Ebook: Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan

The appearance of a revised English edition of Professor Nakamura’s work will be warmly welcomed by scholars and by laymen who seek to understand the complex societies of Asia with whose destinies the West is ever more intimately involved It is surely appropriate that this should be the first major publication of the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, for Mr. Nakamura is concerned with two problems that are crucial for the development of better mutual understanding between East and West.

The first of these problems is the identification in some meaningful way of the “East” and the “West.” How may one define such entities, and how may systematic comparisons be made that will bring into bold relief basic differences and similarities? In the four and a half centuries from the European “discovery” of Asia to the present period of intensified culture contact, Europeans and Asians alike have learned all too little about each other. False antitheses and monolithic comparisons have persisted from one generation to the next; knowledge is difficult to attain, understanding is more so, and resort to cliché generalization proves irresistible. In recent times some of these clichés have been dressed up in new jargons so that thousands of unwary readers have been led to believe that they were being given new magic keys that would open the door to the “Oriental mind,” “Oriental logic” or what-not. But the keys opened doors into dream worlds inhabited only by clichés and phantasies.

Professor Nakamura sweeps aside this Hotsam and sets out to analyze, with rigor and objectivity, the characteristic thought-patterns of four Asian peoples as these are revealed in their languages, their logic, and their cultural products. In this analysis he speaks neither of an “Oriental mind” nor of an undifferentiated “West.” Rather he speaks of the Indians, the Chinese, the Tibetans, and the Japanese out of solid understanding of their distinctive cultures and histories. And when he speaks of the West, it is with full awareness of the mutiplicity of traditions that have contributed to Western civilization. He seems to me to demonstrate the level of understanding that can be reached once we transcend the ancient myth of the “East” and the “West” as monoliths.

The second major problem dealt with in this study is equally relevant to the need for mutual understanding between the peoples of Asia and the West. Mr. Nakamura poses it this way: It is clear that no people in the world today is isolated from those world-wide movements of thought and belief that everywhere tend to transform men’s lives and the values they live by. Yet each people is engaged, consciously and unconsciously, in selecting among the manifold influences which reach them and then of adapting and modifying those elements which they select. What governs this process and how does it come about that out of it cultures emerge which are amalgams—certain elements of them being native and distinctive, others clearly derived from one or another world-wide movement? Mr. Nakamura believes that there are clues to this process in the long history of Buddhism which began and evolved in India and then invaded, one by one, all the historic societies of Central, East, and Southeast Asia. Indians, Chinese, Tibetans, and Japanese were continuously engaged in selecting and adapting elements from the evolving tradition of Buddhism. The ways in which they did this reveal certain long-continuing and distinctive modes of thought, certain key values and attitudes which governed the scope of the borrowing and the process of adapting Buddhist ideas. These peoples’ experience with Buddhism, when properly understood, in turn helps to explain their differences one from another and their widely variant responses to Western culture in our time. This is the great theme to which Mr. Nakamura addresses himself in this volume.