Talk:Eastern world

Regarding 'Buddhism': The Four Noble Truths would be better stated as: There is suffering, There are causes of suffering, There is a cessation of suffering, There is a path that leads to the cessation of suffering. Furthermore, it should be noted that Nirvana (Nibbana in Pali) is only defined in the Pali suttas by the characteristics it doesn't have (eg. it is free of suffering) but does not say anything about 'oneness with the universe' which is suggested toward the end.

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From the article:

The central conceptual structure shared with Classical Western philosophy (and lacking in East Asian thought prior to the Buddhist "invasion") includes counterparts of the dichotomies between reason v emotion, appearance v reality, one v many, and permanence v change. Indian and Western thought, with their robust mind-body conceptual dualism, share consequent tendencies to subjective idealism or dualism. Formally, they share the rudiments of Western "folk psychology" --a sentential psychology and semantics (e.g. belief and (propositional) knowledge, subject-predicate grammar (and subject-object metaphysics) truth and falsity, and inference. These concepts underwrote the emergence (or perhaps spread) of logic in Greece and India (In contrast to pre-Buddhist China). Other noticeable similarities include structural features of related concepts of time, space, objecthood and causation -- all concepts hard to isolate within ancient Chinese conceptual space.

Buddhism and especially Taoism seems to reject these dualities as fundamentally illusory, whereas classical Western philosophy embraces them. Comments on this, please? Kwertii 13:12, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

I dunno, it's sort of complex. I mean, on the one hand in Buddhism the idea of reincarnation only makes sense in as much as the mind and the body exist as a Cartesian dualism, so that the soul moves from one body to the next, even if according to anatman that soul has no essential properties over time. Further, in Buddhism the teaching isn't that the world is illusory as it is in Hinduism and other philosophies. Suffering is real, it just isn't necessary once you follow the eightfold path to enlightenment. On the other hand, Mahayana and especially Zen Buddhism tend to reject all labels and conceptions as arbitrary attachments to be discarded, so the belief that the world or the soul being "real" would seen as a stumbling block on the road to enlightenment... So, it's a sort of complicated mix of things, where the nuances emphasized by different sects can vary. --Carl 15:30, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Also, we have A related argument is linguistic, based on the classification of Sanskrit as one of the earliest Indo-European languages. Shared concepts include the supernatural, the immortal soul (ancestor of mind-body dualism). I'd think that various African and Native American philosophies also have concepts such as the supernatural and the immortal soul, no? Kwertii 17:31, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Shortened Taoism

I took this text on Taoism and tried to shorten it, because I think this level of detail belongs to [[Taoism] main article:

Taoism's central books are the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi). Tradition had it that the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu (Laozi) dates to approximately 600 BCE. Recent archeological finds have reinforced the scholarly argument that it was still being shaped around or after the time of Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi). The core concepts themselves may be much more ancient, incorporating elements of mysticism dating back to prehistoric times.

The traditional story: The Tao Te Ching was written by Lao Zi (Wade-Giles, Lao tse), a minor Chinese court official (and, according to Taoist legend, teacher to Confucius) who became tired of the petty intrigues of court life, and set off to leave China by the "Western Pass". He was stopped by a "keeper of the pass" who, noting that valuable wisdom should not be taken away, required Laozi to put his tao into words -- whereupon Laozi quickly jotted down the 5000 characters that make up the Tao Te Ching (which actually contains about twice that).

His Taoism (interpreted by some as a version of quietism) involved a slogan often translated (obscurely) as "action through inaction", wu wei. The "wu" is not problematic -- it's just "lack" or "absence." But "wei" has a cluster of meanings, including "for the sake of", "doing", and "regarding or deeming as." (A cognate wei means "to call or designate", and another works like the linking verb "is.") We can speculate that the whole idea suggests no actions generated by concepts. The closest familiar Western idea would be something like non-deliberative or sub-conscious action. This produces the familiar gloss in interpretations that one should effect changes subtly and without disrupting the natural flow of the universe, rather than by attempting to force change according to some conceptual norms (a for the sake of).

A related core structural feature is the argumentative reliance on the dualism of concepts (names). All terms are discussed as paired with their opposites and rather than a model where names refer to objects, the text hints that the complementary concepts (names) map onto distinctions that we can draw in reality. (Mastery of language consists in correctly being able to distinguish using the names). Laozi links this learned capacity to learned (hence unnatural) desires which, in turn, lead to wei--action informed by names, learned patterns of discrimination, and associated desires.

The most famous example of this dualism is one only briefly hinted at in the text but which becomes dominant in the Han (220 BC-3rd centry AD) is the yin-yang dualism that dominated the cosmology of the traditional China. These symbolize the divisions of light and dark, male and female,hot and cool, dominant and submissive, upper and lower, stiff and yielding, hard and soft, active and passive etc. Where Confucianism "favors" the "good" yang, Daoism sees them as interdependent. One half is no better than the other, and indeed, neither can exist without the other, since each contains a small amount of the other. Ultimately, both are the same thing -- the great ultimate which a tao "carves" into two to guide action in some WAY. (The concrete -- pun intended -- translation of dao is "road".)

Some time after the publication of the Tao Te Ching and another work by Zhuang zi (Wade-Giles, Chuang tse), Taoism developed its religious aspect, especially among the Chinese peasantry. Lao Zi and other famous personas were elevated to deity status among followers, and complex religious rituals involving alchemy, magic spells and symbology began to be practiced.

I will try to mix this in the main article. gbog 15:49, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

WHAT?

Why was this moved from Eastern philosophy, and how can we fix this as soon as possible? -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 04:24, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

To clarify, in case it's not transparent, culture is a much, much broader topic than philosophy or even "systems of thought" or other glosses. Culture is stuff like music and food. And while an article on Eastern culture is something that's not a horrible idea to have, it should be something other than the Eastern phliosophy article, which should be returned immediately to Eastern philosophy. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 04:28, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Well, lets not be hasty - if youre saying that the term should refer to philosophy instead of culture, then we have a conflict. But if you might agree that there needs to be both, then I can simply parse the material relevant to philosophy to Eastern philosophy, keeping the Eastern culture article as a more general cover - containing within it Philosophy, society, art, etc... OK? -Stevertigo 04:47, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Yes, that should be fine. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 04:50, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Please do not copy-and-paste move articles. Since nearly all of the text was transferred back to Eastern Philosophy, I felt we had to preserve history. I deleted Kukkurovaca, reverted Stevertigo's changes, and did a proper move. I reistated the edits of both of you, and the edit summaries attribute the changes to you. (See history for both pages). [[User:Sverdrup|✏ Sverdrup]] 13:43, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

About the article Eastern philosophy: maoism?

Please forgive my poor english. To me, this article could be improved a lot as a whole. Unfortunatey, my knowledge of english won't allow me to do much, but there's still something that i find quite stunning: even if we accept the field of eastern philosophies has having some kind of discrete character (and I do not, eccept maybe the buddhist lineage in some asian countries) I still wonder why the maoist philosophy is listed in the article. Reading the introduction and the list of traditions, I see that the article deals with philosophies and teachings which have their roots in Asia. This could be considered logic from a certain perspective but, in the same perspective, I don't find any reason to put Maoism in the list. Not only Maoism has its well known roots in the west but it bring into question almost every aspect of cultural continuity in China (which is quite what you would expect from a socialist point of view, and that's ok). So, at first its inclusion in the list would seem laughable, while actually is simply nonsense, IMO. Now, I see that someone would consider my opinion NPOV. But to me, NPOV doesn't mean simply putting some statement everywhere merely adding that it could be false or not. It rather means the respect of the context and structure of an article (and the respect of any user's aim to gather serious informations about something). I would consider a severe infraction of a NPOV to list, say, Ufology in the Science category rather than in Pseudoscience, for that manner. That's all. Thank you. Bai Shengzhi 19:48, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)