How Walden or, Life in the Woods drew on The Bhagavad Gita
A documented line of influence: Henry David Thoreau demonstrably engaged Vyasa’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Bhagavad Gita
Vyasa · c. 200 BCE
Ancient EastThe influenced
Walden or, Life in the Woods
Henry David Thoreau · 1854
The Age of the NovelRelevance
9/10
On Walden or, Life in the Woods’s page
- The philosophy Thoreau says he bathed his intellect in every morning at the pond
- Walden quotes it by name and praises it again in the "Economy" chapter — Thoreau kept it as a constant companion in the woods
- Read the Gita first and you hear its call to inward discipline and detachment running under Thoreau's whole experiment, mingling its Ganges with his pond water
On The Bhagavad Gita’s page
- Thoreau carried the Gita to Walden Pond as a constant companion — and named it inside the book it helped produce
- In Walden he writes of bathing his intellect each morning in "the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta"
- The detachment and inward discipline the Gita preaches became Thoreau's own model for a deliberate life