Eastern religions

Footnote, Johnston, Buddhist China, page 114, end footnote.

And is not the Christ of Christendom above the world of time and space? Lastly, must not both Christians and Buddhists admit that among the Christs or Buddhas the most godlike are those embodied in narratives as Jesus and Gautama? Western and Eastern Religion Religion, as conceived by most Christians of the West, is very different from the religion of India.

Three quarters of it, as Matthew Arnold says, has to do with conduct.

It is a code with a very positive and keen divine sanction.

I don't know how he solves that problem or what his underlying, this other person's, not Aaron's, but the other person's underlying worldview involves, but it just is odd.

I don't go deep in Eastern religions.

I'm a generalist with a lot of this stuff, but I know pantheism, Francis Schaeffer used to call it everything-ism, because God is in everything.

It's kind of an offshoot of monistic Hinduism, where monism is just simply the idea—and I do talk about this in The Story of Reality as an alternate view.

He was asking questions and claiming that God was dictating the answers back.

But it was all very new age.

Yeah, so, well, New Age is a kind of an adaptation or a personalized distortion of Eastern religion, particularly Hinduism.

And so you can't—there's so many permutations of it that it's hard to put your finger on it.

My name is Brad Warner.

I'm the author of a bunch of books about Zen Buddhism, and I'd like to talk to you about one of the first phrases I ever heard when I got interested in Eastern religions, which is, "I am not this body." Let's talk about that after 17 seconds of "Strange World" by La Luz.

[rock music] All right, thrill seekers, that was a little bit of the song "Strange World" by La Luz, who are one of my favorite bands.

They are a current band, so this proves that I do like some stuff that is current.

I don't know.

[rock music] Shaina Cleveland is one of my favorite guitar players, and shout out to Shaina for coming up with that terrific riff.

When I first got interested in Eastern religions a long, long time ago, when I was a little whippersnapper, I probably first got fascinated by them when I was 10 or 11 years old and living in Kenya, in Nairobi, in Africa, and there were a lot of Indian people around there.

And then I, I, I don't know, junior high school or high school, I actually started to try to study it a little bit or read whatever I could to, could find about it.

We do fundamentally just Lotus Sutra and the Nichiren-shu tradition.

What the prison system did, and this is so arbitrary, instead of allowing us just to be Buddhists, they created this category called Eastern Religions.

So anything that wasn't Abrahamic falls under the heading of Eastern Religions.

So I may get Hindus and sometimes a few Jews, pagans.

There's another group, I think it's part of the Islamic tradition, but they're called the 20 percenters or 9 percenters or something like that.

Now, as far back as the 1800s, American esotericists like the Theosophists were incorporating ideas and practices from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism long before they were cool.

But the Americanization of Eastern religions really kicked into overdrive in the 1960s.

In the late 1950s, Beat Generation authors like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were introducing popular conceptions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism to American readers.

Then, in 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act.

Watching that conversation between Shirley and David, we can identify the marks of new thought, with Shirley exhibiting the power of positive thinking and the divinity of the self, as she chants the affirmation, I am God.

We see the perennialist philosophy of Western esotericism, as David shares that the old masters of the world's religions were teaching the same universal truth.

And we see the anti-dogmatism of the American counterculture and the Americanization of Eastern religions as David excoriated the church for suppressing the belief in reincarnation and karma.

The sociologist Robert Wuthnau theorized that the 1960s and the decades that followed marked a major shift in the American religious landscape.