American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West
Om (aum) symbol flag (Vedic Hinduism)
This paperback has a 4.6 out of 5 stars with 236 ratings. Huston Smith wrote the foreword. It's a fascinating look at India’s remarkable impact on Western culture.
This eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta (the best of the ancient Vedas or "Knowledge Books") and the mind-body methods of yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape of the U.S.
US yoga today: selfies and butt-pants (lol)
What exploded in the 1960s, following the Beatles' trip to India for an extended stay with their new guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, actually began more than 200 years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge -- as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics -- from Asia.
The first translations of Hindu and pre-Hindu (Brahminical) texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau (On Walden Pond), Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed India’s “science of consciousness” and wove it into the fabric of their lives.
Trump meditates on "om" syllable.
Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda (World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893) and Paramahansa Yogananda (Self Realization Fellowship) came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), jazz musician John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Harvard Prof. Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them.
The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms.
Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses.
The insights of India’s sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americans—and continue to do so every day.
Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.” More
Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Crystal Quintero (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly, Wiki edits
Gustav Holst (13Orcun) Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, Op. 26, Two Eastern Pictures (1911)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalism is an American movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States.
It arose as a reaction to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.
The doctrine of the Unitarianchurch as taught at Harvard Divinity School was of great interest.
Sarah Margaret Fuller
Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the biblical criticism...the skepticism of David Hume," and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism.
Swedish mysticEmanuel Swedenborg is regarded as a pervasive influence on transcendentalism by Miller and Versluis.
Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, particularly the Upanishads, also strongly influenced it.
A core belief of transcendentalism is in the inherent goodness of people and nature.
Adherents believe that society and its government institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective knowledge (inner knowing, direct intuition of the heart) over objective empiricism (experts dictating from their experiments and heads).
Transcendatalists agree that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little reliance or deference to past "masters." More
The Graduate's Ben Braddock is just drifting along on his parents' California pool all summer.
Civil Disobedience
Thoreau's writing restored Walden Pond.
Civil Disobedience is an 1849 essay by American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. It argues that individuals should resist permitting governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences.
We have a duty to resist and avoid allowing such acquiescence that enables the government to make us the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated, in part, by his disgust with American slavery and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).
In "The Ponds" section of Walden, published in 1854, Thoreau extols the water's physical properties.
He details its unparalleled water quality, clarity, color, temperature, unique animal life (aquatic, avian, mammalian), rock formations and bed and, especially, its mirror-like surface properties.
We can live in forests our own with Nature.
Thoreau contemplates the source of the pristine water body in the woods. He observes that it had no visible inlet or outlet, and considers the possibility of an unidentified spring at the bottom.
Noting the kettle landform's ramparts and resilient shore, he concludes that a unique, natural geologic event (glacial retreat) formed the site, while recognizing local myths:
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition -- the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth -- that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and onlyone old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for...one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in Pond.
In "The Ponds" Thoreau describes incorporeal experiences around the water.
These experiences were relayed to him by others and his own. Thoreau -- who was a well read Transcendentalist and, therefore, presumably intimately familiar with Romanticism -- relates the stories in a way that could be argued to interpret or reveal the pond as the locale of the Grail Legend in the Americas.
An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it....
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grapevines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheater for some kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive... More
The Graduate POOL was my Walden Pond
The Graduate's Ben ("Son" played by Dustin Hoffman), boyfriend of "Mrs. Robinson," on the poolin idyllic California. It's the 50 year anniversary,* and we're barely realizing the connection.
*Mike Nichols’s romantic comedy-drama The Graduate recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. It is in the Top 20 of the American Film Institute’s best American movies list and has the distinction of being the last film to win an Academy Award for best director and nothing else (despite being nominated in six other categories).
GUEST: Laura Dassow Walls is the Willliam P. and Hazel B. White professor of English graduate program in history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame University.
CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Xochitl, Wisdom Quarterly; Sarah Todd (tricycle.com); Rick Fields
The splendor and sophistication of ancient China's walled civilization (Linc060/flickr)
(FA) Documentary about the Chinese discovery of America, with written recorded documentation in China and anthropological evidence in America, long before European explorers. This "shocking" was revealed by Rick Fields in How the Swans Came to the Lake
Editor in chief James Shaheen recommended Rick Fields’ How the Swans Came to the Lake, which offers an in-depth history of Buddhism’s role in American life. Originally published in 1981 and last updated in 1992, Swans is a (mostly) current and always relevant look at Buddhism’s roots.
In a culture saturated with pop-Eastern philosophy -- toy Buddha car accessories, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Tao of [Physics and] Pooh,
the now-discontinued “Om” fragrance by Gap -- it’s clear that Buddhism has
secured a place in the imagination of the American public.
In warm,
witty prose Fields takes on the question of why and how this came to
be. He begins by tracing the development of America’s understanding of
Buddhism, illuminating the way that misconceptions and poor translations
caused even great Western thinkers to misunderstand basic [tenets] of
practice.
(AHB) A Buddhist monk arrived in California/Mexico 1,000 years before
"Who Really Discovered America?" Did numerousexplorers discover the "New World" long before Christopher
Columbus staked a claim for Europe in 1492? No less than a dozen cultures have
tales of these adventurers woven into their histories, but they are
noticeably absent in American history books. This documentary explores
the possibility that the Chinese, Japanese, Polynesians, Norse, Welsh,
Irish, Ancient Hebrews, and the Solutreans all made it to the Americasearlier than Columbus. Rebuild the ships, trace the routes, test the
artifacts and analyze blood evidence to finally learn the answer to one
of the greatest mysteries of all time -- who really discovered America?
From the 18th-century scholar and linguist William
Jones, who understood Asian culture’s potential to offer the West an
“Oriental renaissance” but “either did not know or did not accept the
Buddhist’s version of the origin of their own religion,” to Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who wrote alarmingly of “This remorseless Buddhism…threatening
with death and night,” Westerners often misunderstood Buddhism as a
primitive form of nihilism.
Nonetheless, Fields points out that many artistic and intellectual
movers-and-shakers of early America had more in common with Buddhists
than they themselves may have known. Henry David Thoreau’s experiment on
Walden Pond was focused on mindful sitting in nature that sounds much
like Buddhist meditation; he himself wrote, “I realized what the
Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.” And what
else is Walt Whitman’s expansive embrace than a celebration of the
interconnectedness of all beings, one of the central Buddhist
understandings? First, America became ripe for Buddhism; then came the
ambassadors.
The Western interpreters of Eastern Buddhism rose to prominence in
the form of Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky, spiritualists who
eventually forsook their preoccupation with the afterlife to, as
Blavatsky said, “point the way eastward.” Olcott sought to bring
Buddhism to the public and “unite Buddhists under a common banner,”
writing a book of Buddhist catechisms that was translated into nearly
every European language... More
(History) America was full when Italian Colombus arrived on Spanish ships
When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, unknown to
him he was on islands
located between two huge land masses now known as North America and South America. It was teaming with huge civilizations rivaling any in the world at the time. There were thousands of smaller First Nations
and tribes. According to recent estimates, the population may have exceeded 100 million people from Alaska and Greenland in the north, to
the southern tip of South America. In proto-Canada, most people lived along the coast or along major rivers.
Thoreau the Buddhist Rick Fields (How the Swans Came to the Lake, Shambhala) Thoreau's Walden experiment had as many aspects as the man who lived it. Certainly one of them was to demonstrate how little one really needed to live well. But his primary purpose was to demonstrate something to himself, to "transact some private business with the fewest obstacles. This "private business" was in the nature of what we would call contemplation. Thoreau was constantly tracking his own nature, which to him was not necessarily other than nature itself. His method was quite simple: More>>
George Edward Loper Henry David Thoreau's woods surrounding Walden Pond in 1996 (george.loper.org)
Transcendentalist Thoreau was a young man with a wild nature, sophisticated, original, unattractive, rustic, with good manners. "But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty" (Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks).
The Woods at Walden Pond Fed up with business distractions, Thoreau set out to find some peace and quiet to work on his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose constant companion were early translations of Indian spiritual literature) offered him free use of his woodlot along the northern shore of Walden Pond.
While at Walden, Thoreau walked, studied, wrote, traveled about, and even hosted an anti-slavery fair. In 1846, Thoreau stayed in jail overnight for refusing to pay his poll tax as a protest against his state's role in upholding slavery.
In his 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government," Thoreau states "I did not for a moment feel confined and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar." Of course, his stay in jail was among the shortest in Middlesex County's history (Carlos Baker, Emerson Among The Eccentrics, p. 269).
Thoreau's Cabin at Walden
Austerity in nature like a Buddhist monastic, he strove to reduce his needs and to work efficiently. "The cost of a thing," says Thoreau, "is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
In his essay "Walden" (The Cambridge Companion To Henry David Thoreau edited by Joel Myerson, Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 99), Richard J. Schneider notes that Thoreau's cabin is the antithesis of the fancy homes admired by many New Englanders. More>>
Thoreau said, "Some will chide me for putting my Buddha next to their Christ."
BOOK: How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America
(Shambhala Publications, 492 pp., 1986)
WISDOM-BOOKS.COM SYNOPSIS: Far more than a history of Buddhism's arrival and growth in America -- a development which led to the sudden rise of the ancient Mayan culture -- this highly readable account is packed full of interesting stories and anecdotes, and includes a wealth of material on the spread of Buddhism to the West from the time of Alexander the Great onwards.
This book gives the definitive treatment to the impact Buddhism has had on American thought, and it is a goldmine of information on early Buddhism in Europe. It covers the early Western Buddhist pioneers, plus those who profoundly influenced and paved the way for its appearance in the West.
Included are: the Greeks in India, King Ashoka; the Gnostics; Sir William Jones and the Royal Asiatic Society; Emerson and Thoreau; Whitman and Walden; Edwin Arnold; Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society; the Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities in the States; the Pali Text Society; the World Parliament of Religions; D T Suzuki; Sokei-an; Nyogen Suzuki; Alan Watts; Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beat Poets; Shunryo Suzuki; Philip Kapleau; Chogyam Trungpa; Tarthang Tulku; Geshe Wangyal; Thomas Merton; Jack Kornfield; Joseph Goldstein and Thich Nhat Hanh; and many others.
"Heroic in scope and of undeniable importance" -- L.A. Times.
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The first translations of Hindu and pre-Hindu (Brahminical) texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
