Happy Birthday to the Yogi of Walden

Henry David Thoreau Would Be 208 Today

When I was in college, I was assigned Walden in a literature class. I’d grown up in a densely populated urban neighborhood, where being in nature meant walking about a mile on busy streets to a park. Thoreau’s sublime descriptions of life on Walden Pond was an eye-opener. Of even greater significance, it turned out, was his homage to the Bhagavad Gita. I’d never heard of it at the time, and he made me want to get a copy. Believe it or not, I couldn’t find one—and this was in New York City. Finally, I found one in what was then called an “occult bookstore.” I now have about fifteen translations.

In any event, today is Thoreau’s birthday and we all should be grateful for his contribution to American literature, to the environmental movement, to civil disobedience (which influenced Gandhi, who influenced the civil rights movement), and to the transmission of Eastern philosophy to the west. I wrote about that last item in American Veda. Here is an excerpt from the book:

On July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved into the ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin he’d built next to Walden Pond, on property owned by Emerson, for an early version of “turn on, tune in, drop out.” He had been turned on to Asian philosophy in 1841, while living for a period in Emerson’s home, and he brought to the cabin books from his mentor’s library. Among them was the Bhagavad Gita, which became a constant companion in his days of silence. In a much-quoted passage in Walden, he wrote: “In the morning

I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.” Elsewhere, praising the Gita’s “sanity and sublimity,” he writes that “the reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer, or rarer region of thought.”

In time Thoreau would read every volume of Indian philosophy available in those days, especially after 1855, when a British friend shipped him a collection of forty-four books. (Appropriately, after Thoreau’s death, the finest private Oriental library in America passed to Emerson.) In his notebooks and essays, the Buddha of Walden commended those books and praised their universal vision.

. . . .

Like Emerson, Thoreau had mystical experiences that Vedanta helped him to understand. “The texts were a kind of touchstone for his own notions of personal asceticism and introspection,” the scholar Alan Hodder told me. “He had moments of euphoria and rapture in nature, but he couldn’t really explain them until he started reading the Indian material. Then he actually saw references to what he was experiencing, and he thought, ‘Aha! I’m not the only one having this. There’s a long tradition to it.’”

The sacred books also taught Thoreau the important distinction between philosophical inquiry and spiritual practice. “One may discover the root of an Indian religion in his own private history,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “when, in the silent intervals of the day and night, he does sometimes inflict on himself like austerities with stern satisfaction.” He may have been the first American to call himself a yogi. “Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully,” he wrote to a friend in 1849. “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.” Too bad no gurus had yet arrived, or his yoga would not have been limited to those rare intervals.

. . . .

Thoreau died of tuberculosis at age forty-four, in 1862, one month after the battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest of the Civil War; reports of it must have pained him. Had he lived another four months, he would have rejoiced at the Emancipation Proclamation.