Walden PDF Flipbook (enhanced)

'How Thoreau's Walden Pond Mixed with the Ganges and Yoga Came to America with Swami Vivekananda.' 

One early morning in 1846, during the coldest days of a New England winter, Henry David Thoreau looked out the window of his small cabin on Walden Pond and saw about a hundred men cutting its ice into blocks. That ice was hauled by horse and wagon to a railroad that ran across the western edge of Walden Pond, packed into a boxcar, and taken to Boston, where it was loaded onto a clipper ship that sailed for Calcutta, India, arriving about four months later. Once there, that ice was purchased by grateful members of the East India Company. 

Thoreau had witnessed a small part of the global ice trade between New England and India during the latter part of the nineteenth century.

When Thoreau considered the ice of Walden Pond being shipped to India, his vision sailed on metaphors far beyond the scope of business. The 'waters' he imagined flowed both east and west and were composed not just of natural elements but of culture, religion, and philosophy.. Thoreau knew, that after arriving in Calcutta, the New England ice of Walden Pond would eventually melt in the sweltering heat of India and run downhill, where it would join with the sacred water of the Ganges. He wrote about this in Walden:

 "It appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay, drink at my well. In the morning, I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. 

"I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! There, I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

Thoreau imagined Walden Pond and the Ganges to be ‘mingled,’ encompassed by the same waters. The waters of Walden Pond represent the West, its unique culture, ideas of God, and what life is all about. The "waters of the Ganges" represented to him the religious philosophies of ancient India, epitomized in the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the two books he brought to his two-year retreat in the woods. These books contained the Eternal Law of life, what the Vedic civilization called the 'Sanatana Dharma,' the great theme of the Bhagavad Gita, and the subject of Thoreau's consideration throughout his stay at Walden. 

A few miles upriver from Diamond Harbor where the Walden ice was unloaded in Calcutta, stood the Dakshineswar Kali Temple on the banks of the Ganges. It was the home of Sri Ramakrishna, the great God-man of India, and his well-known disciple, Swami Vivekananda. On many occasions. Ramakrishna had told Vivekananda he had significant work to do in the world, and nearly fifty years after Thoreau's sojourn at Walden Pond, Vivekananda traveled to America for the World Parliament of Religions as a representative of India’s religious culture; bringing with him (symbolically), the waters of the Ganges (the ancient sacred culture of the Vedas-Bhagavad-Gita). Vivekananda was the first person to carry the Yoga of God-Realization to America. However, what he brought with him and what he taught has little resemblance to what is popularly called 'Yoga' today. 

This enhanced Flipbook PDF (movie, glossary, picture galleries) tells the story of these mingling waters. The book contains an introductory video and over 150 pictures, stories, and quotations of the people, events, and ideas that comprise the story of how Yoga first came to America.