Henry David Thoreau

American transcendentalist (1817–1862), author of Walden, who kept one of the most substantial private collections of Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita translations on the nineteenth-century East Coast.

Overview

Thoreau is quoted in Walden for lines that, by his own admission, were shaped in dialogue with the Gita: “Every morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puerile and trivial.” He describes re-opening the Gita as encountering “the light of a purer dawn.”

A British friend sent him 45 volumes of Upanishads and Gita commentaries, which Thoreau kept at Walden. When he died, the collection passed to Emerson — the line of transmission through which those texts entered and shaped American transcendentalism.

Related

• Ralph Waldo Emerson — fellow transcendentalist; inheritor of his Gita/Upanishads collection
• Relevant via bhagavad-gita, upanishads — Thoreau among the earliest serious American readers

Lecture evidence

• Ep. 7 [25:54]: Thoreau introduced; his Walden reference — “I bathe my intellect in the stupendous philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita.”
• Ep. 7 [26:33]: His 45-volume collection; after his death, passed to Emerson.