<P> Transcendentalism has been directly influenced by Indian religions . Thoreau in Walden spoke of the Transcendentalists' debt to Indian religions directly: </P> <P> In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions . I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water - jug . I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges . </P> <P> In 1844, the first English translation of the Lotus Sutra was included in The Dial, a publication of the New England Transcendentalists, translated from French by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody . </P> <P> Transcendentalists differ in their interpretations of the practical aims of will . Some adherents link it with utopian social change; Brownson, for example, connected it with early socialism, but others consider it an exclusively individualist and idealist project . Emerson believed the latter; in his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist", he suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice: </P>

When did transcendentalism begin and who created it