Bookmarks: ‘American Veda’ by Philip Goldberg

Long before the Fab Four embraced the East, there were the Fab Three — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Philip Goldberg’s “American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation — How Indian Spirituality Changed the West� (Harmony: 386 pp., $26) is an authoritative, engaging survey of why, starting with these three venerable American thinkers, the flowers of Eastern practices have thrived in Western soil.

When he set foot in Harvard Divinity School a century and a half ago, Emerson had a shattering realization about Christianity. His discovery of Eastern texts “dispelled once for all the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation — for here in India, there in China, were the same principles, the same grandeurs, the like depths.� Goldberg teases out the karmic principles in Emerson’s writing, among others; chapters move like a succession of ocean swells, easily accessible, and Goldberg applies sharp strokes of the brush to capture particular viewpoints or dilemmas. “Tibetan Buddhists compare gurus to fire,� he writes of the scandalous behavior of some yogis, “stay too far away, and you don’t get warm; venture too close, and you can be burned.�

Goldberg traces the “vedization of America� using the lives of various figures — among them Mary Baker Eddy and a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson — as steppingstones to the present. The popularity today of all things Eastern, including retreats, mala beads, mindful eating and yoga, is a hopeful sign, he says, that we are experiencing a genuine “uptick in interreligious and interethnic harmony.�

— Nick Owchar