I have been recently reading writings on Buddhism, texts exploring the concepts of mindfulness, compassion, the middle way, and other similar topics. Ah yes, and even as I admit it, I hear tut-tuts, for I feel a keen awareness of the Western intellectual bias that categorizes Eastern philosophy as alternately quaint, faddish, and self-helpy. Eastern philosophy has a tendency to be viewed as the trifling of aspirant-hippies or aging-hippies. The former, so the cynic assets, are generally university students who turn to Eastern philosophy as a facile means of appearing wiser and more interesting than their peers; the latter are generally high-status white-collar workers, oftentimes business owners, who manipulate Eastern philosophy into managerial mantras in an attempt to justify their latter-day fondness for capitalism. Yet this cynical perspective is fair neither to most adherents of Eastern philosophy (be they students, business-owners, or anyone else), nor to Eastern philosophy itself. Eastern philosophy can come across as overly-simplistic and shallow to those who hold complicatedness to be the gold-standard of truth/knowledge, for Eastern philosophy does use very simple language and does make what seem to be very basic observations. Yet the very reason the language is, after its fashion, so simple, and the wisdom so commonplace, is largely because Eastern philosophy places a much higher emphasis on its adherents applying their own minds and exercising their own thought than does much Western philosophy. Do not suppose you have understood a thing simply because you have heard/read/(etc.) a thing--so teaches Eastern philosophy. And so the Eastern philosopher offers only the sparsest snippet of counsel, requiring his student to figure out what it means for himself. In analogical terms, one might think of Eastern philosophy as providing seeds that its adherents must sow and nourish and tend-to themselves in order to reap the fruits there-arising, whereas in Western philosophy there is an expectancy that we should be given the fruit itself, fully-formed, thereby allowing us to sample widely. There are merits and demerits to both approaches, of course: the Eastern philosopher must devote all his time and effort to a very few fruits and so his scope for happening upon a fruit that is truly valuable is narrowed. Yet the fruits one grows oneself offer a richness that cannot be found in the fruits one buys from a market, a richness dependent upon the personal effort one puts into growing them, and so the Western philosopher, though he may try every fruit under the sun, may never know the savor of an apple from his own garden. And though I do presently and, I am sure, always shall very much value Western thought and Western philosophy, I cannot pretend to grant it the rights of singular supremacy where the discovery of truth is concerned, for the Western methods of thinking seem just as susceptible to sloppy thinking, and just as conducive of intellectual profundity as the Eastern methods. Oh for more time! Oh to have all fruits and for them to have all come from my own garden!
[Image found on the "Conde Naste Connection" website, available here: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/I-just-found-an-Eastern-philosophy-that-s-very-accepting-of-S-U-V-s-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8479909_.htm]
[Image found on the "Conde Naste Connection" website, available here: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/I-just-found-an-Eastern-philosophy-that-s-very-accepting-of-S-U-V-s-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8479909_.htm]
