Eastern Philosophy: An Introduction

A book review of Eastern Philosophy By Victoria S. Harrison

The book starts by addressing the very title — what exactly is “Eastern” philosophy? It gives a sense of a unified, coherent philosophy across the entire eastern world. However, it is very hard to argue there is such a thing. While there are certainly patterns across different philosophies that aggregate into a specific culture and its neighbours, it nevertheless has countless branches and quite often is not a mere deviation, but they actually oppose each other. So rather than trying to present a philosophy that somehow presents the entire East, the author instead chooses to focus on the philosophy of the two major branches in the East — India, and China. Even this is a simplification, but a required evil for some coherence and endless unhelpful nuance. This ignores other facets of eastern philosophy, such as developments in Japan and Korea, but gives a good overview.

The book is divided into topics, rather than a chronological timeline which is so common in philosophy books. From my experience, a division by topic is much more useful and I was glad to see it done here. The subjects covered are reason, reality, persons, virtue, authenticity, and mind. With each having smaller sub-sections.

Something that surprised me about India is that is not that different from Western philosophy in many ways. Ignorance was considered the core problem, and hence knowledge being the solution. But that opens up the problem of epistemology, which India struggled with endlessly. Different schools, like the Nyaya, Carvakas, and Madhyamaka argued about what constitutes knowledge. From hardcore empiricism all the way to the skepticism (very similar to Descartes, long before he was born).

India was also heavily concerned with the origins of the world, culminating into 2 fields: monism (Advaita Vedânta) or dualism (Sāṅkhya/Yoga). This lays the metaphysical ground for views of the self and spirituality, which is perhaps the most known in the West. From the concept of Anātman (no permanent underlying self) to samsara (the cycle of rebirth). All of this is quite metaphysical in nature. India was mostly concerned with the “know-what”. China, on the other hand, was mostly concerned with “know-how”. It was a lot more concerned with the practical challenges of life and how to best live, the conceptualization of eudaimonia.

Classical China philosophy starts with Kongzi and the beginning of Confucianism, about the importance of tradition, family, and cultivation of goodness (ren). Mohists would later argue that virtue should be impartial, and Confucianism was immoral due to their bias towards kin. The debates created different schools of thought, which promoted the development of logic and argumentation.

Often there was an implicit assumption on human nature that divided each camp. If human nature was ultimately bad, then there is a battle of the cultivation of ren and continuous self-improvement. On the other hand, if human nature is ultimately good, then all we should do is to try to go back to our state of nature. The latter being the birth of the idea of the Dao, which later became very influential. Daoism itself progressed through several stages, initially from a retreat of society to live in accordance with the Dao, and in the end that the Dao is in everything and one can always be in touch with it regardless of circumstance.

It also touches on how India came into contact with China, and how Buddhism was integrated into Chinese culture, merging with the then official doctrine of Daoism. Just as the Dao was in everything, so too was the Buddha-nature present at the core of all things. And enlightenment was the recognition of that nature. That, in turn, created opposition, bringing back neo-Confucian ideas and debates about ontology and metaphysics.

I really enjoyed the book, and I found it did a good job of presenting an overview of Eastern philosophy (with all the problems that entail as mentioned). It wasn’t difficult to read, although at times keeping the terms and the timeline of different thinkers and schools of thought in memory was challenging. Nevertheless, my knowledge about the topic was greatly increased. Not only were topics I previously only knew very superficially deepened, but also a different outlook on how to view Eastern philosophy, especially in regards to how rich and varied it is.

I was very surprised to find how it often resembled Western philosophy because it evitably asks the same questions: What is the self? What is our true nature? What is real? How should we live our lives? The book presents the answers from the other side of the world which most aren’t aware of. Some being surprisingly similar to our own, and some initially seem incredibly esoteric.

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Tiago V.F.