Why Asian Philosophy is Misunderstood in the West

Recently I wrote an article for the Australia China Foundation Association (ACFA)
web site about Asian and particularly, Chinese Philosophy and why it has been
misunderstood in the west for centuries. I must admit this was an article I planned
to write for Shadow in the Flame but I highly recommend it to you as a starter for
understanding where Chinese philosophy differs from western philosophy.
Practically from their earliest contact with the Orient, Western philosophers have
had little understanding of the philosophical traditions of China. In fact their
common view was, and still is in many places, that ancient Chinese writing is not
philosophy, but religion or some form of mysticism.
Apart from anything else the strangest thing about this view is, that in all three of
the major Chinese philosophies;

• Confucianism
• Taoism
• Buddhism

there is no God, which is viewed as essential in the traditional western

understanding of, and a prerequisite to be, a religion. So while the West has often
pointed to China as the great atheist nation they have at the same time tended to
lump the huge body of ethical and metaphysical discussion, which goes back at
least 4,000 years, into the same basket as mysticism and strange religions.

What is Philosophy?

It is totally inappropriate to talk about Eastern or Western Philosophy as though

either one were a homogenous body of thought. Western Philosophy has many,
diverse and assorted streams of Philosophy and so it is with Chinese and Asian
Philosophies as well.

So what is philosophy? While philosophers love to debate this question, roughly

speaking, philosophy is basically the critical discussion of ethical and metaphysical
questions. And generally it is broken down into two major themes: ethics and
metaphysics.

One deals with the nature of reality and the other deals with how to live.

Philosophy is the skill of articulating views on these particular questions.

But there is more to it than that.

Philosophy involves not just an expression of such a view, but also asking yourself
whether that view is right or not? What are the alternatives? Why should I prefer
my particular view to the alternatives?

Thus critical discussion plays an integral role in philosophy. And the question for
this article is “Does Asian philosophy and Chinese philosophy in particular, satisfy
this criteria?”

You cannot read Indian texts or Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist and Confucian teachings
and not find the articulation of world views. All these schools of thought deal with
ethics and the metaphysical while some are more skewered one way rather than
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the other, for example Confucius was more concerned with ethical issues while Lao
Tzu, who wrote the Tao de Ching, was more interested in the metaphysical issues.

Where you do see a difference and therefore why some Western philosophers point
to Eastern philosophy and say “Well, this isn't really philosophy” is because you
don't find much critical appraisal in the Eastern tradition or at least not in the same
style as you do in Western philosophy.

However, I believe that a large part of this conception was due to the fact that, for
much of the time since we “discovered” these countries, we have not had access to
their traditional literature because so little of it had been translated into English and
other European languages. But if you could read Sanskrit you would find you
cannot read good texts of Indian philosophy without seeing a lot of critical debates.

There are many schools of Indian philosophy, and for several hundreds, if not
thousands of years, they were arguing against each other with very sophisticated
philosophical arguments. You've only got to read the text to see that.

China is a bit more difficult. That's because typically Chinese philosophy is written
in a different way. In fact if there is a divide between world philosophies, it's not
the Euphrates (separating Asia from Europe, the river originates in Turkey and ends in the
Persian Gulf), it's in the Himalayas.

Once you get over differences of style, Indian philosophy is written very much like
Western philosophy.

Not so Chinese philosophy. The arguments are put in a different way. Often they
proceed by analogy, so you'll get someone arguing for a position in Chinese
philosophy by giving you examples, analogies and metaphors.

These are things that you do find in Western philosophy as well, they are a
perfectly well recognised form of argument, but you get a lot more of them in
Chinese philosophy than you do in Western philosophy.

But any student of Ancient Chinese philosophers will soon see that these guys do
argue with each other. There are many famous debates between the different
schools of neo-Confucianism, between the Taoists and the Confucians, and so on.

If you would like to read more about the type of debate that went on in Ancient
China, I recommend my article Confucius on Moral Action and Human Nature
on www.shadowintheflame.com/chinesephilosophy which looks at the debate and
contra philosophical arguments that went on over hundreds of years as the Chinese
philosophers developed their philosophy of moral action and human nature.

Ric Vatner

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