J D (Jerome David) Salinger (1919-2010)

[KALKI]

J D (Jerome David) Salinger (1919-2010), born to a Polish Jew and in New York, an American novelist and short story writer, best known as the author of The Catcher in the Rye was regarded by many as a Hindu. Although he was an experimenter in spirituality, he had deep respect for Hinduism and yoga, and also well versed in the Advaita Vedanta philosophy.

Salinger was a Jewish Catholic by birth, but as an adult did not follow any of these family faiths. Like Somerset Maugham of The Razor's Edge and Herman Hesse (Siddhartha and others), his fiction drew explicitly from Eastern spirituality.

A determined seeker and a practitioner of the spiritual arts, Salinger studied Zen after his traumatic service in World War II, and segued to the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism in the early 50s after publishing The Catcher in the Rye, that masterpiece of youthful yearning for higher meaning. He was a regular at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where the great mythologist Joseph Campbell also learned important lessons early in his scholarly career.

He was highly influenced by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's explanation of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism advocating various Hindu beliefs with emphasis on karma, reincarnation, celibacy for the seekers truth and enlightenment, and detachment from worldliness.

The Influence of Vedanta and Bhagavad Gita in Salinger's Works:

Being a life long student of Advaita Vedanta, Salinger was profoundly influenced by this monistic or non-dualistic system, and all these tenets and religious studies began showing up in his short stories in the early 1950s. For instance, the story "Teddy" has Vedantic insights expressed through a ten-year-old child. His reading of Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna's disciple, is seen in the story "Hapworth 16, 1924", where the protagonist Seymour Glass describes the Hindu monk as "one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century." Salinger scholar Sam P. Ranchan's study entitled An Adventure in Vedanta: J.D. Salinger's the Glass Family (1990) throws light on the strong Hindu undercurrents that flow through Salinger's later works. For some literary critics, Franny and Zooey was a strong, emotional, human, easily understood version of Hinduism's The Bhagavad Gita.

Salinger became particularly attracted to Hinduism after reading Swami Nikhilananda and Joseph Campbell's translation of The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna, a profound insight into the various facets of life as described by the Hindu mystic.

Salinger's daughter Margaret wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that it is her belief that her parents were married and that she was born because her father had read Paramahansa Yogananda's guru Lahiri Mahasaya teachings that enlighten the path of the householder, a family man.

Salinger, who passed away on January 28, 2010 at the age of 91, perhaps wished his body cremated, almost like Hindus do in Varanasi, rather than buried under a tombstone. He said, "Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody." Sadly, Salinger's epitaph won't have any mention of this wish!





A Majestic stone Nandi - Shri.ChangaWateshwar Shiva Temple in Saswad, Maharashtra built during the Yadav Era.

To a Hindu, God is that omnipotent, omnipresent and immanent Presence in the universe - so transcends mere mortal minds. God is visualized and worshiped as formless and with form.

Hinduism believes that one may view the Infinite (God) as a diamond of innumerable facets, of which one facet may beckon an individual believer more forcibly than the others.


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(source: J D Salinger's Hindu Beliefs - By Subhamoy Das - about.com and JD Salinger & Hinduism and A Tribute To Swami Salinger - By Philip Goldberg).