2024/02/15

Hinduism in America | The Harvard Pluralism Project

Hinduism in America | The Pluralism Project


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Hinduism in America

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  1. Trade and Transcendentalism
  2. Vivekananda at the Parliament
  3. The Vedanta Society
  4. Yogananda and American Yoga
  5. The Rush of Gurus
  6. The New Hindu Immigrants
  7. The Temple Builders
  8. American Hinduism

The Hindu Experience
Issues for Hindus in America





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Trade and Transcendentalism


Hindu influence in the United States likely started with trading ships that traveled between ports in India and New England in the early 19th century. Prominent transcendentalist writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were also influenced by Hindu teachings and sacred texts.... Read more about Trade and Transcendentalism

Vivekananda at the Parliament


Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu religious reformer who spoke in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, made an impression in America as one of the first Hindus to speak for his own religious tradition before a large audience. Vivekananda traveled across the country and spoke in various public and religious contexts, including two speaking engagements at Harvard.... Read more about Vivekananda at the Parliament

The Vedanta Society


Swami Vivekananda opened the first American Vedanta Society in New York in 1894, and the second Vedanta Society in San Francisco in 1899. Vivekananda’s teachings through these societies focused on Vedanta and on yoga practice. The Vedanta society contributed to yoga’s later rise in popularity.... Read more about The Vedanta Society

Yogananda and American Yoga


Paramahansa Yogananda was a Hindu teacher who came to America to attend the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston in 1920, and stayed to found a religious movement. Yogananda promoted yoga as an intersection of science and religion that emphasized the mind-body relationship. Yogananda wrote The Autobiography of a Yogi, which was published in 1946; at the time of his passing in 1952, his organization the Self-Realizaiton Fellowship was the most prominent Hindu organization in the United States.... Read more about Yogananda and American Yoga

The Rush of Gurus


The 1960s and 1970s mark the popularity of the guru or swami movement in the United States. In the late 1960s and 1970s, new streams of Hindu religious life came to the United States with the arrival of new gurus or spiritual teachers. ... Read more about The Rush of Gurus

The New Hindu Immigrants


Increasing numbers of students and professionals immigrated from diverse regions in India during the 1960s and 70s. Once in the United States, they often formed associations based on their regional origins—associations that later became the basis for collaborations between different immigrant groups.... Read more about The New Hindu Immigrants

The Temple Builders


Hindu “temple societies” were non-profit associations dedicated to building the first generation of temples in the United States. The first Hindu temples were built in the 1970s. The organizations behind the temples blended Hindu traditions with American values like volunteerism.... Read more about The Temple Builders

American Hinduism


The number of Hindu temples in the United States has grown rapidly in the last decades, creating a landscape of varied expressions and structures within American Hinduism that parallels both the sites and histories of India and the value of pluralism in the United States.... Read more



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Vivekananda at the Parliament
Vivekananda at the ParliamentSwami Vivekananda, a Hindu religious reformer who spoke in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, made an impression in America as one of the first Hindus to speak for his own religious tradition before a large audience. Vivekananda traveled across the country and spoke in various public and religious contexts, including two speaking engagements at Harvard.

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Despite more than fifty years of interest in Indian thought, few Americans at the close of the 19th century had yet met a Hindu. So in the late summer of 1893, when a handsome, young Hindu reformer, Swami Vivekananda, arrived in Boston before the opening of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, he attracted a great deal of attention.

Vivekananda had taken a ship from Calcutta to Vancouver and then traveled by train to Chicago, arriving more than a month early for the Parliament. He quickly ran out of money. Fortunately, on the train from the west coast he had met a Boston woman, Kate Sanborn, who had graciously invited him to her house in the country outside Boston. It was at her estate, Breezy Meadows, that Swami Vivekananda was introduced to a number of Bostonians, including Harvard Classics professor J.H. Wright. At Professor Wright’s invitation, Vivekananda came to Annisquam on Boston’s North Shore, where he delivered his first public lecture at the Universalist Church. He subsequently spoke at Wesley Chapel in Salem and caused a stir wherever he appeared on the North Shore in his silk tunic and turban.

At the Parliament, Vivekananda was received with enthusiasm. He was surely the first Hindu most Americans ever heard speak in his own voice, on behalf of his religious tradition. Influenced by modernizing religious currents in India, he called for a universal religion “which would have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, and would recognize a divinity in every man or woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force would be centered in aiding humanity to realize its Divine nature.”

In the two years following the Parliament, Vivekananda toured the United States, speaking in Madison, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Detroit, and many other places. At a summer encampment called Green Acre in Eliot, Maine he taught daily lessons in Vedanta, sitting cross-legged under a large pine tree. Swami Vivekananda also returned to Boston and Cambridge, where he discussed everything from spirituality to women’s suffrage, developed a friendship with William James, and lectured twice at Harvard. In 2013, the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Hindu Students Association at Harvard University commemorated Swami Vivekananda’s 150th birthday by hosting a conversation on campus in the very room in which he lectured over a century before.
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The Vedanta Society
The Vedanta Society

Swami Vivekananda opened the first American Vedanta Society in New York in 1894, and the second Vedanta Society in San Francisco in 1899. Vivekananda’s teachings through these societies focused on Vedanta and on yoga practice. The Vedanta society contributed to yoga’s later rise in popularity.

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In 1894, Swami Vivekananda founded the first American Vedanta Society in New York. The following year, after an intensive training retreat held on one of the islands of the St. Lawrence River, he initiated two Western followers as sannyasis, or “renouncers.” They, too, came to be called “swamis.” In 1896, Vivekananda returned to India and sent Swami Abhedananda, a brother monk from Calcutta, to take over the reins of the small New York community. Abhedananda was a vigorous organizer and a fine lecturer who taught Vedanta three times a week at New York’s Mott Memorial Hall.

Back in India, Vivekananda launched the Ramakrishna Mission, named after his renowned mystic teacher, Ramakrishna. Its “mission” was to revitalize the Hindu tradition for the task of service, education, and nation-building. When Vivekananda returned to the United States for a second stay in l899, he concentrated his efforts in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In San Francisco, he formed America’s second Vedanta Society. Vivekananda returned to India after a lecture tour to many major cities, leaving two Indian Ramakrishna monks in charge of the two major centers of the Vedanta Society, Swami Turiyananda in San Francisco and Swami Abhedananda in New York. After Vivekananda’s death in 1902, the Ramakrishna Mission in India continued to take the lead in sending swamis to lead the growing number of American Vedanta Society centers.

The Vedanta Society appealed greatly to nominal, liberal Christians, who came to see Christianity anew in the context of the Hindu claim to the equality of all religious traditions. It also appealed to secular seekers with no previous stake in any religious tradition. 
Vivekananda emphasized both Vedanta philosophy and the practice of yoga, especially raja yoga, which he described as a “psychological way to union” with the Divine. It involves bodily postures, breath-centered meditation, and the cultivation of concentration so that the mind does not fritter away its energies in the rush of thoughts. The Vedanta Society did not gain wide attention; by l930, its membership probably numbered only in the hundreds. Nonetheless, it was influential as America’s first form of Hinduism and it laid the groundwork for a much wider and more popular knowledge of yoga.
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Yogananda and American Yoga
Yogananda and American Yoga

Paramahansa Yogananda was a Hindu teacher who came to America to attend the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston in 1920, and stayed to found a religious movement. Yogananda promoted yoga as an intersection of science and religion that emphasized the mind-body relationship. Yogananda wrote The Autobiography of a Yogi, which was published in 1946; at the time of his passing in 1952, his organization the Self-Realizaiton Fellowship was the most prominent Hindu organization in the United States.

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Paramahansa Yogananda was another Hindu teacher who came to America for a conference and stayed to found a religious movement. The title Paramahansa, “The Great Wild Swan,” was bestowed by his teacher in India, Swami Yukteswar. The wild swan is the symbol of the liberated soul, and it is the title given to those rare teachers who have achieved this state of freedom. Yogananda was from Bengal and came to the United States to attend a meeting of the International Congress of Religious Liberals held in Boston in 1920. After the conference, Yogananda, like Vivekananda, stayed in the United States, launching the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) in 1925. While Vivekananda returned to India after a few years, Yogananda spent the rest of his life in the United States, returning to India only to visit.

Yogananda used the language of science to teach yoga and saw the Self-Realization Fellowship as uniting science and religion through realization of the unity of their underlying principles. Yogananda was among the first to emphasize the “mind-body” relation, especially for health and healing. Decades later, the yogic knowledge that the focus of the mind can alter the state of the body would become a presupposition of the “new age” and of new perspectives in medicine. Yogananda’s teachings foreshadowed this development. His short collection of “Scientific Healing Affirmations” stresses the role of mental affirmation in the healing of the body.

Yogananda made Los Angeles the center of the Self-Realization Fellowship. He had a knack for organizing and promoting yoga and “self-realization” through dozens of local centers and through a correspondence course available to those who did not live near a center. The popularity of the movement and of Yogananda was enhanced with the publication of his book, The Autobiography of a Yogi (l946). At the time of Yogananda’s death in 1952, the SRF was the most important and extensive Hindu organization in the United States.
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