Icon Books (UK), Totem Books
(USA). Republished 2000 Written by Richard Osborne,
Illustrated / designed by Borin Van Loon
Eastern philosophy is the most ancient form of thought
known to man,
predating
Western philosophy by some centuries. Dissatisfaction with materialism
is
turning Westerners towards the integrated approach of Eastern thought,
but
often in a vague and generalized form.
Introducing Eastern Philosophy focuses on India and China, the two
oldest
and most influential origins of Eastern thought. It elucidates the
complex
schools of Hindu philosophy, the offshoots of Indian Buddhism, the
traditions
of Confucius and the Tao in China and demonstrates their fundamental
differences
from Western notions of truth. It makes clear the Eastern view of
ultimate
reality, the emphasis on selfless ethics and the quest for
Enlightenment
and shows how these ideas are set in a cosmic whole in contrast to the
Western
individual and scientific perspective.
Drawing heavily on the iconography of Eastern Philosophy as well as my
ecclectic
mix of images and illustration, this title delves into ancient mystics,
Chinese prophets and Buddhism. It's an elusive subject, but seen as a
companion-piece
to my own Introducing Buddha,
this volume provides an accessible overview. One Zen Master when asked
the
meaning of Zen said: I raise my eyebrows, I move my eyes.
Perhaps that's all that needs to be said.
The author Richard Osborne has his own website, see Links.
Cover for original edition of Introducing Buddha by Borin Van Loon
Reviews
[Almost as long as
the book itself, this review is worth a scan...]
This is another of Icon Books' graphic introductions to difficult
subjects. In this case, Osborne and graphic artist Van Loon have
probably taken on a bit too much - the whole of Eastern philosophy.
Nevertheless, this 176-page picture book provides a sufficient overview
of Indian, Buddhist and Chinese philosophy that it will act as a useful
guide to those aspects of these traditions that you might want to
explore further. It provides a basic primer on the underlying cultural
attitudes of an East that is likely to become much more obviously equal
to the West in economic terms over the next century.
At the risk of gross over-simplification, we can see that these three
traditions are all going to inform Eastern attitudes for many decades
and centuries to come - and perhaps, as they grow and prosper,
influence us in the West as much as we have influenced them during the
Imperial Age.
India is, in my view, a tougher nut for the Western mind to crack. The
Westernisation implicit in the British Imperial project seems to have
proved less embedded than we might have thought. The rise of an Indian
nationalism of the Right is also a commitment to a particular vision of
Vedanta that is unlikely to want radical reform of the caste system or
the role of women. The whole 'karma' thing might appeal to the Western
New Age but it is essentially a conservative model of the universe that
is unlikely to appeal to anyone angered by the unresponsiveness or
incompetence of their elected Governments. The conservatism of the New
Indian Right may come to prove very problematic for Western liberals
and especially for British liberals who have to cater for these
elements in their own Hindu communities and coalitions.
Osborne tries to show that the Eastern traditions have more in common
with each other than any do with the West. I, for one, am not entirely
persuaded that they are not distinct. The irruption of Buddhism into
China was an alien graft from South Asia that, by the time it reached
Tibet and Japan, eventually transmuted into something very different in
Tibetan Tantra and Zen with their very different philosophical stances.
What they do have in common is the lack of any notion of revelation
outside the person and the use of texts as learning tools and
advisories rather than as the basis for Truth. Much of the dynamism of
the West comes from its revolt against the sclerotic belief in single
texts (Bible or Koran) being repositories of Truth and so against
limitations being put on philosophical investigation, much as small
competing states energised technological innovation through
near-perpetual warfare.
Any Western Right that wants a return to tradition is asking for a
return to text-based sclerosis and does not fully understand that
Indian, Chinese and European pagan models may not have been very
dynamic (based as they were on agrarian societies) but they were far
more culturally dynamic than the book-obsessed over-intellectualised
learning of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic Middle Ages.
In the end, a lot of Western and Eastern philosophy is just dancing
around the unknowability of raw existence and around the relationship
between things and minds perceiving things in that context. One value
of this book is in showing that there is not much that has been thought
of in the West that has not appeared in the East - and vice versa.
Nevertheless, there are significant differences in 'mentality'. The
West has tended to separate out 'science' from 'faith' and to see them
in challenging opposition. The West loves struggle because it is
creative - its culture is based on intellectual war and on crowing
victory from the rooftops before falling to the next challenger. The
quintessential Western philosophy is Hegelianism with its thesis facing
off an anti-thesis to create a synthesis that becomes a thesis. The
Chinese approach is to see things in terms of opposites that must be
recognised as being engaged in a permanent struggle. We, in the midst
of it all, must be actively engaged in calibrating these forces into a
middle way. This is the natural way, the flow of a stream around
boulders to the sea.
The Chinese, despite the incursion of Buddhism, which eventually
beaches in two cultures wary of their great neighbour (Tibet and
Japan), have their own internal philosophical yin and yang in the
competing but also mutually accommodating traditions of Confucius and
the Tao. There is something deeply humane about the original Chinese
solution to the problem of organising and living in an agrarian society
- family life and the State are ordered in ritual and duty while the
individual flows through the vicissitudes of life with an attitude of
withdrawal and self-development.
The Indians have a similar model but treat, in a more essentialist and
less natural way, the individual as preparing himself to be first a
functioning part of society and, then, passing on to what may be called
a form of living death of contemplation in the hope that the next
reincarnation will raise his status in life. Both are philosophies of
hopelessness about radical reform or change except towards some kingly
or monkish ideal but the Chinese does permit the existence of a private
life alongside the public, whereas Indian philosophy (in its ideal
form)turns a man into simply the body for a travelling soul. In that
sense, to return to the Nietzschean analyses on which we so often fall
back, the Chinese way is essentially life-affirming and the Indian way
life-negating, with the challenge and irruption of Buddhism being an
attempt to moderate negation in one culture only to import it into the
other.
Fortunately, East Asian cultures, like Western cultures much later,
have proved surprisingly resilient in the long run. Tibetan Buddhism,
Zen and Neo-Tantra are far removed from Vedanta. But even Vedanta is
far from fixed in its thinking. Yet, within its basic framework, its
many strands generally remain coherently Indian and different from the
West. Yes, there has been some influence from Western methodologies but
these have been absorbed and are perhaps now being reversed as Indian
nationalism makes it increasingly less difficult to not be
overly-submissive to British-inspired modernisation and 'reform'.
The Chinese similarly have not allowed the West to decide how they are
to think with one major exception for which the ground was prepared by
the regrettable but possibly necessary introduction of Neo-Confucian
ideas. The cultural strength of China lay in the calibration of
Confucian and Taoist thinking but it assumed an agrarian Middle Earth
that was not disrupted by international trade, by more innovative
invaders and by massive population pressures. The political and
economic situation of China was often far from stable. The constant
calibration was painful and increasingly ineffective. The arrival of
'foreign' Buddhism in itself is perhaps a sign of stress with Buddhist
reincarnation have the same effect on the suffering poor or relatively
deprived as Christian Salvation had on a flailing Roman Empire.
Neo-Confucianism and Imperial Paganism in the West have much in common
functionally but the latter fell before demotic Christianity in a way
that Neo-Confucian Order did not before Buddhism. In Europe and the
Mediterranean, Christianity and Islam and their texts triumphed but the
Chinese traditional order fought back with an assertion of hard-line
quasi-textual Confucianism over Taoist withdrawal. On top of this, the
second serious collapse of the old order under Western Imperial
pressure saw Marxism-Leninism arrive as a useful appropriation by Mao
of the nearest invader philosophy available to the traditional Yin-Yang
model that was normal to Chinese thought processes - bringing us back
to the essentialism of Hegel by the back door.
Today, China is two steps away from its traditional and relatively
humane model of balancing individualism and nature (the Tao) and public
order and duty (Confucius). It has shifted sharply to the Right
(authoritarian neo-Confucianism) and then to the 'Left' (a form of
social or collectivist Anti-Taoism derived ultimately from Hegel) and
it has now settled into a form of Socialist Confucianism that
represents a major intellectual, philosophical, cultural and now
military and economic challenge to the rest of the world.
This leaves us with the question of the effects on the West of all
these traditions that have evolved over thousands of years - with
Buddhism the relative parvenu alongside the religions of the book.
The best of Eastern thought has made an immeasurable contribution to
the revival of serious thinking about the West's own inheritance. With
the possible exception of the remarkable emergence of Zen in Japan and
some aspects of Tantra (at a pinch), none of these traditions of the
East can be called existentialist as such: they all, at the end of the
day, have some essence of man or society to which they look. However,
the sophisticated approaches to Being, Man and Society of Hindu and Tao
thinkers in particular have allowed new ways of looking at the world
that have worked to build understanding of the possibility of an
actually lived existentialism as well as to explore the links between
the mind and the body - and with social reality and 'things in the
world' - with more data.
The Western rebellion against the text became fully radicalised only
within the last hundred years and has converged with what might be
called the 'religious common sense' findings of the Indian and Chinese
sages. It is not that European thinkers are likely to adopt Eastern
ways (that is for mystics and New Age types) but that the
investigations and techniques of the sages add serious value to the
post-modern philosophical questionings of the West - even if the
research needs to be mindful that we are looking for diamonds and
nuggets of gold in vast masses of ore nade up of Sanskrit obscurity and
gnomic Chinese sayings that may mean nothing or everything.
At the other extreme of sophistication is the convergence of the
creation of the 'new religions', often trying to emulate a pre-text
paganism whose records have mostly been destroyed, with the discovery
of the pagan reality of modern India and (underneath the modernisation)
Tibet, China and Japan. We might add to this the rediscovery of
indigenous shamanistic cultures and of African and Latin American folk
religions. In a sometimes desperate search to find the true nature of
lost Western paganisms - a frenetic process that is scarcely a century
old and parallels the very separate process of the discovery of
existentialism - the East is a fertile ground for uncovering data that
might suggest how we should be thinking if we are to rediscover our
'natural' roots.
The first ports of call tend to be tantra, tao and zen because each of
these can connect to pre-existing Western concerns. Tantra appeals to
the transgressive and rebellious in a highly individualist and
non-traditional society (despite being traditionalist par excellence in
its own territory). It has developed a role in the 'dark arts' Magickal
community, in the benign but shallow waters of New Age sexuality as
Neo-Tantra and in the growth of more mainstream Buddhism, with its
increasing 'Tibetan' bias, as a middle class response to the need for
meaning in a world filled with ennui, powerlessness and anxiety despite
apparent prosperity.
The Tao has emerged as the basis for new age thinking on health and the
environment but has also become an influence by analogy in attempts to
reconstruct the Neo-Pagan Heathen Way of Wyrd espoused by Brian Bates,
a world in which the cultures of the North Europeans share dragons and
shamanistic origins with our Eurasian Chinese brothers. Zen is where
new popular thinking merges with the high thought of existentialism and
phenomenology. Japanese culture intrigues many Westerners as being both
one of the most modern and one of the most culturally coherent in
itself. There may even be envy in some quarters at its dynamic purity -
Zen is where the East meets the new existentialist concerns of the
thinking Westerner who wishes to detach himself from politics and from
the frenetic pace of modern media culture, often while working within
it.
As for the future, Westernised derivatives from the East are unlikely
to be of interest to the East itself - the flow is largely from there
to here and the flow in the other direction is not 'spiritual' or
intellectual but material and technological. They are revolutions
within the West for the West that merely intensify its dynamic and
innovative individualism and that bring yet more creative chaos, much
to the despair of increasingly discredited ruling elites who would
dearly like to introduce Augustan order to their crumbling empires.
However, Indian Nationalism and Chinese Socialist Confucianism are
still relatively sclerotic intellectually. They are still way behind
the West in terms of innovation and flexibility so that the real
challenge here is whether East or West can live with each other under
these conditions of difference. There will be Easterners who want
Western freedoms and Westerners who will want to turn the West into a
disciplined Enlightenment Fortress analogous to Neo-Confucianist
solutions to disorder. There are Easterners who want more Western
technology than the West is prepared to hand over and Westerners with a
post-imperialist determination to export values into these rising
giants. The room for misunderstanding and conflict is large and this
little book is a useful primer on why West and East think about things
differently - that this matters should not be a matter for debate. Tim
Pendry (May 30, 2010) www.goodreads.com
The best introduction to this broad
subject I have read. I say this one is the best, because out of
the five or six intros I have read to eastern philosophy all of them
say the same things, cover the same subjects and don't tread new
ground. The reason this one gets the edge is it reads the quickest and
is the most entertaining in getting the ideas out. Naxa (Mar 25, 2010) www.goodreads.com
"...and that for his own good, he will one day make the
effort to pick
up an elementary book on hindu philosophy and improve his own
understanding...
(I have found a good one - 'ancient eastern philosophy for beginners'
published
by icon books, by richard osborne and borin van loon.. it is
illustrated
with interesting pictures and photographs for easy comprehension...)"
(www.hindunet.com/forum (HinduNet))
Introducing Eastern Philosophy