51 L. Manderson et al. (eds.), Flows of Faith: Religious Reach and Community in Asia and the Pacific, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2932-2_4, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 The Brahma Kumaris emerged as a new religious movement during a time of social upheaval in North-West India in the 1930s; it was forced to move from Karachi to Rajasthan after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. In these first decades, the earliest teachings focused on meditation and the practice of purity as fundamental to true spiritual capacity. These teachings, and the practices and behaviors that flowed from them, provoked considerable hostility from others in the local communities; the measures, required to ensure purity, threatened familial hierarchy and structure; and its devotional practices led to claims that members “had magic in their eyes.” 1 Since the earliest days of its establishment, Brahma Kumaris members have had to manage distinct cultural shifts in thinking to share their philosophy with new and unknown cultures, while maintaining their core principles built on understandings of purity. Our intention in this chapter is to identify and explore the ways in which this has occurred across time and the boundaries of geography and ideology, nation states, and cultural settings. We do this by looking at the patterns of membership (Walliss 2002), at how membership has expanded, and how the core principles are maintained despite the cultural and behavioral pulls of relationships and responsibility. Chapter 4 Brahma Kumaris: Purity and the Globalization of Faith Tamasin Ramsay, Wendy Smith, and Lenore Manderson T. Ramsay School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Monash University, Australia e-mail: tamasin.ramsay@monash.edu L. Manderson School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Monash University, Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, Victoria 3145, Australia e-mail: lenore.manderson@monash.edu W. Smith (*) Department of Management, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia e-mail: wendy.smith@monash.edu