The Hidden Sutra

I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ll be sharing occasional cultural essays here again, when something feels worth thinking through. I hope you enjoy this!

The Hidden Sutra

1. There is a subterranean Indic resonance in American literature, a hidden sutra, which begins in the nineteenth century when American writers encounter the Bhagavad Gītā and other Hindu and Buddhist texts in translation, and that continues to sound through poetry, essays, and song to this day. This resonance deepens over time, sometimes meeting ambivalence and contestation, but more often remaining submerged or ignored.

An Old Forest Practice

2. It begins in a lush thicket, redolent of smoke from kitchen fires. A husband, Yājñavalkya, is renouncing the world and leaving his two wives behind. He will beg alms, wipe the rain from his brow, and transcend his mortal coil. He asks his wives — Katyayana and Maitreyi — to divide his wealth between them. Maitreyi, always the spiritually curious one, asks, “Will I attain immortality through wealth?” “No,” says Yājñavalkya. Immortality, or rather, realizing the immortal divinity within, requires something else: “The Self, my dear Maitreyi, should be realized—should be heard of, reflected on, and meditated upon; by the realization of the Self, my dear, through hearing, reflection, and continuous contemplation, all this is known.”[i]

3. This utterance from Yājñavalkya becomes the basis of the three-fold spiritual path of Advaita Vedanta. The goal of Advaita Vedanta is self-realization, the recognition one is non-different from Brahman, the underlying principle of the universe. The divinity within is the same as the divinity without, and there is only divinity. Śravaṇa means listening to the Upanishads. Manana means reflecting on what you’ve listened to. Nididhyāsana means contemplating the teaching until it transforms perception and becomes an embodied reality, so that one can proclaim, “Aham Brahmasmi,” – I am Brahman.

4. This three-fold path offers an interpretive lens to understand how Indic literature wove itself into American consciousness and formed, as the T.S. Eliot scholar Cleo Kearns wrote, a “constitutive” element of its literature – and not merely an adornment.[ii] In the 19th century, Americans like Henry David Thoreau listened to Indic texts, largely in translation. In the 20th century, they reflected more deeply on them, by either visiting India, as did Allen Ginsberg, or through the study of Sanskrit, as did T. S. Eliot. In the 21st century, Americans of the diaspora have embodied the teaching, bringing down Brahman into the households, inflaming the subtle current and forging a novel poetics.

5. Why do I call this sutra “hidden”? In the urge to assert Western originality, there has been a centuries-long effort to suppress Indic sources, or, where this has proved impossible, to relegate them to mere “ornamentation” to an originality said to emerge from native loins. Philip F. Gura, author of the definitive history of American Transcendentalism[iii] — the post-Christian movement that centered the inner divine against the angry Puritan deity — does not mention the Bhagavad Gītā or any other Indic source in his account. His narrative remains Western-centric, focused on German Romanticism (itself already marked by the hidden sutra) and American Unitarianism. Catherine L. Albanese, the major scholar of American metaphysical religion, cannot evade the effect of Indic texts and yoga on Thoreau, yet nonetheless concludes that it is “overambitious” to call him fully a yogin, since he read texts from other traditions.[iv] There is a persistent cultural reflex to tamp the flame whenever it rises and crackles in the American hearth.

American Lack

6. The Buddhist scholar of nonduality, David Loy, coined the term “lack” to refer to the existential feeling of incompleteness caused by misunderstanding the nature of self.[v] In Buddhist philosophy, and unlike in the Upanishads, the self is a phantom construction. We go on attempting to bolster this phantom self through pleasures, acquisitions, and even spiritual effort, and yet a sense of dukkha, a craving for more, persists. The American lack emerged when poets and writers stood before the bounty of American forests and rivers and had no transcendental grammar to animate it; when they sought a vocabulary to articulate a spontaneous, post-Christian mysticism, freed of Biblical cadence.

7. Before the Romantic poets began their siren-call and the Bhagavad Gītā landed in Boston Harbor, Americans had in their ears the fiery sermons and poems of the Puritans, the infernal smoke rising from the pages. Jonathan Edwards, preaching in 1741, warned: ‘The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.’[vi] Anne Bradstreet’s poetry was the purest moral exemplum, where good behavior in the vale of tears foreshadowed heavenly rewards: “Then straight I gin my heart to chide,/And didst thy wealth on earth abide?”[vii] Fixated on a future state, brimming with both fear and hope; not of the rising New England forests; not of the plains; not of the now. To be fair, some poets and preachers sang of Quaker inner light, but the mystical elements of Protestantism offered experience scaffolded with eschatology.

8. Americans tried to solder off the Puritanical chains throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries. Jefferson, sunburned with Enlightenment chatter, scissored the New Testament into a small book of moral tenets; Unitarianism, the popular New England sect, stripped Jesus of his supernatural garb and rendered him a wise man and a moral preacher.

Listening

9. The first verse that Thoreau scribbled into his journals from the Bhagavad Gītā was 3:7 from the prosy Charles Wilkins translation, commissioned by the East India Company: “the man is praised, who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the event.”[viii] This is karma yoga, doing one’s duty without regard to the fruits. A natural mystic, Thoreau turned away from didactic writing in the Puritan shadow to foster a poetics of self-realization grounded in an ascetism at odds with an industrializing nation. Karma yoga and the contemplative stance of the yogi give Walden its moral force: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools… Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.”

Reflecting

10. In the 20th century, listening gave way to reflection. Sanskrit chairs were established at American universities; Josiah Royce, William James and other American philosophers grappled with Indic thought. T.S. Eliot studied Sanskrit at Harvard University, primarily during his undergraduate and graduate years in the early 1900s. Eliot’s reflection was integrative, balancing Christianity, Indic wisdom, and modernity: “The point of intersection of the timeless/With time, is an occupation for the saint—”[ix]

11. Eliot, more than anyone else, wove the hidden sutra into a poetics of recovery – recovery from the fragmentation of western philosophy, from the maudlin destruction of Europe during the first world war. What is the meaning of art, of mechanical splendor, if it culminates in empty destruction? The hidden sutra provided a therapeutic praxis in karma yoga and in Advaita Vedanta’s realization: “a complete state of simplicity/ (Costing not less than everything)”[x] But Indic wisdom remained a monument for Eliot, clarifying in its foreignness to an essentially conservative Christian sensibility – not to be embodied, not to be practiced with incense and flickering lamps.

12. Allen Ginsberg sat on the banks of Ganges smoking a joint, the nearby ghat crackling with disintegrating bones and stinking of charred remains. In his year in India, he chanted mantras, grew horrified at unspeakable poverty, made love to his boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky, and wrote a torrent of poetry, vignettes, and musings in his Indian Journals.[xi] His manana reflected an inner tension between transcendence and a Whitmanian vitality: “Because I am still clinging to my human known me, Allen Ginsberg - and to enter this thing means final, complete abandonment of all I know of my I am except for this outer-seeming otherness which requires my disappearance.” Ginsberg felt an ongoing tension between desire – the hedonistic impulse of the Counterculture – and the staid ascetical teachings of Buddhism. This tension roiled in him until the end. Unlike Eliot, he practiced but could not metabolize what he had learned into American life.

13. Alice Walker, a student of both Hinduism and Buddhism, wove the hidden sutra into African American literature. In The Color Purple, an epistolary novel about a woman confronting racial and gender prejudice in the Jim Crow-era South, a character named Shug, who stands for spiritual wisdom, opines about God: “Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from everything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.” Walker studied both the Hindu Transcendental Meditation taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Buddhism. [xii] Shug is Walker’s personification of this distilled nondual wisdom.

Embodying

14. In the 21st century, Indic thought expresses itself in embodied experience, free in the world, unhidden – in the kitchen and between the bedsheets. No poet exemplifies this better than Amit Majmudar: “Cupping our newborn daughter…two irrigation tunnels from the same sacred river / out into samsara.”[xiii] Majmudar’s cycle of poems on the Upanishads moves from the earliest evasion to elision – what makes the Hidden Sutra “hidden” – out into the world as an overt and natural expression in American poetry: “There is a place of stillness./But the stillness moves. /Population: One. /When the stillness moves, /so does my tongue.”[xiv]

15. This essay can be at most an adumbration or an uncovering, like lifting a rock and seeing fireflies emerge from the summer earth. As the Italian philosopher of the home Emanuele Coccia says, we “cook the world” – our nourishment comes from “the fire of every living thing.” He speaks of food, but as much about literature. Old Indian books revolutionized a new literary sensibility and culture, long before Indians themselves made America their home.

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[i] Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad 2.4 — trans. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan — The Principal Upanishads — George Allen & Unwin, 1953.

[ii] Cleo McNelly Kearns — “Indic Traditions, American Literature and the Third Point of View” — Completing the Global Renaissance: The Indic Contribution — Menla Institute conference — July 23–27, 2002 — draft manuscript. https://www.infinityfoundation.com/indic_colloq/papers/paper_kearns.pdf

[iii] Philip F. Gura — American Transcendentalism: A History — Hill and Wang, 2007.

[iv] Catherine L. Albanese — A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion — Yale University Press, 2007.

[v] David R. Loy — Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism — Humanities Press, 1996.

[vi] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (sermon delivered July 8, 1741, Enfield, Connecticut).

[vii] Anne Bradstreet — “Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666.”

[viii] Henry David Thoreau — Journal — quoting Bhagavad Gītā 3.7 — trans. Charles Wilkins — as cited in Allan D. Hodder — “Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness” — 2001 — p. 208.

[ix] T. S. Eliot — Four Quartets — “The Dry Salvages” — 1941.

[x] T. S. Eliot — Four Quartets — “Little Gidding” — 1942.

[xi] Allen Ginsberg — Indian Journals: March 1962–May 1963 — Grove Press, 1970

[xii] Alice Walker — The Color Purple — Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982 — see also: Kyle Garton-Gundling — Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present — Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

[xiii] Amit Majmudar — “American Upanishad (IV)” — Plume Poetry — online journal. https://plumepoetry.com/american-upanishad-iv/

[xiv] Amit Majmudar — “American Upanishad” — Plume Poetry — online journal. https://plumepoetry.com/horoscope-and-american-apanashad/