There are an estimated two million Buddhists living in the United States and many more of various religions that embrace Buddhist philosophy. In November 2007, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity revealed that one out of six Unitarian-Universalists also identify themselves as Buddhist (43). Although the idea of a hyphenated Christian may seem like a paradox, it says a great deal about the mutability of the philosophy of Buddhism, especially in the United States. One could argue that Buddhism is an inherently American philosophy, and the unwilling father of American Buddhism is Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Connecting Emerson to the introduction of Eastern religions in the United States is not difficult. His legacy, however, is not as a disciple of the East converting followers to an ancient philosophy; it is more of an inspiration to alternative thinkers who themselves would widen the appeal (Seager 34). What was the appeal to Emerson? Why did he encourage the mining of India’s ancient scriptures? How did he evolve from a man who described Eastern religions as “indolent” and “ignorant” to the man who would later call them “the best gymnastics of the mind” (McAleer 463, Emerson, “Ralph Waldo Emerson” 445)?
Although an exhaustive investigation of the great body of Emerson’s work might ultimately reveal the outlines of an answer, the purpose of this study is narrow. Does a close inspection of his early work reveal the philosophical seeds for his interest in the East? What clues and insights into his private mind are imbedded in this work? How do they connect with the larger canon of Buddhist thought?
One early work that sheds some light into the proto-Buddhist mind of Emerson is The American Scholar.
Delivered at Harvard University in 1837, Emerson’s address would inspire poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to proclaim the oration as “our Intellectual Declaration of Independence” (qtd. in Richardson 263). Emerson’s critique on the American opportunity sings “in pre-established harmony” with the intellectual richness of the society Shakyamuni Buddha created along the Indus River. As Americans of all faiths and philosophies seek reforms in education, politics, and philosophy, as people around the globe seek cultural and religious acceptance, Emerson’s “Man Thinking” arranges the chorus of evolutionary change in modern society.
Context of the Address
Historic events were unfolding in the days leading up to his address that would influence his speech before the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Economic crisis, educational scandal, and recent anthropological discoveries would influence Emerson personally for many years.
Prior to The American Scholar address on August 31, 1837, Emerson had begun to carve out his place in the halls of American intellectualism. Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821 and had a successful career as both a teacher and Unitarian minister. In the previous year, he anonymously published Nature, in which he described a type of enlightenment he experienced through discourse with the natural world. These established his reputation, at least in New England, as a progressive thinker.
On a broader scale, however, America slipped into its second economic recession in May of that year. The booming American economy was inflated by foreign investments. When European banks began to raise deposit rates, investors were persuaded to keep their money in Europe. And when the European dollars left the United States, the American economy crashed and spiraled downward into five years of record-breaking unemployment. Although Emerson was unaffected financially, his brother William was in debt, and Emerson spent much of his fortune helping William retain his property and holdings.
In addition, Emerson’s personal friend Amos Bronson Alcott was under attack for his controversial teaching methods. Alcott based his educational system on the intuitive capabilities of students and departed from the highly-structured lecture and drill methods of most American schools. As Alcott’s methods were made public, popular opinion turned against him, and school attendance began to wither (260-265). Although later his friendship and respect of Alcott would decline, at the time of the address Emerson’s defense of Alcott was strong,.
Finally, beginning in 1837, Emerson became an avid reader of Eastern scriptures, which included Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist texts (McAleer 463). After the failure of the Fruitlands commune in 1844, Emerson purchased most of the Oriental library of co-founder Charles Lane. In January of that year, Emerson, with the help of Henry David Thoreau and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, published the first English translations of many Hindu and Buddhist texts in Emerson’s magazine The Dial. Upon his death in 1862, Thoreau bequeathed 20 volumes of Eastern scripture to Emerson (Allen 615). Although Emerson refused to endorse an American translation of the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text, he retained a personal copy which he loaned to those friends he deemed worthy.
The Address
In light of the political, social, and personal events occurring in Emerson’s world at the end of August 1837, it is easy to read his remarks as a revival of American nationalism, a call to finally sever ties with Europe in order to create a uniquely American identity. Emerson seems to evoke this notion in his opening remarks when he states “our long apprenticeship to the learning of other land draws to a close” (Emerson “Essays & Lectures” 53). The statement is not without some irony, knowing now his penchant for international scholarship. However, coloring Emerson’s oration as simply a pro-American critique is to paint with too broad a stroke.
Emerson debunks the fable that there is One Man, comprised of the combined efforts of all men. If that is true, he says, then that original unit of Man is so divided into disconnected parts that he is indistinguishable. Instead, the equation is reversed. The solidarity of a society is dependent upon the man liberated from mere thoughts and transformed into “Man Thinking” (54). Emerson is describing radical individualism. He is not advocating America’s separation from Europe; he is talking about separating the individual from systems of intellectual tyranny.
Emerson composes his solution with his three influences of the mind – Nature, the knowledge of the past, and action. The first is the natural world. It was through his experiences in the natural world that Emerson had the transcendental moment described in his short book Nature. He felt “the currents of The Universal Being” circulating through him, and he was “part or particle of God” (10). In The American Scholar he identifies the experience as “circular power returning into itself.” Nature is the physical evidence of the continuity of all things. “There never is a beginning, there is never an end,” he says. When we are young we see the world as the composite of distinctive things. This is a tree; that is a flower. The boy is a boy. But as we learn from nature “things contrary and remote conjoin and grow from one stem” until the boy and nature “proceed from one root” (55).
Emerson’s second influence of the mind is “the mind of the past,” more specifically – books. The purpose of books is to “transmute life into truth” (56). There is a flaw in the process. Books are intended to inspire genius, but if read improperly books may supplant it. In Emerson’s “right way of reading,” the reader retains only the truth and rejects the other visions of the occluded eye. He argues that universities should exist not as collectors of truth, but instead as creators of truth. He realized in literature the existence of an evolutionary cycle from one generation to the next and continuing – each new generation refining the knowledge of the last and preserving new truths to be refined by future generations. He called this preservation and perfection of truth “preėstablished harmony” (58). We find personal connections in books because the author or poet has tapped into truths that resonate in the souls of others. Caution is given not to rest in the place of connection, but to create new ones.
The third influence of the mind is action. Action is a resource of knowledge, and action is knowledge in use. Scholars are not meant to be hermits, but teachers and ministers of knowledge. Without work, without the instruction gained from suffering, “thinking is a partial act” (62). The Man Thinking receives knowledge from nature and the past, but he molds knowledge into wisdom from his experiences.
Emerson, then, explains the duties of Man Thinking. He is “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men” (63). Man Thinking is an individual who designs his own path while preserving nobility and truth. The private man is greater than the public hero, and unbound by a dominant culture that domesticates, he becomes the “central fire,” the “one light”, the “one soul which animates all men” (67). In short, the enlightenment of the individual brings enlightenment to society.
Emerson concludes by giving the American Scholar his place in history. He recognizes three great ages of history – Classical, Romantic, and Philosophical – and concludes that everyone passes through these in stages. A fourth age exists, however, the “age of Introversion” (67). America has the opportunity to be a land of great, personal growth through contemplative practice. Emerson argues that it is the American Scholar that is uniquely positioned in the world to achieve these ideals. Shaking off the shackles of society, the individual can connect to the “Divine Soul which inspires all men” (71).
Buddhism – Exposure and Understanding
What Emerson understood about Eastern thought is unclear. Later in his career, Emerson often referenced “the Hindoos” who follow Buddha and wrongly attributed the Gita as “the much renowned book of Buddhism” (Emerson “Ralph Waldo Emerson” 445; Emerson “Letters” 3:290). Vedanta and Buddhism share greatly, and it is true their differences are mostly semantic, but it remains unclear whether Emerson was making connections between the two or expressing his limited knowledge of both. In either case, Emerson probably first encountered Buddha in 1833. While in Paris, Emerson attended university lectures, at least one of which given by French intellectual Eugène Burnouf (3:290).
Burnouf was a student of Pali and Sanskrit and is responsible for the first translations of a Sanskrit text into any Western language. Although Burnouf had published several works and lectured often about Orientalism, his greatest contribution to the expansion of Eastern thought into Western culture began in 1837, the year of Emerson’s address.
Burnouf was serendipitously aided by a civil servant in the British Empire with whom he had no connection. Brian Houghton Hodgson worked in India and Nepal as a collector of specimens, both cultural and natural, and he routinely made shipments to Europe containing artifacts of all kinds. At some point, Hodgson sent a large collection of Oriental literature. Seen more as a cultural oddity than an instrument of scholarship, they were tossed aside and remained untouched on a shelf in Paris for years. In 1837, Burnouf discovered the texts, realized their authenticity, and immediately began to translate them into French (Batchelor 243). It is Peabody and Thoreau’s English translation of Burnouf’s French that appears in The Dial in 1844.
This is important in the sense that it helps define Emerson’s reading knowledge of Buddhism at the time of the address. Because Burnouf’s translations would not be published until 1840, Emerson’s understanding was limited to the interpretations of missionaries. Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman suggests that Western understanding of Eastern religion was and remains at a superficial level. Missionaries sought only enough knowledge to discover a flaw in a system so that they could convert its followers to Christianity or Catholicism. Buddhists, according to the missionary, were nihilistic. Buddhists viewed the world as endless suffering without hope of salvation (Thurman, “Inner Revolution” 246). Although Orientalists like Burnouf provided some intellectual context, in Emerson’s time the East was a cultural curiosity foreign, for the most part, to the Age of Reason.
The Buddha is Everywhere
Emerson’s audience that day in August, 1837 was not limited to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. His audience extends to the reader of his time and for ages to come. Coincidentally, and simply as a by-product of his own uniquely personal journey, Emerson sets the foundation for the philosophy of Buddhism in the United States. Charles Woodbury would later suggest that Emerson had no desire to construct a theology or moral science. He merely intended to influence men and women toward a finer life (84). And although The American Scholar bears resemblance to the philosophy of Plato and Kant, the degree of accuracy in which Emerson related tenets central to Buddhism is uncanny. Specifically, Emerson’s argument for the study of Nature, the study of the past, and neccesity of action complement the Three Jewels of Buddhism – Buddha, Sangha, and Dharma.
Emerson’s introductory point, the liberation of the individual from society, echoes the mission of Shakyamuni Buddha. Robert Thurman explains that the enlightenment movement began by “taking power from ruling bodies and returning it to the individual” (Thurman, “Inner Revolution” 29-30). No matter how much wealth and property a country secures, regardless of the intellectual and technological advances a society obtains, no nation or entity can prevent its citizens from growing old, from getting sick, and from dying. Only the enlightenment of the individual can relieve those sufferings, so the enlightenment of the individual and the cessation of suffering must be the goals of society.
Buddha, the first Jewel, is revealed in Nature. Emerson’s realization of the influence of nature finds a Buddhist refuge in the interconnection of all things. Because the Buddha is everywhere, everything is the Buddha; everything is Nature. Emerson’s experience in the woods resembles in many ways the experiences of a yogic or Buddhist practicioner. Thurman explains interconnecton and the suffering that comes from “misknowledge” – not understanding the true nature of reality. Each of us thinks that we are the most important person in the universe, but we also realize that everyone thinks they are the most important one. As long as we hold to the belief that we are separate and different we succumb to worry and doubt and become reactive. But, if we are all connected, if at some spiritual level we are all made of the same thread, then it is no longer a battle of one man against the universe. It is man and universe together. Man and universe are Buddha; man and universe are Nature (67-77).
Buddha literally means “awake” or “aware” of our inseparability of all things. Nature, then, is not separate from us any more than we are separate from ourselves. The continuity of nature reflects the continuity of our infinite souls. The lotus reveals our struggle through the murky waters of suffering. Its unopened bloom is the heart awaiting enlightenment, and when opened it reveals The Eightfold Path.
The second Jewel of Buddhism revealed in The American Scholar is Sangha, or the teaching of the enlightened. Emerson identifies this as the influence of the past through books. The global community of writers working for the common goal, the discovery of truth, expedites the progress of seekers who follow.
Classifying Buddhism as purely religion is difficult because of the absence of two things – a Messiah and manuscript. Shakyamuni does not achieve enlightenment, return, and say, “Follow me. I am The One. I figured it out, and I won’t tell you what it is unless you follow me.” Instead, he says, “Go find out for yourself.” He sends us out into the boundless universe without providing an instruction manual.
The reason, perhaps, is just as Emerson supposes – the truth is everywhere if you know how to look. Thousands of Buddhist texts abound, but the Diamond Sutra is not held with any higher regard than the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh or the translations of Red Pine. Because the philosophical Buddhist lacks a reference manual, he must seek the truth, the Buddha, in all things. The presence of a definitive scripture diminishes, as Emerson suggests, the ability of the reader of truth to become a creator of truth. The truth must be discerned through intuition and the faith that the truth exists in all things.
Emerson’s third influence, action, is ubiquitous in each of the disciplines of The Noble Eightfold Path – wisdom, ethics, and mental discipline – and represents Dharma, the final Jewel of Buddhism. Dharma represents both the teachings of the Buddha and firsthand experience with the world. There is hardly a section of The American Scholar that does not address in some way the Wheel of Dharma – right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Thurman identifies the Buddhist Dharma as more than teaching. The Dharma is a scientific prescription designed to alleviate the suffering of the individual. As both psychology and philosophy, Buddhism does not provide the easy answer of instant salvation. Exploring the emotional and spiritual interior of your boundless soul is hard work. Freeing ourselves from the disease of “misknowledge” requires us to liberate ourselves from judgment and embrace compassion, first for ourselves then ultimately for all (Thurman, “Infinite Life” 34-35).
Acknowledging that the work is hard further necessitates the need for Sangha. The Western archetype of the monk, isolated and alone in a state of continuous meditation, suggests inactivity. Buddhist monasticism does not support that model. Mendicants are responsible for teaching, preserving, and guiding the rest of society. Most importantly, the Buddhist monk is forever on the path of personal enlightenment, and the bodhisattva works continuously for the enlightenment of others (Thurman, “Inner Revolution” 102-106).
Emerson, Buddha, and The Modern World
It is impossible to say exactly what Emerson knew of the eternal mission of Shakyamuni Buddha. Emerson’s intuition into the biased facets of Buddhism expressed by Western missionaries may have revealed knowledge deeper than expected for his time and place in history. Perhaps, like the Lotus flower, Emerson’s intellect rose through the murky waters of “misknowledge” to discover transcendental truth. The American Scholar, at the very least, shows a harmonic convergence of thought in its infancy.
In a very American way, Emerson laid the groundwork for a new discipline in Western culture. The liberation of the individual from society, the inquiry into nature, the knowledge of the past, and the actions of today sync harmoniously with the Wealth of Buddhism – Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Like Shakyamuni Buddha, Emerson’s appeal for America to take its place in the enlightenment movement of his time strikes a chord that resonates through the ages. In a modern world entrenched in ethnic cleansing, terrorist attacks, and endless war it may be hard to fathom a society that seeks first the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” of all its citizens. Such a society did exist, first in India, then in Tibet. Buddha’s revolution was not born on this continent, but, transplanted here, it remains a sapling growing in spite of its polluted environment. Emerson puts the responsibility of care and growth of this tree of “inner revolution” on the individual, and through our own transcedental inquiries we can ultimately eliminate suffering. As Emerson says, “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it” (Emerson, “Essays & Lectures” 68).
Works Cited
Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. New York: Viking Press, 1981.
Batchelor, Stephen. The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture. Berkeley, Calif: Parallax Press, 1994.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays & Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. The Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., 1983.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Richard Poirier. The Oxford authors. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press, 1990.
McAleer, John J. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
Richardson, Robert D. Emerson: The Mind on Fire : a Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
“Religion in America.” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity Nov 2007: 43.
Seager, Richard Hughes. Buddhism in America. Columbia contemporary American religion series. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Thurman, Robert A. F. Infinite Life: Seven Virtues for Living Well. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004.
—. Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.
Woodbury, Charles Johnson. Talks with Emerson. New York: Horizon Press, 1971.
