Journey · 11 stops
Asia and Europe in Dialogue
Europe reading Asian texts, Asia working with European ones – and where the two met.
Stops
Stop 1 of 11: Yajnavalkya
Is there a self, and how does it relate to the world? In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the sage Yajnavalkya, as the text portrays him, teaches that the innermost self, Atman, is one with Brahman, the ground of all things. It cannot be grasped as an object – only approached by negation: “neti neti”, not this, not that. This teaching sets a question Indian philosophy will argue over for centuries.
Stop 2 of 11: Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)
The Buddha, who probably knew teachings of this kind, rejects their core: look as closely as you like, you will find no permanent self (anatta), only changing processes that arise in dependence on one another. Clinging to a self is what causes suffering. Liberation comes not by uniting with an eternal Self but by seeing through it – a thought his later followers push further.
Stop 3 of 11: Nagarjuna
Nagarjuna, some six centuries later, extends the Buddha’s insight from the self to everything. All things arise in dependence on others, so none has an essence of its own – they are empty (shunyata), and emptiness itself is empty too. With sharp logic he dismantles every fixed position. His school, Madhyamaka (“the middle way”), spreads to Tibet, China and Japan; Europe learns of such ideas only in the age of the missionaries.
Stop 4 of 11: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Leibniz follows the reports of Jesuit missionaries from China closely. In the preface to his Novissima Sinica (1697) he suggests that China should send missionaries to Europe to teach the practice of natural theology; in his late Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (1716) he reads the Neo-Confucian principle (li) as close to his own thought, and he recognises his binary arithmetic in the hexagrams of the Yijing. His reading is generous – and filtered through the missionaries’ Latin.
Stop 5 of 11: The World as Will and Representation
A century later Schopenhauer reads the Upanishads in Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin translation of a Persian version and calls them the consolation of his life. In The World as Will and Representation he finds Kant, the Upanishads and Buddhist teaching in agreement: the world we see is representation, behind it lies one blind will, and salvation lies in its denial. Whether India shaped his thought or only confirmed it is debated; either way, Indian ideas now enter European philosophy.
Stop 6 of 11: Hu Shih
The traffic also runs the other way. Hu Shih studies with John Dewey at Columbia, and when Dewey lectures in China in 1919–21, Hu accompanies him and spreads his ideas. He calls Dewey’s pragmatism “experimentalism” and turns it against grand “isms”: bold hypotheses, careful verification, one concrete problem at a time. In his history of ancient Chinese philosophy he reads the classical masters for their logical method – a European tool used to reread a Chinese past.
Stop 7 of 11: K. C. Bhattacharya
In Bengal, K. C. Bhattacharya treats Kant and Vedanta as equally living options: in The Subject as Freedom (1930) he describes subjectivity as a progressive freeing from the object, in a vocabulary drawn from both. In his lecture “Swaraj in Ideas” he also warns against a “cultural subjection” in which colonised minds take over Western concepts without examining them. Learning from Europe, for him, is one thing; being ruled by its concepts is another.
Stop 8 of 11: Nishida Kitarō
In Kyoto, Nishida Kitarō draws on Zen practice, William James’ “pure experience” and Hegel’s dialectic. In An Inquiry into the Good (1911) he argues that pure experience comes before the split between subject and object; later he grounds everything in a “place” of absolute nothingness. Western concepts here serve to articulate a Zen-informed insight – and philosophers around him in Kyoto soon travel to Germany.
Stop 9 of 11: Martin Heidegger
Tanabe Hajime, Nishida’s younger colleague, later his successor and critic, hears Heidegger in Freiburg in 1923; Kuki Shūzō attends his lectures in Marburg in 1927–28, and Nishida’s student Nishitani Keiji studies with him in Freiburg in 1937–39. Heidegger himself, searching for a thinking beyond Western metaphysics, works in 1946 with the Chinese scholar Paul Shih-yi Hsiao on translating parts of the Daodejing, and later writes “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer”. How far this shaped his thought beyond cautious hints is disputed.
Stop 10 of 11: Bimal Krishna Matilal
After 1950 the encounter moves into analytic philosophy. Bimal Krishna Matilal, trained by traditional pandits in Navya-Nyaya, the “new logic” of Indian philosophy, and then at Harvard, where he studied with Quine, reconstructs Indian debates on perception, negation and the self with the tools of modern logic – not as exotic wisdom but as arguments that can be checked. From 1976 he teaches at Oxford.
Stop 11 of 11: Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit, also at Oxford, arrives by thought experiments – teleportation, divided brains – at a view of the self that he himself compares with the Buddha’s: what matters is not a further fact of personal identity but psychological continuity. From the Upanishads to Parfit, the question of the self has travelled in both directions.
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