Vedic Influence in the West

Throughout history, the influence of the Vedas can be found in numerous civilizations around the world. In the past 200 years or so, after the West started to trade with India, the Vedic influence has penetrated Western philosophical thoughts. American thinkers and writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were inspired by Vedic literature. Emerson was known to have read the Bhagavad-gita, Vishnu Purana, Laws of Manu, etc. He wrote: "I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions that exercise us."

Henry David Thoreau is also an avid reader of Vedic literature and openly expressed his admiration for Vedic thought. He regularly read the Bhagavad-gita while staying at Walden Pond. He wrote: "In the morning, I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial." (Walden, Chapter 16)

Another recognized writer influenced by Vedic philosophy was T.S. Eliot, who studied at Harvard University under the Sanskrit teacher Charles Rockwell Lanman. At Yale University, the teaching of Sanskrit started even earlier.

Outside America, Indian philosophy was also received with great interest in other countries. Thinkers such as Max Mueller, Aldous Huxley of England, Romain Rolland of France, Leo Tolstoy of Russia, and Schlegel, Deussen and Schopenhauer of Germany, were all influenced by Vedic literature. In fact, Schopenhauer went as far as to predict that the Vedas would by accepted as the religion of the world one day.

{The above is an abstract from the book The Secret Teachings of the Vedas by Stephen Knapp.}