Passage to India

Officially Hinduism entered America in 1893 when Swami Vivekananda's first words of address, "sisters and brothers of America", won thunderous applause at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. His mission of spreading the tenets of Hindu philosophy worldwide coupled with the efforts of Raja Ram Mohan Roy brought about the cross-cultural syntheses of Indo-American spiritual bonding. This had its genesis in the ancient Hindu scriptures - the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita - and went on to blossom in the minds of some of the greatest American writers of the 19th century - Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and many others.

Great minds, such as these, were relentlessly tortured by the differences between two seemingly disparate areas of human endeavour, namely, the spiritual consciousness (Purush) and the reality of existence (Prakrit). Unable to resolve the rift they eventually turned to Hinduism and found the answer in Chapter XIII verse 24 of the Gita:

"Dhyaanaynaatmani pashyanti kaychidaatmaanama atmanaa"

which means that meditation refines the intellect and expands it to realize the supreme spirit that dwells in every being. It is meditation which can lift us from the mundane existence (Prakrit) to attain one's true self (Purush) or the inner consciousness which is nothing but the manifestation of the Divine self.

Emerson called this Divine self the 'oversoul'. In his transcendental theory the oversoul, like Brahma in Indian philosophy, is all pervading and that every human soul partakes of this oversoul. Therefore, to reach this point of trance where one can perceive the god-head within, Emerson emphasizes the necessity of revering one's own self -

"Be true to thyself. Because every man has within him somewhat really divine".

Excerpt from his poem 'Brahma', too reflect the Upanishadic concept that the dark and the illumined all emanate from and merge into Brahma:

"Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished Gods to me appear…"

Like his friend Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was well read in the Vedic scriptures. Indophilia permeates his book Walden where he offers an example of one possible approach to realizing one's divinity, to fulfilling one's potential for ideal existence in the real world. He advises his readers to exercise their minds and create an idea of themselves as they might ideally be, and then find the means of making that idea, come true:

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;/ that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them".

In his Transcendental thoughts the world at large conglomerate into one big divine family. He finds beside his Walden pond "the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas…" their buckets "grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges".

The great American novelist Herman Melville, in his magnum opus Moby Dick, refers to the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of a whale, which sounded down to the utmost depths of the sea to rescue the sacred books. And in a later chapter, Melville returns to the same theme:

"When Brahma, or the God of Gods, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolusions, he gave birth to Vishnu, to preside over the work: but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnu before beginni ng the creation…were lying at the bottom of the waters."

The American poet laureate Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, freed American verse from the shackles of European conventions. Turning away from Europe, he turned toward Asia and wrote these lines in his famous poem 'Passage to India':

"Passage to India!
…Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?/ O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?/ Disportest thou on waters such as those?
Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas?
Then have thy bent unleash'd…"

Previous Articles

Join the Hinduism Forum