the sudden rise of the ancient Mayan culture -- this highly readable account is packed full of interesting stories and anecdotes, and includes a wealth of material on the spread of Buddhism to the West from the time of Alexander the Great onwards.

This book gives the definitive treatment to the impact Buddhism has had on American thought, and it is a goldmine of information on early Buddhism in Europe. It covers the early Western Buddhist pioneers, plus those who profoundly influenced and paved the way for its appearance in the West.

Included are: the Greeks in India, King Ashoka; the Gnostics; Sir William Jones and the Royal Asiatic Society; Emerson and Thoreau; Whitman and Walden; Edwin Arnold; Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society; the Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities in the States; the Pali Text Society; the World Parliament of Religions; D T Suzuki; Sokei-an; Nyogen Suzuki; Alan Watts; Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beat Poets; Shunryo Suzuki; Philip Kapleau; Chogyam Trungpa; Tarthang Tulku; Geshe Wangyal; Thomas Merton; Jack Kornfield; Joseph Goldstein and Thich Nhat Hanh; and many others.

"Heroic in scope and of undeniable importance" -- L.A. Times.

iRead excerpts on Amazon