A Kaleidoscope of Religions An Interview with DIANA L. ECK Scholar Diana L. Eck has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with India. It began when she was a student of 20, enrolled in a course in Advaita Vedanta philosophy at Banaras Hindu University. She explored the teeming galis of that city in her free time. "It was in Banaras that I experienced the first real challenge to my faith....It came in the form of people-Hindus whose lives were a powerful witness to their faith," she writes in her autobiographical Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras. An elderly acquaintance was one of these people: "Uncle was fascinated to discover I was a Christian....He asked me to tell him about my ishta devata, my 'chosen god,' Jesus Christ." He then asked, "as if verifying an outlandish rumor," if it is true "Christians believe Jesus to be the only avatara?" Her experiences in India led her to a masters degree in South Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She took her Ph.D. in the Comparative Study of Religion from Harvard. Eck compiled her definitive work Banaras: City of Light (1982) and continued her researches into Hinduism, and other world religions. Her other books include Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India and Speaking of Faith: Global Perspectives on Women, Religion and Social Change, which she compiled with Devika Jain. More recently she has explored the impact of diverse immigrant religions in the United States in A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. This book was inspired largely by her work with the Pluralism Project, a Harvard research team Eck has headed since 1991. The Pluralism Project's interactive CD-ROM, On Common Ground: World Religions in America, has won major awards in the United States. Diana Eck was appointed to a State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad and in 1998 received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the National Endowment for the Humanities on American religious pluralism. She spoke with SPAN Editor Lea Terhune during her recent trip to India. SPAN: You have said that there is a new religious landscape in the United States. Is this something that is true from coast to coast? DIANA ECK: It really is true all over the country that there is a new religious landscape. The biggest expressions of it you see in the big urban areas, like New York and Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. It is spread across the country so that there are Hindu communities in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, and North Carolina, South Carolina-Buddhist communities as well.    It is fair to say that in some places you don't see the diversity as much as others. In my home state of Montana, in the Rocky Mountain west, it's a very sparsely populated state, and there are some Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist communities, but it still looks much more homogenous than the rest of the country. You have also referred to Los Angeles as "the most complex Buddhist city in the entire world." Would you elaborate on that? There are Tibetans, Burmese, there are Thai wats in Los Angeles; there are Sri Lankan viharas, there are Vietnamese and Cambodian communities that came with sort of the backwash from the war in Vietnam. There are Taiwanese and old Chinese communities, and Japanese and Korean. The spectrum of Buddhists that you would really need a few months in Asia to see, you can see in a few weekends in Los Angeles, if you work at it. And of course, there are all the Euro American Buddhists, the folks who have become what we sometimes refer to as "new Buddhists," Tibetan or Vajrayana traditions which themselves are multiple in the United States. And there are teachers from the Thai forest tradition who teach mindfulness meditation in a variety of different styles, and there are old and new zen traditions, all of which now have literally passed the mantle of leadership across the Pacific to a new generation of American teachers. Los Angeles has a Sangha Council, which consists of monks, teachers and religious leaders, men and women, from all of these traditions. It is rather an unusual venture, kind of an ecumenical Buddhist association in Los Angeles. What about the post-September 11 backlash against ethnic minorities? Alongside attacks on Asians, there are also reports of communities defending their Asian neighbors from attacks. What is the climate now? What is on the balance sheet? The balance sheet in my view is overwhelmingly in favor of the backlash to the backlash, the communal outreach rather than the violence. The Pluralism Project has actually done a fairly good job of gathering incidents from across the spectrum, not just Muslims gathering Muslim incidents and the Sikh Media Action Resources Task Force gathering incidents. We have tried to list as many as we have been able to. And it is an ugly story to begin with. The immediate flare-up of violence was a disgrace, in many ways, but it came out of a kind of fear and ignorance, an immediate sense of anger, also. So you could document the numbers of mosques that were attacked or fired upon or had a canister of a firebomb thrown into it. But at the same time there were the prodigious efforts of multi-faith groups and neighborhood groups to protect them (minorities). In the case of Toledo, Ohio, when the big mosque in the cornfield outside the city had rifle fire through the dome on the night of September 11, two days later a Christian radio station called out on the airwaves for people to come and protect the mosque and gather in prayer. There were 2,000 people who showed up to hold hands around the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. The head of that Islamic center is a woman, Sharifi Khadri, and she was astounded. People drove an hour and a half, some of them two hours, to participate in this.    I think that is prognostic of the fact that indiscriminate violence against innocent people, who just so happened to be associated with this religion or that, is something that Americans won't stand for. I was just in Seattle, and there was a piece in the Seattle newspaper about the Idris mosque, which is the first big mosque in Seattle. Immediately after September 11 someone had fired at a couple of worshippers who were approaching the mosque, and put a gas canister to one of the cars. These people were apprehended, but in the days and weeks after that there was a kind of neighborhood watch, and people came together taking turns doing round the clock vigils to protect the mosque. These were not people who knew anything about Islam or had any particular portfolio to carry about Islam, but were simply neighbors who insisted this would not happen in their neighborhood. The piece in the Seattle paper was about a barbecue that the mosque held to thank all these neighbors who had been so supportive through these months. Is awareness of religious and ethnic diversity trickling down to a broader segment of American society? I think the trickle down effect was pretty rapid after September 11. People who had been relatively unaware of all the Muslims and mosques in their neighborhoods now became aware of them, wondered whether they were the very mosques where the terrorist hijackers had prayed and mingled in the community. But the interesting thing is that in those days right after September 11, mosques all over America had open houses. There was a call out to open the doors of the mosque and invite neighbors to come in. It happened in my neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And on a Sunday afternoon they had something like 700 people show up. And similarly, I was reading a story from the Austin American-Statesman in Texas. A woman at that mosque-someone who had never been to a mosque before-was interviewed by the paper and said "The time of not getting to know each other is over." Now I think that is a really profound statement that we can carry around as a slogan for the times. We can't afford the level of ignorance that most of us have. And in part the outreach of the Islamic community even in these tough times has been important in initiating levels of dialogue and beginnings of understanding.    The same thing, I think is true of the Sikhs…the outreach of the Sikh community was immediate. They put out education packets. You have drawn comparisons between the significance of the American motto "E Pluribus Unum" and the essence of the Hindu tradition. Can you expand upon this idea? There is a way in which Hinduism is kind of a theology for American religious pluralism. Our commitment to freedom of religion implies the diversity of religions and the unwillingness of the framers of our Constitution to even think about the establishing of any religion, even a generalized form of Christianity, sort of implies the ongoing development of religious freedom and therefore religious diversity.    Now E Pluribus Unum was a motto that meant out of many colonies, out of 13 colonies, one nation. Eventually it took on ethnic and European national meaning, out of many peoples one people. It certainly doesn't mean out of many religions. That's sort of where the melting pot breaks down, but there is a commitment, a common commitment to the covenants of citizenship out of which many people become co-citizens of one country. Now there is a way in which I think Hinduism has a theology for religious pluralism because it really recognizes the manyness of human constructions of the divine and understandings of god. This verse that everyone intones from the Vedas, Ek um sat vipraha bahuda vadanti, "truth is one, but even the wise speak of it in many, many ways", that is an understanding that has given strength to the fabric of India's diversity. India's a place in which unity out of diversity has been a strong theme, and not always lived up to. But unity certainly does not mean unanimity or uniformity. It means ability to hang together out of all the diversity. So Hindus are kind of born to the American project in some ways.    It is certainly true that among the things their (Hindus') new American neighbors find hardest to understand is the multiplicity of gods and forms of god and names of god and images of god. So you can see the language of polytheism, the bowing down to graven images and idols just sort of streaming through the consciousness of some of the less well-informed Christian and Jewish and even secular American citizens. They simply don't understand Hinduism. So it's a challenge. It's obviously something that India today is really struggling with, also. There is a way in which India ought to be at the forefront in real leadership in the international community as a country that has had a long experience of living together through all the tensions and difficulties, into a fabric of very rich and vibrant diversity. And that should be, at this point in time, the mature leadership of India for the rest of the world. Please tell us a little about the Pluralism Project at Harvard which you have been directing for the past decade. What is its aim? We really started asking three overarching questions. One, the question of who's here: because the United States doesn't do a religious census, we don't count by religion. We actually don't know who we are religiously. But we do know that cities like Denver, Colorado, have begun to change. There are five or six Buddhist temples, quite a few mosques or Hindu temples, so basically we document some of the institutional ways in which American cities and towns have begun to change. And we have a directory, a database, profiles of and stories about literally hundreds of religious communities in the United States.    The second question is how are these religious traditions changing in the American context, because immigration means change in some way, it always has. And as Hindu communities put down roots in Boston, Massachusetts, they are bound to find new forms of community life and religious life and new demands on their time that they just never had to encounter before. They need new vehicles to pass on their religious tradition to the next generation who simply won't get it by osmosis in the family or in the community. So there is a greater intentionality needed in religious communities in the United States.    And the third question is how is America changing in the light of this new multi-religious reality? What are the new kinds of questions that come before the courts in the terms of church-state? Does a Hindu temple have to look more Spanish to conform to the zoning codes of Norwalk, California? What about building an Islamic school in an area where people are not so sure what it means to have an Islamic school? What are the kinds of challenges that Sikhs might bring when they petition to wear a turban instead of a helmet on a hardhat job? Or as schoolchildren who are Khalsa Sikhs try to bring their kirpans to school? All of these pose new sets of questions. And these questions are literally on the agenda of every public institution.    So it's this kind of documentation that we are doing. So far the project has been carried largely by research students from Harvard University, but in the last couple of years we've started de-centering this from Harvard and having a group of affiliates from across the country from Anchorage, Alaska, to Orlando, Florida. These are professors and students from colleges and universities who want to take on a kind of pluralism project of their own in their own area. If there is a new Hindu temple being consecrated with the rites of Kumbh Abhisheka in Cleveland, Ohio, it makes so much sense for the universities in Cleveland to begin studying this. They can take advantage of this remarkable opportunity to learn about a new phase in the life of their town and a new phase in the life of the Hindu community there.