Buddhism: A Concise Introduction by Huston Smith

Author:Huston Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

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AMERICA THE BUDDHA FULL

It was in sources like William Jones’s Asiatick Researches that American writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson first discovered the mind of India. Yet as Jones’s own studies were confined to Hinduism, the Indian ideas that the American Transcendentalists picked up were largely Hindu. Buddhism had not yet been clearly extricated from its parent. Around 1840, Brian Hodgson, a British civil servant stationed in Nepal, happened upon a Sanskrit copy of an important Mahayana Buddhist Sutra, the Saddharma Pundarika (“Lotus of the True Teaching”). It found its way to Eugene Burnouf in Paris, whose French translation of it reached Emerson and Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1844, Thoreau published an English translation of it, and (figuratively speaking) the first faint strains of “America the Buddha Full” could be heard drifting across the waters of Walden Pond.1

Perhaps more significant for American Buddhism than what Thoreau translated, however, was the way he lived his life—his contemplative habits. Although Emerson was first, last, and always a writer, Thoreau, in addition to writing (his journals run to fourteen volumes), experimented with silence. “Ask me for a certain number of dollars if you will,” he said, “but do not ask me for my afternoons.”2 He tells us that he could sit alone for hours, listening to nature, doing nothing, just being. This wholly different kind of study deepened him, helping him grow, he said, “like corn in the night.”

Thoreau was certainly not the only American contemplative, but as historian Rick Fields says, he was one of the few to live contemplatively in a Buddhist way. That is to say, he was perhaps the first American to explore the nontheistic mode of contemplation that is the distinguishing mark of Buddhism.3 Perhaps it was a Buddhist sort of simplicity that caused Thoreau to remark that “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” and to add that “Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants.”4 And perhaps it was a Buddhist sort of gentleness that moved him to say, “I know some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ mentioned beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for love is the main thing.”5

One of the most potent seeds to be sown in the young American Buddha-field was the publication in 1879 of Edwin Arnold’s already alluded to rhymed-verse biography of the Buddha, The Light of Asia. Arnold was an English poet and journalist married to an American. He had lived in India for a time, retained a lively feel for its sights and sounds, and had been deeply impressed by the Buddha’s life—Asia’s candidate for the greatest story ever told. Informed by the available European scholarship on Buddhism, Arnold turned all these influences to marvelous account in a perceptive, highly sympathetic, and inspirational epic poem about the “World-honoured One.

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