T he crisis of organized religion in the West, and the numberless ways in which religious

morality has actually managed to fall well below the human average, has always led some

anxious “seekers” to pursue a softer solution east of Suez. Indeed, I once joined these potential

adepts and acolytes, donning orange garb and attending the ashram of a celebrated guru in

Poona (or Pune), in the lovely hills above Bombay. I adopted this sannyas mode in order to help

make a documentary film for the BBC, so you may well question my objectivity if you wish, but

the BBC at that time did have a standard of fairness and my mandate was to absorb as much

as I could. (One of these days, having in the course of my life been an Anglican, educated at a

Methodist school, converted by marriage to Greek Orthodoxy, recognized as an incarnation by

the followers of Sai Baba, and remarried by a rabbi, I shall be able to try and update William

James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.)

The guru in question was named Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. “Bhagwan” simply means god or

godly, and “Sri” means holy. He was a man with huge soulful eyes and a bewitching smile, and a

natural if somewhat dirty sense of humor. His sibilant voice, usually deployed through a low

volume microphone at early-morning dharshan, possessed a faintly hypnotic quality. This was

of some use in alleviating the equally hypnotic platitudinousness of his discourses. Perhaps you

have read Anthony Powell’s tremendous twelve-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of

Time. In it, a mysterious seer named Dr. Trelawney keeps his group of enlightened followers

together in spite of various inevitable difficulties. These initiates can recognize each other not by

the individuality of their garb but by an exchange of avowals. On meeting, the first must intone,

“The essence of the all is the godhead of the true.” The proper response to this is, “The vision of

visions heals the blindness of sight.” Thus is the spiritual handshake effected. I heard nothing at

the Bhagwan’s knee (one had to sit cross-legged) that was any more profound than that. There

was more emphasis on love, in its eternal sense, than in Dr. Trelawney’s circle, and certainly

there was more emphasis on sex, in its immediate sense. But on the whole, the instruction was

innocuous. Or it would have been, if not for a sign at the entrance to the Bhagwan’s preaching

tent. This little sign never failed to irritate me. It read: “Shoes and minds must be left at the

gate.” There was a pile of shoes and sandals next to it, and in my transcendent condition I could

almost picture a heap of abandoned and empty mentalities to round out this literally mindless

little motto. I even attempted a brief parody of a Zen koan: “What is the reflection of a mind

discarded?”

For the blissed-out visitor or tourist, the ashram presented the outward aspect of a fine

spiritual resort, where one could burble about the beyond in an exotic and luxurious setting. But

within its holy precincts, as I soon discovered, there was a more sinister principle at work. Many

damaged and distraught personalities came to Poona seeking advice and counsel. Several of

them were well-off (the clients or pilgrims included a distant member of the British royal family)

and were at first urged—as with so many faiths—to part with all their material possessions.

Proof of the efficacy of this advice could be seen in the fleet of Rolls-Royce motorcarsmaintained by the Bhagwan and deemed to be the largest such collection in the world. After this

relatively brisk fleecing, initiates were transferred into “group” sessions where the really nasty

business began.

Wolfgang Dobrowolny’s film Ashram, shot in secret by a former devotee and adapted for

my documentary, shows the “playful” term kundalini in a fresh light. In a representative scene, a

young woman is stripped naked and surrounded by men who bark at her, drawing attention to

all her physical and psychic shortcomings, until she is abject with tears and apologies. At this

point, she is hugged and embraced and comforted, and told that she now has “a family.”

Sobbing with masochistic relief, she humbly enters the tribe. (It was not absolutely clear what

she had to do in order to be given her clothes back, but I did hear some believable and ugly

testimony on this point.) In other sessions involving men, things were rough enough for bones to

be broken and lives lost: the German princeling of the House of Windsor was never seen again,

and his body was briskly cremated without the tedium of an autopsy.

I had been told in respectful and awed tones that “the Bhagwan’s body has some allergies,”

and not long after my sojourn he fled the ashram and then apparently decided that he had no

further use for his earthly frame. What happened to the Rolls-Royce collection I never found

out, but his acolytes received some kind of message to re-convene in the small town of

Antelope, Oregon, in the early months of 1983. And this they did, though now less committed to

the pacific and laid-back style. The local inhabitants were disconcerted to find an armed

compound being erected in their neighborhood, with unsmiling orange-garbed security forces.

An attempt to create “space” for the new ashram was apparently made. In a bizarre episode,

food-poisoning matter was found to have been spread over the produce in an Antelope

supermarket. Eventually the commune broke up and dispersed amid serial recriminations, and I

have occasionally run into empty-eyed refugees from the Bhagwan’s long and misleading

tuition. (He himself has been reincarnated as “Osho,” in whose honor a glossy but stupid

magazine was being produced until a few years ago. Possibly a remnant of his following still

survives.) I would say that the people of Antelope, Oregon, missed being as famous as

Jonestown by a fairly narrow margin.

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. “The sleep of reason,” it has been well said, “brings

forth monsters.” The immortal Francisco Goya gave us an etching with this title in his series Los

Caprichos, where a man in defenseless slumber is hag-ridden by bats, owls, and other haunters

of the darkness. But an extraordinary number of people appear to believe that the mind, and

the reasoning faculty—the only thing that divides us from our animal relatives—is something to

be distrusted and even, as far as possible, dulled. The search for nirvana, and the dissolution of

the intellect, goes on. And whenever it is tried, it produces a Kool-Aid effect in the real world.

“MAKE ME ONE WITH EVERYTHING.” So goes the Buddhist’s humble request to the hot-dog vendor.

But when the Buddhist hands over a twenty-dollar bill to the vendor, in return for his slathered

bun, he waits a long time for his change. Finally asking for it, he is informed that “change comes

only from within.” All such rhetoric is almost too easy to parody, as is that of missionary

Christianity. In the old Anglican cathedral in Calcutta I once paid a visit to the statue of Bishop

Reginald Heber, who filled the hymn books of the Church of England with verses like these:

What though the tropic breezes

Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle

Where every prospect pleases

And only man is vile

What though with loving kindness

The gifts of God are strown

The heathen in his blindnessBows down to wood and stone.

It is partly in reaction to the condescension of old colonial boobies like this that many

westerners have come to revere the apparently more seductive religions of the Orient. Indeed,

Sri Lanka (the modern name for the lovely island of Ceylon) is a place of great charm. Its people

are remarkable for their kindness and generosity: how dare Bishop Heber have depicted them

as vile? However, Sri Lanka is a country now almost utterly ruined and disfigured by violence

and repression, and the contending forces are mainly Buddhist and Hindu. The problem begins

with the very name of the state: “Lanka” is the old Sinhalese-language name for the island, and

the prefix “Sri” simply means “holy,” in the Buddhist sense of the word. This postcolonial

renaming meant that the Tamils, who are chiefly Hindu, felt excluded at once. (They prefer to

call their homeland “Eelam.”) It did not take long for this ethnic tribalism, reinforced by religion,

to wreck the society.

Though I personally think that the Tamil population had a reasonable grievance against the

central government, it is not possible to forgive their guerrilla leadership for pioneering, along

with Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, the disgusting tactic of suicide murder. This barbarous technique,

which was also used by them to assassinate an elected Prime Minister of India, does not excuse

the Buddhist-led pogroms against Tamils or the murder, by a Buddhist priest, of the first elected

president of independent Sri Lanka.

Conceivably, some readers of these pages will be shocked to learn of the existence of Hindu

and Buddhist murderers and sadists. Perhaps they dimly imagine that contemplative easterners,

devoted to vegetarian diets and meditative routines, are immune to such temptations? It can

even be argued that Buddhism is not, in our sense of the word, a “religion” at all. Nonetheless,

the perfect one is alleged to have left one of his teeth behind in Sri Lanka, and I once attended a

ceremony which involved a rare public showing by priests of this gold-encased object. Bishop

Heber did not mention bone in his stupid hymn (though it would have made just as good a

rhyme as “stone”), and perhaps this was because Christians have always foregathered to bow

down to bones of supposed saints, and to keep them in grisly reliquaries in their churches and

cathedrals. However that may be, at the tooth-propitiation I had no feeling at all of peace and

inner bliss. To the contrary, I realized that if I was a Tamil I would have a very good chance of

being dismembered.

The human species is an animal species without very much variation within it, and it is idle

and futile to imagine that a voyage to Tibet, say, will discover an entirely different harmony

with nature or eternity. The Dalai Lama, for example, is entirely and easily recognizable to a

secularist. In exactly the same way as a medieval princeling, he makes the claim not just that

Tibet should be independent of Chinese hegemony—a “perfectly good” demand, if I may render

it into everyday English—but that he himself is a hereditary king appointed by heaven itself.

How convenient! Dissenting sects within his faith are persecuted; his one-man rule in an Indian

enclave is absolute; he makes absurd pronouncements about sex and diet and, when on his trips

to Hollywood fund-raisers, anoints major donors like Steven Segal and Richard Gere as holy.

(Indeed, even Mr. Gere was moved to whine a bit when Mr. Segal was invested as a tulku, or

person of high enlightenment. It must be annoying to be outbid at such a spiritual auction.) I will

admit that the current “Dalai” or supreme lama is a man of some charm and presence, as I will

admit that the present queen of England is a person of more integrity than most of her

predecessors, but this does not invalidate the critique of hereditary monarchy, and the first

foreign visitors to Tibet were downright appalled at the feudal domination, and hideous

punishments, that kept the population in permanent serfdom to a parasitic monastic elite.

How might one easily prove that “Eastern” faith was identical with the unverifiable

assumptions of “Western” religion? Here is a decided statement by “Gudo,” a very celebrated

Japanese Buddhist of the first part of the twentieth century:
As a propagator of Buddhism I teach that “all sentient beings have the Buddha nature” and

that “within the Dharma there is equality with neither superior nor inferior.” Furthermore, I

teach that “all sentient beings are my children.” Having taken these golden words as the

basis of my faith, I discovered that they are in complete agreement with the principles of

socialism. It was thus that I became a believer in socialism.

There you have it again: a baseless assumption that some undefined external “force” has a

mind of its own, and the faint but menacing suggestion that anyone who disagrees is in some

fashion opposed to the holy or paternal will. I excerpt this passage from Brian Victoria’s

exemplary book Zen at War, which describes the way the majority of Japanese Buddhists

decided that Gudo was right in general but wrong in particular. People were indeed to be

considered children, as they are by all faiths, but it was actually fascism and not socialism that

the Buddha and the dharma required of them.

Mr. Victoria is a Buddhist adept and claims—I leave this to him—to be a priest as well. He

certainly takes his faith seriously, and knows a great deal about Japan and the Japanese. His

study of the question shows that Japanese Buddhism became a loyal servant—even an

advocate—of imperialism and mass murder, and that it did so, not so much because it was

Japanese, but because it was Buddhist. In 1938, leading members of the Nichiren sect founded a

group devoted to “Imperial-Way Buddhism.” It declared as follows:

Imperial-Way Buddhism utilizes the exquisite truth of the Lotus Sutra to reveal the majestic

essence of the national polity. Exalting the true spirit of Mahayana Buddhism is a teaching

which reverently supports the emperor’s work. This is what the great founder of our sect,

Saint Nichiren, meant when he referred to the divine unity of Sovereign and Buddha.... For

this reason the principal image of adoration in Imperial-Way Buddhism is not Buddha

Shakyamuni who appeared in India, but his majesty the emperor, whose lineage extends

over ten thousand generations.

Effusions like this are—however wicked they may be—almost beyond criticism. They consist,

like most professions of faith, in merely assuming what has to be proved. Thus, a bald assertion

is then followed with the words “for this reason,” as if all the logical work had been done by

making the assertion. (All of the statements of the Dalai Lama, who happens not to advocate

imperialist slaughter but who did loudly welcome the Indian government’s nuclear tests, are also

of this non-sequitur type.) Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless

even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called

spiritual discourse is of this type.

You will notice, further, that in the view of this school of Buddhism there are other schools of

Buddhism, every bit as “contemplative,” that are in error. This is just what an anthropologist of

religion would expect to find of something that was, having been manufactured, doomed to be

schismatic. But on what basis could a devotee of Buddha Shakyamuni argue that his Japanese

co-thinkers were in error themselves? Certainly not by using reasoning or evidence, which are

quite alien to those who talk of the “exquisite truth of the Lotus Sutra.”

Things went from bad to worse once Japanese generals had mobilized their Zen-obedient

zombies into complete obedience. The mainland of China became a killing field, and all the

major sects of Japanese Buddhism united to issue the following proclamation:

Revering the imperial policy of preserving the Orient, the subjects of imperial Japan bear

the humanitarian destiny of one billion people of color.... We believe it is time to effect a

major change in the course of human history, which has been centered on Caucasians.

This echoes the line taken by the Shinto—another quasi-religion enjoying state support—that

Japanese soldiers really fell for the cause of Asian independence. Every year, there is a famouscontroversy about whether Japan’s civil and spiritual leaders should visit the Yasukuni shrine,

which officially ennobles Hirohito’s army. Every year, millions of Chinese and Koreans and

Burmese protest that Japan was not the enemy of imperialism in the Orient but a newer and

more vicious form of it, and that the Yasukuni shrine is a place of horror. How interesting,

however, to note that Japanese Buddhists of the time regarded their country’s membership of

the Nazi/Fascist Axis as a manifestation of liberation theology. Or, as the united Buddhist

leadership phrased it at the time:

In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and

compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful. We now

have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of “killing one in order that

many may live” (issatsu tasho). This is something which Mahayana Buddhism approves of

only with the greatest of seriousness.

No “holy war” or “Crusade” advocate could have put it better. The “eternal peace” bit is

particularly excellent. By the end of the dreadful conflict that Japan had started, it was Buddhist

and Shinto priests who were recruiting and training the suicide bombers, or Kamikaze (“Divine

Wind”), fanatics, assuring them that the emperor was a “Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King,”

one indeed of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or “fully

enlightened being,” of the material world. And since “Zen treats life and death indifferently,”

why not abandon the cares of this world and adopt a policy of prostration at the feet of a

homicidal dictator?

This grisly case also helps to undergird my general case for considering “faith” as a threat. It

ought to be possible for me to pursue my studies and researches in one house, and for the

Buddhist to spin his wheel in another. But contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not

being passive. One of two things may happen: those who are innocently credulous may become

easy prey for those who are less scrupulous and who seek to “lead” and “inspire” them. Or those

whose credulity has led their own society into stagnation may seek a solution, not in true self

examination, but in blaming others for their backwardness. Both these things happened in the

most consecratedly “spiritual” society of them all.

Although many Buddhists now regret that deplorable attempt to prove their own superiority,

no Buddhist since then has been able to demonstrate that Buddhism was wrong in its own

terms. A faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and

resignation, and that regards life as a poor and transient thing, is ill-equipped for self-criticism.

Those who become bored by conventional “Bible” religions, and seek “enlightenment” by way of

the dissolution of their own critical faculties into nirvana in any form, had better take a warning.

They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being

asked to put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals.