No abstract

This article states that Asian religious texts and traditions had the greatest impact on the American Transcendentalists. Their embrace of the Asian religious ideas was a corrective step to the centuries-long dominion of Christianity in the west. The commerce—both intellectual and material—that had linked Asia and Europe played a crucial role in it. The French and English agents began acquainting themselves with the cultures and languages of the areas. The flow of material profit soon led to an unsuspected intellectual windfall in the form of a host of texts and translations that shed new lights on the traditions of Asia. This eventually led to the English translation of Bhagavad Geeta, the introduction of Buddhism in the west, and so on. The article looks at the contributions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Amos Bronson Alcott to the Asiatic influence on Transcendentalism.

Despite the theological gulf that separated the Transcendentalists from their Puritan predecessors, certain leading Transcendentalists-Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau among them-often punctuated their writings, published and private, with literary representations of dramatic episodes of spiritual awakening whose rhetorical structure sometimes betrays suggestive parallels with traditional, recognizably Christian, forms of conversion rhetoric. While all of these Transcendentalists clearly showcase representations of dramatic religious experience in their work, this reliance on Christian rhetorical patterns is most obvious in the early writings of Emerson and Fuller. Thoreau's constructions reflect little ostensible Christian influence, yet even here, thematic continuities with earlier forms of religious self-expression are discernible.

No abstract

No abstract