Transcendentalists: Borrowing From Non-Western Cultures Term Paper

The similarities between the two perspectives - the Vedic and the Transcendentalist ones - start with the stress over the virtues of intuition when it comes to both social and spiritual knowledge. Truth must agree to an individual intuitive notion of truth, seem to say the Transcendentalists, and part of this truth can be found within nature. Maintaining a Christian approach (which means that the doubts they were expressing were connected rather to the teachings of the church than to the words of the Gospel), they held that religious knowledge is also a matter of intuitive abilities, rather than of rituals and practices. Later on, they started to question some aspects of the Bible, meaning the miracles described there, as being uncertainly of divine nature, but possible signs of pious mythology.

The concept of original sin was contradicted by the transcendentalist authors, who believed in the innate goodness of man and in the priority of individual spiritual insights and instincts, which is a clear deviation from the rules and dogma of the Church. In the social context of the Unitarian and Calvin communities from the 19th century America, this was a real challenge, and the opposition they had to face was increasingly growing.

The religious and philosophical aspects created debates even among the members of the movement. Some of them were more radical than others when it came to social reform (for example, Emerson refused to participate in the Brook Farms community, since he was having a more individualistic approach), some were more devoted to Christian traditions then others, who were more fascinated by the sacred texts of the Orient.

One of the strongest supporters of the Eastern ways of perception was Henri David Thoreau, who in promoting the Buddha to the same rank as Christ, in elevating the scriptures of the East alongside those of West, [...] was plainly striking a raw nerve. It was not the case, of course, that liberally educated readers of 1849 were unprepared for objections, in the abstract, to the ascendancy of Christian faith; what they found hard to take, though, was this brazen assault on Christian supremacy by way of a series of irrelevant comparisons with various preposterous Hindu, Buddhist or Chinese religious forms" (Hodder, 1993; 404)

For Emerson, on the other hand, the unity between the soul and the nature is announced even since the publication of his work "Nature." Here, he expressed that all the beings in the Nature are interconnected with each other and with the infinite Oversoul, or Nature. The reverberations of individual acts are felt within the entire system as consequences and the individual has not only the ability to decide autonomously about his acts, but also the duty to deal with the consequences of his own actions, when confronted to his own internal intuition, with his soul. These arguments are of Eastern origins and close to the Buddhist doctrine of individual responsibility, of the causal relation between one's actions and his own spiritual development.

The philosophy and evolution of the philosophical and religious perspective of Transcendentalist should be seen only within the larger frame of the dominant ideology of the time, of the epistemological barriers and rigid framework that were dominant in the universities of the time - let us not forget that most of the representatives of this trend were Harvard educated, young intellectuals. Moreover, when speaking about Transcendentalism, one should notice their influence as well - not only in the field of literature, where Emerson and Thoreau left a valuable work, but also in education, women's rights and other liberating movements.

Reference List www.emersoncentral.comThe Transcendentalist, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842, Retrieved March 10, 2007 at http://www.emersoncentral.com/transcendentalist.htm

Transcendentalism. (n.d.). The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/transcendentalism

Hodder, Allan D - "Ex Oriente Lux": Thoreau's Ecstasies and the Hindu texts, Harvard Theological Review, 86 (4), 1992, pp. 403-438

Hutchinson, William R. - the Transcendentalists as Church Reformers: Conflict and Experimentation in American Unitarianism, 1836-1853, Yale University,….....