Nobel Excerpts about Bharata Varsha -1

Some of the  intellectual celebraties in the world of the

West and the East had the following things

 to say about Hinduism:

1. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)  American Philosopher, Unitarian, social critic, transcendentalist and writer. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who aroused in him a true enthusiasm for India. 

The force from the Upanishads that Thoreau inherited emerged in Walden and inspired not only those who pioneered the British labor movement, but all who read it to this day. Meandering in northeastern Massachusetts, his reverent outer gaze fell upon Walden Pond. 

He alluded often to water---the metaphor is clear---the Gita's wisdom teachings are the purifier of the mind: "By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent." 

He had found his sacred Ganga (Ganges). Living by it and trying to "practice the yoga faithfully" during his two years

at Walden, he wrote: 

"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the River Ganga reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water---jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganga (Ganges)." 

At Walden he put the Bhagavad Gita to the test, while proving to his generation that "money is not required to buy one necessary for the soul."

(source: The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau - Walden 1989. Princeton Univ. Press. p 298 and How Vedanta Came to the West - By Swami Tathagatananda - swaveda.com). Listen to The Bhagavad Gita podcast - By Michael Scherer - americanphonic.com.
In the 1840s Thoreau's discovered India, his enthusiasm for Indian philosophy was thus sustained. From 1849-1854, he borrowed a large number of Indian scriptures from the Harvard University Library, and the year 1855 when his English friend Thomas Chilmondeley sent him a gift of 44 Oriental books which contained such titles as the Rig Veda Samhita, and Mandukya Upanishads, the Vishnu Puranas, the Institutes of Manu, the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagvata Purana etc. 
In Indian contemplation he found a "wonderful power of abstraction" and mental powers which were able to withdraw from the concerns of the empirical world to steady the mind and free it from distractions. 
"What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through purer stratum. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far stratum in the sky." 

(source: Commentaries on the Vedas, The Upanishads & the Bhagavad Gita  - By Sri Chinmoy Aum Publications. 1996. p 26).

"Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I am at it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night." 

source: The Hindu Mind: Fundamentals of Hindu Religion and Philosophy for All Ages - By Bansi Pandit  B & V Enterprises 1996.

"I would say to the readers of the Scriptures, if they wish for a good book, read the Bhagvat-Geeta .... translated by Charles Wilkins. It deserves to be read with reverence even by Yankees...."Besides the Bhagvat-Geeta, our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green... Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light it is destined to derive thence."

In his book Walden, Thoreau contain explicit references to Indian Scriptures such as:

"How much more admirable the Bhagavad Geeta than all the ruins of the East.'

(source: The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau - Walden 1989. Princeton Univ. Press. p 57).
Thoreau described Christianity as "radical" because of its "pure morality" in contrast to Hinduism's "pure intellectuality"
(source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - By Henry David Thoreau  p 109 - 111). 
"The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without."
Thoreau, like other Transcendentalist had a breath and catholicity of mind which brought him to the study of religions of India. From the beginning he was disillusioned with organized Christianity (he never went to Church) and like Emerson showed great interest in Hinduism and its philosophy. In comparison to Hebraism, Thoreau found Hinduism superior in many ways. The following passage demonstrates Thoreau’s disenchantment with Hebraism and his love for Hinduism: In 1853 he wrote:

“The Hindoos are most serenely and thoughtfully religious than the Hebrews. They have perhaps a purer, more independent and impersonal knowledge of God. Their religious books describes the first inquisitive and contemplative access to God; the Hebrew bible a conscientious return, a grosser and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent, though you are chief of sinners. It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him. The calmness and gentleness with which the Hindoo philosophers approach and discourse on forbidden themes is admirable.” 

The Christian and Hindu concept of man, Thoreau thinks, are diametrically opposed to each other, the former sees man as a born sinner whereas the latter takes him to be potentially divine. The lofty concept of man embodied in Hinduism appealed to Thoreau. Praising such concept he writes: “In the Hindoo scripture the idea of man is quite illimitable and sublime. There is nowhere a loftier conception of his destiny. He is at length lost in Brahma himself ‘the divine male.’ 

Thoreau – his grand philosophic aloofness, his hatred of materialism, his society, his yogic renunciation and austerity, his lack of ambition, his love of solitude, his excessive love of nature, resulting his refusal to cooperate with a government whose policies he did not approve of, were certain extreme traits like to be misunderstood. Besides, he was a vegetarian, a non-smoker, and a teetotaler. He remained a bachelor, throughout his life, walked hundreds of miles, avoided inns, preferred to sleep by the railroad, never voted and never went to a church, derived spiritual inspiration from the Hindu scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita, and the laws of Manu living an extremely frugal and Spartan life. 

The influence of Hinduism made Thoreau a Yogi. 

(source: Hindu Scriptures and American Transcendentalists - By Umesh Patri p 98 -240 and India And Her People - By Swami Abhedananda  p.235-236).

Henry David Thoreau, was dazzled by Indian spiritual texts, especially the Bhagavad-Gita. He kept a well-thumbed copy of the Gita in his cabin at Walden Pond, and claimed wistfully that “at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.”

(source: Fear of Yoga - By Robert Love - Columbia Journalism Review- December 2006).

"In the Hindoo scriptures the idea of man is quite illimitable and sublime. There is nowhere a loftier conception of his destiny. He is at length lost in Brahma himself....there is no grandeur conception of creation anywhere....The very indistinctness of its theogeny implies a sublime truth."
Thoreau's use of Indic scriptures in Walden far outweighs his use of the Bible. He refers to the Bhagawad-Gita, the Harivamsa, the Vedas, the Vishnu Purana, Pilpay (whose fables form the Hitopadesa) and Calidasa. Thoreau annexes India for his own purpose. It is, for example, in the spirit of the Indic myth that Thoreau writes the fantastic passage connecting Walden with the Ganga and Concord with India, and it is in the spirit of India that Thoreau wrote or included the story of the artist of Kuru.  
On 6 August 1841 he wrote in his journal that:
"I cannot read a sentence in the book of the Hindoos without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganga (Ganges), and seems as superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mounts. Even at this late hour, unworn by time with a native and inherent dignity it wears the English dress as indifferently as the Sancrit."
(source: India in the American Mind - By B. G. Gokhale 

He even followed a traditional Hindu way of life.

"It was fit that I should live on rice mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India."

(source: Philosophy of Hinduism - An Introduction - By T. C. Galav Universal Science-Religion. ISBN: 0964237709 p 18).

 In his Transcendental thoughts, the world at large conglomerate into one big divine family. He finds beside his Walden pond "the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganga reading the Vedas…" their buckets "grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganga".

Thoreau, the Concord sage, said, "The Vedanta teaches how by 'forsaking religious rites' the votary may obtain purification of mind." And  "One sentence of the Gita, is worth the State of Massachusetts many times over"

(source: The Bhagavad Gita: A Scripture for the Future Translation and Commentary - By Sachindra K. Majumdar  Asian Humanities Press. 1991. p 5.)

"The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagavad-Gita. The Gita's sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds of even soldiers and merchants."

He also admitted that, "The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture." Thoreau's reading of literature on India and the Vedas was extensive: he took them seriously.

(source: The Secret Teachings of the Vedas. The Eastern Answers to the Mysteries of Life -  By Stephen Knapp volume one. p  22).
Like Emerson, the Concord sage, Thoreau, was also deeply imbued with the sublime teachings of Vedanta. 
(source: India And Her People - By Swami Abhedananda p.235-236).
He was particularly attracted by the yogic elements in the Manu Smriti. Thoreau embarked on his Walden experiment in the spirit of Indian asceticism. In a letter written to H. G. O Blake in 1849, he remarked:
"Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the Yoga gather in Brahmin the certain fruit of their works. Depend upon it, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. This Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he heard wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi. 
(source: Oriental Enlightenment: The encounter between Asian and Western thought - By J. J. Clarke p. 86-87 and Hindu Scriptures and American Transcendentalists - By Umesh Patri p 98 -240). For more on Thoreau refer to chapter GlimpsesVI).
Along with Emerson, he published essays on Hindu scriptures in a journal called The Dial.

Thoreau paid ardent homage to the Gita and the philosophy of India in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: 

"Most books belong to the house and streets only, . . . .But this . . . . addresses what is deepest and most abiding in man. . . . Its truth speaks freshly to our experience. [the sentences of Manu] are a piece with depth and serenity and I am sure they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by."

(source: How Vedanta Came to the West - By Swami Tathagatananda –

2. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher and writer. He was one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century. He was the first Western philosopher to have access to translations of philosophical material from India, both Vedic and Buddhist, by which he was profoundly affected. Counted among his disciples are such thinkers as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, as well as Sigmund Freud, who takes a large part of his psychological theory from the writings of Schopenhauer. 
No other major Western philosopher so signalizes the turn towards India, combined with a disenchantment with the European-Christian tradition. He proclaimed the concordance of his philosophy with the teachings of Vedanta. His contribution to the propagation and popularization of Indian concepts has been considerable.

(source: India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding - By Wilhelm Halbfass p. 436).
"There is no religion or philosophy so sublime and elevating as Vedanta."
(source: Kumbha Mela - By Jack Hebner and David Osborn  p. preface - By Thomas Beaudry).

Schopenhauer became acquainted with the thought of the Upanishads through a Latin translation from Persian by a Frenchman, Anquetil Duperron.  His eulogy is well known. 
"The Indian air surrounds us, the original thoughts of kindred spirits.....And O! how the mind is here washed clean of all its early ingrafted Jewish superstition! It is the most profitable and most elevating reading which is possible in the world."

(source: Eastern Religions and Western Thought - By Dr. S. Radhakrishnan p 248 and Hinduism Invades America - By Wendell Thomas p. 240 published by The Beacon Press Inc. New York City 1930).
"How entirely does the Oupnekhat (Upanishad) breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one, who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book, stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his Soul!
(source: Harvest Fields).
Schopenhauer was in search of a "philosophy which should be at once ethics and metaphysics." India did not disappoint him. He found it in the Upanisadhic "tat twam asi", "that thou art".

"From every sentence (of the Upanishads) deep, original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit...."In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. They are destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people." 
Schopenhauer, who was in the habit, before going to bed, of performing his devotions from the pages of the Upanishads, regarded them as:

" It has been the solace of my life -- it will be the solace of my death."

(source: The Discovery of India - By Jawaharlal Nehru Oxford University Press. 1995. pg 92 and The Upanishads Translated for the Modern Reader By Eknath Easwaran Nilgiri Press. 1987 p. 300 and Outlines of Hinduism - By T. M. P. Mahadevan - p.30).
He anticipated later speculations with his claim that Christianity had "Indian blood in its veins" and that the moral teachings of the New Testament had their historical source in Asia beyond Israel: "Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better" 
(source: Oriental Enlightenment: The encounter between Asian and Western thought - By J. J. Clarke p.68-69).

To Schopenhauer the Upanishads were documents of  'almost superhuman conception,' whose authors could hardly be thought of as 'mere mortals.'
He also remarked: "How every line is of such strong, determined, and consistent meaning! And on every page we encounter deep, original, lofty thoughts, while the whole world is suffused with a high and holy seriousness."
(source: cited in German in Upanishaden: Altindische Weisheit (Upanishads: Ancient Indian Wisdom) - By Alfred Hillebrandt (Dussseldorf-Koln, Germany; Diederichs Verlag, 1964 p. 8).
.
He spoke of India as the 'fatherland of mankind' which 'gave the original religion of our race,' and he expressed the hope that European peoples, 'who stemmed from Asia,...would re-attain the religion of their home.'

He believed that the Upanishads, together with the philosophies of Plato and Kant, constituted the foundation on which to erect a proper philosophy of representation. It was the Upanishads' analysis of the self which caused Schopenhauer to stamp them as " the product of the highest human wisdom". He dedicated himself to this task, producing his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, in 1819. This is what he says in this book:

 "We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff.  "In India, our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought."

(source: The World as Will and Representation - By Arthur Schopenhauer Volume I, & 63 p. 356-357).
Schopenhauer regarded the Hindus as deeper thinkers than Europeans because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual. For intuition unites everything, the intellect divides everything. The Hindus saw that the "I" is a delusion, that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One "That art Thou"

(source: India and World Civilization  - By D. P. Singhal Pan Macmillan Limited. 1993. p 254).      
Schopenhauer wrote in the preface of his The World as a Will and Representation  

"According to me, the influence  of Sanskrit literature on our time will not be lesser than what was in the 16th century Greece's influence on Renaissance. One day, India's wisdom will flow again on Europe and will totally transform our knowledge and thought." 
Schopenhauer, had extracted from Indian philosophy its contempt for the mere intellect. He admitted extracting his philosophical outlook from the Vedanta and attempting to weld "empirical realism" with transcendental idealism."  
"Schopenhauer went on from there to vindicate Indian philosophy's rightful place in the world.." He even went so far as to express pleasure at the continuous failure of West-Christian proselytism in Asia and added: "Our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought."  His anti-Christianism was largely based on a fierce anti-Biblism; .....he attributed systematically to subtle influences originating on the "holy-banks of the Ganga."
(source: The Soul of India - By Amaury de Riencourt   p 274-275).
It is well-known that the book 'Oupnekhat' (Upanishad) always lay open on his table and he invariably studied it before retiring to rest.  He called the opening up of Sanskrit literature 'the greatest gift of our century', and predicted that the philosophy and knowledge of the Upanishads would becomes the cherished faith of the West.
(source: Western Indologists: A Study in Motives - By P B Dutt     http://www.philosophy.ru/library/asiatica/indica/authors/motives.html).
The Upanishads came to Schopenhauer as a new Gnosis or revelation. "That incomparable book," he says, "stirs the spirit of the very depths of the soul."
(source: The Legacy of India - edited By G. T. Garratt p. 32).
Schopenhauer was fond of saying that the first intuition of the work he was to do came to him while reading these texts, of which he was later to say that they had been “his life’s consolation.”
(source: Yoga and the Hindu Tradition - By Jean Varenne

3. Lord Warren Hastings (1754-1826), was the first governor general of British India. Hastings was very much impressed and overwhelmed with Hindu philosophy:

He wrote with a prophetic and resounding pronouncement on the whole body of Indian writings:
"The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive, when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrances."

(source: Philosophy of Hinduism - An Introduction - By T. C. Galav Universal Science-Religion. p 19).
" I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality, of sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind.."

(source: India Discovered - By John Keay p 25).

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) an author, essayist, lecturer, philosopher, Unitarian minister who lectured on theology at Harvard University. Emerson was born at Boston in 1803 into a distinguished family of New England Unitarian ministers. His was the eighth generation to enter the ministry in a dynasty that reached back to the earliest days of Puritan America. Despite the death of his father when Emerson was only eleven, he was able to be educated at Boston Latin School and then Harvard, from which he graduated in 1821. After several years of reluctant school teaching, he returned to the Harvard Divinity School, entering the Unitarian ministry during a period of robust ecclesiastic debate  Following the death of his first wife, Ellen, his private religious doubts led him to announce his resignation to his congregation, claiming he was unable to preach a doctrine he no longer believed.
He was becoming increasingly disillusioned with aspects of Christian teaching that just did not make sense to his active and inquiring intelligence. He was influenced by Indian Scriptures the most. His initial rebellion against Christianity in its various forms prompted him to find a ready refuge in the idealism of Hinduism. 
Eminent Indian Historian Protap Chunder Mazumdar has said about Emerson that he was the best of Brahmin and:
"Amidst this ceaseless, sleepless din and clash of Western materialism, this heat and restless energy, the character of Emerson shines upon India serene as the evening star. He seems to some of us to have been a geographic mistake, he ought to have been born in India. Perhaps Hindoos were closer kinsmen to him than his own nation because every typical Hindoo is a child of Nature." 
For Emerson, the idealism of the Hindus propounded in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and other Indian scriptures, was based on fundamental concepts. He turned eastward towards India very early in life, when he was in his teens.
He said this about the Bhagavad Gita:
"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was as if an empire spoke 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."

(source: Philosophy of Hinduism - An Introduction - By T. C. Galav Universal Science-Religion. p  65 and Hinduism - By Linda Johnsen  p 42 and Hindu Scriptures and American Transcendentalists - By Umesh Patri p 22-23).
(Artwork courtesy of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. www.krishna.com).
Listen to The Bhagavad Gita podcast - By Michael Scherer - americanphonic.com.
In his Journal, Emerson paid homage to Vedic thought:

" It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble poetic mind....It is of no use to put away the book; if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence....This is her creed. peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods." 
(source: India's Priceless Heritage - By Nani A. Palkhivala 1980 p 9 - 24).

Repelled by the increasing materialism of the West, Emerson turned to India for solace:

"The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles. ...all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ...cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world."
Emerson refers to the Indian doctrine of transmigration calling it easy of reception and used the idea in his essay on History. As early as 1821 he speaks of the intimate relationship between man and nature and the system of emanations in Indian thought. He wrote poems such as Brahma and Hamatreya. "Hamatreya" is a free rendering of a passage in the Vishnu Purana which Emerson copied into his 1845 Journal.
By 1856 Emerson had read the Kathopanisad and his ideas were increasingly reflecting Indian influence. His poems, such as Hamatreya showed he had digested his Indian philosophic readings well. Hamatreya apparently was inspired by a passage from the Vishnu Purana (Book IV). He was concerned with the subject of illusion-maya. He wrote about it. In his essay Illusions he said: “ I find men victims of illusions in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults and old men, all are led by one bauble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo.”

(source: India in the American Mind - By B. G. Gokhale p. 120-21 and  India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal Pan Macmillan Limited. 1993

Emerson's Oversoul is the paramatman of the Upanishads.

"All science is transcendental or else passes away. Botany is now acquiring the right theory - the avatars of Brahman will presently be the text-books of natural history."
(source: India's Priceless Heritage - By Nani A. Palkhivala 1980 p.9).
Ralph Waldo Emerson says: "Plato was synthesis of Europe and Asia, and a decidedly Oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color." 
(source: India And Her People - By Swami Abhedananda p.223).
He felt that the genius of the Hindus was unsurpassed "in the grandeur of their ethical statement." Emerson's interest in India which began in 1818 continued well into the 1860s. He admired the "Largeness" or sweep of the Indian vision which should be a vital part of the Transcendental wisdom.

In 1848 he says that he owed a "magnificent day to the reading of the Bhagavat-Gita" and adds that England could not produce such a book as the Gita. He found Indian books "excellent gymnastic for the mind as showing treatment - imagination, volatility etc."
In 1859 he felt: "When India was explored and the wonderful riches of Indian theological literature found that dispelled once and for all the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation."
(source: India in the American Mind - By B. G. Gokhale p. 16). 

In 1868, he wrote to the nineteenth century American poet,  Emma Lazarus (1849-1887):

"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 Max 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."

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.

The description of Unity in his poems "The Celestial Love" and "Wood-Notes" reflects the description of the immanence of the Supreme Being in the tenth discourse of the Bhagavad Gita. Emerson's Essays includes his comments on the role of Warren Hastings, in the dissemination of the Bhagavad Gita through Wilkins' translation: 

"By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistible taste for Orientalism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish life, made up of trifles, clinging to a corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no remedy like the Oriental largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts English decorum. For once, there is thunder it never heard, light it never saw, and power which trifles with time and space. I am not surprised to find an Englishman like Warren Hastings, who had been struck with the grand style of thinking in the Indian writings, depreciating the prejudices of his countrymen while offering them a translation of the Bhagavat Gita. "  (Essays, V:258-9)

(source: How Vedanta Came to the West - By Swami Tathagatananda
His famous poem "Brahma" is an example of his Vedantic ecstasy. If there is one piece that beautifully and succinctly expresses Emerson's vision of India it is in his poem Brahma.

(source: Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage - By Will Durant  MJF Books 1935. p 415).
Emerson wrote a third poem with a Hindu title in addition to "Brahma" and "Hamatreya"; this little poem, entitled "Maya", begins,
"Illusion works impenetrable,
Weaving webs innumerable."
The poem is called Maya for Hindu Goddess who keeps mankind under the spell of illusions. For Emerson, life was a riddle; he loved the Hindus because they had attempted to find a satisfactory answer to it. In "Poetry and Imagination" the sage of Concord tells us how ephermeral are man's various conditions in life: youth, age, property - all like a great dream." ...successive Mayas through which Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul"  But it is not only the Vishnu Purana that inspired Emerson. Another Hindu work stimulated his mind a great deal: The Katha Upanishad. In 1856, when he was fifty-three, he wrote in his Journal:
"A grander legend than Western literature contains, is the story of Nachiketas."
We have noticed how strong had been the influence of Indian thought in shaping the intellectual and spiritual growth of the sage of Concord. He felt his own spiritual affinity for the Hindus and wrote once to a friend, "nature makes a Brahmin of me presently."
(source: Elements of Brahmanism in the Transcendentalism of Emerson - By Leyla Goren p. 42-45).
Emerson's essays like The Oversoul and Circles and poems like Brahma are Upanishadic wisdom, pure and simple. At one stage of his life he writes, 
"Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently." 
(source: The Soul of India - By Satyavrata R Patel  p.74).
Emerson's Transcendentalism earned him the appellation of "the Boston Brahmin" 
(source: Indian Philosophy and Modern Culture - By Paul Brunton  p. 35 London. Rider & Co).
(Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term ''Boston Brahmins'' to describe blue-blooded New Englanders. It first appeared in his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table in 1857. Some of the most popular antebellam writers came from upper-class New England. These poets and authors became known as Boston Brahmins, coming from the word Brahmans, the highest caste of the Hindu religion. The leading Brahmins were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russel Lowell, Theodore Parker and Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier). 
Emerson was the father of Transcendentalism and his philosophy influenced people like Mary Eddy Baker, founder of the Christian Science Church, poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, feminist Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, reformer Dorothea Dix, Unitarian ministers Theodore Parker, William Henry Channing, William Ellery Channing, Educator Horace Mann, Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, Catherine Beecher, Sarah Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others. The American transcendentalists seemed to reject the narrow orthodox Christian concept of God.
Fredric Ives Carpenter in his book, Emerson and Asia (1930) says, that Emerson was the first American thinker to plant Oriental, especially Indian thought, on the American soil and draw spiritual inspiration from it. The poem Brahma became a controversial poem from the very beginning because of its anti-Christian attitude and the direct treatment of the Upanishadic mysticism. He further says that this poem expresses the fundamental Hindu concept "more clearly and concisely than any other writing in the English language perhaps better than any writing in Hindu literature itself. Emerson got his central idea of the poem from his reading of Katha Upanishad...If the slayer thinks I slay......does not slay nor is it slain."
The idea of rebirth or reincarnation is found throughout Emerson's work and journals. "The transmigration of souls is no fable...."
Faith in transmigration of souls though antithetical to Christianity, appealed to him because it countered the notion of finality, inherent in Christianity, and embodied a vision of correction through successive stages of development until one achieves beatitude and divine bliss.
(source: Hindu Scriptures and American Transcendentalists - By Umesh Patri p. 22 -23 and 79).
Emerson, talking of the Upanishads and the Vedas, said that having read them, he could not put them away. "They haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace."
(source: The Commemorative Sanskrit Souvenir 2003 of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan  p. 28).
"When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of" Emerson joyfully proclaimed. "It is only within this century (the 1800's) that England and America discovered that their nursery tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are therefore the property of all the nations."
(source: Hinduism Today - April/May/June 2004  issue  p  59). 

Unitarian minister and great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was moved to write poetry in imitation of Hinduism’s scripture and to find relief in its teachings when the faith of his childhood could not serve. For more refer to Americans and Hinduism's Great Truth - By Rev. Jack Donovan - Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Gainesville, Florida).

5. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767- 1835) Prussian minister of education, a brilliant linguist and the founder of the science of general linguistics. Humboldt  began to learn Sanskrit in 1821 and was greatly moved by Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavad Gita, on which he published an extensive study. The Bhagavad Gita made a great impression on Humboldt, who said that " this episode of the Mahabharata was: 
"The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue ....perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show."

(source: Philosophy of Hinduism - An Introduction - By T. C. Galav Universal Science-Religion. p  650). 
Listen to The Bhagavad Gita podcast - By Michael Scherer - americanphonic.com.

He devoted to it a long treatise in the Proceedings of the Academy of Berlin (1825-6).
After looking into the Gita, he wrote to his friend, statesman Frederick von Gentz (1764 - 1832) in 1827: 
“I read the Indian poem for the first time when I was in my country estate in Silesia and, while doing so, I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude to God for having let me live to be acquainted with this work. It must be the most profound and sublime thing to be found in the world. “
(source: The Bhagavad Gita - The Quest for the Moral Ideal, Religious Values and the Affirmation of Faith - By  P. Nagaraja Rao Madras 1986  p. 20).

He thanked God for having permitted him to live long enough to become acquainted with the Gita.

(source: Vedanta: Heart of Hinduism - By Hans Torwesten An Evergreen Book. Grove Press.
On June 30 1825, Humboldt lectured to the Berlin Academy of Sciences on the Gita, placing it firmly in the mainstream of the scholarship of the period. He found in the Bhagavad Gita his own "spiritual ancestors". What appealed to him was its originality and its simplicity. Krishna's doctrine, he wrote,
" ...develops in such a peculiarly individual way, (and) it is, so far as I can judge, so much less burdened with sophistry and mysticism, that it deserves our special attention, standing as it does as an independent work of art..."

(source: The Universal Gita: Western Images of the Bhagavad Gita a Bicentenary Survey - By Eric J. Sharpe p. 19).
Humboldt studied Sanskrit with Franz Bopp in London. For Humboldt, Sanskrit with its wealth of grammatical forms is the climax of inflecting languages.

(source: German Indologists: Biographies of Scholars in Indian Studies writing in German - By Valentine Stache-Rosen. p.5-6).
6. Mark Twain (1835-1910) also known as Samuel Clemens, one of the most widely loved and celebrated American writers since his first books were released in the late 1860s. Many of his writings have reached the pinnacles of American and world literature, including the timeless Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court and Following the Equator. Besides these easily recognizable classics, Twain wrote fascinating Travelogue detailing his experiences in Asia.
"So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked." 
 "Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that all men desire to see and having seen once even by a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the globe combined."
"India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soul."
Varanasi or Banaras has been continuously populated for more than 3,000 years, and has often been called the oldest city in the world. It was the contemporary of Thebes and Babylon. Early visitors were struck by the "spectacle" the "panorama" of the Banaras riverfront. 
In his around-the-world adventures, Following the Equator, Mark Twain wrote:
"The Ganga (Ganges) front is the supreme showplace of Benares. Its tall bluffs are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair flights, rich and stately palaces....soaring stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed - streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in metaphorical gardens on the mile of great platforms at the river's edge."
(source: Banaras: City of Light - By Diana L Eck  p.14).

He had said in his inimitable style: “Varanasi" or Banaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”

(source: Soul of a Nation - The Hindustan Times). 
Mark Twain remarked: "India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire." When traveling through India, he had exclaimed that though a week had only seven days, Indians seemed to celebrate eight festivals every week.
He observed that having had only the briefest glimpse of India, you would not trade the experience for all the riches in the world. This is what he wrote about India in 1896:
"India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellect; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soul."
(source: Hinduism Today July/August/September 2002  p. 52).
"Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India."
Twain was awed by Hindu tradition. He said, "the one land that all men desire to see, and having once seen, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined."
(source: Hinduism - By Linda Johnsen p. 364).
"India is a country "whose yesterday's bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of nations."
7. Dr. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) the great British historian. His massive research was published in 12 volumes between 1934 and 1961 as `A Study of History'. Author of several books, including Christianity: Among the Religions of the World and One World and India. Toynbee was a major interpreter of human civilization in the 20th century.
"It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history , the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together in to a single family." 
The tolerance of Hinduism was recognized by Toynbee, who on many occasions contrasted the exclusivity of the Jewish religion, based on the Jewish belief that the Jews are the chosen people with the large tolerance of the Hindus and Buddhist. This plague of exclusiveness, he claims, was inherited by both the Christians and Muslims: hence their lamentable record. 
(source: Concordant Discord - By R. C. Zaehner  p 22-23).
“So now we turn to India. This spiritual gift, that makes a man human, is still alive in Indian souls. Go on giving the world Indian examples of it. Nothing else can do so much to help mankind to save itself from destruction.”
(source: Greater India - By Arun Bhattacharjee  inside cover).

‘‘There may or may not be only one single absolute truth and only one single ultimate way of salvation. We do not know. But we do know that there are more approaches to truth than one, and more means of salvation than one.’’‘‘This is a hard saying for adherents of the higher religions of the Judaic family (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but it is a truism for Hindus. The spirit of mutual good-will, esteem, and veritable love ... is the traditional spirit of the religions of the Indian family. This is one of India’s gifts to the world.’’

(source: Britannia Perspectives - Quoted By T. V. R. Shenoy in Secularism is not for Hindus alone).

Toynbee predicted:  "At the close of this century, the world would be dominated by the West, but that in the 21st century "India will conquer her conquerors."

(source: Spiritual Heritage of India - By Swami Prabhavananda Vedanta Press )

India is a whole world in herself; she is a society of the same magnitude as our Western society."

(source: Civilization on Trail and the World and the West - By Arnold Toynbee Meridian Books. p. 257).
In 1952, Toynbee had observed: “In fifty years, the world would be under the hegemony of the USA, but in the 21st century, as religion captures the place of technology, it is possible that India, the conquered, will conquer its conquerors.” 
(source: Power of the Indian mind: our heritage & asset - by Jagmohan - tribuneindia.com - editorial - Sunday February 23 2003).
"India is not only the heir of her own religious traditions; she is also the residuary legatee of the Ancient Mediterranean World's religious traditions." "Religion cuts far deeper, and, at the religious level, India has not been a recipient; she has been a giver. About half the total number of the living higher religions are of Indian origin."

(source: One World and India - By Arnold Toynbee Indian Council for Cultural Relations New Delhi. 1960  p 42 - 59).   
Toynbee explains his position in clear terms: In our spiritual struggle, he says "I guess that both the West and the world are getting to turn away from man - worshipping ideologies - Communism and secular individualism alike - and become converted to an Oriental religion coming neither from Russia nor from the West. I guess that this will be the Christian religion that came to the Greeks and the Romans from Palestine, with one or two elements in traditional Christianity discarded and replaced by a new element from India, I expect and hope that this avatar of Christianity will include the vision of God as being Love. But I also expect and hope that it will discard the other traditional Christian vision of God as being a jealous god, and that it will reject the self-glorification of this jealous god's "chosen people" as being unique. This is where India comes in, with her belief that there may be more than one illuminating and saving approach to the mystery of the universe."
(source: East and West: Some Reflections - By S. Radhakrishnan  p.128). 
What Tonybee, said of Hindu philosophy of life and its culture is very thought-provoking. He wrote:
“We witness such unique mental approach and consciousness among Indians as may help humanity progress like a family unit. If we do not wish to perish in this atomic age, we have no other alternative left.” 
“Today, the western scientific progress has physically united the world. It has not only got rid of the ‘space’ factor, it has also equipped the various countries of the world with deadly arms. But they have not yet learnt the art of knowing and loving one another. If we want to save humanity at this most critical juncture, the only option is the Indian approach.” 
“ India has a perception of life-force and has a vital role to play in the performance of human conduct, which will be beneficial not only to India but to the whole world in the present sorry state of affairs.”
(source: Hindutva is universal love - By Girish Chandra Mishra )

8. Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) was an active socialist on the executive committee of the Fabian Society along with George Bernard Shaw. George Bernard Shaw regarded her the "greatest woman public speaker of her time." Was a prominent leader of India's freedom movement, member of the Indian National Congress, and of the Theosophical Society. Dr. Annie Besant was a housewife, a propagator of atheism, a trade unionist, a feminist leader and a Fabian Socialist. 
She was also fundamentally instrumental in freeing the country she lost her heart and sublimed her soul to: India. Besant is an indivisible part of the composite struggle for independent India because she declared most passionately,

"I love the Indian people as I love none other. My heart and my mind... have long been laid on the alter of the Motherland."
source: Hindustan Times 
Annie Besant, proponent of the philosophy of Theosophy, gave many a lecture in which she aired her views that India was a victim of the mischief wrought by Christian missionaries.
A friend of Swami Vivekananda, Mrs. Besant was trying to lead Indians back to their own gods and arouse their sense of self-respect and pride in the greatness of their religions. 
This is what she said on India and Hinduism :
"After a study of some forty years and more of the great religions of the world, I find none so perfect , none so scientific, none so philosophical and none so spiritual that the great religion known by the name of Hinduism. Make no mistake, without Hinduism, India has no future. Hinduism is the soil in to which India's roots are stuck and torn out of that she will inevitably wither as a tree torn out from its place.  And if Hindus do not maintain Hinduism who shall save it?  If India's own children do not cling to her faith who shall guard it. India alone can save India and India and Hinduism are one. "

Annie Besant  thought that  "among the priceless teachings that may be found in the great Indian epic Mahabharata, there is none so rare and priceless as the Gita."  
"This is the India of which I speak - the India which, as I said, is to me the Holy Land. For those who, though born for this life in a Western land and clad in a Western body, can yet look back to earlier incarnations in which they drank the milk of spiritual wisdom from the breast of their true mother - they must feel ever the magic of her immemorial past, must dwell ever under the spell of her deathless fascination; for they are bound to India by all the sacred memories of their past; and with her, too, are bound up all the radiant hopes of their future, a future which they know they will share with her who is their true mother in the soul-life."
(source: India: Essays and Lectures Vol. IV - By Annie Besant London. The Theosophical Publishing Co. p. 11
Mrs. Besant remarked at Calcutta: "India is the mother of religion. In her are combined science and religion in perfect harmony, and that is the Hindu religion, and it is India that shall be again the spiritual mother of the world."
(source: Hindu Superiority - By Har Bilas Sarda - Besant's lecture at the Grand Theatre, Calcutta on Jan 15th 1906).
“During the early life of a Nation, religion is an essential for the binding together of the individuals who make the nation. India was born, as it were, in the womb of Hinduism, and her body was for long shaped by that religion. Religion is a binding force, and India has had a longer binding together by religion than any other Nation in the world, as she is the oldest of the living Nations.”
(source: Hindu Rashtra-What It Means - By Prof. V. Rangarajan).  
Besant held Hinduism in high esteem and very well advised in her book, In Defense of Hinduism: 
"Based on knowledge it need not fear any advance in knowledge; profound in spirituality, the depths of the spirit find in it deeps answering into deep, it has nothing to dread, everything to hope, from growth in intellect, from increasing sway of reason."
(source: India Rediscovered - By Dr. Giriraj Shah p. 31  Abhinav Publications New Delhi 1975).
As Annie Besant and Bhagavan Das, who jointly authored an Advance Text Book of Hindu Religion and Ethics entitled 'Sanatana Dharma' in 1898, rightly observed:
"The religion based on the Vedas, the Sanatana Dharma or Vaidika Dharma, is the oldest of living religions and stands unrivalled in the depth and splendor of its philosophy, while it yields to none in the purity of its ethical teachings, and in the flexibility and varied adaptation of its rites and ceremonies. It is like a river, which has shallows that a child may play in, and depths which the strongest diver cannot fathom. It is thus adapted to every human need, and there is nothing which any religion can add to its rounded perfection. The more it is studied and practiced, the more does it illuminate the intellect and satisfy the heart."
(source:  Cry for a Hindu Nation - By V Sundaram )

 

Om Tat Sat

                                                        

(Continued...) 

( My humble Pranam, Honour  and also gratefulness  to   Ms. Sushma Londhe ji for her  noble, magnanimous and eminent works on the   peerless  Wisdom of our Sacred Scriptures)
  
_{(My humble salutations to   , H H Swamyjis, Hindu Wisdom, great Universal Philosophers, Historians, Professors and Devotees   for the discovering  collection)}

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