Versluis Transcendentalism and Asian Religions

Maybe it was the time of day I read it, but this one gave its lack of confidence away by its length.  Nothing so simple need to take so long to communicate.  Basically, that with only primary texts, certain Transcendentalists, chiefly Emerson, but also Thoreau and Alcott appropriated a rather basic understanding of eastern religion to accommodate their religious outlook.  The work would have been much more compelling had the author chosen to stop proving his point and rather make some judgements about it.

The section on Emerson is tedious.  He painstakingly went through all of Emerson's notebooks and most basic conversations to find any shard of linkage to Eastern religions.  Although he proved his point that Emerson was clearly theologically a distant relative to some Asian thought, it seems to me that he missed making his point that these religions influenced Emerson, and rather ended up making the point that Emerson seemed to use them as a back-up justification of a part Christian, part Eastern world view that exorcised the ghost of Plato from Christianity's makeup.

The part on Thoreau was much better.  He starts it out by highlighting the contradictory views that  held toward the Eastern religions, and I was dreading the pages to come as they would have seemed to have been nullified of any value by the section's opening.  However, this section goes on to highlight all the times Thoreau integrated these philosophies into his work, going so far as to translate some of them (from French).  I found this interesting as the author had put so much value in the introduction to Emerson's affinity for these texts, but in the end, it was Thoreau who did more work with them, and oddly ended up walking away from them.

I wonder if Thoreau was the first to see Jesus as an avatar of Brama?  This would seem to me to be a pretty radical thought for the time and would seem to have mad Thoreau's understanding of (what we now call Hinduism) pretty deep, making his walking away more troubling.  Thoreau seemed to be less appropriating than understanding, when compared with Emerson.  Maybe his walking away was less of an abandonment than it was a sign of a wholistic integration.

The Alcott section starts dubiously, saying that you have to dig into his journals just to get a mention of Eastern scriptures, and it gets worse from there.  This section did not move the author's thesis, nor did it help me at all.

Melleville and Hawthorne were Gnostics, seeing a dualist if separation between right and wrong.  I'm not sure why they are here.  We're the Transcendentalists?

The last is Brownson, who took the middle way between Thoreau and Melville.  His position was that Christianity was essentially already lined up with Eastern thought and it had been corrupted or changed when it collided with Western or materialistic thought.  Brownson, therefore saw the integration of Eastern thought as appropriation, and unnecessary, paralleling my comment above regarding Emerson.

Of all of this, the early notion of Jesus as an avatar of Brama is the most interesting.  This work, as a whole was not compelling.