Being an empiricist of his transcendentalism, David Thoreau lived in and looked into Nature for ultimate Truth. In his Walden Thoreau explores the great truths of Nature and experienced a spiritual transformation. Thoreau's Walden experiment demonstrates how carefree a man can be when he is living in much the same way as a Chinese Taoist, or a Taoist-saunterer. On the one hand, Thoreau's roaming by Walden Pond can be compared to the big bird's soaring in the sky in Chuang-tzu, in which spiritual transcendence is coupled with the perennial Tao; on the other, it can be seen as a return to Nature, where the artifice and depravity of society cannot reach. Both Walden and Chuang-tzu try to reach the conviction of the entity of the natural world and God, or the realization of the significance of Nature's essential role in realizing man's spiritual transformation. As Thoreau's transcendental philosophy corresponds to Taoist-like thought, in this paper I intend to read Thoreau's Walden in the light of Taoist philosophy so as to see how Thoreau works out his Taoist-like vision in Walden.
