Lost in Translation: Guru English

What are some of the repercussions of mash-ups from different myths when you try to take one world-view and tell it in a completely different culture and language? This is what Jane Iwamura grapples with in The Oriental Monk. Asian figures like the Dalai Lama and the samari both have become stereotypes and idealized icons in our Western culture. Instead of looking at the nuances of traditions and the characteristics in these people, Americans take a sound-byte of information. We condense everything down, and repeat that morphed image or phrase so much that we believe it was the original – we make myths.

I’d call this cultural reframing: consciously or not, we reframe these new and Orient cultures with our Western conceptions. In America, we like things that are new but not too new and “alien” so we conform ideals that fit into our Western, secular, and subtly-racist culture. Within this interplay between exoticism and appropriation, we mash-up a “wide range of religious figures (gurus, sages, swamis, masters, teachers) from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (South Asian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese)” (Iwamrua) into a homogenized ‘Oriental Monk’ figure, for example.  

Our language too, is a mash-up. Words are adapted, shortened, and taken from other culture and transformed into English. And as we do, these words are culturally reframed to fit into our vocabulary of Western values.

In the late 1800s, South Asian Buddhists and Hindus sought to connect with those who could “only connect in English.” So they translated Hindu texts into English but then spun off different meanings to make them more accessible to the Western mind-set. And from this, as scholar Srinivas Aravamudan writes, Guru English was born.

You’ve probably heard it. Mindfulness, esoteric, auras, spiritualism, magnetism, energy fields. These words are mash-ups from a number of religious teachings, yet exist without a “sociological basis or doctrinal core.” With these words, secular Westerners could conceptualize and believe in certain Hindu teachings that at the time were considered primal and unclean. For Westerners, these words are catchy and easy to say; they played off scientific movements of the day, but had a credible and ancient past. Therefore, these “mutants and recombinants to jostle, proliferate, and clash within the confines of a common theolinguistic frame.” In the hazy space of East-West connection, these words modify Hindu and Buddhist teachings into “scientific” and Western jargon.

Certain things have been lost in this transmission of teachings. With these words, we see a theolinguistic slippage and a muddying of theological teachings. Sometimes we have to ask, what do these words even mean? When we hear the term prana, do we think back to the ancient Bhagavad-Gita and Patanjali? Or are is it a mix of breath, force - spirit - vitalism - healing - America's physical culture and alternative medicine. Similarly, the term “God” in Guru English can signify a "God" (Isvara, Yaweh, Vishu, Allah, Kali), the individual Self (soul)-realization (Hindu atman-brahman), or the Superself. Guru English is a mash-up that can mean almost anything, but it is seen as syntax grounded in ancient Eastern teachings.  

Many Eastern conceptions have been, perhaps, lost in translation due to this Guru English and preconceived Western notions. It is important to know that we not only tell myths with our English tongue, but our English words are constructed myths as well.