Transcendentalism

Hello Friends, 

This blog is my response to the task assigned to us by our teacher VaidehiMa'am on Transcendentalism, so read, learn and enjoy. Happy Learning!

Click here to view Teacher's blog

Q-1 Transcendentalists talk about Individual’s relation with Nature. What is Nature? Share your views. 

A-1 For me Nature is our natural surroundings like trees, birds, mountains, breeze, flowers, sky, Earth, etc. I like to 

"LOOK AT THE FLOWERS".

When I look at the flowers, I feel the presence of Nature, divine, the supreme power. 

"If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change."

Buddha

When we look at many flowers and plants, they give us a soothing effect upon us. They bring us calmness and gives us peace. Looking at the flowers eliminates our stress, helps to cure depression and brings us happiness. Birds flying, peacocks flying with its long feathers, white birds and colourful sky at dusk, All these are the beautiful aspects of Nature. I like to spent time in garden and with many flowers and trees, that's the most beautiful part of Nature for me. Every flying butterfly cheers our mood and brings a bliss. Every little puppy makes my heart jump with love and joy. The rains and the rainbow, it Nature's way of telling us that she's with us always as long as we take care of her. 

"Love Nature and Nature will love you."

Nature includes beautiful sunrise and the sunset, especially sometimes the beautiful pink rising sun in winter, red moonrise and moonset, full moon and stars twinkling in the dark night sky. 

We can see the Nature and its most powerful form in cyclone, floods, earthquakes, etc. This reminds that Nature is superior to us and more powerful than us. We're just tiny dots in this big universe. Nature controls our life and everything that includes in it and also death. We've to obey Nature and live in its harmony but we can never challenge Nature. 

Nature teaches us many important lessons of life. From spider we learn that inspite of many failed attempts, it succeeds in making its cobweb. So if we observe carefully, every element of nature teaches us something valuable. 

'It's never never too late to dream, to learn or to change. Like Nature have no excuses, Life is not easy but it can be rewarding."

Nature cures us in times of stress, Nature is the best doctor as well as a teacher. We find medicines of various diseases also from plants. Humans invented aeroplane by observing a flying bird and learnt to swim like a fish. So in this way we still can learn many more things from Nature. 

Even the Sun is also the most important part of Nature. The morning sunlight cheers our mood, decreases and eliminates stress, depression and all tensions of life. It even gives us vitamin D. So Sun and Moon play a very important role in our life. They also teach us important life lessons. From stars we learn that even in the darkness of life if we see carefully there are stars twinkling in it. Means there's something good in every worst situation of our life. 

In Nature all things are connected with each other. For example, if we see the Water Cycle, sun evaporates water in ocean and the clouds are formed, then they condense and come to Earth in form of rain water. 

Then if we see our own body is also a creation of Nature, then we see how different parts of body work together, various systems in our body are interdependent and work collectively and this is how we're healthy. 

In a rainbow various colours collect together and we see a beautiful rainbow in the sky. So there's beauty in unity.

So above  examples tells us that in any organization or family, we've to work together in order to get our work done. There're some things which can't be done alone. So we must learn to live in harmony with others and work effectively. 

We see how karma plays role even in Nature. So this teaches us to 

"Be Good, Do Good."

Nature teaches us to be humble and to never misuse our powers in whichever position we're in life. It teaches us to treat others as we would like to be treated in return. 

Q-2 Transcendentalism is an American Philosophy that influenced American Literature at length. Can you find any Indian/Regional literature or Philosophy came up with such similar thought?

Ans.

We do find similar Philosophy in Bhagwad Gita, Ramayan and in Bible too. 

In Gita, it's said that 

This body is not ours nor we belong to this body. It's made up of fire, water, soil (Earth), sky and air and in end after death it'll mix with these only. So we're made of Nature and we'll go back to Nature. Nature is our creator and destroyer. 

In Bible also after the new life that Jesus Christ gets on Easter day is in the form of flowers, eggs and new birds from them, we see nature very much live. Flowers bloom and birds chirp and Easter is celebrated as a renwal in nature in the form of Christ.

In Ramayan also we see that when Lakshmana fell unconscious, near death, hit by an arrow from Ravana’s son Meghnad, Hanuman approached the Lankan Royal Physician Sushena for advice.

Sushena asked Hanuman to rush to Dronagiri Hills and fetch four plants: Mruthasanjeevani (restorer of life), Vishalyakarani (remover of arrows), Sandhanakarani (restorer of the skin) and Savarnyakarani (restorer of skin colour) (Srimad Valmiki Ramayana, 74th chapter, Yuddakanda, Slokas 29-34).

Hanuman, not able to pick the four from the multitude, brought back the entire hill. And Lakshmana was revived from near death back to life, and to victory.

A view the western ghat from NH No. 48 at Shirady Ghat section on Dakshina Kannada-Hassan border in Karnataka. Photo: A.J.Vinayak | Photo Credit: A.J.Vinayak

So Nature plays very vital role in our religious scriptures and even in our daily life too. 

Kadamba and Lord Krishna:

Kadamba is mentioned in most of the Indian mythological and historical literature. The tree is associated with Lord Krishna. Radha and Krishna are supposed to have conducted their love play in the hospitable and sweet-scented shade of the Kadamba. In his younger days, Krishna performed most of his famous ‘Raas-Lila’ and also played his mesmerizing flute (Bansuri) under this particular tree.

Now let's see some writers from across the world, and their interaction with Indian thought and spirituality

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

American Transcendentalist poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s interest in Indian thought spanned the greater part of his life and career, roughly from 1820 to 1870. He was drawn to both Indian poetry and philosophy — Kalidasa and Vedanta, the latter as a reaffirmation of Transcendentalism, which was ultimately an act of experiencing the world, set against the intellectual and spiritual vacuity that it came to perceive in social institutions, including the church, university and politics.

What Emerson took from India, he preserved remarkably unaltered. His poem ‘Brahma’ – about the pure being, unknowable and formless – bears this out:

The strong gods pine for my abode,

…But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

The Transcendental seeker, like the karmayogi, must perform the selfless deed, which is greater than the merely good deed that brings the doer the lesser reward of heaven.

 Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)

A German-born Swiss novelist and poet, Hesse’s life and work was characterised by a deep spirituality and search for the self. His family was Protestant-Pietist, and consisted of theologians and preachers: his parents’ and grandfather Dr Hermann Gundert’s missionary work in India meant the young Hesse was exposed to both Hinduism and Buddhism. Much later, his study of German philosopher Schopenhauer led to his reading of the Bhagavad Gita.

Hesse’s understanding of both Buddhism and Hinduism is often criticised as homogeneous and facile but Siddhartha – his novel based in India that tells the story about the spiritual journey of a young boy who was a contemporary of the Buddha – remains much-read, a work in which his familiarity with Indian spiritual thought is most apparent.

WB Yeats (1865-1939)

Yeats’ fascination with Indian spiritual thought was shaped by his acquaintance with a number of individuals. While his friend painter George Russell introduced him to eastern thought and mysticism, his interest was also sharpened by the theosophist Madame Blavatsky, as well as Mohini Chatterjee, whose lecture in Dublin on Upanishadic philosophy Yeats had attended in December 1885. Years later, in 1928, Yeats would write a poem called ‘Mohini Chatterjee’; his ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’ show the distinct influence of Chatterjee’s Hindu belief, albeit with a western twist. (As academic P Lal points out, ‘Mohini Chatterjee would have smiled at that’.) With Rabindranath Tagore, Yeats maintained an epistolary relationship till 1930, writing the introduction to Gitanjali in which he had found “a world I had dreamed of all my life long”. Later, his familiarity with Shree Purohit Swami allowed him to work closely with both Vedantic and yogic philosophy as he translated and wrote introductions to the Swami’s works.

TS Eliot (1888-1965)

Eliot’s interest in eastern philosophical traditions stems from his student days at Harvard University: it is estimated that one third of his graduate course work was devoted to Asian philosophy and philology, from Patanjali’s metaphysics to Buddhist studies in China and Japan. Later, speaking of his formative years, he had famously remarked that the intellectual subtleties of the great Indian philosophers made “most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys”.

It is not surprising then that both Hindu and Buddhist influences are scattered throughout his body of literary work, in imagery and metaphors, even when he had stopped actively pursuing Indic thought and traditions. The more famous instances? The triple benediction offered at the end of The Waste Land (shantih shantih shantih), the Upanishadic advice of datta (give), dayadhvam (compassion) and damyata (self-control) that come just before it, to ‘The Dry Salvages’ section of The Four Quartets, which echoes Krishna’s advice to Arjuna at Kurukshetra.

W Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

In December 1937, when Maugham, the British novelist, playwright and short story writer set sail for India, he was already a famous and successful man. But despite his life of plenty, he wasn’t happy. He had started taking an interest in Indian spirituality and carried with him books on Hindu philosophy and LD Barnett’s translation of the Upanishads.

Early in 1938, he arrived at the ashram of Ramana Maharshi, a few hours away from Madras. The Maharshi would serve as the model of Shri Ganesha in The Razor’s Edge (1944), a sage who guides WWI ace pilot Larry Durrell to salvation, after the latter is traumatised by his war experiences. The epigraph to the novel is chosen from a verse in the Katha Upanishad. Maugham himself does not seemed to have gained as much as his hero: a fainting incident he underwent at the ashram was interpreted widely as a spiritual experience though Maugham always insisted he had no such recollection.

Octavio Paz (1914-1998)

A Mexican poet and writer who won the Literature Nobel in 1990, Paz was a career diplomat. In 1952, he travelled to India for the first time, visiting Mathura, which led to his long poem Mutra, a “subject associated with Hinduism and its search for unity in the plurality of the forms of life”. In 1962, he was appointed Mexico’s ambassador to India (he resigned six years later, in protest against the Mexican government’s massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco).

His essay In Light Of India, which deals with India’s painting, music, architecture, philosophy and religion, rests on how a Mexican writer at the end of the twentieth century perceives the reality of India while his poems on India are collected in East Slope (Ladera Este). Paz was interested in Tantra, with Tantric thought and imagery permeating his works; his understanding of Vedanta and Buddhist religious philosophy is apparent in essays he wrote on those subjects.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986)

The playwright-novelist, English born but American by citizenship since 1946, embraced Vedanta with a passion and severity that matched his equally passionate rejection of Christianity earlier in life. He collaborated with Swami Prabhavananda, the founder and head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, all his life, most importantly, co-translating Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God, which carried an introduction by Aldous Huxley. Isherwood wrote a large number of articles, mostly on Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramhansa, in ‘Vedanta and the West’, the official journal of the Vedanta Society, some of which were later compiled into a book called Vedanta for the Western World. In the 1974 Paris Review interview, Isherwood admitted that Vedanta had “made a very great difference” to his life, including influencing his literary work, and that at one point, he had toyed with the idea of becoming a monk himself.

2,164 Words

Works Cited

1. BALASUBRAMANIAN, D. "In Search of the Sanjeevani Plant of Ramayana." The Hindu, 10 Sept. 2009, www.google.co.in/amp/s/www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/In-search-of-the-Sanjeevani-plant-of-Ramayana/article16880681.ece/amp/?espv=1.

2. Das, Antara. "Ten Writers And Their Interaction With Indian Thought And Spirituality." Swarajyamag, 12 Apr. 2015, swarajyamag.com/culture/ten-writers-and-their-interaction-with-indian-thought-and-spirituality.

3. "Growing Kadamba – Lord Krishna’s Favourite Tree." Gardening Ideas, Tips, Trends and Information - Ugaoo.com Blog, 30 Oct. 2018, www.ugaoo.com/knowledge-center/growing-kadamba-lord-krishnas-favourite-tree/.