EMERSON AND VEDANTA

Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1803-1882), was an American poet, essayist, and philosopher.  After a studious but undistinguished career at Harvard, and a brief period of teaching, he entered the ministry. 

He was appointed to the Unitarian, Old Second Church of Boston, his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher.  Unable, in conscience, to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, he resigned his pastorate.

In 1836, he published an essay entitled “Nature,” considered the moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement.  

Emerson’s transcendentalist philosophy was characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality.  Like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, he was also attracted to mystical Indian literature and philosophy.

His interest in Indian thought came from his reading the French philosopher Victor Cousin.  Emerson went on to read the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s Essays on the Vedas.  The nondualism of Vedanta colored much of his writing afterwards.

His 1841 essay “The Oversoul” reflected this:

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.  Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.  And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.  We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”