The Gita in Walden

In the Walden chapter “The Pond in Winter,” Henry David Thoreau recounts a morning spent reading “the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy” of the classic Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita. “The pure Walden water,” he notes, “is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.” In this course we will study that curious “mingling” through a comparative reading of Walden and the Bhagavad Gita. As we read these texts side-by-side, we will consider their intellectual contexts of Transcendentalism and Hinduism, and trace the influence of both texts in such thinkers as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Annie Dillard, and others.