Online research in philosophy

: Thoreau's engagement with and perspectives on the Orient are considered here. Within Thoreau's Hindu appropriations, the 'practical' importance for Thoreau of yogic practices is reemphasized. Thoreau's often-cited Buddhist links are questioned. Instead, it is Thoreau's explicit use of Confucian and Persian Sufi materials that deserve reemphasis, as do, in retrospect, some striking thematic convergences with Taoism. Thoreau's 'Light from the East' focuses on ethical and mystical techniques, infused with lessons from Nature for 'a very Yankee sort of Oriental.'.

I will speak here of three notions which are crucial for a thoroughgoing understanding of the three East Asian philosophical/religious teachings of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The first I name integrated practice ; the other two are already known to modern scholarship as essence-function and interpenetration. Despite the readily observable reliance on these fundamental and unifying elements by the major masters of the three traditions, through the past century of modern scholarly investigation in the West they have been paid almost no sustained attention. While they have occasionally been identified in a fragmentary and cursory way, they have not been examined from the perspective of their role as fundamental constituents of a holistic cultural worldview, or as a set of pan-East Asian metaphysical categories which are radically distinct from basic Western paradigms, and which have retained remarkable consistency throughout the long histories and wide range of schools of thought contained in the three traditions.

PART ONE INDIAN THOUGHT INDIAN THOUGHT HAS A LONG AND COMPLEX DEVELOPMENT. IT is DIFFICULT TO GIVE AN EXACT HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIAN ...

Oriental thought requires the introduction of a novel metaphysical concept of nonbeing, along with being, to exhibit the dynamics of becoming. The initial contact of being and nonbeing is the basis of aesthetic nature and the fountainhead of Oriental aesthetics.