Emerson's Kenshō

Ralph Waldo Emerson highly valued a type of experience which is ineffable in English, but which the Japanese Buddhists have termed kenshō.

Late one January afternoon, Emerson wrote: “The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors … The leafless trees became spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost contribute something to the mute music.”

Biographer Robert D. Richardson Jr.  observed, “(T)he experience Emerson most valued is the exhilaration that can arise sometimes from our presence in nature, though we cannot say quite why.”

“If this is mysticism, it is mysticism of a commonly occurring and easily accepted sort. The aim of the mystic is to attain a feeling of oneness with the divine. Experiences of the kind Emerson here describes have happened to nearly everyone who has ever sat beneath a tree on a fine clear day and looked at the world with a momentary sense of peace and a feeling, however transient, of being at one with it.”