This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nature reads Asian scripture only at a distance; by the 1840s Emerson was reading it directly, in the translations then available to him. He first encountered the Bhagavad Gita in Charles Wilkins's English translation, and wrote in his journal in 1845 that he owed it "a magnificent day," that it was "the first of books," carrying "the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."
Brahma is the direct result. Published in the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly in November 1857, it puts the Hindu god Brahma in the first person, drawing on the Gita and the Katha Upanishad for its central paradox, that the slayer and the slain, the doubter and the doubt, are one thing seen from two sides. Antebellum readers mostly found it baffling, and it drew more parodies than any other poem Emerson published; his own suggested remedy was to substitute the word Jehovah for Brahma and read it again.
His Persian reading ran alongside the Hindu. He did not read Persian, but he read German, and worked from Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall's German translations of Hafiz and of Saadi. He rendered some of Hafiz's verse into English himself from that German, closer to an adaptation than a translation, and his 1842 poem Saadi takes its name from the other poet directly. Between the Gita, Hafiz and Saadi, Emerson and his Transcendentalist circle were among the first Americans to treat Asian religious and literary texts as scripture and as literature, rather than as curiosities.