A slight man dressed in Oriental robes with a white turban wrapped around his head, Virchand Gandhi arrived in Chicago as a unique “chosen one.” He came to attend the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, a trip that came about only after considerable debate among leaders of his faith, Jainism, a religion in India that shares roots with Hinduism. Here was their dilemma:
They had been invited to Chicago to what they knew would be a breakthrough event, the beginning of religious pluralism in the Western Hemisphere. It would be the first chance for most Eastern religions to introduce themselves in the United States. And it would be the first public forum anywhere for leaders of different faiths from around the world.
However, the orthodox Jain monks could not come to Chicago because their religion forbade them to travel outside India.
Gandhi, a young lawyer and practicing Jain in Muhava, India, became the solution. Taking a year off from his profession, he underwent thorough training with Jain monks in Bombay to qualify him as Jainism’s intellectual and theological representative to the parliament and was shipped off to the U.S. Today Virchand Gandhi is commemorated as “the first Jain to land in America.”
Gandhi’s story is an epitome of the great contrast between the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions that was attended by some 400 delegates and the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions that began yesterday and was expected to draw some 3,500 participants to Chicago.
“This will be the greatest gathering of religious leaders ever in terms of diversity, breadth and depth of representation,” said Daniel Gomez-Ibanez, executive director of the Parliament’s organizing council, shortly before the start of the meetings.
The religious groups who registered for this week’s gathering cover a wide spectrum-from Baha’i, Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Hindu and Jain to Jewish, Muslim, Native American and Neo-Pagan, along with Shintos, Sikhs, Taoists and Theosophists, Rastafarians, Unitarians and Zoroastrians.
Besides the 38 tribes of Native Americans from the U.S., indigenous religious groups in attendance include tribal religions from Africa, Mayans from Guatemala and Maoris from New Zealand.
Like the extraordinary 1893 gathering whose centennial it celebrates, this year’s event includes prominent religious figures from around the world, among them the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa.
But unlike many of those who arrived at the Parliament a century ago as strangers in a strange land, a good number of this year’s participants would feel right at home in the significant communities of their faiths that have been established in and around Chicago. In September 1893, as he walked among Roman Catholic, Confucian and Taoist priests, Buddhist monks, Protestant ministers and Hindu swamis, all variously garbed in scarlet vestments, vermillion cloaks, ocher robes and dark suits, Gandhi was the lone Jain in America.
For this parliament, several delegates are representing Jainism, and they should feel right at home in the $3 million Jain Center and Temple that was dedicated just this summer in west suburban Bartlett to serve a Jain community in the Chicago area that’s estimated at 2,500. At the center are records that include an account of Virchand Gandhi’s historic visit to Chicago a century ago.
With some 70,000 adherents in the U.S., Jainism typifies the changes and growth, particularly among non-Christian religions, that have taken place in this country since the last world religion parliament in Chicago.
Buddhists claim 4 million followers in the U.S., with an estimated 155,000 of them in the Chicago area, and Hindus say they have 1 million U.S. adherents, including 100,000 in the Chicago area.
Both traditions trace their origins in Chicago to 1893, and specifically to two small groups who came to the Parliament that year-the Buddhist scholars headed by Venerable Anagarika Dharmmapala of Ceylon and Venerable Shogen Shaku of Japan, and the Hindu delegation led by Swami Vivekananda.
Today the 14 Hindu leaders from around the world expected to attend this year’s parliament will find more than a dozen Hindu places of worship across the Chicago area. And the Dalai Lama, revered by followers as the living Buddha and also scheduled to attend, will find 28 distinct Buddhist organizations in Chicago-area Buddhist communities that range from a few hundred Sri Lankans and Tibetans to more than 20,000 Japanese and Vietnamese, 30,000 Koreans, 30,000 Thais and some 1,500 American converts.
Muslims, represented only by one delegate, a convert from Anglicanism, in 1893, trace their presence in Chicago to 1889. In attending this year’s parliament, Abdullah Omar Naseef, secretary general of the World Muslim League, will find 250,000 Muslims who worship at mosques throughout the city and suburbs.
These religions have quietly established themselves alongside the old American mainstays. Thus, while Roman Catholics quadrupled their already large 1893 U.S. population to 55 million and quintupled their Chicago Archdiocese numbers to 2.3 million, Zoroastrians have also grown, to an estimated 10,000 in the U.S. Of these some 500 are in the Chicago area, served by a Zoroastrian center in Hinsdale.
Two groups-the Anglicans and Native Americans-that were already well established in the U.S. but were markedly absent from the event a century ago are participating in this year’s Parliament.
Anglicans were among the members of the Jamestown colony in 1607, but they sent no official representatives to the 1893 Parliament because the Archbishop of Canterbury disapproved of it, saying that “the Christian religion is the one religion.” (As represented by the 50,000-member Episcopal Diocese, Chicago Anglicans are today outnumbered in the area by one of the “newcomer” groups, the Hindus.)
Native-Americans did not attend, because they were not invited to, the 1893 parliament. It was then just three years after more than 150 Indian men, women and children were killed at Wounded Knee Creek, S.D.-in the last major battle between Indians and whites-and the U.S. government was herding native tribes into reservations and imposing land allocations and so-called “civilized ways” on them.
At the same time, government exclusion acts kept immigration by Asians into the U.S. negligible until the 1960s. “The real dynamic change in Asian immigration and the presence of Eastern religions in the U.S. was the 1965 Immigration Act,” says Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions and director of a religious pluralism project at Harvard University.
Gradually for the most part, dramatically at times, mosques and temples of faith groups from Islamic to Zoroastrian have gone up near the churches whose congregations once considered Jewish synagogues as exotic neighbors.
And that, Eck says, accounts for the biggest difference between the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions and the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions:
“The central issue of both parliaments is the same-namely, how do various religious traditions understand one another other? But unlike 1893, that is no longer an exotic issue of people who are interested in international geopolitical affairs. It is now a practical main-street issue for much of America, particularly urban America.”
The Parliament’s 600 offerings range from scholarly presentations, papers and symposia to spiritual films, live performances and celebrations. Most of the agenda is scheduled for the Palmer House and generally limited to registered participants, but some celebrations, prayer services and exhibits open to the public are being held at various houses of worship and at the Art Institute, Field Museum and Historical Society (check for the usual entrance fees).
At a major plenary session at this week’s Parliament, Eck is scheduled to lead a discussion of religious pluralism based on a study in which Harvard students went to various communities to research the “religious landscape of America.”
At another session, Gerald Barney, founder and director of the Millenium Institute, will challenge spiritual leaders at the Parliament to deal with such issues as war, poverty and environmental destruction and their effects on “how we humans are to live together, meet our basic needs, and still allow other species-the whole community of life-to continue to exist and support us.”
Delegates are not expected to act directly on the reports of Barney, Eck or those at other plenaries and workshops. The Parliament, however, has two specific goals: That top religious leaders adopt a Declaration of a Global Ethic, and that the delegates set up two ongoing interfaith organizations-a working group in Chicago and an international network as a kind of religious United Nations.
Above all, the Parliament aims to showcase the great diversity of religions in an atmosphere of harmony and understanding. Much like like athletes at the Olympic Games, a procession of hundreds of delegates in varied religious garb was scheduled to open the Parliament yesterday in the grand ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton. And at the closing plenary session on Saturday, the highlight will be an address by the Dalai Lama at a rally open to the public at the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park.
On these pages are pictures of some of the Chicago-area religious communities that have established host committees to welcome members of their faiths who have come to Chicago to meet fellow travelers seeking a new way to walk together.
