The Gita within Walden by Paul Friedrich

This ebook explores and translates the myriad connections among non secular classics, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and the Bhagavad-Gita. proof exhibits that Thoreau took the Gita with him whilst he moved to Walden Pond, and the books have a lot in universal, referring to final moral and metaphysical questions. Paul Friedrich appears at how each one paintings speaks to basic difficulties of excellent and evil, self and cosmos, responsibility and fervour, fact and phantasm, political engagement and philosophical meditation, sensuous wildness and ascetic devotion. His exam strikes via a number of phases, from an research of key symbols, corresponding to the upside-down tree, to an exposition of social, moral, and metaphysical values, to a attention of the numerous resources of those syncretic works. This booklet could be of vigorous curiosity to these inquisitive about the origins of Indian and American proposal, activism, and poetry.

“By getting to the complexity and wonder of Thoreau’s argument … and studying via it to a blinding array of assets that incorporates the Gita, Friedrich not just illuminates the 2 books into account but additionally sheds a few gentle for writers and others engaged in trying to envision a social truth that's not permeated by means of violence.” — visible Artists Collective

“This is the main entire learn thus far of Henry David Thoreau’s vintage in terms of Hindu scripture.” — CHOICE

“Friedrich frames his learn round the use of metaphors, beliefs of behavior, rules of purity, and personality-based principles of advantage. greater than a e-book approximately books, it's also approximately cultures and authors.” — Lalita Pandit, coeditor of Literary India: Comparative reviews in Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture

Paul Friedrich is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and within the Committee on Social suggestion on the collage of Chicago. he's the writer of numerous books, together with From Root to Flower and song in Russian Poetry.