The Turbaned Superman 35
concerning the Transcendentalists, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry
David Thoreau.^34 Emerson, as journal entries made in his younger days will attest,
initially appeared quite perturbed by the “Yoguees of Hindostan” and “their
extravagancies and practices of self torture”^35 though he later came to admire a
good number of Indian texts. However, while Emerson’s interest in India and its
religious literature was rather diffuse, Thoreau expressed a rather targeted inter-
est in Yogis, even going so far as to identify with what he believed to be their
ideologies. Of course, while the rest of America was busy absorbing missionary
accounts of widow burnings and frightful ascetics, Thoreau was sojourning at
Walden Pond and reading the Bhagavad Gītā. Thus, his notion of what it might
have meant to be a Yogi was perhaps rather different from the perspectives of
many of his contemporaries.
Whereas the chief manifestation of Indian ideolog y in Emerson’s work
appears as a kind of spiritual aesthetics, Thoreau had a more utilitarian approach.
He read the texts available to him as instruction manuals. While at Walden, he
appears to have tried his hand— or rather his head— at meditation, though to
unclear degrees of success. In an 1849 letter to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, Thoreau
writes:
Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the
yoga faithfully... . “The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in
his degree to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful
things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and, united to the
nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original mat-
ter.” To some extent, and at rare intervals even I am a yogin.^36The incorporated quotation, which Thoreau drew from a translation of the
Harivaṃśa, was a favorite of his.^37 To what extent Thoreau experienced such
visions and felt himself to be “animating original matter” remains ambiguous, but
such passages make it clear that he did make a genuine attempt to take his practice
beyond simple aesthetic contemplation. Thus, as Stefanie Syman has argued, we
can perhaps legitimately say that “Thoreau was a Yogi, in part, because he tried
to be one.”^38 Insomuch as Thoreau’s stance reflects a universalization of yogic
practice— oftentimes requiring a break with traditional lineage- based modes of
transmission and an ongoing transformation of ritual practice— he is certainly
among the first data points in a powerful trajectory of how yoga and Yogis have
been defined.
When Moncure Conway, Thoreau’s friend and admirer, eulogized him in
1866 as something like a Yogi, the old language of asceticism began to take on
rather new meanings. Referring to Thoreau’s time at Walden, Conway wrote: