A Study of Taoism in Thoreau’s “Walden”

DOI

10.2991/hsmet-18.2018.155How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Walden, Taoism,Transcendentalism

Abstract

Walden records the life and thoughts of the American writer Henry David Thoreau when he lived in Walden Pond by himself. Although Thoreau never mentions Taoism in Walden, this book always reflects his spiritual pursuit of Taoism. Thoreau and Taoists have the similar answers to the problems that human face in different era and different cultural backgrounds. This paper analyzes the Taoism in Walden from three aspects: return to nature, pursuit of simple life and social criticism, and points out that the similar philosophical basis between “Tao” and Transcendentalism accounts for the similarities between Thoreau and Taoist.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Minglan Zhang
PY  - 2018/06
DA  - 2018/06
TI  - A Study of Taoism in Thoreau’s “Walden”
BT  - Proceedings of the 2018 3rd International Conference on Humanities Science, Management and Education Technology (HSMET 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 781
EP  - 784
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/hsmet-18.2018.155
DO  - 10.2991/hsmet-18.2018.155
ID  - Zhang2018/06
ER  -