Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- The famed author was heavily influenced by Indian literature, informing his decision to self-exile on Walden Pond.
- He was introduced to these texts by his good friend’s father, William Emerson.
- Yoga philosophy was in America a century before any physical practices were introduced.
Though yoga today is associated with expensive leggings and an infestation of Instagram selfies, the philosophical underpinnings have long predated the physical asana practice. In fact, the first century of yoga in America had little to do with postures, but the cognitive and emotional flexibility needed to criticize one’s society and try to make it better through ancient philosophical ideology.
Such was the case of Henry David Thoreau, as a colleague and friend of mine, Natalia Petrzela, recently wrote about in the Washington Post. While her piece focused on the longstanding political aspects of yoga, one of my editors here at Big Think raised an eyebrow at this sentence:
Nineteenth-century transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau was drawn to yoga and Hinduism as forms of resistance to mainstream market capitalism.
We all know about his self-imposed exile on Walden Pond (even though it was walking distance back to town). Still, resistance to the growing market economy of nineteenth century New England was part of Thoreau’s philosophical bedrock. Credit his friend’s father, William Emerson, whose early fascination with the literature of India led to his published translations of Sanskrit texts in 1805. As Thoreau stated after reading the text, Manusmirti,
I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau shared a love for the ideas behind works like the Bhagavad Gita, incorporating symbols and metaphors into their own transcendental and nature-based writings—and leading to his time on Walden Pond. They were witnessing a widening rift between technology and the soil and trees around them, and used Indian mythologies as guiding principles informing their own form of revolt.
Yoga continued to influence thinkers, such as Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, who integrated Hindu and Buddhist texts with Christian mysticism, Kabbalah and Sufi philosophies. In works such as Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine she speculated on the yogic underpinnings of men like Jesus and Mohammed, showing how various forms of mysticism from any culture could be related on a common ground—similar to the work of Evelyn Underhill, who was born the year the foundation was founded.
The first citing of a more physical yoga in the West, however, is due to Swami Vivekananda, who at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 gave a lecture and demonstration that made him a conference highlight. During the talk he spoke of the easy distractions…
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