It is more than a century since what we call the ‘history of religions’ was discovered and has been studied. But only recently have we realized that the ‘geography of religions’ is just as important. East and West are essential geopolitical categories, determined by cultural, historical and even religious differences: an Indian and a Swedish Catholic (both of them members of a minority) display notable religious differences, as great as those that separate an Indonesian from a Saudi Muslim (both members of a majority). The ‘geography of religions’ cannot be ignored. Differences exist but simplifications must be avoided: we have to go beyond the cliché according to which the Orient is mystical and the West pragmatic. Logical thought is no more eastern than western. There is scholastic philosophy in the East as well as the West, magic and rationalism are found everywhere. But as human beings are intrinsically earthbound beings, even though they are more than ‘of this world’, East and West are categories that are not only geographical and historical but also anthropological. There is an East and a West in each of us. That is why it is possible for us to understand each other.

Since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the phrase ‘Copernican revolution’ has been used in many fields to illustrate an event equivalent to the one Kant brought to philosophy, a revolutionary change in perspective. And Thierry Marchaisse, who questions the philosopher and Sinologist François Jullien in the book Penser d'un dehors (la Chine), entretiens d'Extrême-Orient, writes that the book proposes ‘nothing less than a relaunch of the great work of decentring that defines our modernity - in effect a new “Copernican reversal”‘. Jullien explains that ‘the confrontation between China and the West is one of the great contemporary issues’, that ‘Chinese thought reveals to us different coherences’, that it ‘also makes us go back to the preconceived ideas behind our Reason’, that it is thus ‘in the best position to intrigue today's thinking and shake philosophy up’ … China as philosophical tool.

This paper is situated in the broader context of an examination of the relationship between East and West from the particular perspective of our experience of the body. It is therefore based on two specific traditions, one belonging to the East - a particular strand of Tibetan Buddhism - the other to the West - the Orthodox tradition of the heart prayer - in order to try to show the similarities and differences in their approach to the body and attempt to compare them in the light of their respective ‘phenomenology’. In this sense phenomenology, as a western philosophical discipline, plays a pivotal role in this comparison and hopefully helps to bring new light to bear on this investigation. The early Eastern church evokes the concrete experience of the body as a holy body and sees it as an exemplary route to deification via the mystical practice of the ‘heart prayer’ (hesychasm). As regards Tibetan Buddhism, it advocates the gradual experience of the body as a rainbow body, defined as a path towards illumination, by means of ‘sitting meditation’ which brings liberation in bardo. In order to carry out this analysis, I shall refer to two recent books that are authorities in both these fields, Corps de mort et de gloire, Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps by O. Clément and Rainbow Painting: A Collection of Miscellaneous Aspects of Development and Completion by Tulku Urguyen Rinpoché.

Delicately and with a voluptuous spiral movement the leaf from the tall beech tree detached itself from its branch and landed on the flaming bed made by its companions.

That autumn, that morning, while I was observing this unique event, I began to reflect on the emotion I felt in its probably universal connotation. Like aesthetic feeling, a great many concepts affect living beings in the deepest part of themselves, and come from the depths of the cognitive processes, those determinants that are innate dispositions to feel and know. Those depths have a reality and a meta-historical, infra- and extra-verbal dimension.

It is the nature of the earth to lie ‘wholly spread out under the sky’: hapasê hê hupo tô kosmô keimenê (Isocrates); and the sky determines the World. Indeed it is the same as the World, as Plato states in the final words of Timaeus: ‘the World was born: it is the Sky, which is one and alone of its race’ (ho kosmos … gegonen heis ouranos hode monogenês ôn). What is thus clearly ‘one and alone of its race’ dominates by its very nature what is subjected to it: the earth. With the coming of the age of modernity, and today more than ever, the West has indeed subjected the Earth and its peoples by imposing its World on them. But it is the nature of worlds, as it is of heavens, to be limited by a horizon; and there is no sky, nor world, that is not supported by an earth. By the Earth, we mean to say nature. This ancient certainty, this primary metaphor, has been inscribed in us since the first creatures to become human, standing with both feet on the ground and head turned towards the sky, first saw the horizon. As paleo-anthropology tells us, it is in effect in the same movement that they began to create technical and symbolic systems from which the ecumene would spring; and this prime metaphor that was the basis for the ecumene and its worlds has continued to work on the generation of secondary metaphors that govern the history of human thought through the unconscious - from Aristotle when, inventing the notion of subject, he called it hupokeimenon, ‘what lies below’ (as the earth lies below the sky), to Heidegger when he imagined The Origin of the Work of Art as a ‘dispute’ (Streit) between a world and the earth. Indeed there is Streit because the earth denies itself and withdraws into its interior, in the very exteriorization that opens it into a world.

The East has been upsetting and sometimes even revolutionizing Europeans’ modes of thought, feeling and enjoyment since the most ancient times, well before Marco Polo, when it transmitted its techniques and arts (printing, paper money, the compass, porcelain, etc.). From the 18th century Europe has played a similar role in the technological and even the philosophical field, with regard to India, China and Japan. Apart from the infrequent exchanges between West and East, the transmission of knowledge was carried out through ‘buffer civilizations’ - Persians, Sassanids, the Turkic-Iranian Muslim world - whose languages were Indo-European or whose religion was Abrahamic, and so culturally linked to the West. Thus it was to the east of them that the great frontier between civilizations was situated, in a region that, since around the seventh century, has been dedicated to Islam. The huge Euro-Asian bloc was the arena for several encounters, or clashes, between civilizations which considerably enriched the technical skills, culture and taste of Europeans; the transmission of Greco-Arab knowledge in the 12th century, the contribution of Chinese techniques thanks to the great Asian land routes (christened the Silk Road in the 19th century), the importation of Indian techniques over the sea routes. These encounters were also the occasion for two-way trade that gave a new face to countries like India or Japan; the latter, for instance, opened up not only to western technologies in the Meiji period, but also to the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger in the early 20th century (the case of the Kyôto School of philosophy should be mentioned). The last of the great encounters date from the late 19th and the 20th centuries at the very moment when Europe and the American world were claiming to be the only ‘civilization’ worthy of the name, and considered they had nothing to learn from others, but, on the contrary, could teach them everything. However, this was also the time when a deepening knowledge of India, China, Korea, Japan led to a ‘rediscovery’ of Asia as a continent of great and rich civilizations whose philosophies, arts and many other disciplines were a match for their European counterparts; the French writer Henri Michaux described himself as a ‘barbarian’ when he visited that part of the world at the beginning of the 20th century.

Gandhara, an area that welcomed Buddhism and where the earliest monasteries are found from the late third century BC, was also a ‘land of immigration’.

With the aim of converting the Greco-Iranian peoples to Buddhism, the dignitaries in charge of these provinces under Asoka had identified in Greek and Aramaic vocabulary equivalents of Hindu or Buddhist themes. But the Gandhara Buddhists seem not to have continued this attempt to translate their sacred texts into Greek, Aramaic and probably Middle Iranian. On the other hand the Buddhists from Bactrian, Sogdian and Xinjiang translated the great texts of Buddhism from Sanskrit into the indigenous languages.

Johann Galtung in one of his lectures talks of a painting that hung in the ante-room of the late Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah. It was a giant picture of Nkrumah himself struggling loose from his chains. There is thunder and lightning in the air, and in one corner of the picture are three men, three white men. The first is a capitalist and he carries a briefcase. The second is a missionary and he clutches a Bible. The third, the meekest looking carries a book whose title can be barely read. It is African Political Systems, and the third man is an anthropologist.

Cultural space knows no official boundary. Civilizational interaction, recorded and unrecorded, is an ongoing process. Diffusionism and parallelism get interfused in civilizational studies. To think of one-sided borrowing or lending in the realm of culture rests on bias or prejudice, perhaps both. To think that originally there was only one culture (Egypt or India or China) and that all other cultures are its diffused or dispersed form is incorrect, both theoretically and evidentially. Comparably incorrect is the anthropological hypothesis that different cultures, in response to diverse social and natural stimuli or conditions, developed quite independently and in parallel manner. Once we believe, as I think we must, that cultural space is a continuum, the parallelistic thesis is bound to collapse. If, on the other hand, we totally reject the possibility of independent, relatively independent, origin and development of different cultures, we are obliged to deny the differentiable identity and personality and distinct cultures. To deny cultural pluralism is psychologically untenable and ideologically pernicious, and I have argued the point at length elsewhere.

The theme ‘East versus west’ is an old topic for discussion, but one that is constantly being rehashed. Though it has many aspects, a number of elements remain vague. Do East and West each form a monolithic bloc? Where does the East begin in the West's eyes, and vice versa, the West for the East? What, if any, are the basic differences separating the two?

Palaeontologists tell us that a dividing line indicating a divergence of traditions in stone tools can be traced back to the Lower Palaeolithic era, that is, a million years ago, in the western region of India. To the east of that line, in other words in East and South-east Asia, the most common tools are choppers and chopping-tools, while to the west, in western Asia, Europe and Africa, the main tools are hand-axes. The former are suitable for working vegetable materials and making bamboo or wooden, therefore perishable, objects, which for this reason leave no trace in the form of archaeological clues. The hand-axes are capable of being worked into stylized shapes and are appropriate for dismembering large herbivores and cutting up their meat.

First I think I should explain that call. It echoed in my ears for the first time a very long time ago and far, far away: on the Roof of the World, the Afghan Pamir, more than 30 years ago. It was uttered by a Kirghiz shepherd following a herd of sheep. Even if it is not in fact possible to transcribe that call accurately - the combination of the phonetic parameters that determine it would necessitate a representation using a graph or numerical matrices - I will attempt to give it a written shape, HAY, while admitting that this transcription denotes an abstraction that subsumes many possible realizations. But be that as it may. A few years later, when I was living in the Haut-Livradois, in the deepest heart of rural France, I was surprised to hear that call again on the lips of an Auvergnat peasant who was taking his sheep to the meadow. This unlikely coincidence led me to take a closer interest in the problem of communication between humans and animals. It is the essence of that thinking that I would today like to pass on to the readers of Diogenes in an issue devoted to the East/West contrast.

The notion that there was a profound cultural boundary between Europe (defined as Christian) and Asia (defined as other, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism …) was dear to the hearts of the Europeans at least from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But it is as much a figment of European creation as the notion of a physical boundary. Of course there were cultural differences of a graduated kind and important political-military ones with the western developments of ships and guns (using the Islamic compass and Chinese gunpowder), but especially with the development of industrial production. Pomerantz has recently argued that western economic supremacy was not in evidence until after that time, a thesis that obviously cuts at the roots of those many writers who claim a cultural advantage in the West going back perhaps to classical times, to Christianity, to the German heritage, or even to the Renaissance and Reformation. Some important changes did occur in the West following developments in the sphere of printing, mainly in the sphere of education and the modes of communication. That earlier levels of cultural attainment were not so very different is clear from the early Jesuit reports of their work in the East.

On 6 August 1945, I was exposed to radiation in Hiroshima during the atomic bombing. At that time I was 15 years old, a third-year junior high school student, and working at a factory in Hiroshima under the wartime student mobilization plan. A total of 201 people from my school (13 teachers and 188 students) were killed outright in the bombing. I narrowly escaped death, but suffered from radiation sickness for many years afterwards. At one point, my white blood cell count dropped sharply, endangering my life.

When I chose painting as my vocation, I decided to put on canvas my prayer for world peace that stems from my experience in Hiroshima. In 1959, I painted Arrival of Buddhism, a picture depicting the 17-year-long journey to India of Xuanzang (600–664), a Chinese priest during the Tang Dynasty, in search of enlightenment. This work made my name known as a painter among the general public.

Two great challenges for reform of education have to be addressed if Muslim society is to respond meaningfully to the threat of terrorism.

Most Muslims are strongly opposed to acts of violence, in any form, undertaken in the name of religion. Consequently, it hurts us to constantly see the name of Islam, ‘the religion of peace’, linked with international terrorism. Nevertheless, as Muslims we must face the reality that if we fail to address the challenges before us we will find ourselves constantly confronted with accusations of harbouring terrorists - regardless of how fair those generalized accusations might be. If, however, we are prepared seriously to address these two challenges, people such as Osama Bin Laden will find increasingly little solace or support in Muslim society.

In the course of human civilization, religion has underpinned the development of values of human respect, tolerance, peace, and the culture of peace. Unfortunately, at the same time, religion has also played the opposite role during some periods of history. Therefore, it is important to investigate how and to what extent religious faiths, or if I may say more accurately religious paradigms, have been and are ready to educate their believers in the above-mentioned value support system, and how they could set about so doing. How can religion provide us with an ambiance and a paradigm within which we can create an atmosphere of dialogue among different value systems? In this brief article, I try to seek light from the teachings of the great Persian thinker and poet, Jalaluddin Mowlavi Rumi, to be able to elaborate on this topic.