Association, issued more than 500 separate works
explaining and describing the East.
Beginning in 1875, the THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
took to the United States an appreciation of Hindu-
ism and Buddhism, interpreted through the lenses
of its Western leaders, HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY,
Charles Leadbeater, and ANNIE WOOD BESANT,
who traveled to India and took home firsthand
impressions. Theosophists directly proclaimed an
adherence to Asian thought but included elements
of occultism and psychism as well. As a result of
this synthesis, the contribution of Theosophy to
the developing American consciousness was an
amalgam of Hinduism, Buddhism, spiritualism,
and rationalism. Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled
claimed direct revelation from Eastern adepts,
called Mahatmas, and celebrated the traditional
Hindu concepts of REINCARNATION and KARMA. In
spite of its original association with spiritualism,
Theosophy exerted a major influence in both India
and the United States. By 1884, in addition to its
success in the United States, over 100 branches
of Theosophy flourished in India. Continuing
until the present, various Theosophical publish-
ing houses have been important disseminators in
the United States of Hindu texts, commentaries,
and histories. Much of what Americans grasp of
Hinduism has been a result of the popularity of
Theosophical publications.
Uniquely American religions, including New
Thought and Christian Science, took up Hindu
concepts. The New Thought churches, which
include Religious Science, Divine Science, Unity
School of Christianity, Mind Cure, and Applied
Metaphysics, concentrated on VEDANTA philoso-
phy and the concepts of REINCARNATION and KARMA.
Indebted to the research of the Theosophists,
exponents of New Thought gained for Hinduism
a new kind of acceptance, however narrow, in the
United States. No longer were the doctrines of the
East damned as pagan nonsense; they were now
incorporated into American religion. Christian
Science, with its radical monism, its doctrine of
eternal mind, its disavowal of the ultimate reality
of the world, and its unorthodox interpretation
of Christ, demonstrated a mixture of Eastern and
Western views of reality. The sources of the Chris-
tian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy’s ideas
remain in debate, but the result is clear: the incor-
poration in an organized American church of at
least some of the ideas and values of Hinduism.
While religious movements and philosophi-
cal schools offered their interpretations of Hin-
duism, scholars were examining the East from
their own perspective. The American Oriental
Society, founded in 1842, provided a forum for
scholarly exchange. It established a library and
published the Journal of the American Oriental
Society, which ran bibliographic essays reporting
on Vedic research occurring in Germany, transla-
tions of religious texts that exposed ideas formerly
unavailable to American readers, and essays on the
philosophy of Hindu scriptures and on the various
schools of Hinduism. These scholarly efforts lifted
cultural, religious, and linguistic barriers. Leaders
in the society were Edward Salisbury; William
Dwight Whitney, who became America’s greatest
Oriental scholar; and Charles Rockwell Lanman,
who, among other contributions, edited the Har-
vard Oriental Series.
Attempts to understand and explain surfaced
in the general press as well. Although popular
magazines did not carry reliable information
about Asia, serious reviews served to foster escape
from American isolation by looking analytically at
Hindu ideas and scholarship. The North American
Review, as did the Edinburgh Review, touched on
many aspects of Indian culture and the Hindu reli-
gion. Book publishing reflected the new interest
in the East. The popularity of Sir Edwin Arnold’s
Light of Asia (1879) and his free translation of
the Bhagavad Gita (1885) drew the author to the
United States for a lecture tour.
In 1883, the first Hindu GURU visited America.
Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, a representative of
the BRAHMO SAMAJ, delivered his first American
address at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
widow in Concord, Massachusetts. He returnedK 466 United States