Author: Aseem Shukla
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: May 26, 2011
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/oprah-isa-dharma-seer/2011/05/26/AGWUq3BH_blog.html
"I know that every thought that I think,
every thought that I have, that moves into action is going to create an equal
and opposite reaction. So everything that I put out into the world is going
to come back. It's the golden rule on steroids."
"There are many paths to what you call
God....there is not just one way..."
"The ego is the illusory Self!"
These reflections on karma, pluralism and
enlightened self-realization are basic tenets--core beliefs--for the Dharma
religious traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. The Holy Vedas
or the Buddhist sutras are replete with insights into those understandings
on the path of liberation. But the quotes above are not translations from
the original Sanskrit or Pali, but rather the words and musings of the scriptures
of Oprah.com.
Oprah Winfrey's phoenomenal success as an
eponymous media conglomerate is a testament to incomparable gifts as an entertainer
and even thought leader of our times. Her savvy as a business mogul is no
less amazing. She is bold and brilliant, perhaps the most influential media
personality ever. She wears many monikers very well, but if some are eager
to burden her with another epithet--messiah--then let us be very clear: Oprah's
message, her religion, is very much an iteration of the eternal teachings
of the Dharma traditions.
Paraphrasing and then repackaging the wisdom
of Hindu sages, Sikh gurus and Boddhisatvas into New Agey aphorisms is certainly
not a new practice. I have written before and been queried, of course, by
Deepak Chopra on my assertions against the appropriation and delinking of
yoga from its Hindu origins. And while I had my own questions about Chopra's
reluctance to acknowledge the "empire of wellness he has built on the
foundations...of Hindu masters," Eckhart Tolle, the author whisked to
international fame by Oprah's endorsement, comes in for similar criticism
for a softer deceit in expounding on the Hindu school of nondualism, or Advaita
Vedanta, albeit beautifully. Hindus read his book and realize that his concepts,
embraced enthusiastically by Oprah's audience as novel revelatory insights,
are something they know well as a retelling of the three thousand years old
Upanishads.
So while Hindu Americans should be pleased
and proud that their erstwhile esoteric and lofty ideals--long misunderstood
and misinterpreted--are going very much mainstream, they are also undergoing
their own awakening as to the dangers when appreciation and assimilation border
on appropriation. Hindu Americans realize now that they may have failed to
shape the narrative of their faith and other dharma traditions, allowing its
reductionist caricaturization while ceding the transcendent teachings of pluralism,
inherent divinity of the soul, reincarnation, meditative contemplation and
much more to be sanitized for mass marketing.
Oprah and charisma are synonymous, just as
charisma and messiah are intertwined. She may not claim the mantle of a religious
leader, but like any prophet, Oprah has her flock, her commandments and her
scrolls. Her unabashed embrace of pluralism--many potential paths to one eternal
Truth--is an urgent message for contemporary times.
But Oprah's is not a new message, a new commandment
or new god, but rather a message heard over eons of time, reverberating from
the Himalayas where ascetics passed on wisdom for the ages in an oral tradition
continuing today. It is the eternal relevance of those verses that reverberate
within, spiritually uplift and empower Oprah and her flock.
