The Impact of Eastern Wisdom on the West

Extract

Of the impact of Western science and technology on the East little needs to be said. But there is a reverse process which is less manifest, more subtle, but which may perhaps prove hardly less effective in shaping the future of mankind. ‘Let us look towards the East’, the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung has bidden us. ‘Let us look towards the East. . . . European cannons have burst open the gates of Asia; European science and technique, European worldly-mindedness and cupidity. . . . We have conquered the East politically. . . . But do you know what happened when Rome overthrew the Near East politically? The Spirit of the East entered Rome . . . and out of the most unlikely corners of Asia Minor came a new, spiritual Rome. Would it be unthinkable that the same thing might happen today? ... I know that our [Western] unconscious is full of Eastern symbolism. ... The spirit of the East penetrates through all our pores, and reaches the most vulnerable places of Europe.’

Perhaps that sounds extravagant. But I am not so sure. It was just about the time when the French revolutionaries were enthroning the goddess of Reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame that some Upanishads were first translated into a European language. It was a rather dubious translation into French by way of the Persian, and, for some time after that, European renderings of the great spiritual classics of the East were rare enough. But we know how the discovery of Buddhist thought influenced Schopenhauer; and however much he may have misinterpreted it, European thinkers have never since been unaware of the challenge to their own ways of thinking of an immense power of age-old wisdom in the Far East.