Eastern Ideas Research Articles

China's New Political Discourse

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons.In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.

Meritocracy Is a Good Thing

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons.In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.

Political Meritocracy and Direct Democracy: A Hybrid Experiment

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons.In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.

Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture Gala Argent (bio) Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture by Donna Landry Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 248pp. US$52. ISBN 978-0-8018-9028-4. Donna Landry has done what Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a French zoologist and paleontologist, declared he could do: "Tell me the horse of a population. I'll tell you about its customs and institutions." Between 1650 and 1750, more than two hundred horses of Eastern origin—Arabians, North African Barbs, and Turkoman or Turanian horses from Central Asia—were imported to England and crossbred to indigenous breeds. With these animals came Eastern ideas about the horse-human relationship that were quite at odds with prevailing British beliefs. In five essays, Landry analyzes the verbal and visual record in order to bring to light the impacts these exotic creatures and ideas had on English culture during the early modern period. Narratives that include horses as agents of cultural change remain rare. In most scholarship that includes horses, they, like other nonhuman animals, are studied as modes of transport or sport, as receptacles of [End Page 255] symbolic meaning, or as they are exploited or abused. This view is at odds with the lived experience of those who interact with actual horses. In reaching beyond these conventional academic approaches, Landry poses a question that horse people will find entirely sensible: "Might not horses have had some effects on human culture as well as the other way around?" (14). With this question in mind, Landry deftly intertwines the importation of Eastern horses and Eastern concepts with British social structures. These Eastern horses were characterized as finer and tougher than British horses of the time. They also were recognized as loyal, intelligent, sensitive, and even as "peculiarly rational" (16) and "chivalrous" (120) companions in the stories that travelled from the East with them. As such, they need not be, indeed could not be, dealt with in the old way, and new styles of training, riding, and keeping were needed to accommodate their particular ways of being. In the first two chapters, Landry argues that the new equestrian cultures of sporting, hunting, and racing fostered a new style of riding, "free forward movement" (3), that reflected English cultural values. Drastically breaking with the precise and rigidly controlled tradition of the dressage school that was in fashion among the courts and with the gentry across greater Europe and the British Isles, this freer style of riding involved trusting the horse at speed and on a loose rein. As a "fully embodied ideology" (4), Landry argues, the "free forward movement" and the particular style of riding that went with it also referenced a loosening of control in a broader political sense and served as a potent metaphor for liberal political values, where it both reflected and fostered England's imperial ambitions and growing mercantile and leisure classes. Histories often tell of horses as a kind, but rarely outside of equestrian circles do we hear of "this horse." In chapter 3, Landry tracks the manner of acquisition—through war, trade, and diplomatic gifting—of three named Eastern sires with English endeavours, juxtaposing the growing importance of breeding and pedigree in horses and humans to English nationalism. Chapter 4 continues the theme of individual horses by providing a "cultural biography" (108) of the Bloody Shouldered Arabian, a horse whose story reflects his value as a foreign commodity and also recognizes his individual character. In eighteenth-century discourse, Landry posits, both art and text presented horses as sentient and rational, and "humans and horses became increasingly interchangeable" (126). Chapter 6 addresses how the Eastern tradition of lenient, kind ways of interacting with horses as family members and partners, arguably necessitated by the intelligent sensitivity of the Eastern horses, led to more harmonious relationships [End Page 256] with these animals in England. These beliefs also provided a springboard for political critique of the very institutions that brought the horses to British soil. Here, for example, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, "saturated with Houyhnhnm lore, turns the world upside down in a radical way, and in doing so reveals how animals, servants, colonial subject...

A Study on the Deep Ecological Patterns of Eastern Ideas in Jeong Hyeon-Jong's Later Poems

A Study on the Deep Ecological Patterns of Eastern Ideas in Jeong Hyeon-Jong's Later Poems

In search of an ethical university: a proposed East–West integrative vision

This article employs a sociological analysis of the changing role and mission of higher education from that of a ‘public good’ to that of a service industry. In this regard, the rise of modern universities as corporate enterprises in the recent decades has often neglected the important dimension of education as a process of enlightenment, with its ethical and moral dimensions. The author tries to put into perspective the relevance of searching for an ‘ethical university’ by proposing to integrate the important notion of Enlightenment as formulated by Kant, Newman's idea of the university and other similar western ideals, with the eastern ideas of the Confucian Classic The Great Learning, in order to suggest how the quest for an ‘ethical university’ might materialize in the future.

Cyborg Spirituality

This article explores crossovers from Eastern philosophy and spirituality to contemporary science and medicine in the West. My interest is not so much in specific lines of historical transmission, as in the channels through which they flow. In particular, my argument is that different ontologies – visions of how the world is – either facilitate or block such exchanges. As an example, think about physics. The ontology of mainstream physics is a modern, dualist one, inasmuch as physical thought revolves around a material world from which anything human is absent, and the human leftovers fall to the humanities and social sciences. This ontology, more or less by definition, blocks any resonance with Eastern ideas or practices, and, accordingly, they are almost entirely absent from the history of physics, except, importantly, in lines of work on the foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics. If one meditates on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, boundaries between the observer and the observed start to unravel, the dualist ontology erodes, and there, indeed, one finds all sorts of resonances with the East, as elaborated in an endless list of books that includes, for example, The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. That is my basic idea: resonances with the East spring forth in Western science whenever modern dualism starts to fray around the edges. But this essay is not about physics, and I turn now to the post-war history of cybernetics in Britain and its rather different non-modern ontology.

A Set of Four: New Studies of The Novels of Joseph Conrad

Exploring the multiplicities that make up the work of a great writer is rather like the old Eastern idea of blind men feeling parts of an elephant and each coming up with a piece of the whole, each experiencing a relative but never complete truth. If Joseph Conrad is our elephant (begging his pardon), then the varying approaches to his work promise soon to yield a fuller pictureproviding we do not confuse the trunk with the tail. New insights appear each year and the four texts under review are a sample of the work going on. Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre forms part of the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series published by the Ohio

Vishnu's crowded temple: India since the Great Rebellion

There can be few more discussed countries in the world today than India. In recent years it has shed its popular image as a poor, tradition-bound backwater to stand poised on the threshold of super-power status, rivalled only by China as the greatest winner in the post-Cold War world order. In Vishnu's Crowded Temple Maria Misra has written the essential history to allow us to understand the fascinating historical trajectory of this emerging third-world super-state. The book dramatizes the dynamic counterpoint between the resilient Indian people and a succession of ambitious, if flawed visions of the nation. This is an extraordinary story and Misra tells it charismatically with wit and style. Vishnu's Crowded Temple is the history of a wholly contemporary state, an India shaped both by western and eastern ideas, but the slave of neither - the harbinger of a resolutely post-modern democracy, at once wholly new and yet steeped in its past.

Reconceptualizing the Competition— Cooperation Relationship

Although competition and cooperation individually have received much consideration in the strategy field, researchers have given little attention to the fundamental issue of interplay between the two concepts. Nor has a framework been proposed for examining how competition and cooperation interrelate. Given the notion that competition and cooperation exist in a paradoxical, either/or relationship, reexamination of the idea of paradox itself is imperative. This paper converges Western and Eastern ideas to address the need to transcend conventional perspectives of paradox. It proposes a new concept, transparadox, a hybrid of the either/or and both/and perspectives that characterize, respectively, Western and Eastern thought. The transparadox perspective provides an expansive framework within which the range of competition—cooperation interrelationships may be examined. The introduction of three conceptions of competition—cooperation relationships (independent, or binary, opposites; interconnected opposites; and interdependent opposites) provides researchers with platforms for future theoretical development and empirical study.

Jung's Affinity for Buddhism: Misunderstandings and Clarifications

Much of the West's understanding of Jung's thinking about Buddhism comes from reading his essays on Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, in which his commentary focuses upon particular doctrinal teachings of these two forms of Mahayana Buddhism. However, his writings about the figure of the Buddha and the Buddha's earliest sermons, as they are collected in the Pali Canon, are less well known. By looking closely at what Jung had to say about the Buddha, his early discourses, and his comments in other works that have a correspondence with these discourses, we can clarify some common misconceptions about Jung's thinking in this area. Such an examination offers a better understanding of Jung's depth of feeling for the essential teachings of the Buddha. In order to accomplish these aims, the article begins with a discussion of the historical and cultural background in which Jung was writing and his concerns about the West's infatuation with Eastern ideas. Moving from this discussion to an examination of Jung's reflections on Buddhism, taken directly from Jung's writings, conclusions are drawn regarding Jung's hermeneutic method of approaching the Buddhist canon.

Reformpädagogik aus dem Osten? Körperauffassung und Körpererziehung

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German Reformpädagogik movement exerted considerable influence on Japan. The new Western educational concepts were adopted quite smoothly despite the vast differences between the two cultures. What are the main reasons for this smooth adoption? Two plausible answers to this question have been suggested so far. The first answer claims that there is nothing extraordinary about the phenomenon since Japan adopted, in a highly selective fashion, only methodological concepts. Cultural differences, therefore, did not play an important role and any elements that might have proved difficult to adopt because of differing cultural backgrounds were filtered out in advance. The second answer stresses a cultural contingency, the predominance of a Buddhist sect whose doctrines were compatible with those of the Protestantism favoured by most proponents of educational reform in German‐speaking countries. The Japanese educators who adopted Western teachings were either close to this Buddhist sect or were Christians to begin with. Is it possible to propose a third answer to the question of why Japan adopted the new educational ideas so smoothly? The heyday of the Reformpädagogik movement in Europe coincided with a wave of orientalism. Since the new educational concepts were already steeped in Eastern ideas, they may have been all the easier to adopt in Japan for this reason. The author analyses Das Werdende Zeitalter, a sister magazine of Pour l’ère nouvelle and The New Era, in order to examine this potential connection.

Golden Fetters and Economies of Cultural Exchange

AbstractIn W. Burkert's Orientalizing Revolution, itinerant craftsmen and other specialists moving from East to West are the primary vector for the movement of Near Eastern ideas and practices to the Greek world in the archaic period. In this model, the incentive for movement is a choice between western economic freedom and the despotism of eastern palace-centered economies. When set in the context of theoretical debates over the ancient economy, and particularly the important studies of C. Grottanelli and C. Zaccagnini on the mobility of specialists, Burkert's model appears to accept that modern divisions between eastern and western economies were also salient for ancient actors. This supposition is tested through a reexamination of Herodotus' story of the Greek doctor Democedes and the golden fetters awarded to him by Darius (Histories 3.125, 129-137). Though Herodotus uses the symbol of "golden fetters" as a focal point for the construction of cultural difference, parallel Greek and Egyptian evidence of specialists in royal service suggests that such gifts could also function as cross-cultural prestige items, and that the royal economies in which they circulated could facilitate and even stimulate the adoption and dissemination of notionally foreign ideas and practices.

Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (review)

Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination. By Maynard Solomon. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003. [xi, 327 pp. ISBN 0-520-23746-3. $29.95.] Index, bibliography, music examples. How Beethoven's intellectual concerns affected the creative work of his last 15 years is the underlying issue in Maynard Solomon's Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, a collection of 13 essays comprising both previously published and new contributions on the composer's outlook and the spiritual resonance of his music. In the conviction that Beethoven's later music explores different worlds than his earlier works, Solomon draws on an impressive array of sources to suggest ways in which the composer's increased accessibility and receptivity to a broad repertory of highly imaginative conceptions(p. 10)-including ancient and Eastern ideas about the nature of Divinity, Masonic ideals of spiritual progress, and Romantic imageryfacilitated the expansion of Beethoven's imaginative faculties and led him to pursue increasingly ambitious aims in his music. book divides more or less evenly into chapters concerned with biographical and historical contexts and those focused on the interpretation of works. essays of the first category, mature fruit of one of the great biographers of our time, posit various ways in which the ageing Beethoven regarded himself, the world, and his art differently than he did as a young man. Prologue: A Sea Change expounds one of the book's basic theses: that Beethoven experienced in his forties an existential crisis, documented in the diary that he kept from 1812 to 1818, that led him to read Classical, Eastern, and contemporary sources, to explore religious and philosophical questions as to ultimate meanings, and to rededicate himself, martyr-like, to his art, as a consequence of which his later work experienced a remarkable expansion of intellectual and emotional scope. Chapter 5, Reason and Imagination: Aesthetic Dimension, cautiously advances another provocative thesis: that Beethoven's aesthetics-such as they can be reconstructed from scattered utterances-evolved over the course of his career from moral and rationalist concepts about art rooted in Enlightenment notions to views that enriched (but did not supplant) those of his youth by granting greater privilege to the prerogatives of creative fantasy. Two chapters devoted to Freemasonry make a compelling case for Beethoven's familiarity with Masonic symbols, language and rituals, although Solomon finds no evidence that Beethoven actually ever joined the order, having arrived on the scene after the lodges had been suppressed in the Hapsburg lands for political reasons. The Masonic Thread (chapter 7) impressively documents that many of Beethoven's most important contacts in Bonn and Vienna, including teachers, patrons, publishers, and dedicatees, had been active Masons and/or Illuminati during the heyday of Josephinian Freemasonry; through such people, the composer would have gained some knowledge of Masonic aims and symbols (although Solomon concedes that many of these ideas were not exclusive to Masonry). In chapter 8, The Masonic Imagination, Solomon strengthens the case for Beethoven's awareness of secret societies by relating the diary of 1812-1818 to the journals required of members of the Illuminai! to chart their spiritual progress through confessional statements and extracts of significant passages from literature, philosophy and religious writings. That a number of the entries in Beethoven's diary can be tied to Masonic ideals of self-betterment, initiation and purification, and to Eastern religious conceptions (which held a particular importance for Masons) seemingly seals the argument for Beethoven's sympathy for, and receptivity to, Masonic thought. More ambiguous is the case for Beethoven's openness to the influence of Romanticism, a topic that Solomon pursues in chapters 3 and 4. …

The Political Thought of Sun Yat-sen: Development and Impact. By Audrey Wells. [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 256 pp. £50.00. ISBN 0-333-77787-5.

What, another book about Sun Yat-sen? The sceptical reader should not be deterred. He or she will learn much by reading this informative, lucid history of Sun Yat-sen's career, his thinking, and his influence on China as well as on various leaders of developing nations of the last century.Wells portrays Sun as a rare, humane revolutionary who could have unified China and facilitated China's transition to a peaceful, modern society and state. Such achievements were well in his grasp but the foreign leaders of Sun's time preferred a weak, divided China and ignored his pleas for assistance.Although Sun was famous in China immediately after his death, Sun's “synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas” attracted few outstanding Chinese leaders to his cause. As Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank stated in their China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (p. 276) “the doom of the Kuomintang was sealed from the time when Dr. Sun failed to convince the scholars of Peita that his “Three People's Principles” could give them intellectual leadership.” Why Sun's political thought did not attract a broad segment of the leading elite to agree with his message and follow his revolutionary path is still a puzzle.

The Origin of Eastern Ideas and Mt. Paekdu in Korea

The Origin of Eastern Ideas and Mt. Paekdu in Korea

Ideas of Nature in an Asian Context

Contemporary Western philosophers have customarily displayed a marked ambivalence in their collective opinion regarding the merits of Eastern ideas generally, and especially in discussions of environmental ethics. On the one hand are enthusiastic and quite frankly uncritical assumptions that the Eastern view represents a more enlightened and nature-friendly alternative to exploitative Western ideologies. On the other hand, of course, stand harsh and sometimes woefully ignorant claims that Eastern philosophy, if there is any, is distinctively life-denying and thus nature-unfriendly. Both attitudes have a long history running back to the early nineteenth century, with eminent philosophers on either side and spanning many philosophical issues. My assumption is that neither view is correct. However, more nuanced discussions of the ramifications of Eastern ideas for environmental ethics have turned up, though sometimes the assessments are no less harsh.' In particular, Holmes Rolston, III, has argued the case that a detailed look at the resources of Asian religious and philosophical traditions leaves little that could, as he says, help the West to value nature.2 Two considerations make his evaluations of Eastern views worthy of examination. First, this is not a casual remark made in the context of some more general philosophical analysis. It represents a conclusion based on a discussion of specific Eastern philosophical concepts and ideas. Second, many aspects of Rolston's arguments have gone unanswered in the literature on the other side of the issue.3 Furthermore, these arguments have been made in other contexts and face the enterprise of comparative philosophy generally. So, lessons learned here may have application elsewhere. And lastly, Rolston is not entirely dismissive of Eastern traditions, which suggests not only a more balanced approach than many critics but also that his is an informed opinion. conclusion Rolston reaches may be summarized quite succinctly. Eastern religious and philosophical insights would need considerable reformulation in order to find positive application within environmental ethics. Essentially, Rolston's argument consists of two intermingled parts. On the one hand stands an account covering the important or necessary features of ethical theories appropriate to valuing the natural world, while on the other, a hard look at traditionally Eastern concepts of reality and their related axiologies. In the background stands the Western scientific understanding of nature, that is, the understanding that the contemporary biological sciences have come to hold. Rolston, of course, assumes that such scientific views are largely true but ethically neutral. In other words, Rolston fully acknowledges a genuine need to look beyond science. The West desperately needs an account of evoMichael G. Barnhart

Europe versus Asia: Truth versus Virtue

AbstractWhen examining the four dimensions of national culture from an Asian perspective, Hofstede expands on his well-known measure of comparative cultural values and emerges with a new dimension unrelated to results from questionnaires designed by Western scholars. This new dimension emphasizes a Long-Term versus a Short-Term Orientation in Life. The author explores the religious and philosophical origins of these two approaches and illustrates how each views the concept of virtue differently with Western ideas of virtue tied closely to Truth, while Eastern ideas of virtue are not attached to any particular version of Truth. The implications of these differing ways of thinking on scientific inquiry, forms of government, and ways of managing are considered.

Floraculture and the Sensorium: The Culture of Flowers . Jack Goody. ; Scents Appeal: The Silent Persuasion of Aromatic Encounters . Gabrielle J. Dorland.

TACK GOODYS LATEST OFFERING, The Culture of Flowers, is a delight. A study of the symbolic import of flowers in different cultures, it commences, properly enough, with a conundrum: Why do Africans have so little interest in the culture of flowers, particularly as compared with Europeans and Asians, for whom flowers so importantly in commerce, symbolic representation and aesthetic sensibility? Goody's answer, developed in great detail in this large and wonderfully illustrated book, hinges on the double sense of that word culture. He reminds us that it can mean both that peculiar thing anthropologists are always trying to figure and the activities surrounding the cultivation of domestic plants and all the processes involved in their transformation from natural or wild plants into objects of use, desire, enjoyment, and prestation. Comparative floraculture, however, makes only part of his story, for he is also concerned with the representation of flowers as symbolic forms in a wide range of media, including the written texts that have configured both the culture of flowers and the cultures of flowers. We might put the question another way: Why do some peoples develop sensuous sensibilities for such non-utilitarian plants that, no matter how wondrously colorful and fragrant, are doomed too soon to fade and die? Goody first outlines the Near Eastern idea of the garden, with its associated meaning of paradise, and traces its diffusion and development in the ancient world as pleasure grounds, places of both retreat and ostentatious display for priests and kings. The spread of gardens to Greece and Rome secularized them and made them emblems of luxury for the wealthy. Flowers were also desacralized in discursive texts describing their properties and methods of cultivation. Flowers became objects of commerce in the form of garlands used as decorative offerings to deities or as crowns worn in celebrations and rituals. In time, garlands came to replace blood sacrifice and were offered as substitutes for animals. In Rome flowers ultimately came to be regarded with ambivalence, not just because they were luxury objects, but because their increasingly widespread cultivation took too much arable land out of food production and because their use in ritual as substitutes for blood came to symbolize the decay of manliness and martial spirit.

A foundation for physiology

From a study of the literature on the Philosophy of Physiology it became clear that a crisis exists. This crisis was studied by means of a classification of philosophical views. Two main categories, namely Positivistic and Transcendentalistic, frameworks of thought were used. Under the Positivistic category such models as radical materialistic, mechanistic and cybernetic were placed. Under the Transcendentalistic category were classified holistic, humanistic, mystic and eastern ideas. Paradoxic ideas were discussed. None of the frameworks of thought supply a good foundation for Physiology. A liberating foundation for Physiology is proposed. A model of man as a personal unity in a created environment is described. This model does not contain either the contradictions nor polarizations of the positivistic versus transcendentalistic frameworks of thought.