Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but he spent most of his life in Concord. His father was a Unitarian minister with a keen interest in fine literature who was instrumental in founding several important literary societies and publications of the time. When his father died, Emerson was given into the care of his aunt, who took a strong interest in his education. His literary gifts were recognized, encouraged and developed early. In 1817 he entered Harvard College where he met "Hindu missionaries, " including Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Emerson eventually became licensed to preach in the Unitarian community in 1826. His early sermons contained the themes of his later famous essays. His early work from the pulpit also laid the foundation for the distinguished skill he later displayed as a lecturer. The grief of the death of his first wife drove him to question his beliefs and his profession in the Christian ministry, turning him to other religions (including Hinduism) for evidence of vital truth. At this point he resigned from the Unitarian ministry and traveled abroad. Infatuated by the possibility of spiritual correspondence between man and nature, he began lecturing and writing. As with many writers, personal experience played heavily into Emerson's assimilation of creative ideas. Emerson often presented Hindu principles in their original purity. Sometimes he would quote the scriptures directly.
Transcendentalism was a literary movement founded in 1836 by Emerson and a handful of other adventuresome American thinkers. It featured at least three authors of world stature: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Combining Romanticism with reform, Transcendentalism celebrated the spiritual potential of man by encouraging nonconformity so that, through a sense of individuality, man might be released from mass conditioning enough to intuitively experience God's all-pervading oneness by personal efforts of unbiased and open-minded introspection. Transcendentalism emphasized the individual rather than the masses, intuition rather than reason, the forces of nature rather than the powers of man.
Emerson is the first great American literary figure who read deeply and fully the available philosophic literature from India. By 1856 Emerson had read the Kathopanisad and his ideas were increasingly reflecting Indian influence. His poems, such as Hamatreya (a poem composed in 1845) showed he had digested his Indian philosophic readings well. Hamatreya apparently was inspired by a passage from the Vishnu Purana (Book IV).
Emerson:
"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavat-Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake 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 that exercise us. All my interest is in Marsh's Manu, then Wilkins' Bhagavat Geeta, Burnouf's Bhagavat Purana and Wilson's Vishnu Purana, yes, and few other translations. I remember I owed my first taste for this fruit to Cousin's sketch, in his first lecture, of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna and I still prize the first chapters of the Bhagavat as wonderful." http://venu1005.blogspot.com/2006/12/ralph-waldo-emerson-hindu-influence.html http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=1330