Radical Religion: A Peek Inside the Mystical Scriptures “Cabinet”

By Rebecca Kneale Gould | Edited by Gosia Sklodowska

Of the many characterizations of the Transcendentalist movement that remain lively today, one is that it was thoroughly protest-ant in multiple senses. First, Transcendentalism was a loosely structured movement engaged in multiple forms of protest against the status quo of mid-nineteenth-century New England, even in its most liberal circles. Additionally, the intellectual roots of Transcendentalism were also distinctly Protestant in the cultural-religious sense, although more accurately “post-Protestant” for those who had left the ministry (Emerson), never intended to join (Thoreau) or were prohibited from entering the fold (Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and other women). While many in Transcendentalist circles were in hot pursuit of new ideas about the self, literature, nature, divinity and what can be truly known by the mind (and how), their thinking and writing naturally reveals the Unitarian and even Puritan roots of their Idealist worldviews.

But when one opens the digital “cabinet” of the Transcendentalist “Mystical Scriptures,” we encounter a wide-ranging mosaic of texts that tell us much more than a strictly Protestant story.[i] Sources on Greek religion; Catholic, medieval mystical testimonies; translations of Chinese and Sanskrit texts all “sit” side by side as if eager to converse with one another. Many of these sources, as well as the original catalogue of the “cabinet,” appeared in the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, sometimes as extracts, often as foundations for the lively—and sometimes obscure— array of poems, essays, fiction and criticism that appeared throughout The Dial’s short tenure from 1840-1844. The Dial’s most notable legacy, however, was the serial publication of “Ethnical Scriptures” (where “ethnic” referred to non-Biblical sources) including Hindu, Persian, Chinese and Buddhist source material in English and French translations.[ii] Gazing into the “Mystical Scriptures” cabinet—particularly the “Ethnical Scriptures” source material—we discover an intellectual wildness and the unique building blocks of a dynamic story of interreligious spiritual seeking, one of the first of its kind in American history.[iii]

It bears mentioning, however, that some significant prior “proto-pluralist” groundwork was already laid well before the “Ethnical Scriptures” came to the attention of The Dial’s readers. In 1784, Hannah Adams, the first American-born woman to be publicly identified as an author, published her expansive A View of Religions, a text she would continue to revise and expand. With a commitment to interpretive neutrality that was stunning for its time, Adams brought non-Christian religions to the attention of an increasingly wider and more prominent readership.[iv] Similarly, the New England publication (beginning in 1817) of the captivating writings of Bengali scholar and polymath, Rammohan Roy, brought a “Hindoo” perspective to New England, although that perspective was hardly a “representative” one.[v] Roy’s excerpted writings set off a fiery debate in the Unitarian and Congregationalist press, ultimately making Roy’s work not so much a potential new voice in a nascent interreligious dialogue as an occasion for heated theological arguments that were already well underway. Unitarians were quick to claim Roy as one of their own (seeing in his critique of polytheism an echo of their complaint against Trinitarianism), while more orthodox Congregationalists hoped that Roy’s reformist impulse might “undermine the fabric of Hindoo superstition.”[vi]

Roy also captured the imaginations of various women in Transcendentalist circles. In 1821, Mary Moody Emerson wrote to young Waldo of an encounter with a visitor from India who had spoken favorably of Roy. Hinduism, to the extent that it reflected philosophical and religious idealism, intrigued Mary Moody in ways that presaged the flavor of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s encounters.[vii] In 1828, Margaret Fuller would write in a letter that she “passed a luxurious afternoon” reading Roy’s Precepts of Jesus, “framing dialogues aloud on every argument beneath the sun,” although, sadly, she doesn’t specify what precisely these arguments were.[viii]

Keeping these significant precedents in mind, for the purposes of this brief essay, I want to focus on those “Eastern” texts that are found in “the cabinet.” These texts engaged many (but not all) in the Transcendentalist circle and, in some cases, became the source material for the “Ethnical Scriptures” series that was first published in The Dial in July 1842.[ix] By examining the uses to which these Eastern texts were put, we can celebrate—and also critically evaluate—a unique moment in the mid-nineteenth-century when comparative religion can be said to have made a rather dramatic entrance onto the American religious and literary stage.

My phrasing “can be said to” is intentional here. What I want to convey is a kind of double resonance that we find upon engaging with these texts (The Hitopadesha of Vishnu Sharma, The Laws of Manu, The Analects of Confucius, among others). From the perspective of the 1840s, we can enjoy the frisson of religious innovation that is at hand. To dare to call anything but the Christian Bible “scripture” was a stunning—and potentially dangerous—move.[x] Even so, a closer examination of how—and to what purpose—the “Ethnical Scriptures” were deployed reveals how limited this comparative project actually was.[xi] The Transcendentalists often turned to both ancient and modern texts to affirm their preexisting convictions about inner divinity, the significance of self-culture, the dangers of industrialization, the needs of the laboring classes and our responsibilities to our nonhuman kin. Thoreau’s selections from the Laws of Manu give us one revealing illustration of the selective, and yet innovative, practices deployed by the authors and editors of “Ethnical Scriptures.” 

When Thoreau first peered into The Laws of Manu, he was entranced.[xii] In the Journal, he describes this “Hindoo Scripture” as a “fragrance wafted down from old times,” an ancient text that somehow conveyed “the laws of You and Me. . . . no more to be refuted than the wind” (emphasis mine).[xiii] What exactly was this fragrance? We gain something of a sense of it when we examine several excerpts that appear on the “Mystical Scriptures” website.[xiv] From his English Manu translation, Thoreau provides the following excerpt: “The soul is its own witness; the soul itself is its own refuge; offend not thy conscious soul, the supreme internal witness of men.” Further on we find: “If the vital soul be in amity with the divine soul, those two spirits sitting as assessors never disagree, his own heart is his internal witness.” In The Dial, Thoreau also includes an excerpt that emphasizes his own sense that divinity assuredly can be found within the self: “O friend to virtue, that Supreme Spirit, which thou believest one and the same with thyself, resides in thy bosom perpetually, and is an all-knowing inspector of thy goodness and thy wickedness.”[xv] If the “Unitarian Pope,” Andrews Norton, found Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” to be the “latest form of infidelity,” one wonders what he might have said about the Scriptures that Thoreau obviously admired.

Thoreau’s selections from Manu also reflect his interest in asceticism as an internal discipline that sharpens the imagination while simultaneously questioning the dominant, acquisitive culture of his day. “The resignation of all pleasures is far better than the attainment of them” and “[although] permitted to receive presents, let him [the Brahmin] avoid a habit of taking them; since by taking many gifts, his divine light soon fades” are two illustrative excerpts that seem to speak directly from ancient India into Thoreau’s milieu. Indeed, sometimes it seems that Thoreau looks to Manu—particularly in passages about virtue—for descriptions of a Brahmin that closely resemble himself, as in: “An earthen water-pot, the roots of large trees, coarse vesture, total solitude, equanimity toward all creatures, these are the characteristics of a Brahmin set free.” These excerpts would sound familiar to readers of Walden or A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Their emphasis on inner divinity and on non-attachment to outcomes, possessions and desires resonate with Thoreau’s spiritual project and his quest for freedom. 

Nevertheless, with the exception of a magisterial and evocative story of creation (Book I), which sets the terms for what is to follow, the actual text of Manu has only moderately to do with inner spiritual disposition per se. While references to the inner divinity (atman)—or “soul” as it is translated by Jones— are plentiful, as are reminders of the virtues of non-attachment, the bulk of the text of Manu is precisely what its title suggests: a legal code. The “laws” delineated in the course of the text range from the details of daily dharmic conduct for everyday members of the “twice-born” classes (guidelines for study, maintaining purity when eating, conducting life-cycle rituals) to more particular “legal” guidance for kings and judges, as well as overviews of grounds for litigation in various categories (debts, property, violent crime, expectations of husbands and wives). 

Moreover, this legal code—embracing both spiritual principles and everyday practices—is a very particular and undeniably hierarchical one, speaking to the duties (dharma) of the various classes (varnas), especially as keyed to a man’s various stages of life (ashrama). The profusion of details that constitute varnashramadharma accounts for the majority of Manu. Shaving ceremonies, ancestral offerings, acceptance of food and gifts, grounds for litigation, compassionate acts toward animals, the proper occupations of the four varnas, the consequences of associating with outcasts—these are the kinds of subtopics that appear across the ten (out of twelve) chapters that constitute the text.

Thoreau’s familiarity with Eastern texts was striking for its time, but his writings fall short of demonstrating any textured sense of the sociocultural context of Manu, whether in the time of its composition or in the time of Jones’ translation, when much of Manu’s guidance was still in play. Thoreau’s excerpts for The Dial mention the four varnas and briefly note expectations of men at different phases of life, but they offer scarce textual evidence to suggest any depth of understanding of the lived religion of those called “Hindoo.”[xvi]

If Thoreau had gleaned a sense, he might have been quick to object to much of what he found. Thoreau’s excerpts pertaining to the expectations of a Brahmin, for instance, lean heavily on ideal behavior and the cultivating of inner virtue (suggesting, perhaps, that some Brahmins might be behaving in ways that required some guidance?). But Thoreau’s other writings refrain from commenting on the strict hierarchies (and patriarchy) that were at work in every facet of Indian life.  Commenting on the sociopolitical tensions that were in play at the time of Manu’s composition (internal challenges to the hierarchy of the four varnas, as well as external challenges from rulers who were favorably inclined toward Buddhism), Patrick Olivelle observes that “one cannot fail to see and to feel the intensity and urgency with which the author defends Brahmanical privilege.”[xvii] Thoreau might have chafed at such reassertion of privilege had he been aware of it.

Thoreau’s understanding of what the “Hindoos” might offer him was radical in terms of how seriously and approvingly he engaged with the texts he read. At the same time, his perspective was also limited to what was available to him through the texts he had access to and colored by the Western cultural lens through which he and other Transcendentalists read them. It bears noting, however, that Hannah Adams’s portrait of Hinduism contains a level of detail that Thoreau was either unaware of or chose not to convey to his readers.[xviii] When Thoreau speaks of Manu saying, “I remember the book as an hour before sunrise,” his use of the word “remember” is revealing.[xix] While his mind was certainly expanded—indeed, “blown”—by his explorations in ancient Eastern texts, Thoreau searched for those insights that he sensed he already knew, if only he could recall them. 

Reflecting on the religious radicalism of the Transcendentalists has brought me back to a question with which I have long been engaged: what exactly is the task of “doing” comparative religion, whether in academic circles, the public square or more private spiritual quests? Essential to the task, in my view, is the rigorous pursuit of historical and cultural specificity, resisting the temptation to conclude that “all religions, at heart, are basically the same,” even when such conclusions are deployed toward laudable efforts in peacemaking, mutual understanding or simply the pursuit of the Universal in the Emersonian sense.[xx] It means studying not just texts, but rituals, social structures, cultural complexity and how the vicissitudes of daily life are negotiated religiously both by religious professionals and by “ordinary” men and women. It also requires learning enough of a particular religious language that we preserve the nuances that can be lost in translation (thus we speak of karma, dharma, ahimsa, satyagraha without always reconceptualizing them via our native tongues). 

The Transcendentalists did little of this kind of truly comparative work. As scholars have long observed, the Transcendentalists peered into Eastern texts to find what they—at least partially—already knew.[xxi] Of course, the Transcendentalists lacked many of the contemporary linguistic, historical and methodological tools that would have even enabled the kind of comparative work that we expect of scholars today. Nor were these more nuanced approaches widely pursued in their times. None of this is terribly surprising, nor do I see it as grounds for the dismissal of any of these visionary reformers. 

Instead, we might better praise the Transcendentalists for making a small, but dramatic, intervention in the course of American religious history.[xxii] Together (although seldom in unison), they took bold steps to start a genuinely pluralist conversation. To do this, they gathered, they talked, they traded books, they imported libraries and they earnestly published excerpts of texts that were then republished in wider circles. In the face of exhaustion and financial strain—particularly for women such as Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody—they worked tirelessly at transformation and reform.[xxiii] They conducted all of this considerable labor through a particular cultural lens, the lens of New England Protestantism, yet they did so while yearning for a new, dynamic post-Protestant future. 

Although it is my task as a scholar to discern where and how our biases and limitations show up when we engage with the religious traditions of the world, when I peer into the “Mystical Scriptures,” limitation is not what I primarily see.  Instead, I see quest, adventure, openness, discovery, risk, vulnerability and boundless curiosity.  That’s the kind of Transcendentalist legacy that I want to take up and take with me. With luck, I won’t be alone.  

[i] Sklodowska, Gosia. Mystical Scriptures: The Transcendentalists’ Cabinet of Mystic and Theosophic Lore. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.  The texts listed (and linked) on this website include: the Alcott-Lane Library, the personal libraries of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Bronson Alcott, a reconstructed record of Margaret Fuller’s reading and the circulating catalogue of the Foreign Library kept by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody at 13 West Street in Boston.  Also included are short excerpts from the “Ethnical Scriptures” that were published in The Dial.

[ii]  As Emerson opined in his introduction to “Veeshnoo Sharma” (the “author” of the accompanying Hindu text, the Hitopadesha): “Each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been willing or able in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of other nations. . . bring[ing] together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment in different ages and races” (The Dial, July, 1842). Revealingly, Emerson expresses his wish that this grand collation “is to be done by religion and not by literature.”

[iii]  While published after the appearance of the “Ethnical Scriptures,” Lydia Maria Child, in her The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages (1855), broke significant barriers in attending to “world religions” in her work with the intention (echoing Adams) of respectfully representing non-Christian traditions, even while ultimately championing Christianity as the most evolved form of religious expression. 

As Lydia Moland aptly characterizes Child’s work (and a similar claim could be made for Adams): “Her scholarship was heroically impartial for her time, but her preference for Greek and Christian worldviews is unmistakable.” Child’s reviewers, Moland notes, “went in the other direction,” often complaining that Child “had not shown Christianity triumphant enough,” as exemplified by a Christian Examiner reviewer who claimed that Child’s work “was simply a ‘geography of heathenism.’ ” Lydia Moland, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 282. 

The publishers and contributors to the “Ethnical Scriptures” in The Dial faced similar challenges, but their direct praise for the spiritual value of non-Christian traditions was, when compared to Adams and Child, more theologically radical. That said, their portraits of these traditions (in The Dial, in lectures and essays and in Thoreau’s Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) are, to my mind, more suggestive, allusive and de-contextualized, when compared to the detailed research offered by Adams and Child. 

I am indebted to Gosia Sklodowska for telling me the stories of both Hannah Adams and (below) Abner Kneeland. 

[iv] Adams published a second, expanded edition in 1791 and her continued research culminated in a fourth edition with a new title, Dictionary of all Religions and Religious Denominations (Boston: James Eastburn and Company and Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1817). It was this last edition that Unitarians and Transcendentalists most likely would have consulted.

Adams represents what I call a “proto-pluralist” stance, reaching as far toward pluralism as one imagines she could have from the place, time and existing Christian commitments that together forged her religious context. For example, in the “Advertisement” placed at the beginning of her book, Adams lists her four self-imposed “rules” for her literary “performance.” She writes first of her resolve “to avoid giving the least preference of one denomination above another; omitting those passage in the authors cited, where they pass their judgment on the sentiments, of which they give an account; consequently, the making use of any such appellations, as Heretics, Schismatics, Enthusiasts, Fanatics, &c. is carefully avoided.” In rule number four, Adams declares her commitment to quote directly and accurately from the authors of the sources she consults and when forced to summarize to “take the upmost care not to misrepresent the ideas” (Adams, Dictionary of All Religions [1817 edition], i). 

At the same time, the challenges of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interpretive limits—ones that we would expect to find even in liberal New England circles—emerge, at times, in her writing. Revealing an unsurprising preference for monotheism, Adams’ discussions of “the religion of the Hindoos” illustrates her discomfort with devotional rituals accorded to multiple gods. She writes: “The religion of the Hindoos, though involved in superstition and idolatry, seems to have been originally pure, inculcating the belief of an eternal and omnipotent being . . . .” (Adams, Dictionary, 110). This is a particular version of Hinduism that Roy (discussed below) also sought to convey. 

[v]Roy’s name received multiple spellings in the West including Rammohun and, in India, Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Indeed, while no single author from India could have been able to give New Englanders a “representative” view of the many forms of Indian religion flourishing on the subcontinent, Roy—later known as the founder of the “Hindu Renaissance”—was distinctive in his views. Roy’s writing supported but one strand of multi-stranded Hindu thought: the elite, philosophical school of Vedanta which prioritizes the singular, invisible force of Bhraman (“Ultimate Reality”) and de-emphasizes the significance of the incarnated deities such as Shiva and Vishnu. Meanwhile, daily ritual honoring of these and other deities (and their multiple avatars) constitutes the primary lived religion of devotees throughout the regions of India.

New England readers were introduced to Roy when his introduction to his Translation of an Abridgement of the Vedant, was extracted in the British press and then republished in the Boston Recorder (Trinitarian) and the Christian Disciple (Unitarian). Michael Altman quips that upon reading Roy’s opening words “To the Believers of the only True God,” the respective readers of the Recorder and the Disciple, of course, assumed that Roy was speaking only to them. See Altman, “Before Hinduism: Missionaries, Unitarians, and Hindoos in Nineteenth-Century America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Summer 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2, 276. Altman’s work, along with Alan D. Hodder’s earlier, “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1988, 133–48) together provide an excellent overview and analysis of Roy’s impact on the New England Christian and Transcendentalist world. It bears noting that it was not only Roy’s thought, but also his reformist impulses—especially with respect to education and the rights of women—that appealed to the Unitarians and Transcendentalists.  Once again, I wish to thank Gosia Sklodowska for reminding me of Roy’s influence and providing me with these articles. 

[vi] Altman, “Before Hinduism,” 277.

[vii]  See Phyllis Cole’s discussion in her Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 169–70. In that same letter to Waldo, Mary Moody emphasizes her own view of the underlying “doctrine of universal presence and agency of One God” that lies underneath the incarnations of Vishnu that she was shown by her visitor, and notes “a strange resemblance with the Christian facts.” Cole clearly establishes the extent to which Mary Moody directly influenced Waldo’s growing knowledge of Eastern traditions, although he seldom publicly acknowledged his aunt’s influence. See also Hodder’s discussion of the same letter, 133–34.

[viii]Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Volume I: 817-38, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 155. Fuller’s letter was addressed to Susan Prescott. 

Richardson notes that Thoreau was also an avid reader of Roy, including Roy’s Translation of Several Principal Books, Passages and Texts of the Vedas, where Thoreau focused especially on the Upanishads. See Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 205–6. In various primary sources (which gets repeated in some secondary literature), Roy is often described as a Christian Unitarian “convert,” which suggests wishful thinking on the part of some Unitarians. Roy remained an Indian reformer who drew on liberal Western thought to serve his reformist work.

[ix] The Dial, vol. 3, no. 1 (July 1842).

Apparently the generally radical Theodore Parker denounced the “Ethnical Scriptures,” speaking out against the “absurdities in the Indian Vedas,” claiming that Emerson “exaggerates their merits, and misleads himself by their bizarréries.” This strikes me as a rare blind spot for Parker.  Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 245, fn. 8). In quoting Parker, Myerson relies on John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (New York: Appelton, 1864), Vol. I, 364.

[x] Megan Marshall notes that in the wake of Emerson’s incendiary “Divinity School Address,” (1838) and the subsequent outcry of “blasphemous” and “heretical” that followed (from the Divinity School’s old guard), Elizabeth Palmer Peabody feared for Emerson’s safety. That same summer, the self-described “pantheist” free-thinker, Abner Kneeland, had been imprisoned for blasphemy (five years after publishing his views in his self-founded magazine, The Boston Investigator). See Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 346.  

Clearly, Peabody had genuine reasons to be concerned. Publishing “Ethnical Scriptures,” it would seem, was a yet more dangerous move, although Peabody herself worked on the project, including translating a French translation of the Lotus Sutra which was published in The Dial as “The Preaching of the Buddha” in 1844 (see Marshall, 425 and 571, correcting a former misattribution of this translation to Thoreau). Nevertheless, compared to the heated public response to the “Divinity School Address,” the publication of “Ethnical Scriptures” was met with vocal, but not overwhelming, concern about “blasphemy” and “heresy.” See Myerson, 77-99.

[xi]  See my prior discussion in footnote 2. 

It is worth noting that even in their own cultural contexts these texts would not be seen as the equivalent of what is deemed “scripture” in the West. The purported sayings of Vishnu Sharma (as conveyed by Narayana) amounted to popular, folk-tale style ethical guidance, but they were not given anything like the kind of sacred authority that the Vedas held. Even the revered and influential Laws of Manu (or Manusmriti) do not quite carry what we might call full “scriptural” weight. Texts known as smriti are known as “that which is remembered” or recorded, which is still a step away from the more authoritative shruti “that which is revealed.”

[xii] Sir William Jones first translated The Laws of Manu in 1794. The edition that Thoreau consulted in the 1840s was a later edition of Jones’ original translation, reformulated into a new edition “collated with the Sanscrit text,” edited by Graves Chamney Haughton. William Jones, trans. Institutes of Hindu Law; or, the ordinances of Menu, according to the gloss of Culluca (2 Vols.; London: Rivington & Cochran, 1825).

The name “Manu” is eponymous and the historical author of the text (produced sometime between the first century BCE and the second century CE) is unknown. Nevertheless, a figure named “Manu” was often mentioned as an authoritative law giver, perhaps the first human being and sometimes also the first king. See Patrick Olivelle’s “Introduction” to his 2004 translation, The Law Code of Manu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xxi. I am indebted to Frank Clooney for pointing me to this translation and loaning me his personal copy.

[xiii]Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Volume I, Elizabeth Hall Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer and Thomas Blanding, eds.; John C. Broderick, General Editor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 311.

[xiv] These excerpts are a small, but revealing, subset of what was originally published in The Dial, vol. 3, no. 3 (January, 1843) which can be found via the links provided at the “Ethnical Scriptures” section of “Mystical Scriptures.”

[xv] This excerpt and the remaining ones discussed below are not on the Mystical Scriptures website, but they can be found in the linked issue of The Dial from which the website excerpts are taken.

[xvi] Meanwhile, as Lawrence Buell notes—in his discussion of Emerson’s poem, “Brahma”—Emerson sometimes actively changed the meanings of the Eastern texts that he read and referenced, for instance, “occidentalizing his sources by making Brahma speak of repudiating ‘heaven,’ and by deleting from the Katha Upanishad story its references to transmigration and ritual practices.” See Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 179–80.

[xvii]Olivelle, “Introduction,” The Law Code of Manu, xliii.

[xviii]Prior to Thoreau and Emerson, Hannah Adams also consulted Jones’ translation, likely the original 1794 edition.

The limitations of a Western lens included the assumption (shared by Emerson and others) that sacred texts play the same significant role in a Hindu context as they do in a Christian one (particularly the Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura) when, in fact, direct access to sacred texts (in Sanskrit) was largely reserved for Brahmins.

[xix] Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1: 311.

[xx] There are, of course, particular contexts (personal, liturgical and political) in which it is helpful not to pour cold, scholarly water on the good intentions of an individual or a movement that is making a case for the shared values of distinctive religious traditions.

[xxi] For the most detailed and analytically sophisticated discussion, see Alan Hodder, “ ‘Ex Oriente Lux’: Thoreau’s Ecstasies and the Hindu Texts,” The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 86, no. 4 (October, 1993), 403–38 and Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. See also the work of Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[xxii] See Diana L. Eck’s discussion of “The ‘Easting’ of Old New England,” in her A New Religious America: How a ‘Christian Country’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002 [first edition, Harper Collins, 2001], 94–96. See also The Pluralism Project at https://pluralism.org. I offer a deep bow of gratitude to Professor Eck for her mentorship and for decades of inspiring conversation on the topic of religious pluralism.

[xxiii] For an insightful discussion of Transcendentalist women’s labor and its personal costs, see Alice De Galzain’s “Pecarity, Then and Now: Margaret Fuller and Caroline Healey Dall as Editors of Periodicals,” The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, vol. 2, no. 1, Summer 2025, 1–17.