America's Love for the Bhagavad Gita

America's poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) wrote in his Essays:

"In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta and the Vishnu Purana. These writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it."(Essays, X, p. 120)

In 1845, Emerson's Journal records that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. (Sachin N. Pradhan, India in the United States: Contribution of India and Indians in the United States of America , (Bethesda, MD: SP Press International, Inc., 1996), p. 12.

According to Swami Vivekananda, Emerson's greatest source of inspiration was

"this book, the [Bhagavad] Gita. He went to see Carlyle, and Carlyle made him a present of the Gita; and that little book is responsible for the Concord [Transcendental] Movement. All the broad movements in America, in one way or other, are indebted to the Concord party." (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda , (Mayavati:Himalayas: Advaita Ashrama, 1963), Vol. IV, p. 12).

The only book Carlyle showed to Emerson during their first visit together, was an English translation of The Bhagvat-Geeta by Charles Wilkins. He told Emerson,

"This is a most inspiring book; it has brought comfort and consolation in my life---I hope it will do the same to you. Read it." (Swami Abhedananda, Thoughts on Sankhya, Buddhism, and Vedanta, (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, 1989), Appendix I, p. 118).

The Gita that Carlyle gave to Emerson is preserved in the Emerson archives in Boston.

Recent research shows that he had borrowed a copy of the Gita from his friend, James Elliot Cabot, (The letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph L. Rusk, ed, 1939 reprint (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1996),I:lx; iii: p. 288 [Hereafter Letters of Emerson]). before going to England and meeting Carlyle, and before getting a copy of his own, sent from London. Several years later he requested a second copy as well. When he wrote to his sister, Elizabeth Hoar on June 17, 1845, to tell her about the "the arrival in Concord of the "Bhagvat-Geeta," Emerson initially thought the Gita was a "much renowned book of Buddhism [Emerson's error], extracts from which I have often admired, but never before held . . . in my hands."(Letters of Emerson, III:290) He held on to Cabot's copy as long as he could: "I have tried to once or twice to send it home, but each time decided to strain a little your courteous professions that you could supply your occasional use of the book from the Library," he wrote to Cabot---he returned it on September 28, 1845, only after his copy from London had arrived from John Chapman, to whom he had written on May 30, requesting the Wilkins' translation "at a reasonable price for I do not want it at virtu rates." (George Hendrick in his Introduction to Charles Wilkins' The Bhagavad-Geeta (1785), Gainsville: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprint, 1959), x, [hereafter, The Bhagavad-Geeta(1785)])

A catalogue of the books in Emerson's library, compiled by Walter Roy Harding, lists a copy of the Bhagavad Gita that was published by Trubner in London in 1874 and which is inscribed by S. A. Dorsey of Louisiana. Rod W. Horton wrote in Background of American Literary Thought (1952) that, "Emerson's favourite of all Vedantic writings was the Bhagavadgita which he read and loaned to his friends until it was worn-out." According to the prominent writer, Franklin B. Sanborn, Emerson's copy of the Gita was more widely read than the one at Harvard University, because few Americans besides Emerson possessed it. (op. cit.)

In a letter to Max Müller on August 4, 1873 (Letters of Emerson, See also The Bhagavad-Geeta (1785), x) he confessed:

I owed---my friend and I owed---a magnificent day to the Bhagavat Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us. Let us not now go back and apply a minute criticism to it, but cherish the venerable oracle." (Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, eds., 10 Vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909-1914), VII:241-42, 511)

In 1868, he wrote to Emma Lazarus,

"And of books, there is another which, when you have read, you shall sit for a while and then write a poem--[it is] the "Bhagvat-Geeta," but read it in Charles Wilkins' translation." (The Bhagavad-Geeta (1785), xi)

On August 4, 1873 (nine years before his death) Emerson had also written to Müller that,

"all my interest in the Aryan is . . .Wilkin's [sic]  Bhagavat Geeta; Burnouf's Bhagavat Purana;, and Wilson's Vishnu Purana---yes and a few other translations."

and that he credited a work he had read in his youth for the spark of enthusiasm he received for the Gita:

"I remember I owed my first taste for this fruit to Cousin's sketch (Victor Cousin's Cours des Philosophies), in his first lecture, of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjoon, and I still prize the first chapters of Bhagavat as wonderful." (Letters of Emerson, VI:246; I:322-3)

Emerson's profound harmony with the Indian scriptures is best illustrated in his poem "Brahma," (Brahman) derived from Kalidasa, and in numerous essays. According to his Journals, the theme for "Brahma," composed in 1856, came to him after he read the Upanishads in the Bibliotheca Indica. He was clearly influenced by the Katha Upanishad and by the second discourse of the Bhagavad Gita. His poem "Brahma" reached the highest level of American Vedantism. The higher truths of non-difference between the illusory opposites, the contrasting descriptions of the Absolute and their ultimate transcendence in the Unity of Brahman, are all reflected in Emerson's poem:

If the red slayer thinks he slays,
     Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
     I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
     Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
     And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
     When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
     And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.