ABSTRACT
In a breezy note to his Concord neighbor Elizabeth Hoar on June 17, 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson included an announcement that proved to have major repercussions both for his own career as a writer and philosopher, and for the subsequent reception of Asian religions in the United States: “The only other event is the arrival in Concord of the ‘Bhagvat-Geeta,’ the much renowned book of Buddhism, extracts of which I have often admired but never before held the book in my hands.” 1 Emerson’s odd characterization here of the Bhagavad Gītā as a Buddhist text reveals much about the still rudimentary state of Western knowledge of Asian cultures in the early nineteenth century, particularly of Buddhism. But it should not diminish our sense of the cultural significance of this belated arrival of the Gītā in Concord or the importance of the heightened sense of expectation with which it was greeted by Emerson and, subsequently, his Transcendentalist friends. 2
