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 while he moved to Walden Pond, and the books have a lot in universal, referring to final moral and metaphysical questions. Paul Friedrich seems to be at how every one paintings speaks to primary difficulties of excellent and evil, self and cosmos, accountability and fervour, truth 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, akin to the upside-down tree, to an exposition of social, moral, and metaphysical values, to a attention of the various assets of those syncretic works. This publication could be of energetic curiosity to these eager about the origins of Indian and American notion, activism, and poetry.

“By getting to the complexity and wonder of Thoreau’s argument … and examining via it to a blinding array of assets that comes with the Gita, Friedrich not just illuminates the 2 books into consideration but in addition sheds a few mild 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 accomplished research thus far of Henry David Thoreau’s vintage on the subject of Hindu scripture.” — CHOICE

“Friedrich frames his learn round the use of metaphors, beliefs of behavior, rules of purity, and personality-based rules of advantage. greater than a booklet 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 notion on the college of Chicago. he's the writer of a number of books, together with From Root to Flower and track in Russian Poetry.