The Easternisation of the West as a Problem of Transmission

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Abstract

The movement of Indian ideas into the modern West, widely called the Easternisation of the West, is examined as a problem in the theory of cultural transmission. The debate between W. H. R. Rivers, the diffusionist who explained cultural similarity by migration and the layering of peoples, and A. L. Kroeber, who stressed the autonomy of culture, the reticulate shape of history and stimulus diffusion, is reconstructed and used to frame a five-phase model of transmission: stimulus, selection and abstraction, translation, legitimation, and re-embedding or return. The model is applied to five bodies of material: the Vedanta of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and the Parliament of Religions of 1893; the conversation between quantum physics and Indian thought; the making of modern yoga and meditation; nature cure, Ayurveda and the critique of industrial medicine; and homeopathy and its indigenisation in India. The article argues that transmission is distinct from validity, that every transmitted practice is translated and so partly invented by its receivers, that power and mediation shape what travels, and that the route is circular rather than linear, since what returns to India is often a hybrid. It closes with five theses on diffusion, reflections on first-person and third-person knowledge, and an agenda for research.

Keywords: diffusionism; Rivers; Kroeber; stimulus diffusion; Easternisation; Vedanta; yoga; homeopathy; cultural transmission; circulation

1. Introduction: A Quarrel Revisited

Every generation of anthropologists inherits a quarrel about how culture moves. In the first decades of the twentieth century it was conducted between W. H. R. Rivers, the Cambridge physician, psychologist and ethnologist who came to explain cultural similarity by migration and the layering of peoples, and A. L. Kroeber, the Berkeley anthropologist who insisted that culture is a level of reality with its own regularities and that its history is better pictured as a net than as a tree. The quarrel was never settled, and it was largely abandoned rather than resolved, so that for much of the later century diffusion was treated as a discredited explanation and a faintly embarrassing relic. The thesis of this article is that the quarrel has been misread by both sides and by their successors, and that it can be put to work on a phenomenon that neither man could have foreseen: the movement of Indian ideas, practices and ways of understanding the world into the intellectual and everyday life of the modern West.

That movement is commonly called the Easternisation of the West. The phrase was given its currency by the sociologist Colin Campbell, who argued that the West has undergone a gradual shift from a transcendentalist, dualist and theistic outlook towards an immanentist, monist and holistic one, and that the shift is best understood as the replacement of a Western by an Eastern pattern of thought. Philip Goldberg has told the story from the side of the American reception, in which Vedanta, yoga and meditation passed from the margins of the nineteenth century to the centre of twenty-first century life. Neither account is chiefly concerned with the mechanics of movement, and it is the mechanics that this article examines. Who carried the ideas? What was chosen and what left behind? How were the chosen elements translated into the idiom of the receiving culture? What authority legitimated them? What returned to the place from which they set out?

The argument proceeds through a deliberate separation of questions. The first question is how an idea, a practice or a technique has travelled; the second is whether it is true, or effective, or good. The two are constantly confused. Enthusiasts treat popularity as proof, and sceptics treat the discovery of an untidy pedigree as refutation. The principle adopted here is that transmission is analytically distinct from validity. That an idea has travelled successfully shows that it was portable, that it found carriers, and that it could be made to fit a receiving context; it does not show that it is true, and its failure to travel does not show that it is false. Where the article assesses the scientific evidence for a practice, as it does for meditation, lifestyle medicine and homeopathy, it does so as a distinct step, after the history of its movement has been told.

The article makes four claims. First, the Rivers–Kroeber debate supplies a better vocabulary for the study of ideational transmission than the models now in use, provided that it is read selectively: Rivers for his insistence that contact is a historical fact that must be established by evidence, Kroeber for his demonstration that what crosses a boundary is changed by crossing it. Second, transmission can be analysed as a sequence of five phases, which are stimulus, selection and abstraction, translation, legitimation, and re-embedding or return. Third, the application of this model to five bodies of material, namely the Vedanta of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, the encounter between quantum physics and Indian thought, the making of modern yoga and meditation, nature cure and Ayurveda, and homeopathy, shows consistent patterns and instructive exceptions. Fourth, the pattern that emerges is not a one-way export of Eastern wisdom but a circulation, in which what is received by the West is largely made there, and what comes back to India is often a hybrid.

2. Two Theories of Diffusion

2.1 Rivers: contact as a historical fact

W. H. R. Rivers began as a physician and experimental psychologist. His fieldwork on the Torres Straits expedition of 1898 and among the Todas of southern India yielded the genealogical method, the recording of pedigrees as a means of collecting kinship and demographic data. The method left him with the conviction that social structure carries the record of historical events, and that the terms and customs of a society can be read as the sediment of earlier contact and migration. In his later work, notably The History of Melanesian Society (1914), he used this conviction to argue that the peoples of Melanesia were the product of successive waves of immigration, and that their institutions could be stratified into the layers deposited by each.

Rivers’s diffusionism had a precise structure. It rested on three assumptions: that cultural similarity between distant peoples called for an historical explanation; that the most likely such explanation was contact, whether by migration or by borrowing; and that the burden of proof therefore lay with those who would claim independent invention. The assumptions were not absurd. They answered a real weakness of the evolutionism that preceded them, which assumed that all peoples passed through the same stages and which dealt with similarities by the method of comparison without regard to history. Rivers’s work was also, at its best, careful, and the later and cruder hyper-diffusionism of G. Elliot Smith and W. J. Perry, who derived the whole of civilisation from ancient Egypt, was in part a distortion of his programme. It collapsed under the weight of chronological and archaeological evidence, and with it went much of the credit that diffusion as a category had enjoyed.

2.2 Kroeber: the superorganic and the stimulus

Alfred Kroeber came to the problem from the opposite direction. A student of Franz Boas, he was convinced by his work on the Indians of California that culture could not be reduced to the biology or psychology of its bearers. In ‘The Superorganic’ (1917) he gave this conviction a name and a programme: cultural history was to be explained by cultural causes, and the individual genius, so beloved of narrative history, was to be treated as a point at which the culture expressed itself. The doctrine has often been criticised for its reification of culture, and Kroeber himself modified it. Its value for the present argument lies elsewhere, in the corollary that a receiving culture is not a passive medium but a system with its own logic, which determines what it can take up and what it makes of what it takes.

The most useful of Kroeber’s concepts is stimulus diffusion, which he introduced in 1940. It names a form of diffusion in which the idea of a thing crosses a cultural boundary but its specific content does not, so that the recipients invent a new form of their own in response to the idea. The standard examples are Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary, devised after he had learned that the whites possessed a writing system but without any knowledge of its letters, and the European discovery of porcelain, undertaken in emulation of the Chinese ware that had been imported and arrived at by quite different technical means. In both cases the stimulus came from outside and the product was invented inside, and the history could be told neither as a pure borrowing nor as a pure invention. This is the point from which the present argument starts, because the history of Indian ideas in the West is full of stimulus diffusion. A yoga posture class in a city of the American Midwest owes something to Indian practices, but the thing itself, with its mats, its sequences, its vocabulary of wellness and its hybrid physical culture, was made in the West and in India together.

2.3 The tree and the net

The late Kroeber contributed a further image. In Configurations of Culture Growth (1944) and elsewhere he argued that the history of culture is not tree-like, as biological descent largely is, because cultural branches fuse again after they have diverged. He proposed instead a reticulate or net-like structure, which his readers have sometimes called the banyan model, after the Indian fig whose branches send down roots that become trunks in their own right. The image has a particular appropriateness for the subject of this article. It dissolves the contest between diffusion and independent invention, since a net has no single origin to be diffused from, and it makes room for the observation, confirmed in every case below, that the movement of ideas across the Indo-Western boundary has been two-way and repeated.

2.4 What the debate teaches

The debate between the two men has usually been told as a victory of the party of autonomy over the party of contact. This reading is mistaken, and it has had the unfortunate consequence of making the study of contact seem naive. The better reading is that each man was right about something the other neglected. Rivers was right that contact is a matter of historical fact, to be established by evidence about persons, routes and times, and that a theory of culture which cannot accommodate it is incomplete. Kroeber was right that the receiving system is active, that what arrives is transformed, and that a trait is never the same trait in two cultures. Later scholarship has largely accepted both points. The concept of acculturation, fixed by Redfield, Linton and Herskovits in 1936, drew attention to the changes that follow continuous first-hand contact; Fernando Ortiz’s transculturation, coined in 1940, insisted on the creation of new forms in the process; and the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon on translation has shown how a thing is changed, in being moved, into terms that serve the interests of those who receive it. 

3. A Five-Phase Model of Transmission

3.1 The limits of the diffusion metaphor

The model of diffusion that dominated early twentieth-century anthropology, and that still shapes much popular thinking, rests on a physical metaphor. A trait, like a drop of ink in water, is imagined to spread from a point of origin, with a velocity and pattern determined by the properties of the medium. The metaphor has uses: it directs attention to the geography of spread and to barriers and channels, and it supports the quantitative study of the adoption of innovations. But it conceals as much as it reveals. It assumes that what spreads is identical with what originated, that the medium is passive, that the movement requires no work, and that the spreading thing has an inherent momentum which carries it forward regardless of the interests of those who meet it. None of these assumptions survives contact with the history of Indian ideas in the West. The ideas did not move by themselves. They were carried by identifiable people, they were shaped by the societies and presses that printed them, and they were adopted or refused according to what their receivers wanted.

3.2 Mediation and agency

Two features of the Indo-Western encounter require emphasis. The first is that it took place under colonial conditions. The first great wave of Indian ideas reached the West in the age of the British Empire, through institutions such as the Asiatic Society of Bengal, through the labours of orientalist translators, and through the educated Indian elite that the colonial order had created. This asymmetry shaped what travelled. Europeans first encountered Indian thought as texts, edited and translated by scholars who imposed Western categories of religion, philosophy and science upon them, and the picture of ‘Hinduism’ as a unified religion with a canonical scripture is in considerable part a product of that mediation. The second feature is that Indian agents were not passive. Reformers such as Rammohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen and Vivekananda reshaped their own inheritance in dialogue with Western critics, and in doing so they became the principal carriers of what the West received. The Indian side of the transmission was authored, not merely sampled.

3.3 The five phases

The framework may be stated in five phases, which are analytically distinct, though in practice they overlap and recur.

The first phase is stimulus. Something in the source tradition becomes visible to a receiving society, through a text, a teacher, a performance or an object. The stimulus need not be accurate or complete; as Kroeber’s examples show, a rumour of a thing may be as productive as the thing. The Cherokee syllabary stands behind many an exotic reception in which the idea of an Indian science of the mind or an Indian medicine, rather than its content, was what incited a response.

The second phase is selection and abstraction. Of the whole content of a source tradition only a part is chosen for transmission, and that part is usually detached from the ritual, social and doctrinal setting in which it was embedded. The pattern of selection in the Indian case is striking. A small number of elements was taken up with enthusiasm: non-dual Vedanta, certain techniques of meditation and concentration, the postures and breath exercises of hatha yoga, a psychologised version of karma and rebirth, and a handful of therapeutic principles. Much was left behind: caste and its ritual hierarchy, the devotional cults, the domestic rituals and pilgrimages, and the great scholastic literatures of grammar, law and poetics. Five properties appear to determine portability. The first is detachability from a social context, since a technique can be taught in a weekend and practised in a suburban bedroom, while a caste obligation cannot. The second is universalisability, the ability to be presented as valid for all humans, which requires the removal of specifically Hindu associations. The third is experiential verifiability, which suited a culture shaped by empiricism and by William James’s treatment of mystical experience as an object of study. The fourth is compatibility with science, or the ability to claim its support. The fifth is congruence with categories the receiving culture already possessed: Vedantic monism found a niche in idealist and Neoplatonic traditions, yogic concentration in contemplative prayer, and prana in the vitalism that survived in Western biology and medicine.

The third phase is translation. In the sense of Latour and Callon, translation is the work by which a thing is transformed, in being moved, into terms that serve the interests and meet the understanding of those who receive it. Its implication is that no transmission leaves the transmitted thing unchanged. Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896), which presented Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra to Anglophone readers as an experimental psychology, is the paradigmatic text: the Sanskrit original was rearranged, annotated and explained in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century science, and the result became a source for Western yoga in its own right. A translation of this sort is neither a distortion nor a faithful copy. It is an act of composition, and the question to be put to it is what it made possible.

The fourth phase is legitimation. A transmitted practice must acquire authority in the receiving society, and the sources of authority open to a modern Western audience are few. Traditional religious authority was in decline, the authority of the state could be invoked mainly for the regulation of medicine and education, and the principal remaining source of cognitive authority was science. The strategy of legitimation by science was therefore almost inevitable, and it took three forms. Teachers claimed that Eastern doctrines were scientific in method, that the yogi was an experimenter in the laboratory of consciousness. They claimed that Western science, at its most advanced, was converging on truths long known to the East. And they enlisted the techniques of science to test the claims, by measuring the brain waves of meditators or conducting randomised trials of yoga therapy. The strategy gave the practices prestige that they could not otherwise have commanded, but it also exposed them to testing by the standards of the sciences, with results that were not always favourable.

The fifth phase is re-embedding and return. The transmitted and translated element is established in a new institutional setting, such as the yoga studio, the meditation clinic, the homeopathic hospital or the naturopathic school, and it may travel back to its place of origin in its new form. What returns is seldom what departed. The postural yoga now taught in Indian cities owes much to an interchange with Western physical culture, and the scientific idiom in which Indian institutions present Ayurveda and yoga was learned in part from Western critics. It is at this phase that the linear picture of diffusion fails most obviously, and that the model most obviously requires the term circulation, defined as the continuing two-way movement of persons, texts, practices and objects between a source region and a receiving region.

3.4 Power and the ethics of exchange

A fuller theory would attend to asymmetries of power. The transmission of Indian ideas took place within colonial and then global economic structures, and it has often rewarded the carriers in the West more than the communities from which the practices are derived. The commercial exploitation of yoga, meditation and Ayurveda by Western enterprises, with little acknowledgement or return to the source, raises questions of justice that are not dissolved by the observation that practices are hybrid. A history of transmission that ignores these asymmetries is incomplete, and one that treats them as the whole story is reductive. The model proposed here treats power as a force that shapes selection, translation and legitimation at each phase, but it does not collapse transmission into domination.

4. The First Wave: Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and the Chicago Moment

The first body of material is the Vedanta of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda, which reached the West at the end of the nineteenth century. Ramakrishna, a temple priest in Dakshineswar near Calcutta, practised the disciplines of a series of traditions, Hindu, Christian and Islamic, and reported that each had led him to the same reality. The claim of experimental verification, that he had tested the paths by following them, passed to his disciple and became one of the chief devices of transmission. The disciple, Narendranath Datta, educated at a Scottish missionary college in Calcutta and conversant with Mill, Spencer and Hume, was a made translator. He had the Western philosophical vocabulary to render his teacher’s experience in terms that an educated Anglophone audience could grasp, and he had the experience of being, in his own country, a subject of the criticism that he later answered abroad.

The World’s Parliament of Religions, held at Chicago in September 1893 as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition, gave him a platform. His address, with its salutation to the ‘sisters and brothers of America’ and its claim that all religions are paths to the same end, was a success, and it is easy, in retrospect, to read as the origin of Easternisation. The model suggests a more careful reading. The Parliament was a stimulus that fell on prepared ground. American Transcendentalism, with Emerson and Thoreau, had already absorbed translations of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita; the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875, had spread a syncretic version of Indian ideas; and the liberal Protestantism that organised the Parliament was seeking a universal religion into which Eastern teachers might be received as partners. The Western demand preceded the Indian supply, and Vivekananda’s achievement was to give it a form.

The form was a selection. Vivekananda presented Vedanta as the universal philosophy of the unity of existence, not as a Hindu sectarian doctrine; he presented Raja Yoga as an experimental science of the mind; and he presented the harmony of religions as the Indian contribution to a world in which Christianity no longer held a monopoly. Each step abstracted from the tradition, and each had a cost. The ritual and devotional life of Ramakrishna’s Bengal, which was the ground of the experience that Vivekananda sought to universalise, was largely absent from the Western teaching, and the neo-Vedanta of the Ramakrishna Mission, to which the teaching gave rise, was in important respects a modern construction. Its claim to be the essence of Hinduism has been disputed by traditional Hindus, and the extent to which it was shaped by Western ideas has been argued by historians of the period.

The first wave illustrates the five phases and two conclusions. It shows that the ground in the West was prepared by Western movements, so that the Easternisation of the Western religious imagination owed as much to the internal condition of Protestant and post-Protestant culture as to anything arriving from India. And it shows the circularity of the process even at this early stage: Vivekananda returned to India as a hero, and his reformulated Vedanta, with its emphasis on service, science and national regeneration, was incorporated into the Indian national movement. A teaching that had been translated for the West came back as a source of Indian self-assertion, which is exactly what the model predicts at the phase of return.

5. Physics, Information and the Participatory Universe

The second body of material concerns the long conversation between modern physics and Indian philosophy. It differs from the first in that the principal carriers were not Indian teachers but Western scientists, and the movement of ideas took the form of analogy more than of teaching.

The founders of quantum theory, among them Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, frequently looked eastwards for philosophical resources. Schrödinger, who had read the Upanishads closely, saw in the Vedantic identification of the individual self with the universal a counterpart of the unity he felt to be implied by the wave function, and Bohr, who adopted the yin-yang symbol on his coat of arms, regarded complementarity as an instance of a wider truth that Eastern traditions had long recognised. In the 1970s the analogy became a genre. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) argued that the world picture of modern physics resembles that of Eastern mysticism, and the books enjoyed an extraordinary sale among readers who had no training in physics. The movement was strongly marked by its Californian origin, and David Kaiser has shown that the Fundamental Fysiks Group of Berkeley, whose members pursued the foundations of quantum theory in the countercultural 1970s, supplied an important part of the milieu in which the analogies were developed.

Other contributions were more rigorous. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker attempted a reconstruction of quantum theory from simple alternatives of knowledge, and his interest in Indian thought was serious. John Archibald Wheeler’s notion of the participatory universe, summarised in the phrase ‘it from bit,’ proposed that physical reality arises from the answers to yes–no questions posed by observers, and it has often been read as congenial to Indian idealism. David Bohm, who developed the idea of an implicate order in which what appears as separate objects is enfolded in an undivided whole, was in extended conversation with J. Krishnamurti. The Mind and Life dialogues, begun in 1987 between the Dalai Lama and scientists, moved the exchange from analogy to collaboration in the study of the mind.

The five-phase model shows why the physics case is distinctive. The selection was of an image rather than a practice: the oneness of the observer and the observed, the unity of apparent opposites, the unreality of separateness. Translation was extensive, since the Sanskrit and Chinese terms were reduced to the vocabulary of quantum theory, and legitimation was reflexive, in that the authority of physics was borrowed to certify the East while the East was invoked to give philosophical depth to physics. The principal difficulty is that analogy is not evidence. Critics have pointed out that the resemblances are selective, that the physical concepts are used metaphorically, and that physics does not support the metaphysical claims that are drawn from it. Quantum mechanics does not establish that consciousness creates reality, and Indian philosophy is not a proto-physics. The convergences that remain, between the relational character of quantum properties and the Buddhist analysis of dependent origination, for example, are instructive but are properly a matter of philosophical comparison and not of confirmation.

The Indian reception of the analogy has its own history. Indian scientists and philosophers welcomed it, in some cases as a vindication of the heritage, and the politics of analogy gave rise to a body of writing on ‘Vedic science’ that claims for the ancient texts anticipations of relativity, quantum mechanics and genetics. Here the model identifies a return which is not a confirmation but a recycling: the Western analogy, itself constructed from selected Indian ideas, comes back to India as external endorsement, and is cited by nationalist writers to show that the tradition has been confirmed by Western science. The circuit is complete, and it is no more probative on its return than it was on its departure.

6. Yoga, Psychology and the Science of Life

6.1 The scholarly and postural construction of yoga

Yoga is the practice most widely identified with the Easternisation of the West, and it is also the one whose modern form is most clearly a product of circulation. The scholarly image of yoga was shaped by Mircea Eliade, whose Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1954, from a French original of 1936) presented it as an archaic technique of ecstasy and liberation, systematised by Patañjali and continuous across the centuries. That picture has been qualified by historians, who have shown that the practices called yoga were diverse, that the postural practice that now dominates the term was minor in the classical sources, and that its modern form was assembled in the early twentieth century. Joseph Alter’s study of the physical culture of the wrestlers’ gyms and of the scientific yoga of Kuvalayananda at Lonavla, and Mark Singleton’s account of the entanglement of postural yoga with European gymnastics and the Indian physical culture movement, have established that the yoga of the studio is a hybrid whose parentage is both Indian and Western. Its principal Indian architect, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, taught in the Mysore Palace, and his pupils B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois and Indra Devi became the carriers of the Western versions.

The model explains the pattern. Selection took the postures and the breath control, which were detachable and experiential, and left behind the ethical discipline and the theistic frame. Translation recast them as exercise, therapy and stress reduction. Legitimation came through the laboratory, and return, in the form of the International Day of Yoga proclaimed by the United Nations in 2014 at India’s initiative, brought the hybrid back to its supposed source as national heritage.

6.2 Psychology and the laboratory

The psychological reception of yoga began with Carl Gustav Jung, whose seminar on kundalini yoga in 1932 was an attempt to read the symbols of the Indian tradition as expressions of the psychic process of individuation. Jung’s attitude was ambivalent. He admired Eastern introspective disciplines and warned that Westerners could not simply adopt them without risk of losing their own roots. His reading shows translation in a pure form, since the Indian symbols are processed through a Western psychological theory, and it demonstrates that the translation could be creative: it contributed to the later transpersonal psychology and to the language in which meditation entered clinical practice.

The scientific study of meditation passed through several stages. Early physiological studies in the 1950s and 1960s, of yogis and Zen monks, and Herbert Benson’s work on the relaxation response, drew public attention to the bodily effects of meditation. The most consequential translation was that of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in 1979 founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and developed mindfulness-based stress reduction, a secular programme that removed the Buddhist context from the practice and presented it as a clinical technique. The programme is a textbook case of abstraction and legitimation, and its success has been very great. The evidence for the clinical effects, however, is more modest than its public image. Systematic reviews have found moderate evidence of benefit for anxiety, depression and pain, comparable to that of other active treatments, and much weaker evidence for broader claims; the research literature has also been criticised for small samples, weak controls and the inflation of results. The principle of separation applies: that the practice has been successfully translated into the clinic is a fact about transmission, and what it achieves there is a separate question to be decided by trials.

6.3 The subtle body under scrutiny

Of the claims transmitted with yoga, the doctrine of the subtle body, with its channels (nāḍī), centres (cakra) and the latent energy called kundalini, is the most difficult. Gopi Krishna’s account of his own kundalini experience, published in English in 1970, argued that the awakening was a biological process, a physiological evolution of the human brain, and proposed that science should investigate it. The proposal was taken up in the 1970s at the Menninger Foundation, where Elmer and Alyce Green studied the voluntary control of physiological functions by Swami Rama and others, with results that were widely reported and that gave a certain scientific colour to the claims. The studies established that trained persons can influence autonomic functions to a degree that was not previously believed possible; they did not establish the existence of the subtle body or of kundalini as a physiological entity. A critical reading must keep these apart. The subtle body is best treated as a phenomenological map, a structure of reported experience that may be fruitfully investigated, and its identification with an anatomical or energetic substrate lacks support. Here the principle of separation yields a clear result: the portability of the doctrine, which is high, tells us nothing of its truth.

7. Nature Cure, Ayurveda and the Holistic Critique of Industrial Medicine

The fourth body of material complicates the usual picture, because the origin of the nature cure movement is European. The water cure of Vincenz Priessnitz in Silesia, the hygienic and dietary reforms of Sylvester Graham and others, and the ‘return to nature’ of Sebastian Kneipp and Adolf Just in Germany formed a tradition that was transmitted to India before it was transmitted back. Mohandas Gandhi encountered Just’s Return to Nature in South Africa, adopted its methods, and, in the course of a long experiment with diet, fasting, clay and water, made nature cure an Indian cause and, characteristically, a part of his moral programme. The Indianisation of nature cure through Gandhi, and the institutions that followed, including the Nature Cure Hospital at Urulikanchan near Pune, is a case in which a Western system was received in India, translated into Indian terms, and then offered to the world as an Indian inheritance.

Ayurveda was reconstituted in a related way. The colonial government’s preference for biomedicine, the training of Ayurvedic practitioners in institutions modelled on Western medical colleges, and the standardisation of textbooks and pharmacopoeias changed the system’s organisation, so that the modern Ayurveda of India is, in significant respects, a creation of the colonial and postcolonial period. Its export to the West from the 1980s, through teachers such as Vasant Lad, Deepak Chopra and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s organisation, again involved selection and translation: an emphasis on constitution types, diet and lifestyle, and a language of balance and energy, in preference to the system’s surgical and pharmaceutical content.

Behind the movement stood the critique of industrial medicine. Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis (1975) argued that medicine had become a source of illness, and George Engel’s call in 1977 for a biopsychosocial model proposed that medicine include the psychological and social dimensions of disease. These were Western criticisms, and they created a demand which Eastern systems could be called to satisfy. The World Health Organization’s declaration at Alma-Ata in 1978 and its subsequent strategy on traditional medicine gave the demand institutional form. The surviving core of nature cure is now lifestyle medicine, a discipline with an evidence base: dietary change, physical activity, stress reduction and the avoidance of tobacco have demonstrated effects on the course of chronic disease. The vitalist and metaphysical frameworks with which nature cure began have not fared as well. Vitalism, the doctrine that living things are governed by a principle distinct from physical and chemical forces, has not been supported by biology, and the identification of the vital force with prana is a translation that explains little.

8. Homeopathy: Diffusion and Indigenisation

The fifth body of material is homeopathy, and it is the most instructive case in the series because it combines a European origin, a spectacularly successful transmission to India, and an exceptionally clear verdict of the evidence. Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, announced the system in the 1790s and set out its doctrine in the Organon of the Healing Art (1810), proposing that a substance capable of producing symptoms in a healthy person can cure similar symptoms in the sick (the law of similars), and that its curative power is released by serial dilution and succussion. Hahnemann’s theory of the vital force supplied the metaphysical frame. The system diffused rapidly in Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, in part because the heroic therapeutics of the orthodox physicians of the time, with its bleeding and purging, left patients ready to prefer a gentle alternative.

Homeopathy came to India in the 1830s, with the practice of the Transylvanian-born physician Johann Martin Honigberger at the court of Ranjit Singh in Lahore, and with missionaries and military surgeons, and it took root in Bengal, where Rajendra Lal Dutta and Mahendra Lal Sircar, the latter a convert from allopathy who founded the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, became its Indian champions. It was recognised by the Indian state after independence, and the Homoeopathy Central Council Act of 1973 established a national regulatory regime. India is now the largest single market for homeopathy in the world, with a very large number of registered practitioners.

The model accounts for the success. Selection took the system whole, for homeopathy was transmitted as a complete doctrine and practice and not in parts. Its portability was high: it required little equipment, drew on cheap remedies, and could be practised by a single practitioner. Translation consisted of its identification with Indian ideas of subtle energy and its assimilation into the pluralism of Indian medical culture. Legitimation was largely political and institutional. The state’s recognition of the system, in the form of colleges, councils and public dispensaries, secured an authority that did not depend on the findings of laboratory science.

The scientific assessment is separate and, on the best evidence, unfavourable. The principal difficulty is that the dilutions that characterise high-potency remedies are such that no molecule of the original substance is likely to remain, and no mechanism by which they could act has been identified. Clinical evidence agrees. The most comprehensive assessment, by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council in 2015, which reviewed the evidence on a large number of conditions, concluded that there were no health conditions for which there was reliable evidence that homeopathy was effective; earlier meta-analyses reached the same conclusion for the specific effects of the remedies. The persistence of homeopathy in spite of this verdict is a fact about transmission and not about efficacy. It is explained by what Western and Indian patients have found in it: long consultations, attention to the person, low cost, a gentle repertoire, and the natural course of most self-limiting illness.

The case therefore yields a clean illustration of the principle of separation. Homeopathy travelled spectacularly, and it was indigenised so completely that many Indians regard it as a native system, which it is not. Neither fact bears on its truth. In the contemporary West, several governments have curtailed its public funding, while in India it remains an official system of medicine, and the divergence shows how much the fate of a transmitted practice depends upon the institutional soil in which it is re-embedded. The comparison with the Indian prana, which some writers have proposed as the equivalent of the vital force, deserves one comment: the equation is a translation, made by the receivers, and it adds a rhetorical bridge between two concepts without adding evidence for either.

9. Easternisation Reconsidered: Five Theses on Diffusion

The cases permit a reassessment of Campbell’s thesis and a statement of what they teach about diffusion. The reassessment may be put in four observations. The first is that the strong form of the thesis claims too much. The shift from a transcendentalist to an immanentist conception of the divine has undoubtedly occurred in some sections of Western society, and it shows in surveys of religious belief, which record a decline of belief in a personal God and a growth of belief in a spiritual force or higher power. It has coexisted with strong counter-currents, and has provoked them: the revival of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, the growth of Islamic movements in Europe, the persistence of institutional religion in many societies, and a vigorous defence of scientific naturalism. The West is not being converted to the East. It is becoming more plural, and Eastern elements are some of the strands.

The second observation is that the East of ‘Easternisation’ is a construct. The ideal-typical East of Campbell’s analysis, monist, immanentist and holistic, is a Western construction shaped by the Romantic and Orientalist traditions, and it is not an accurate description of the diversity of Indian traditions. India has dualist philosophies, theistic devotionalism, ritual orthopraxy and materialist scepticism, and the neo-Vedantic doctrine of the unity of all religions is only one, and a modern, current among them. To speak of the Easternisation of the West is to speak of the Westernisation of a particular version of the East, in a double movement of construction, first by Indian reformers in dialogue with the West and then by Western receivers adapting the result.

The third observation is that the phenomenon is partly explained by factors internal to the West. The decline of institutional religion, the growth of individualism and consumerism, the rise of therapeutic culture, and the long Western tradition of mysticism, Neoplatonism and esotericism would, even in the absence of Eastern influence, probably have produced a turn towards inward and holistic spirituality. The Eastern materials gave a vocabulary, a set of techniques and a source of legitimation, but the demand arose within. This suggests that the metaphor of import is inadequate and that a better image is the catalyst, which accelerates and directs a reaction that is already under way.

The fourth observation concerns the opposite process, the Westernisation of India. The modern forms of Indian religion and medicine have been shaped by the encounter with the West, in the reform movements of the nineteenth century, in the institutions of the colonial state, and in the global market of the late twentieth century. The yoga of the contemporary Indian studio, the Ayurveda of the state-run college and the homeopathy of the registered practitioner are all products of exchange, and the reification of an authentic India uncontaminated by the West is a fiction, on which Western Romantics and Indian nationalists have alike depended. Seen in this light, East and West, as cultural entities, are constituted by their exchanges.

Taken together, these observations allow the term Easternisation to be retained as a convenient name for a family of transformations, but not as the name of a unitary process, a movement in a single direction, or a single kind of event. It is a set of interrelated transmissions whose mechanisms, carriers and outcomes differ from field to field.

The arguments of the preceding sections can now be stated as five theses on diffusion.

Thesis one: transmission is distinct from validity. That an idea has travelled tells us about its portability and its carriers, and nothing about its truth. The two questions require different evidence and different methods, and a good history of transmission leaves the second open.

Thesis two: every transmission is a translation. No practice crosses a cultural boundary intact. What the receivers make of it is partly their own invention, so that stimulus diffusion, far from being a marginal type, is a general feature of the movement of ideas. This is Kroeber’s lesson, and the Indian cases confirm it in every field examined.

Thesis three: contact must be established by evidence. This is Rivers’s lesson. The claim that two cultures are connected requires documentary, chronological and biographical evidence, and the shorthand of resemblance is not enough. The easy analogies between Indian thought and Western physics fail this test, and the weak form of diffusionism that ignores it deserves the neglect that it has received.

Thesis four: power and mediation shape what travels. Selection is not random. It is governed by the properties of the ideas, by the demands of the receivers, and by the structures of power, colonial and commercial, within which the exchange occurs. A history that attends only to the properties of ideas is naive, and one that attends only to power is incomplete.

Thesis five: the route is circular. What goes out comes back changed, and the returned form acts upon the source. The Indian tradition that exists today is in part the product of what it sent abroad and received back, and the notion of an unaltered original is a fiction. The reticulate model, and not the branching tree, is the appropriate picture.

These theses carry consequences for the quarrel with which the article began. Rivers and Kroeber are not rivals but complements. The question that divided them, whether culture spreads by diffusion or arises independently, is ill-formed, because culture neither moves as a lump nor is generated afresh in every place; it passes between people who adopt and transform it, and the outcome depends on what they bring to the encounter as well as on what they receive.

10. Knowledge, Ethics and an Agenda for Research

10.1 First-person and third-person knowledge

The most significant question left by the study concerns the relation between the first-person, experiential and often animistic resources that Eastern traditions supply and the third-person methods of the natural sciences. The contemplative traditions have developed, over many centuries, techniques for the systematic cultivation and observation of states of consciousness, and the reports and theories they have produced are a source of hypotheses and methods for the sciences of mind. This potential has begun to be realised in the clinical use of mindfulness, in Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenological programme, and in studies of the neural correlates of meditation.

The claims of the traditions are of three kinds and must be distinguished. Some are empirical claims, about the effects of practices on attention, emotion and behaviour, which can be tested. Others are phenomenological claims, about the structure of experience, which can be examined by methods of disciplined first-person inquiry and cross-checked for agreement among practitioners. Others again are metaphysical claims, about the ultimate nature of reality, the existence of subtle energies or the possibility of rebirth, which are not at present open to scientific test and which, if they are to be assessed, must be assessed by other means. The persistent weakness of the discourse of Easternisation has been the failure to separate them, so that the evidential standing of the first is carried over to the second and the third.

Four principles follow. Third-person tests should be applied rigorously and without prejudice, with adequate controls, adequate samples and the honest reporting of negative results. First-person data should be treated with respect, as a source of information about experience that cannot otherwise be had, with the recognition that it is shaped by the interpretative framework of the observer; training is on this view a condition of reliability, as in any observational science. The exchange should be reciprocal: the traditions must be willing to submit their claims to test, and the sciences to learn from the methods of the traditions. And the exchange should be candid about its limits. There are questions about the purpose of life, the nature of the good and the meaning of suffering to which the traditions give answers that are not the subject of scientific test, and the pretence that they are is no part of dialogue.

10.2 Ethics, regulation and the responsibilities of scholarship

The study has implications for practice and policy. In health, practices should be evaluated on evidence, system by system and claim by claim. Yoga, meditation and certain dietary and lifestyle interventions have support and may reasonably be recommended as adjuncts to conventional care for appropriate conditions. Practices such as homeopathy, which have repeatedly been tested without evidence of benefit beyond placebo, cannot be justified as treatments for serious disease, and their public funding should be reconsidered in the light of the evidence, as several governments have done. In India, where plurality of systems is a matter of deliberate policy, integration should be accompanied by investment in rigorous evaluation, in quality control of medicines, and in the training of practitioners to recognise the conditions that require conventional treatment.

In culture, claims of heritage and appropriation should be handled with attention to the historical record. The claim that yoga is an ancient Indian possession that the world has borrowed is partly true and partly an oversimplification: the modern practice is the product of a global exchange to which Indians and others contributed. A just recognition of India’s contribution need not rest on the myth of an unchanged antiquity, and it would be better served by honest history. Yet the commercial exploitation of Indian practices by Western enterprises, with little acknowledgement or return to the communities from which they derive, raises questions of justice that are not dissolved by the observation that practices are hybrids.

In scholarship, the study of cultural transmission demands a combination of philological, historical, ethnographic and scientific skills that rarely resides in one person, and it therefore calls for collaboration across disciplines and across the divide between Indian and Western academies. The history of the field has been shaped by the inequalities of the colonial and postcolonial worlds, in which Western scholars have dominated the interpretation of Indian traditions and Indian scholars have too often been constrained to speak in Western categories. A reconsidered diffusionism should be a joint enterprise, in which scholars of the source and receiving societies share in the setting of questions and the assessment of answers.

10.3 An agenda for research

Four lines of inquiry seem especially promising. The first is the study of carriers: prosopographical work on the persons, societies, presses and institutions through which ideas moved, which would replace the generalities of influence with the documented movements of identifiable people. The second is the quantitative study of reception, using the digitised archives of periodicals, catalogues and library records to track the circulation of terms and texts. The third is comparative work, setting the Indian case beside that of Chinese and Japanese ideas in the West, and beside the movement of Western ideas to Asia, to determine which features of the five-phase model are general. The fourth is the evaluation of the practices themselves, by the standards of the relevant sciences, as a task parallel to the history and not a substitute for it.

11. Conclusion: The Banyan and the Net

The quarrel between Rivers and Kroeber, about whether culture spreads or arises independently, has not been resolved, and it is unlikely to be resolved in the form in which it was posed. What the Indian case suggests is that the question was wrongly framed. Culture neither moves like a body nor arises spontaneously in every place; it passes through people, who adopt and transform it, and the outcome depends on what they bring to the meeting as well as on what they receive.

The image of the banyan which Kroeber’s followers gave us, whose branches send roots to the ground which become trunks in their turn, has a particular fitness for the study of India, where the tree is a sacred and enduring symbol. In this image culture is not a single trunk with separate branches but a net of relations in which the distinction of trunk and branch, source and offshoot, is blurred. The Easternisation of the West, far from being the migration of an Eastern tree to Western soil, is the growth of a new, interconnected structure in which Eastern and Western elements are so intertwined that to separate them would be to destroy the shape of the whole.

This does not mean that origins do not matter or that all claims of priority are equally baseless. There are Indian sources, texts and teachers whose work made possible what followed, and a just history must acknowledge them. There are German sources of homeopathy and nature cure, and American sources of the clinical translation of meditation; and there are Indian modernisers who reshaped their inheritance in dialogue with the West. The history of transmission is a history of debts, but debts that run in many directions and cannot be entered in a single ledger. Nor does the reticulate picture imply that what has been transmitted is of equal worth. The traditions contain elements of lasting value, such as disciplined attention to the inner life, a conception of health as more than the absence of disease, respect for the individuality of the patient and a sense of the interdependence of things, and they contain elements that do not survive testing: claims about energies that cannot be detected, remedies that cannot be shown to work, doctrines that cannot be tested. The task of critical and generous scholarship is to distinguish the one from the other without prejudging the result and without treating the success of a transmission as proof of its truth or its failure as proof of its falsity.

The future of the Easternisation of the West, and of the global circulation of which it is part, will depend on whether the resources it has brought can be placed in a productive and critical dialogue with the methods that continue to define the natural sciences, or whether the two will remain in a relation of cultural coexistence without mutual transformation. The evidence of the past century is mixed. In some fields, notably the clinical use of meditation and the study of contemplative states, the dialogue has been fruitful. In others, notably the relation of homeopathy to pharmacology and of ‘Vedic science’ to physics, it has not. The difference lies in the readiness of the parties to submit their claims to test, and in the fit of the claims to the evidence. Where the readiness exists there is ground for hope that the meeting of India’s traditions and the West’s sciences will go on enriching both. Where it does not, the meeting will remain what much of it has been: a commerce in images, in which each party sees in the other what it wishes to find.

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