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CONCORD, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — Henry David Thoreau was a lot of things. He was a writer, a poet, a philosopher — but he may have also been into yoga.
The famed 19th Century transcendentalist is best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond in Concord, where he opined about living life in simple solitude in Walden. But scholars say Thoreau had another muse besides nature: yoga. It's a fitting local tie for World Yoga Day on Wednesday, a global holiday pioneered by India in 2015.
Research by Professor Richard Davis of Bard College and Professor Jeremy Engels of Penn State indicates that the thinker had a soft-spot for the philosophy of yoga, and devoured classical Hindu texts on yoga like the Bhagavad Gita.
There's no evidence that Thoreau really did yoga poses like the modern Downward Dog, but he appears to have read the texts every morning.
"In comparison...our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial," he writes in Walden.
In an 1849 letter to his friend Harrison Blake, he even says he identifies as a yogi, at times.
WBZ's Chaiel Schaffel (@CschaffelWBZ) has more:
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