When Does a Tradition Survive by Changing Into Something Its Founder Would Not Recognise?

When Does a Tradition

Survive by Changing Into Something Its Founder Would Not Recognise? A young IIT graduate books a bus ticket to a Himalayan ashram the same night he watches a film about a guru who died decades before he was born. He is grieving, he says and finds something at the shrine the film itself could not give him.

Multiply that single visitor by hundreds of thousands and you have the modern resurgence of Kainchi Dham - driven not by scripture or lineage, but by a biopic, Instagram reels and a well-told story about Steve Jobs. This is not really a story about one ashram.

It is an entry point into a much older and larger question: what actually happens to a tradition when modernity gets hold of it? The instinctive answer is that modernity dilutes tradition - turns sacred things into content, devotion into tourism revenue.

That instinct is not wrong, but it is incomplete. What modernity typically does is not erase tradition but re-mediate it - carry it forward through entirely new channels of attention, while leaving open whether anything essential survives the journey.

Silicon

Valley's borrowed devotion Consider the earlier chapter of this same story: Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist, travelled to Kainchi Dham in the same countercultural wave that sent thousands of disoriented Westerners looking for meaning outside their own civilisation.

He returned as Ram Dass and his book Be Here Now became a foundational text for an entire generation's search for spirituality. Decades later, Steve Jobs - himself shaped by that same countercultural moment - visited the same ashram before founding Apple and reportedly urged a young, struggling Mark Zuckerberg to do the same.

A 20th-century Indian ascetic's teaching, in other words, had already been carried into Silicon Valley's foundational mythology long before any biopic existed. The tradition did not stay still to be preserved; it moved through completely foreign institutional machinery - American psychology, tech entrepreneurship - and came out changed, but not extinguished.

A different domain entirely:

the printing press and vernacular scripture Pull the lens back further, to a genuinely different era and medium. When vernacular translations of religious texts spread through Europe after the printing press, the Church's monopoly on interpreting scripture broke down - ordinary readers could now access sacred texts directly, without a priest as intermediary.

Traditionalists at the time saw this as debasement: religion reduced to mass-printed pamphlets, stripped of its proper ritual context. Yet what actually happened was not the death of Christian tradition but its redistribution - a wider, more argumentative, more personally-owned relationship to faith that reshaped Western religious and political life for centuries.

The technology did not ask permission before changing what devotion looked like.

SYNTHESIS

Held together, these two examples - a Himalayan guru's teachings travelling through Silicon Valley's founding myths and scripture travelling through the printing press - reveal something a single case cannot: modernity does not choose between destroying tradition and preserving it untouched.

It routes tradition through whatever technology of attention and distribution happens to be dominant at the time and what survives that routing is never identical to what went in. The question worth asking is therefore not "is this authentic or is this commercialised"

• that framing assumes tradition has a fixed, original form modernity can only corrupt. The better question is what a tradition retains of its original function - offering meaning, belonging, moral orientation - even as its form is unrecognisably rebuilt by each new medium that carries it forward.