Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
Perhaps yet another thing WL had going for him when he came was that the TV show "Kung Fu" was popular. Sorry...had to say it. I think it set people up for some super spiritual Chinese man to tell them "secrets" of how to live! It ran from'72 to '75. : )
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I know you're being facetious, but there's some truth here. In the late '60s - early '70s USA the Old Order of the West was collapsing around the youth (Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, Environmental Crisis, Sexual Revolution, the Bomb (Nuclear Annihilation - remember the Cuba Missile Crisis) Women's Liberation Movement). JFK and RFK and MLK were shot to death, the college campus was the scene of riots, Yippies, Hippies, Diggers, Black Panthers, Weathermen, SLA ... I could go on. Suffice it to say there was a lot of uncertainty and instability.
So a sage from the East telling his 'grasshopper' the hidden secrets and wisdom as an emergent myth was not without attraction. The Beatles went to India looking for Wisdom, followed by the Stones and the Who. Sun Myung Moon started his Korean Holiness Church. We started talking about "karma" even though we knew nothing about it - we just said it because others were saying it and it was new and, "cool". Thus, culture is born anew. It assimilates 'the other' in a constant attempt to re-invent itself. Religion is really no different.
Suddenly the little humble Chinaman Bruce Lee sprouts claws (oops, that was the wrong comic) and beat up Chuck Norris in 1972
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068935/
and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and in the same year. We were all impressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_Death
Culture is a double-edged sword. We're attracted by the "other" and yet repelled by it. Witness Lee definitely took advantage of the novelty factor, claiming credit for his seemingly otherworldly ministry, but then he and his group had to deal with it when the cultural pendulum swung the other way.