Should You Withdraw from the World or Engage with It?

The Isha Upanishad's first verse inspired Emerson and Thoreau across an ocean.

Īśā Upaniṣad vs Emerson and Thoreau. Live in the world, act fully, but do not cling. American Transcendentalism was built partly on this principle, read across an ocean in translation.

The Study in Concord

On an evening in the summer of 1845, in a small New England village called Concord, Massachusetts, a 42-year-old former Unitarian minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson sat down in his study with a borrowed book. The book was an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, printed in 1785 by Charles Wilkins, a clerk of the British East India Company. It had traveled from Bengal to London, from London to Boston, and finally to the shelves of the Emerson family library in Concord. The lamp was lit. The house was quiet. On the desk lay his journal, a half-finished essay, and a stack of letters he had not yet answered.

Emerson had spent most of the past decade looking for a spirituality that was not Christian in the narrow sectarian sense, not dependent on any church, and that treated the interior life as the central fact of religion. He had given up the ministry in 1832 after refusing to administer communion. He was forty-two years old and still looking.

That summer he wrote in his journal, in a hand now preserved at the Houghton Library at Harvard, that the Gita was 'the first of books', 'as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.' Reading it, Emerson felt he had met someone who, three thousand years earlier, had already answered the question he was still trying to form.

That question is the subject of this lesson. Emerson caught half of its answer. He did not catch the other half. The gap between the Upanishad and the American who fell in love with it is what the rest of the lesson is about.