Hinduism

HINDUISM

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HINDUISM. Americans learned about Hinduism in the late eighteenth century from European scholars and from missionaries and traders returning from India. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson incorporated Hindu themes in their transcendental philosophy in the 1830s and 1840s. The first Indian to successfully promote Hinduism in America was Swami Vivekananda, who represented Hinduism at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. He went on to establish Vedanta Societies in major American cities, teaching a variety of Hinduism that emphasizes social reform, religious tolerance, and the unity of self (atman ) and Absolute (Brahman ). Swami Paramahansa Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship, established in 1935 to teach kriya yoga, soon surpassed Vedanta in popularity. In the 1960s, transcendental meditation and the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, or Hare Krishna Society, gathered large numbers of followers among Americans seeking spiritual alternatives to mainstream religion, and the civil rights movement drew inspiration from Indian nationalist Mohandas K. Gandhi's interpretation of the Hindu tradition of ahimsa (nonviolence).

After the passage of less restrictive immigration laws in 1965, a large influx of Asian Indian immigrants brought a new plurality of Hindu practices to the United States. They contributed the first major, Indian-style Hindu temples, built to accommodate immigrant Hindus, to the American landscape. In 2000, there were approximately one million Hindus in the United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jackson, Carl T. The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth-Century Explorations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

———. Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Tweed, Thomas A., and Stephen Prothero, eds. Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Susan Haskell

See also Asian Religions and Sects .