American Transcendentalism And Asian Religions

Arthur Versluis offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between the American Transcendentalists and Asian religions. He argues that an influx of new information about these religions shook nineteenth-century American religious consciousness to the core. With the publication of ever more material on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, the Judeo-Christian tradition was inevitably placed as just one among a number of religious traditions. Fundamentalists and conservatives denounced this influx as a threat, but the Transcendentalists embraced it, poring over the sacred books of Asia to extract ethical injunctions, admonitions to self-transcendence, myths taken to support Christian doctrines, and manifestations of a supposed coming universal religion.