The Role of American Oriental Society and the Harvard Oriental Series

In 1842 a 'crucial chapter in America's cultural history' was born when the American Oriental Society was formed in Boston.

The first American Sanskritist, and "father of American Oriental studies," Edward Eldridge Salisbury (1814-1901), established an Oriental Library and the Journal of the American Oriental Society. The work of eminent American Oriental scholars, including Salisbury, William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894), Josiah Royce (1855-1916), Edward Washburn Hopkins (1857-1932), and Charles Rockwell Lanman (1850-1941), who became the founding editor of the Harvard Oriental Series, proved their receptivity to the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. Hopkins' books containing information on the Mahabharata are still an authoritative resource.

Franklin Edgerton (1885-1963) the American linguist and educator, was a well known authority in Sanskrit, Hindu philosophy and culture, Indian art, economics, education and literature. Edgerton advocated the unity of the text of the Bhagavad Gita, calling it "India's favourite Bible." The French mystic Simone Weil also found in it a "Christian sound, put into the mouth of an incarnation of God." (S.P. Dubey, Srimad Bhagavadgita - A Global Perspective, p. 25). Edgerton's book, The Bhagavad Gita, appeared in two volumes in 1944; the Harvard Oriental Society also published it in 1949. Dale Riepe, in his Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought wrote that Edgerton's second chapter of The Bhagavad Gita is "one of the most elegant accounts of the development of Hindu speculation" and gave equal praise to the third chapter, "The Upanishads and Later Hindu Thought." (Dale Riepe, The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought (Springfield,IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), pp. 151-2).

Robert Ernest Hume (1877-1948) was the only American Sanskritist native to India (he was born in Bombay) and taught in India as well as at Oxford. His correct appreciation of the Upanishads as the first written evidence of a philosophical system in India resulted in the publication of his Thirteen Principal Upanishads in 1921. It has been reprinted many times since then. With skillful imperative he included his estimation of the Upanishads in a lengthy introduction:

"In the long history of man's endeavor to grasp the fundamental truths of being, the metaphysical treatises known as the Upanishads hold an honored place . . . they are replete with sublime conceptions and with intuitions of universal truth. . . . The Upanishads undoubtedly have great historical and comparative value, but they are also of great present-day importance. It is evident that the monism of the Upanishads has exerted and will continue to exert an influence on the monism of the West; for it contains certain elements, which penetrate deeply into the truths which every philosopher must reach in a thoroughly grounded explanation of experience." (The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, vii ff,)

"The earnestness of the search for the Truth is one of the more delightful and commendable features of the Upanishads," Hume wrote in a footnote to that work. (Op.cit., 301n)

Hume's second revised edition of The Thirteen Principal Upanishads was published in 1931. A favorable, authoritative review by R. D. Ranade gave prominence to Hume's work. This edition included an appendix with a list of recurrent and parallel passages in the major Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The list, prepared by Hume's co-author George C. O. Haas, was printed earlier in the Journal of the American Oriental Society.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), whose respective novels, The Near and the Far and Island, explored the concepts of moksha and nirvana, was transformed by his association with Vedanta. He wrote the introduction to Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God (1944), translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) had some knowledge and regard for the Upanishads, which are the storehouse of the invaluable perennial treasures of human wisdom, and some of his poems reflect the message of the Upanishads. It is interesting to note Eliot's great esteem for the Bhagavad Gita. When he wrote his monograph on Dante (1974), he dared to place the sacred scripture next to La Commedia Divina of the Italian poet: "The Bhagavad Gita . . . is the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine Comedy, within my experience."

The Bhagavad Gita's revelations about the function of ego in human affairs deeply influenced Eliot. In his drama, "Murder in the Cathedral," the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, is horrified to discover the underlying motive impelling his actions. The otherwise noble and right deed of self-sacrifice for his church that he is contemplating, is actually guided by the desire of his ego to enjoy the fruits of glory that martyrdom would offer. Through Becket's speech at the height of his spiritual crisis, Eliot proved his understanding of nishkama karma as Shri Ramakrishna explained it:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Ambition comes behind and unobservable. Sin grows with doing good.
For those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them, still doing right; and striving with political men may make that cause political, not by what they do but by what they are. (Studies on Sri Ramakrishna, Commemorative Volume, 150th Birth Anniversary of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Lokeswarananda, ed. (Gol Park, Kolkata: The Ramakrishna Institute of Culture, 1988), pp. 269-70).

  Part 8 of this article. For other parts of this article, see How Vedanta Came to the West

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3. Ramayan Anudhyan (Bengali), 1996
4. Healthy Values of Living, 1996
5. Meditation on Swami Vivekananda, 1994
6. Meditation on Shri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, 1993
7. Albert Einstein and His Human Face, 1993
8. Glimpses of Great Lives, 1989
9. Shubha Chinta (Bengali), 1988
10. Smaran--Manan (Bengali), 1987

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