Eastern vs. Western Philosophy

let’s start in an unusual place with an
Australian supermodel called Miranda
Kerr she’s pretty successful and very
rich she’s been named three years in a
row the sexiest woman on the planet
she’s also deeply interested in
developing her mind and so she’s become
very involved with yoga chanting
meditation and Japanese Buddhism she
recites nam-myoho-renge-kyo twice a day
invoking the mystic lore of the lotus
flower which asserts that Miranda and
the cosmos are two sides of the same
coin Kerr has had some real difficulties
with loneliness and loss her first
boyfriend died in a car crash a later
lover turned out to be a crook she
married Orlando Bloom but it all fell
apart pretty quickly her needs are real
and she’s turned for comfort and help to
the east
she might have looked elsewhere she
might have found that Plato or Tolstoy
had things to teacher maybe she could
have been touched by Bach or medieval
architecture it’s not as if the West
doesn’t also have a deep and long
engagement with the sorrows of life but
like so many spiritually curious people
she didn’t end up engaging with its
culture instead she joined the soccer
gak eye buddhist movement how has it
happened that Western culture has
largely bypassed Miranda and so many
others seeking enlightenment it’s not
their fault they needed something and
the West wouldn’t give it to them so
they went elsewhere and their decision
tells us something hugely important
about how the Western world handles or
more accurately mishandles its culture
you’d imagine that Western University
philosophy departments would be natural
places one might go in search of wisdom
and consolation but they aren’t
interested in these things they’re
trying to define ontological naturalism
situate Vidkun Stein in this proper
historical perspective footnote a volume
of late Heidegger and compare plato’s
feeders with Aristotle’s ethics it’s not
a bad way to spend the time but it isn’t
arguably very helpful to anyone with
anything resembling a real problem
academic institutions have turned
culture which should help us to live and
die well into abstract scholarship
Buddhist philosophies are not like this
they’re on a mission to help you find
your way through
the challenges of existence that’s why
it would be extremely strange to hear at
a middle-class dinner party that the
person next to you had found solace in
Hegel or Aristotle but totally
unsurprising to learn that they’d been
to Nepal and were entranced by its
traditional wisdom we are missing out on
a crucial resource the great figures of
Western culture almost all wanted
culture to function as an instrument for
the pursuit of a wiser life
Socrates Epicurus Seneca Montaigne
Schopenhauer Nietzsche Schiller Tolstoy
Proust all wanted culture to be not an
object of academic study but a living
resource that could offer counsel and
direction for when a boyfriend has died
or someone has been fired much as the
Eastern wisdom tradition has always
believed it’s time to return Western
culture to its rightful ambitions not in
order to win out over the East but in
order to stand as its legitimate equal
in the pursuit of a path to human
in the West philosophers write long
non-fiction books often using
incomprehensible words and limit their
involvement with great work the world as
will and representation
Schopenhauer was the first serious
Western philosopher to get interested in Buddhism and his thought can best