Emerson and Thoreau were steeped in Buddhism. One of Emerson’s first poems was called ‘Brahma’, and was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita. His Journals contain many references to Zoroaster, Confucius, the Hindus and the Vedas. On 1 October 1848 he wrote: ‘I owed…a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Geeta. 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 which exercise us.’
