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They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass and turn again."
Could the strange ideas and hardly less strange language of this verse have been
drawn elsewhere than from the 19th verse of the Second Valli, of the Katha
Upanishad,15 which reads?:
"If the slayer thinks I slay; if the slain thinks I am slain, then both of them
do not know well. It (the soul) does not slay nor is it slain."
His poem "Hamatreya" comes next in importance as showing Hindu influence. In
another poem, "Celestial Love," the wheel of birth and death is referred to:
"In a region where the wheel
On which all beings ride,
Visibly revolves."
Emerson argues for reincarnation in the Journal of 1845. "Traveling the path of
life through thousands of births."
"By the long rotation of fidelity they meet again in worthy forms." Emerson's
"oversoul" is synonymous with a Sanskrit term. He regarded matter as the
negative manifestation of the Universal Spirit. Mind was the expression of the
same Spirit in its positive power. Man, himself, is nothing but the universal
spirit present in a material organism. Soul is "part and parcel of God." He says
that "the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all organs;
from within and from behind a light shines through us upon things, and makes us
aware that we are nothing, that the light is all."16 This is Vedanta philosophy.
In the Journal of 1866 he wrote:
 17
"In the history of intellect, there is no more important fact than the Hindu
theology, teaching that the beatitude or supreme good is to be attained through
science: namely, by the perception of the real from the unreal, setting aside
matter, and qualities or affections or emotions, and persons and actions, as
mayas or illusions, and thus arriving at the conception of the One eternal Life
and Cause, and a perpetual approach and assimilation to Him, thus escaping new
births and transmigrations. . . . Truth is the principle and the moral of Hindu
theology, Truth as against the Maya which deceives Gods and men; Truth, the
principle, and Retirement and Self-denial the means of attaining it."17
Mr. Christy18 states that Emerson's concept of evolution must be thought of in
terms of emanation; and a detailed examination of his concept of compensation
reduces it to the doctrine of Karma.
The Journals are full of quotable passages upon one or another phase of
Hinduism. And there are his other poems "Illusions" and "Maya," whose names
bespeak Oriental presentations. But Mr. Christy thinks the following excerpt is
Emerson's supreme tribute to Orientalism:
"There is no remedy for musty, self-conceited English life made up of fictitious
hating ideas-like Orientalism. That astonishes and disconcerts English decorum.
For once there is thunder he never heard, light he never saw, and power which
trifles with time and space."19
It may seem ludicrous to suggest that Emerson was the chief forerunner of Madame
Blavatsky, her John the Baptist. Yet seriously, without Emerson, Madame
Blavatsky could hardly have launched her gospel when she did with equal hope of
success. There is every justification for the assertion that Emerson's
Orientalistic contribution to the general Transcendental trend of thought was
preparatory to Theosophy. It must not be forgotten that his advocacy of
Brahmanic ideas and doctrines came at a time when the expression of a laudatory
opinion of the Asiatic religions called forth an opprobrium from evangelistic
quarters hardly less than vicious in its bitterness. Theosophy could not hope to
make headway until the virulent edge of that orthodox prejudice had been
considerably blunted. It was Emerson's magnanimous eclecticism which
administered the first and severest rebuke to that prejudice, and inaugurated
that gradual mollification of sentiment toward the Orientals which made possible
the welcome which Hindu Yogis and Swamis received toward the end of the century.
The exposition of Emerson's orientalism makes it unnecessary to trace the
evidences of a similar influence running through the philosophical thinking of
Thoreau and Walt Whitman. The robust cosmopolitanism of these two intellects
lifted them out of the provincialisms of the current denominations into the
realm of universal sympathies. We know that Thoreau became the recipient of
forty-four volumes of the Hindu texts in 1854; but it is evident that he, like
Emerson, had had contact with Brahmanical literature previous to that. His works
are replete with references to Eastern ideas and beliefs. He could hardly have
associated so closely with Emerson as he did and escaped the contagion of the
latter's Oriental enthusiasm.
Mr. Horace L. Traubel, one of the three literary executors of Whitman, had in
his possession the poet's own copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Perry and Binns, in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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