Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Meditation is a mantra based meditation technique taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi from the mid 1950s in India and carried to a wider international, especially Western, audience from the 1960s onward, distinguished from most other mantra meditation traditions by its unusually standardised and tightly controlled method of transmission: the technique is taught only through a structured course delivered by teachers certified by the Maharishi's own organisation, for a set fee, with each student individually assigned a personal mantra according to a fixed system rather than choosing or being given a mantra through the more variable, teacher discretion based methods common in many older meditative lineages. This standardisation and commercial structure has been central to how Transcendental Meditation has been studied, discussed and, at points, legally contested, since the organisation has consistently maintained close control over how the technique is taught, branded and represented publicly, an approach that has made TM one of the most institutionally organised and commercially structured meditation movements to have spread from South Asian religious roots into the wider Western world.

Transcendental Meditation's organisation has long promoted the technique publicly as a secular, scientifically validated stress reduction and self improvement method rather than as a religious practice, a framing central to its marketing and to its introduction into secular institutional settings including some public schools, but this claim was directly and consequentially tested in United States federal court: in Malnak v.

Yogi, decided by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 1979, the court ruled that the Science of Creative Intelligence curriculum built around TM, as taught in a New Jersey public school programme, was religious in nature, citing among other evidence the puja, a devotional ceremony invoking Hindu deities, performed as part of the initiation each student underwent to receive their personal mantra, and on that basis held the programme's presence in public schools unconstitutional under the First Amendment's prohibition on government establishment of religion. The ruling remains a frequently cited legal precedent in American church-state law discussions of how courts determine whether a given practice counts as religious for constitutional purposes, and it sits in genuine tension with TM's continued public self presentation as secular technique, a tension the organisation has not abandoned even as the legal finding on the specific school programme has stood since 1979.