Peter van der Veer
Spirituality in Modern
Society
social research Vol 76 : No 4 : Winter 2009 1097
1. Spiritual and Secular
the origins of modern spirituality are, in my view, to be
found in the nineteenth century and in the West. One can, obviously,
find deep histories of spirituality in mysticism, gnosticism, hermeticism,
and in a whole range of traditions from antiquity, but modern
spirituality is something that is, indeed, modern. It is part of modernity
and thus of a wide-ranging nineteenth-century transformation, a
historical rupture. Spirituality is notoriously hard to define, and I want
to suggest that its very vagueness as the opposite of materiality, as
distinctive from the body, as distinctive from both the religious and the
secular, has made it productive as a concept that bridges various discursive
traditions across the globe.
The argument of this paper is that the spiritual and the secular are
produced simultaneously as two connected alternatives to institutionalized
religion in Euro-American modernity. The paper also argues that a
central contradiction in the concept of spirituality is that it is at the same
time seen as universal and as tied to conceptions of national identity.
Moreover, while the concept travels globally, its trajectory differs from
place to place as it is inserted in different historical developments. My
focus is on India and China, but not in an attempt to provincialize Europe
or America, but in recognition of the fact that Indian and Chinese modernities
are a product of interactions with imperial modernity (van der Veer
2001). The examination of Indian and Chinese spiritualities is important
in itself, but in the context of this special issue of Social Research it has the
1098 social research
added advantage that it also yields a better understanding of the interactional
history of Euro-American modernity with Asian modernity.
The spiritual as a modern category emerges in the second half
of the nineteenth century as part of the Great Transformation. As such
it is part of nineteenth-century globalization, a thoroughgoing political,
economic, and cultural integration of the world. As Prasenjit Duara
has convincingly argued, this integration is uneven in time and place,
and occurs at different levels of society, integrating markets and political
systems in a differential process. In this paper we are dealing with
what an instance of what Duara calls “cognitive globalization,” which
produces “unique” national formations of spirituality within a global
capitalist system (Duara 2009: 5-7).
The emergence of spirituality is tied to the better-known ascendancy
of the secular. Again, like spirituality, the concept of the secular
also has deep histories, as in the separation of worldly and transcendent
orders or in that of transcendence and immanence, but modern secularism
is, indeed, modern and another aspect of the Great Transformation.1
Much sociological attention and imagination has gone into, first, the
development of the secularization thesis as part of the modernization
paradigm and, more recently, its dismantling. José Casanova has been
in the forefront of this dismantling with his important book, Public
Religions (1994). He has argued that the three propositions of the secularization
thesis—the decline of religious beliefs, the privatization of religion,
and the differentiation of secular spheres and their emancipation
from religion—should be looked at separately in a comparative analysis.
He comes to the conclusion that comparative historical analysis
allows one to get away from the dominant stereotypes about the United
States and Europe and to open a space for further sociological inquiry
into multiple patterns of fusion and differentiation of the religious and
the secular across societies and religions. This means moving away
from teleological understandings of modernization. Or perhaps better,
it means questioning that telos by recognizing its multiplicity and its
contradictions. Casanova’s intervention can be understood as building
on the Weberian project of comparative and historical sociology, but
Spirituality in Modern Society 1099
going beyond it by avoiding the reduction of civilizations to essences
that can be compared and by avoiding a Hegelian evaluation in terms of
“lack” or “deficit” in the world-historical process of modernization and
rationalization. Eisenstadt’s proposal to speak about multiple modernities
similarly creates space for such a post-Weberian project, but the
question has to be asked what the role of secularity and secularism is in
the production of these multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2002).
Casanova’s post-Weberian perspective is entirely acceptable,
but I want to make a few observations. The first is that the project
of European modernity should be understood as part of what I have
called “interactional history” (van der Veer 2001). That is to say that
the project of modernity with all its revolutionary ideas of nation,
equality, citizenship, democracy, and rights is developed not only in
Atlantic interactions between the United States and Europe but also in
interactions with Asian and African societies that are coming within
the orbit of imperial expansion. Instead of the oft-assumed universalism
of the Enlightenment, I would propose to look at the universalization
of ideas that emerges from a history of interactions. Enlightened
notions of rationality and progress are not simply invented in Europe
and accepted elsewhere, but are both produced and universally spread
in the expansion of European power. This entails a close attention to
the pathways of imperial universalization. Examining India and China
uncovers some of the peculiarities of this universalization by showing
how it is inserted in different historical trajectories in these societies.
The second is that with all the attention to secularization as a historical
process, there is not enough attention to secularism as historical project.
Casanova has in his recent writings rightly drawn attention to the importance
in Europe of secularism as an ideological critique of religion, carried
out by a number of social movements (Casanova 2004). Secularism as an
ideology offers a teleology of religious decline and can function as a selffulfilling
prophecy. It is important to examine the role of intellectuals in
furthering this understanding of history, but also their relation to sources
of power: state apparatuses and social movements. Secularism is a forceful
ideology when carried by political movements that capture both the imag-
1100 social research
ination and the means to mobilize social energies. It is important to attend
to the utopian and indeed religious elements in secularist projects in order
to understand why many of these movements seem to tap into traditional
and modern sources of witchcraft, millenarianism, and charisma, while
at the same time being avowedly anti-traditionalist. Much of this remains
outside of the framework of discussions of secularization, but the cases
of India and China show us how essential this is for understanding the
dynamics of religion and the secular.
Third, I would like to point out that the spiritual and the secular
are produced simultaneously and in mutual interaction. As many
scholars have been arguing, religion as a universal category is a modern
construction with a genealogy in universalist Deism and in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century European expansion (Asad 1993). One needs therefore
to analyze how the categories of “religion,” “secularism,” and “spirituality”
are universalized. This is also true for the category of the secular
that has a genealogy in church-world relations in European history but
is transformed in modernity both in Europe and elsewhere. The modern
origins of “the secular” are already clear when we look at the first use of
the term secularism in England by George Holyoake in 1846. Holyoake
attacked Christianity as an “irrelevant speculation,” and his attack was
carried forward by Secular Societies that were formed in the early 1850s.
One of the interesting aspects of these societies is that they combined
radical antichurch attitudes, anti-establishment socialism and freethinking
with spiritual experimentation. Secular Societies had a membership
that was hugely interested in connecting to the other world by do-it-yourself
science. These practices were not considered to be antirational, but
rather to constitute experiments that were scientific though different
from what was going on in the universities. They did not need (or want)
to be legitimated by a scientific establishment that was considered to be
intimately intertwined with high society and the established church, as
indeed Oxford and Cambridge were in this period.
A good example of the combination of socialist radicalism, secularism,
and spirituality is the prominent feminist Annie Besant. In the
1870s Annie Besant became a member of the Secular Society of London
Spirituality in Modern Society 1101
and began to collaborate with Charles Bradlaugh, a prominent socialist
and president of the National Secular Society, in promoting birth control
and other feminist issues. She combined her radical socialist views
and her scientific training as the first woman graduating in science at
University College in London with a great interest in spiritual matters.
After meeting Madame Blavatsky she became a leading Theosophist,
and after going to India she even became for a short moment president
of the Indian National Congress (Nethercot 1961, 1963).
Science and scientific rationality are fundamental to the secular
age, and scientific progress is often seen to depend on the secularization
of the mind (Chadwick 1990). From our contemporary viewpoint
it seems strange that spirituality and secular science were not seen as
at odds with each other in the nineteenth century. A common view of
the history of science is that science purifies itself from unwarranted
speculation. So, for instance, while the contribution of Alfred Russell
Wallace in developing evolutionary theory concurrently with that of
Darwin is generally acknowledged, Wallace’s spiritual experiments are
generally seen as an aberration from which science has purified itself
(Pels 2003). What falls outside of this teleological perspective on science
as a process of progressive purification is the social and political embedded
nature of both the elements from which science is purified and of
purified science itself. Spiritualism was seen as a secular truth-seeking,
experimental in nature and opposed to religious obscurantism and
hierarchy. This was a truth-seeking that was hindered by both the state
and the church, which in England were two intertwined institutions. It
is within the context of spiritualism, spirituality, and the antinomian
traditions of Britain that an anticolonial universalism was born.
An important element in the emergence of spirituality was that
it offered an alternative to religion. This was first and foremost institutionalized
religion. In the West, spirituality formed an alternative to
church Christianity. Together with the so-called secularization of the
mind in nineteenth-century liberalism, socialism, as well as in science
(especially Darwin’s theory of evolution), one can find widespread
movements in different parts of the world that search for a universal
1102 social research
spirituality that is not bound to any specific tradition. Good examples in
the United States are the transcendentalists from Emerson to Whitman
as well as Mary Baker’s Christian Science. Theosophy is another product
of spirit-searching America. In fact, not only America is full of spirituality,
as Catherine Albanese has shown (Albanese 2007), but there is a
huge proliferation of this kind of movement that parallels the spread of
secularist ideologies around the world.
However, it is important to highlight that spirituality should not
be relegated to the fringes of modernity, as often happens, but that it is
located at the heart of Western modernity. The extent to which spirituality
emerged as a sign of Western modernity can be best shown by its
direct connection to abstract art. In December 1911 Wassily Kandinsky
published his Über das Geistige in der Kunst (“On the Spiritual in Art”), one of
the most influential texts by an artist in the twentieth century. He stated
that the book had as its main purpose to arouse a capacity to experience
the spiritual in material and abstract things, and that it was this capacity
that enabled experiences that were in the future absolutely necessary
and unending. Kandinsky emphasized that he was not creating a rational
theory, but that as an artist he was interested in experiences that were
partially unconscious. One of the formative experiences he describes is
his encounter at a French exhibition with Monet’s “Haystack”:
And suddenly for the first time I saw an Image. That it was
a “haystack” I learned from the catalogue. That I had not
recognized it was painful for me. I also thought that the
painter had no right to paint so unclearly. I experienced
dimly that there was no object in this image. And noticed
astonished and upset that the image did not only catch,
but that it imprints itself indelibly in memory and floats
always totally unexpected in final detail before one’s eyes
Kandinsky (1952 [1913]: 9).
Abstract art is one of the most distinctive signs of European
modernity. One can study its gradual development from the impres-
Spirituality in Modern Society 1103
sionismofMonetandothersthroughsymbolism,butitishardtoescape
the sense of drastic rupture with representational art. Kandinsky, one
of the pioneers of abstract art, connects abstraction with the spiritual.
He is certainly not exceptional, since other leading abstract pioneers,
such as Frantisek Kupka, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich, similarly
saw themselves as inspired by spirituality, either through the
influence of Theosophy and Anthroposophy or otherwise (Tuchman
1986). This may be somewhat unexpected for those who see the
modern transformation of European life in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in Weberian terms as demystification. In one of
the most pregnant expressions of modernity—namely, modern art—
the spiritual stages a come-back as the return of the repressed. The
connection between art and spirituality points at the way in which
art comes to stand for the transcendental interpretation of experience
that is no longer the exclusive province of institutional religion.
While some of the theories one encounters in this area seem to be
of the crackpot variety (especially Mondrian tends to be incredibly
confused and confusing in his writings), one should be careful not
to dismiss them too quickly as irrelevant. Artists are groping for a
radically new way of expressing transcendental truth and are often
more successful in their chosen medium than they are in words. The
transcendental and moral significance of modern art, enshrined in
museums and galleries, makes ideological attacks on art seem inevitable.
Such attacks acquire the status of blasphemy and iconoclastic
sacrilege, as in the Nazi burning of entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”).
One could legitimately argue that the spirituality of Western modernity
is enshrined in art.
2. Orientalist Spirituality
In Christianity, the religion of the colonial powers, we find in the
second half of the nineteenth century attempts not so much to convert
people to Christianity but to find a universal morality or spirituality
in other religious traditions, and thus a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung of
all traditions. This is exemplified in the Unitarian organization of the
1104 social research
World Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago, where representatives
of world religions were invited to speak on a common platform,
as well as in the newly developed discipline of science of religion that
went beyond Christian theology. The term “world religions” has been
coined in this period to designate religious traditions of a high morality
that could be treated as relatively equal. Buddhism was a perfect
candidate to be included in this category, while Islam, despite its clear
global presence and similarity to Christianity, was excluded at first
(Masuzawa 2005).
These attempts to isolate core elements of spirituality in existing
religious traditions were dependent on the development of new
philological and linguistic tools to analyze religious traditions. The
most important two figures for translating Indian and Chinese traditions
into the new category of world religion were Friedrich Max Muller
(1823-1900) and James Legge (1815-1897). Both have been the subject of
a wide interpretative literature, and I want to limit myself to an understanding
of their role in the discovery of Oriental spirituality. Muller
and Legge were colleagues at Oxford University and Legge produced
the Sacred Books of China for Muller’s Sacred Books of the East series,
which was published in 50 volumes between 1879 and 1902. India was
of much greater interest to British scholarship than China, primarily
because India had been colonized and secondly because India’s cultural
and linguistic heritage had been shown to be deeply related to that of
Europe, while China was not in the Indo-European family and seemed
deeply alien to scholars. Nevertheless, Muller accepted Confucianism
and Daoism into the fold of World Religion and invited his colleague
and friend Legge to make his translations of the classical texts of these
religions available for his famous series.
Legge had learned Chinese as a missionary in China for the
London Missionary Society and had already begun his monumental
work of translating Chinese classics in Hong Kong. When he returned to
England he became the first professor of Chinese at Oxford (1876-1897).
At Oxford he came more and more under the influence of Muller’s
Spirituality in Modern Society 1105
science of language and science of religion, and turned from a religious
missionary into a scientific missionary. A major element of this scientific
approach as opposed to a religious approach is the willingness to
see some essential Truth shining in all existing religions. This dissuades
the student of a particular religion from attacking the other religion
and allows for a liberal, tolerant attitude that is clearly most conducive
to the scholarly approach to non-Christian religious traditions.
This attitude makes the great project of translations contained in The
Sacred Books of the East feasible in the first place.
Max Muller had made his name early in his scholarly career by
editing the Rg-Veda, a foundational Sanskrit text, an undertaking financially
underwritten by the East India Company and finished in 1874. It
was one of the major gifts brought to India by the Prince of Wales on
his tour in 1875-1876. Muller had been rejected by Oxford as its Boden
Professor of Sanskrit because of his liberal views of religion, a rejection
that had deeply disappointed him. However, it seems that Muller
had found a perfect response to evangelical orthodoxy by making an
arrangement with Clarendon Press for the publication of The Sacred
Books of the East, dealing equally with the great religions: Brahmanism,
Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Islam. Although
he was not allowed to deal with Judaism and Christianity and publish
the Old and New Testament in this universalist series, he was able to
make his point in an indirect way that God’s Truth can be found in all
the great traditions (“the Bibles of Humanity” as he called them in a
letter to Ernest Renan; quoted in van den Bosch 2002: 134).
It is clear that the Orientalist translation of the great traditions of
India and China by Muller and Legge was embedded in Christian theological
disputes as well as colonial knowledge. The exception granted
to Judaism and Christianity was just as political as the ability to deal
with the other religions. Nevertheless, as Girardot observes, the spirit
of Muller’s and Legge’s enterprise was symbolized by the fact that the
earlier gift of the Rg-Veda by the Prince of Wales to Indian nobles was
reciprocated by the gift of the sacred books to Queen Victoria and the
1106 social research
gift of a Chinese New Testament by Wang Tao (1828-1897), Legge’s
Chinese collaborator in translation projects and a respected intellectual
in China, to Cixi, the dowager empress in Peking (Girardot 2002: 351).
At the same time, however, that translation also recreated these traditions
for the societies from which they came. A Buddhist monastery in
Japan sent two pupils to Muller to learn Sanskrit and make the Sanskrit
tradition of Buddhism again available in Japan. King Chulalongkorn of
Siam (Burma) gave a grant for three volumes of Buddhist Sanskrit texts
(van den Bosch 2002: 133).
The choice of traditions to be translated was not easy and was
heavily biased toward the center of gravity of Orientalist scholarship,
the traditions of South Asia and Iran, seen as the cradle of the
Indo-Aryan world. In comparison, the traditions of the Far East were
given short shrift. The choice of translators and, especially, convincing
them to spend time on translations, were other hard jobs.
Translation was seen as much less prestigious then the philological
collation of manuscripts and the interpretation of difficult passages.
It was considered to be a service to the larger reading public rather
than a scholarly achievement. Legge, however, was a willing collaborator,
because he shared parts of Muller’s scientific and moral
program. At the insistence of Muller, Legge translated, in addition to
the Confucian texts, Daoist texts to give a larger picture of Chinese
traditions.
The emergence of spirituality as a concept enabled the inclusion
of a variety of traditions under the rubric of universal morality without
the baggage of competing religious institutions and their authoritative
boundary maintenance. Missionization and conversion certainly
have continued full blast till today and are still in my view the most
important religious aspect of modern globalization in its current phase.
The so-called decline of religion is limited to Western Europe, but the
globalization of Christianity and other religions is continuing (Jenkins
2002). However, the importance of the globalization of spirituality as
an alternative to both institutionalized religion and secularism should
not be underestimated.
Spirituality in Modern Society 1107
3. Indian National Spirituality
While modernity and spirituality are conceived to be universal, Asia
is thought to have a special connection to spirituality. There is no
term equivalent to “spirituality” in Sanskrit or Mandarin Chinese
(although there are words for “spirit”), but this term is increasingly
used to connect discursive traditions that come to be called Hinduism
or Confucianism or Daoism, none of which were “isms” prior to the
imperial encounter. Following I. A. Richards’s explorations of the
translation of Chinese thought, I would propose that an embracing,
vague term like spirituality has been adopted precisely to make peaceful
communication between different conceptual universes possible
(Richards 1997 [1932]).
At the end of the nineteenth century the discovery of the traditions
of the East engendered great interest in the West. The concept of
spirituality has played a crucial role continuously throughout contemporary
history in the nationalist defense of Hindu civilization. In
taking this up, the nationalists adopted the Orientalist perspective of
European Romanticism, in which Hindu civilization is highly appreciated
for its spiritual qualities. Schopenhauer was deeply influenced
by the Upanishads, while Goethe adopted specific theatre techniques
from Sanskrit theatre in his writing of Faust. Hindu civilization and its
offshoot Buddhism are central to what Raymond Schwab has called the
Oriental Renaissance. Indian religious movements in the second half of
the nineteenth century reappropriated Western discourse on “Eastern
spirituality.” The translation of Hindu discursive traditions into “spirituality”
meant a significant transformation of these traditions. This
process can be closely followed by examining the way in which one of
the most important reformers, Vivekananda, made a modern, sanitized
version of the religious ideas and practices of his guru Ramakrishna
(a practitioner of tantric yoga) for a modernizing, middle class in
Calcutta. Ramakrishna (1836-1886) was an illiterate priest in a temple
for the Goddess Kali who regularly became possessed by the goddess.
Ramakrishna’s ideas and practices were based on a specific, highly eroticized
tradition of tantra. Ramakrishna was a particularly gifted practi-
1108 social research
tioner of a tradition that is widespread in North India and he was highly
popular in Calcutta. Even leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, a movement
propagating Rational Hinduism, became his followers. Vivekananda
(1863-1902), who as a member of Calcutta’s Westernized elite had
received a thorough Western education and had joined the Brahmo
Samaj, also came under the sway of this charismatic guru and spent
his life translating the guru’s beliefs and practices into “Hindu spirituality”
of a sort that could be recognized by Western and Westernized
audiences alike. This was not an easy task, since it entailed moving out
of sight the image of the Goddess Kali with her protruding tongue and
her necklace of skulls dancing on the corpse of the God Shiva as well
as Ramakrishna’s, for Victorian times, outrageous tantric rituals. While
we can still interpret most of Ramakrishna’s beliefs and practices in
terms of Hindu discursive traditions, we enter with Vivekananda the
terrain of colonial translation.
Vivekananda’s translation of Ramakrishna’s message in terms
of “spirituality” was literally transferred to the West during his
trip to the United States after Ramakrishna’s death. He visited the
World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a sideshow of the
Columbian Exposition, celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of
Columbus’ voyage to the New World, but perhaps more importantly
Chicago’s recovery from the Great Fire of 1871. Religions represented
in this show of religious universalism included Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam,
Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, and various others (Ziolkowski
1993). But the show was stolen by the representative of Hinduism,
Swami Vivekananda. In his speech to the parliament, Vivekananda
claimed that he “was proud to belong to a religion which had taught
the world both tolerance and universal acceptance” (Ziolkowski 1993:
221). Vivekananda’s spirituality was not modest or meek; it was forceful,
polemical, and proud. As the response in the parliament and in his
further lecture tours in the United States indicate, this was a message
that resonated powerfully among American audiences. His writings
in English often compare the lack of spirituality in the West with
Spirituality in Modern Society 1109
the abundance of it in India. Vivekananda is probably the first major
Indian advocate of a “Hindu spirituality” and his Ramakrishna Mission,
the first Hindu missionary movement, following principles set out in
modern Protestant evangelism (van der Veer 1994).
Vivekananda’s construction of “spirituality” has had a major
impact on Hindu nationalism of all forms, but also on global understandings
of “spirituality.” Two major figures in the history of modern
India were deeply influenced by Vivekananda’s ideas about spirituality:
the great Indian political leader Mohandas Gandhi and the Noble Prizewinning
poet Rabindranath Tagore. The first developed the nationalist
strand in the idea of spirituality while the second developed the international
strand, both showing the extent to which the national and
transnational are actually interwoven. They argued that the materialism
of the West created warfare and colonial exploitation, while the
spirituality of the East provided an alternative that would lead to world
peace and equal prosperity for all. After the Second World War some
of these ideas entered into the ideology of the Third Way, especially
exemplified by the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Nonaligned
Movement.
As in the West, Indian spirituality transcends institutionalized
religion. It uses and transforms existing traditions, but goes beyond the
authority of priestly lineages and monastic institutions. Gandhi used
the ideas of Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Nordau concerning civilization, spirituality,
and industry to transform the Hindu traditions in which he
had been socialized. His political actions against the British colonial
state were meant to pose a spiritual alternative to materialist exploitation.
Since one of the biggest problems in the Indian subcontinent that
continues today is the relation between Hindus and Muslims, a transcendence
of religious difference in universal, all-embracing spirituality
is of the utmost political significance. Interestingly, Gandhi found a
way to tie this universalist spirituality to the nationalist project by arguing
that since one was born in a particular tradition and civilization,
one should not proselytize or convert. Instead, each person had to find
the Truth in his or her own traditions. In this way Gandhi could argue
1110 social research
for a spiritual nation that transcended internal religious differences. It
is clear that Gandhi’s brand of spirituality found as many supporters as
opponents. Within his own Hindu community, his assassins, inspired
by a radical form of Hindu nationalism, argued that his spirituality was
“foreign” and meant to emasculate the Hindu nation by bending over
backwards in allowing privileges to Muslims. Regarding “foreignness”
they had definitely a point, since spirituality was indeed a modern
concept born out of the interaction between India and the West.
Although most students of Indian society would maintain that
Gandhi was spiritual but not secular and that it was Nehru who was
secular and not spiritual, I want to suggest in line with my general
historical argument that Gandhi’s spirituality was deeply entwined
with secularism. He argued that all religions should be treated equally
(sarvadharma samabhava) and that the state should be neutral to them
(dharmanirapeksha); these principles are still maintained in India and
show continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial situation.
One can indeed call this Indian secularism and often scholars
and others argue that it is deeply rooted in India’s spiritual civilization,
citing the examples of the Buddhist ruler Ashoka or the Muslim
ruler Akbar. Tolerance is often seen as an aspect of Indian civilization
and thus connected to the idea of secular neutrality. I do not want to
engage here in a critical discussion of these notions, but would like to
point out how much also in Nehru’s major book, The Discovery of India,
it is this particular civilizationally or nationally inflected spirituality
that is the basis of his nationalism and his rejection of Communism. It
is also what motivated Nehru to coin the term nonalignment in 1954 and
become a leader of the nonaligned world as an alternative to capitalism
and communism (Nehru 1946).
One of the difficulties in Gandhi’s all-embracing spirituality
and rejection of conversion is that it does not easily allow exit as an
option. The encompassment of religious and social difference within a
hierarchical order has been a long-standing feature of the Indian caste
system and exit through conversion had been at least an option under
Muslim rule or under British rule. While it is clear that Gandhi rejected
Spirituality in Modern Society 1111
the structure of purity and impurity underlying the caste system, his
attempt to incorporate the Untouchables as harijan, “children of god,”
fell far short of the revolution needed to change the discrimination of
this large community in India. If, in Gandhi’s understanding, change
of heart had to come from within a community rather than being
imposed from outside, it is hard to see that his spirituality would be
able to achieve this. The great Untouchable leader Ambedkar, one of
the authors of the Indian constitution, was at first a great believer in
the possibilities of reform through secular law, but became gradually
disappointed about secular progress. He rejected Gandhi’s ideas about
the possibilities of reform from within and the ensuing absence of a
need for conversion. He converted to Buddhism, since he believed that
Hindu traditions would always sustain deep inequality and that one
could still be a nationalist by choosing a spiritual tradition from the
Indian soil rather than converting to foreign religions like Islam or
Christianity.
4. Asian Transnational Spirituality
Besides Gandhi, it is the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
whose understanding of spirituality has been very influential both
within India and outside of it. Tagore was, however, deeply ambivalent,
if not hostile toward “the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” (Tagore
1916: 15). However, as the irony of history has it, today both India and
Bangladesh use his poems as national anthems. Tagore was convinced
that a unique spirituality unified Asia and in a series of lecture tours in
Japan and China tried to persuade Chinese and Japanese intellectuals
to create a pan-Asian movement toward a common Asian civilization.
Crucial for the pan-Asian turn that Tagore’s Bengali spirituality took is
his encounter with Kakuzo Okakura (1862-1913), a leading figure in the
Japanese art scene, who in 1901 stayed a year with the Tagore family
in Calcutta. In Japan, Okakura had established a national art school
combining traditional art with modern techniques. Rabindranath was
very interested in Okakura’s educational experiences, since he himself
was starting an educational experiment in Shantiniketan (“Abode of
1112 social research
Peace”) outside of Calcutta. Okakura had been trained in art history
in Japan by a Harvard graduate, Edward Fenollosa (1853-1908), who
had taught him to have a new, basically Orientalist understanding of
Japan’s religious and artistic traditions and brought him to Europe and
America. While in Calcutta, Okakura wrote his first book in English, The
Ideals of the East (1903), which opens with the famous line, “Asia is one.”
Between 1904 and 1913, Okakura became the curator of the Japanese
collection of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which was (and still is) the
greatest collection of Japanese art outside Japan. Like Vivekananda
before him, Okakura was a great embodiment of Oriental spirituality
in Boston.
After receiving the Noble Prize in 1913 and with the outbreak
of World War I in Europe, Rabindranath Tagore felt that Asia should
assume a role of spiritual leadership in the world. Three years after
Okakura’s death, he visited Japan and was received by huge crowds
with unbridled enthusiasm. At Tokyo Imperial University he delivered
a speech on June 11, 1916, entitled, “The Message of India to Japan.” His
major theme was the unity of Asia and the spiritual mission of Asia in
the world. While Europe’s achievements are not denied, Tagore points
at its great materialistic pursuit of self-interest and the need for the
spiritual resources of a regenerated Asia. Japan had at that time already
made the most successful transition to modernity and certainly not by
rejecting material civilization. Not being colonized by Western powers
but acutely feeling their backwardness, the Japanese Meiji reformers
had embarked on a very ambitious adoption of Western science and
technology, while creating a religious nationalism centering on the
emperor. All Asian nations looked with awe at the Japanese model and
especially the Chinese nationalists tried to adopt important elements
from it. The Japanese also saw themselves very much as the leaders of
Asia. What, then, did the Japanese make of Tagore’s claim of an Asian
spirituality that transcended national boundaries?
While Japanese intellectuals accepted that there was a spiritual
element in Japanese civilization, they tended to see it as a part of their
Spirituality in Modern Society 1113
national heritage in a way very similar to followers of Vivekananda in
India who interpreted Hindu spirituality as a part of religious nationalism.
They also definitely liked Tagore’s denunciation of Western
imperialism, but rejected Tagore’s denunciation of Japanese fledging
imperialism. Tagore’s attitude toward Japanese militant nationalism
was explained as a sign of his membership of a defeated, colonized
nation. His critics rightly saw that there was a contradiction between
his rejection of Japanese militancy and his praise of Japanese spirituality
of which that militancy was part and parcel. Tagore’s and Gandhi’s
interpretation of Eastern spirituality as nonviolent ignored or rejected
the militant aspects of Asia’s religious traditions. In India this rejection
led to an antagonism between Gandhi’s pacifistic nationalism and the
militant nationalism of Hindu radicals who ultimately murdered him.
In Japan militancy was even more pronounced in the samurai traditions
that became foundational to Japan’s nationalism. When Japan attacked
China, the correspondence between Tagore and his friend Yoneuo
Noguchi, the Japanese poet, showed showed the extent to which panAsianism
had become a slogan (“Asia for Asia”) to justify Japanese imperialism
(Tagore-Noguchi correspondence 1938).
In 1924, Tagore went to China. His reception in China resembled
the one in Japan. At first there was great interest in this great poet from
unknown India and in general he drew large audiences. But quickly
his message of pan-Asian spirituality and the revival of ancient religious
traditions in China were met with strong criticism—especially
in Beijing, where there was considerable student activism. Tagore was
received by Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of China’s most prominent
nationalist intellectuals who supported Tagore throughout his visit, as
well as by younger leading literary and intellectual figures like Hu Shih
(1891-1962), who had studied at Columbia with John Dewey. Much of
the opposition against Tagore was organized by Communist activists
who painted Tagore as a traditionalist from a weak and defeated colonized
nation. But more generally, the poet’s visit was a failure because
Chinese intellectuals had been leading a revolution against the Qing
1114 social research
Empire and the traditions that supported the ancient regime. They
were too much inclined to reject the past in building a modern society
to be able to accept Tagore’s praise of ancient traditions.
The response to the imperial encounter in India and China is
quite different. After the great Taiping and Boxer rebellions of the nineteenth
century, Chinese nationalists decided that Chinese traditions
were to be blamed for the backwardness of Chinese society and that in
order to progress, China had to adopt Western materialism, based on
science and secularism. In Chinese modern fiction of the first part of
the twentieth century, there is a strong sense that China is a society not
so much endowed with a spiritual heritage but afflicted with a spiritual
disease (Goldman and Lee 2002: 142). Nevertheless, there are important
currents of thought in China that attempt to recuperate some of the
spiritual resources of the past and especially those of Buddhism and
Confucianism. Someone like Liang Qichao, who was Tagore’s host in
the 1920s was in fact critical of the exclusive emphasis on science and
rationality in the West and argued that the East was spiritual. In his
foundational work on Chinese historiography he gradually replaced
evolutionary history and chains of causality with the Buddhist notion
of “interdependence” (yinyuanjiebao, 因缘捷报) (Schneider 2001: 8).
While Liang rejected Confucianism as a model, others tried to develop
a modern understanding of history as a sign of the nation by referring
to Confucian social ethics as the “spirit of the nation” (minzujingshen,
民族精神). This form of neo-Confucianism as a kind of spiritual nationalism
ultimately failed to take root in China, since it turned out to be
too difficult to unmoor Confucianism from the now defunct imperial
system and turn it into the civil religion of the modern nation-state
(Kuo 2008).
5. Asian Spirituality Today
With the victory of the Communists in 1949, historical materialism
became the official ideology of the state, and spirituality was seen as
an aspect of the feudalism of the past that had to be removed violently.
Spirituality as a major term, however, kept coming up in cultural and
Spirituality in Modern Society 1115
philosophical arguments in nationalist Taiwan and in the periphery
of China, especially Hong Kong and Singapore. This is why the neoConfucian
intellectual Tu Wei-Ming, who teaches at Harvard University,
emphasizes a role of leadership for Chinese intellectuals who live
outside of China. In his view, the Chinese desire for material progress
after the collapse of the Qing Empire led Chinese intellectuals to launch
a frontal attack on Confucian spirituality that was seen to have caused
China’s decline. This successful attack on what Tu sees as the very spiritual
essence of Chineseness had the marginalization of the Chinese
intelligentsia as its unintended consequence.
It is only after the development of Deng Xiaoping’s socialism with
Chinese characteristics and especially under Jiang Zemin in the early
nineties that Chinese intellectuals could again develop neo-Confucian
spirituality both as the spirit of the nation and as a Chinese contribution
to global humanism (Tu 2005; Tu and Tucker 2003; Tu and Tucker
2004).
The relative success of “spirituality” in India and its relative failure
in China cannot merely be explained by the rise of communism
in China. More deeply, it is the conviction that Chinese traditions
had to be replaced by Western science that has characterized Chinese
modernity long before the Communist takeover, while in India traditions
were made into resources in the anti-imperialist struggle against
a material modernization that culturally and politically subjected India
to Western power. The distrust of material civilization was shared by
both metropolitan and Indian intellectuals criticizing imperialism in a
dialogue that was fed by the use of a common English language.
The wide span of worldviews and traditions that are bridged
by the word spirituality ranges from American transcendentalists
like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, to European abstract painters
like Kandinsky and Mondrian, to neo-Confucian thinkers like Tu
Wei-Ming, to political leaders like Gandhi. Boycotts and satyagraha
can be seen as attempts to create bridges between radically different
conceptual universes in order to create possibilities for nonviolence.
At the same time it is important to realize that spirituality can also be
1116 social research
harnessed to a narrow vision of the spirit of the nation, as Tagore was
well aware.
Spirituality is not quite the opposite of secularity or materiality.
The aggressive secularism in China that attacked religion, destroying
temples and their priests, simultaneously promised a transcendence
of bodily limits and the coming of a socialist paradise. The charisma
of Mao Zedong seemed hardly secular, but on the contrary rather
close to that of the Son of Heaven. In India it was colonial rule that
brought the legal and constitutional fiction of secular neutrality, but
it was Gandhi who made that secular neutrality of the state into a
feature of Indian spirituality. Today it is not only with the opening
up of Indian and Chinese production and consumption that materialist
consumption is enabled and grows, but also with the marketing
of spirituality by entrepreneurs in yoga, taiji quan, qi gong, shaolin
wushu.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the alignment with neoliberal
capitalism is global business practices, in which spirituality is part
of the training for more success in the marketplace as well as better
living. A number of Indian spiritual leaders today have a following in
secular business schools and IT companies. Their mediation techniques
and emphasis on spiritual experience seems to fit well with the lifestyle
and case-study-oriented intellectual style of young urban professionals.
Experiential styles of spiritual life are central to what is presented as
both an alternative to empty secular and religious life. From an outside
perspective, however, it seems to allow people to pursue their secular
goals in career and life within deeply disciplining institutions without
being too stressed or depressed. Instead of challenging the nature of
one’s life, it leads to feeling comfortable with it from an experience of
spirituality, however produced. In the postcolonial period it is really the
liberalization of the Indian and Chinese economies under the impact
of global capitalism that frees the energies of spiritual movements to
organize civil society. This is very clear in the Chinese case, where liberalization
first gives space to a spontaneous qigong re and later to the rise
Spirituality in Modern Society 1117
of movements like Falun Gong that connect qigong to older ideas of a
moral and political nature. In India one can see this especially in the
rise of a Hindu nationalism that rejects an earlier secular and multicultural
project of the state by emphasizing Hindu traditions as the
basis of Indian civilization, thereby excluding other contributions by
religious minorities. It is especially a newfangled urban religiosity that
is both interested in yoga and in a strong nation that supports this kind
of politics.
As we have seen, Indian spirituality has been formulated by
Vivekananda during a trip to Chicago and has been further developed
in constant interaction with the rest of the world. A political figure
like Mahatma Gandhi fits seamlessly in this history. Since the 1970s
and 1980s, highly educated members of the Indian middle class have
migrated to the United States for medical and engineering jobs and
have been confronted with an aggressive marketing of Indian spirituality
in a market for health, for exercise, and for management practices.
This, in turn, is brought back to India, where especially successful new
movements, like the Bangalore-based Art of Living with Guru Ravi Ravi
Shankar cater to a mobile, transnational class of business entrepreneurs.
China’s isolation between 1950 and 1980 has ensured a belated entry
of Chinese spirituality on this market, but nevertheless it is quickly
catching up with products like taiji quan and qigong. In the Chinese case
there is a stronger connection with sports and especially martial arts,
which are also promoted by Hong Kong and mainland movies. In both
India and China one finds a similar appropriation of spiritual traditions
to cater for the newly emerging middle classes. These newly manufactured
spiritualities have a tenuous relationship with textual traditions,
guarded by centers of learning and spiritual masters. They are
creative in their response to new opportunities and anxieties produced
by globalization and are, as such, comparable to Pentecostal and charismatic
varieties of Christianity.
This new political deployment of spirituality is what is now
considered to be “new age” or indeed a form of depoliticization. I hope
1118 social research
to have shown, however, that these understandings of spirituality as
apolitical or even antipolitical obscure the fact that spirituality, as
much as secularity, can be and has been deployed in radical struggles
both in the East and in the West.
notes
1.	For an intellectual history of the Western concept of the “secular,”
see Taylor (2007).
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