The Transcendentalists

My time in Japan has largely been a series of train trips. Thanks to the JR (Japan Railways) local and inter-city lines, the Hankyu and Hanshin privately-run railroads, and the Osaka and Kyoto subways, I have not missed having a car at all - indeed, I'm feeling disappointed that I'll have to drive when I get back home to Baltimore.

That's partly because of one of the big benefits of train travel: it is highly conducive to reading. (Well, except on a crowded rush-hour commuter train, where one usually barely has space to breathe.) That's great for me - I had dozens of books shipped over here because I can't imagine three months without plenty of reading material.

I've been catching up on the Transcendentalists, reading some Whitman and Emerson. It's great to read Whitman's transcription of the American carols while in a foreign land -- I'm far enough away from home to silence the noise of the contemporary political "dialog", such as it is, and to really contemplate what it is to be an American.

I'm coming to see that Whitman, and the other Transcendentalists, had a vision of their nation as a world leader. Not in the spheres of politics or military power, but artistically and spiritually.

It was 1837 When Emerson gave his landmark lecture "The American Scholar": six decades since the American colonies had declared their political independence, and a quarter-century since they had made it stick in the War of 1812. But like a teenager who has just moved out on their own, the U.S. still sought to define its own identity.

In literature and the arts it still looked to England rather than to any domestic tradition. Socially and economically it was dealing with the Industrial Revolution, and in politics it still wrestled with issues its Enlightenment-inspired founders hadn't settled -- chiefly, slavery.

The question, "just what is America, anyway?" was being urgently explored, and was so divisive that within Emerson's lifetime tens of thousands would be killed trying to settle it by force.

Tumultuous times have often given impetus to spiritual or religious movements. The turmoil caused by plagues and "barbarian" attacks helped open the way for Christianity in Rome. The "Little Ice Age" and the Black Death caused such disruption in Europe that the Catholic Church split in two, each side claiming to have the genuine Pope. It was only was 25 years between Columbus's voyage and Luther's theses; six years between the start of the English civil war and when George Fox started preaching, the start of the Quakers.

So, early nineteenth century New England gave birth to the Transcendentalists. They had an vision that was in some ways similar to that of the original Puritan colonists, who saw the new nation as a shining "city upon a hill" that would be a guide to the world. But where the Puritans sought to build a rigid order based on received Biblical truth and a structured clergy, the Transcendentalists wanted to enable each person's individual and direct religious experience.

As Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile ... perhaps a generation or two ... dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place ... the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future... . They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.

Their vision was much more individual and mystic than that of mainstream Christianity. It was also very heterodox: they were among the earliest Westerners to take a serious interest in Buddhist and Hindu thought. Emerson's famous poem Brahma riffs off the Bhagahada-Gita, and Thoreau was the first to publish (in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial) an English translation of a Buddhist scripture.

Historian Arthur Versluis has devoted an entire book, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, to the subject of the Transcendentalists and Asian religion. He writes:

[O]n the whole, the Transcendentalist movement, both early and late, was a product of Unitarianism, Puritanism, and other currents of Western thought and also of contact with the world religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, which was largely seen in the light of "universal progress".

Emerson even went so far as to claim Buddhism as part of the Transcendentalist movement, in his famous lecture "The Transcendentalist"

In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment; any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist who thanks no man, who says, "do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

Also in that lecture we can see the influence of Vedantist (Vedanta being the philosophy of Hinduism) and Buddhist ideas that the world we experience is a construction of mind, and that the "self" has no existence separate from the world:

Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena....

...

I -- this thought which is called I, -- is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me.

Both directly, and through their inspiration of the twentieth century Beats, the Transcendentalists had a tremendous influence on the development of Buddhism in the West.

They also helped promote to industrialized Western civilization the idea that contemplation of nature could be a spiritual activity. In this they followed the trail blazed by the Romantics movement, especially the British Romantic poets. Both Romantics and Transcendentalists found poetry to be far, far more than an amusing diversion: Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote that "poetry is connate with the origin of man" and called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," while (as we saw above) Whitman predicted that "the new breed of poets" would displace the priests. Emerson went even further, rhapsodizing:

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, -- a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. ... It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. ...

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, -- opaque, though they seem transparent, -- and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real.

And like the British Romantics, the Transcendentalists were not afraid to pay homage to the Old Gods, especially Pan. In the space of a few paragraphs in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau pays his respects to Pan, Buddha, and Jesus, and throws in a reference to the necessity of the Divine Feminine for good measure:

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks. I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosised, so wholly masculine, with no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me.... The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumoured. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

...

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

In their syncretism -- Whitman, for example, said that he "had perfect faith in all sects, and was not inclined to reject a single one" -- in their insistence on individual experience over revealed truth, and in their love of Nature as a spiritual force, we can see much that contributed to the modern Pagan movement.

It might even be argued be argued that, depending on definitions, the Transcendentalists were the first American Pagans. Tim Zell, who was one of the first to use the word Pagan in its modern sense, included them in an explanation of the term in Green Egg in 1968.

And perhaps they were the first American Buddhists as well. That argument is strongest in the case of Thoreau -- he published the Lotus Sutra, name-dropped the Buddha as we saw above, and owned a copy of R. Spence Hardy's A Manual of Buddhism, which respected enough to bequeath to his friend A. Bronson Alcott. His peers seem to have thought it apt to call him Buddhist: his classmate John Weiss said of Thoreau that he "went about like a priest of Buddha who expects to arrive soon at the summit of a life of contemplation."

In the words of Rick Fields, "[Thoreau] forecast an American Buddhism by the nature of his contemplation, in the same way that a certain quality of transparent predawn forecasts a clear morning.... He was certainly not the only one of his generation to live a contemplative life, but he was, it seems, one of the few to live it in a Buddhist way."

But whether we draw the lines of these movements to include them or not, the Transcendentalists certainly laid down a grove that infuenced the later development of Paganism and Buddhism on American shores. They prepared the ground that would receive the seeds of modern witchcraft and occultism from Britain, and the seeds of Buddhism -- especially of Zen -- from Asia, and sprout forth many strange and interesting flowers in the twentieth century.

They were just one thread in the tapestry of the Buddhist and Pagan revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a strange weave of poets, Theosophists, Buddhists, magicians, witches -- and jesters.