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The East and the West: From Holism to Dialogue through Confrontation
107 Europe. These ancient civilisations incorporated much which can be seen in the further development of European culture. Since ancient times, Western civilisation was characterised by its focus on the objectification of spiritual practice, the desire to give a substantive and conceptual expression to this practice and, ultimately, its reduction to a technique which operates on ideas and concepts. Nevertheless, if you compare the Oriental and Classical civilisations of antiquity, some mutual influence and borrowings can be detected. For example, Indo-Buddhist sculpture, which was widespread in China, dates back to the Kushan Hellenistic prototype. 5
not see such significant differences between the development of proto- European traditions and the Arab (Jaahiliyyah) or Buddhist-Confucian world. Thus, this ancient period of history allows us to speak of the unity and universality of historical processes. However, in the Early Middle Ages we see a radically different situation. In discussing the unity of mankind in the ancient period of history, we might recall the term “axial age,” which was coined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers in order to designate the period (first century BC), when some radical changes in the attitude of a person to himself and the world around him occurred. 6
(“world religions”) and philosophical doctrines emerged which centred around the problem of the meaning of individual existence and the relationship between a man and the world, a man and his deity, a man and society and, finally, a man and other people. All these problems are essentially ethical problems: thus, we can see that people’s outlook and attitude began to be concentrated upon ethics and, in fact, to be determined by ethics. All the changes of this period occurred only in the spiritual realm. The emergence of a new ethics was not spontaneous: it was based on the old norms and principles, as applied to questions of the ruler’s role. Later, this new ethics formed the basis of the new religions of the axial age. The relevant questions and proposed answers were explicitly formulated in the scriptures of these new religions (which is why they are also called “religions of salvation”), and in the new philosophies, many of which also had (or later acquired) semi-religious and, subsequently, overtly religious features, having acquired their own mythology (e.g., Buddhism). Within these teachings, a holistic understanding and perception of personality was developed. A self-aware person is an ethical person. However, the beginning of the ethical quest refers to a much earlier time - the epoch of the appearance of class-based society - and perhaps to even more ancient
5 Murian 2005, p. 85-87. 6 Jaspers 1994, p. 32-50. www.cclbsebes.ro/muzeul-municipal-ioan-raica.html / www.cimec.ro
R. R. Muhametzyanov
108 times, when man first became aware of himself not as an inseparable part of a clan or a tribe, with no intrinsic value, but as a self-sufficient individual and as a unique personality. Changes in the spiritual realm led to changes in all spheres of human life: economic, political and social. Hereupon, the face of culture changed. The result of this process was the appearance of many cultural worlds, which began to develop independently. The single history of mankind became divided into separate national local cultures. As Jaspers puts it, “The deployment of the few great cultures is parallel. These are different histories.” 7
retained practically no memories of their past. The only exceptions were Chinese and Indian cultures; for them the past remained a reference point. The European medieval world began to remember its past only during the Renaissance. By the second half of the Middle Ages, it becomes difficult to find items that clearly show their common origin and development. In contrast, this commonality is preserved in the regions which retained closer ties to their historical and cultural development (such as Afro-Asian, Indian, Chinese societies). The evidence of such tightly-linked communities can be found in the introduction of round sculptures, pagodas and temples into both Chinese and Japanese Buddhist culture; in the Samurai code of honour, Bushido, which was based, amongst other things, upon Chinese Confucian principles of fidelity to the emperor or lord; and the philosophical acceptance of death associated with Zen Buddhism, 8 which is a Japanese version of Chinese Chan Buddhism. 9 In fact, here we face large- scale civilizations, 10 such as Buddhist-Confucian. The memory of the unity of ancient empires (such as the Roman Empire, which united the European and Afro-Asian worlds), led to the idea of a world empire, a world theocracy, but this idea was not typical of everyone in the Middle Ages. The bourgeois revolutions of the 17 th -18
th
7 Ibid., p. 94. 8 Zen Buddhism is one of the most important schools of East Asian Buddhism. It emerged in China in the 5 th -6 th centuries. It is believed that the teachings of Zen came from India to China, where it was brought by Bodhidharma, and was further extended to the Far East. Traditions of Chinese Chang, Japanese Zen, Korean Thien and Vietnamese Son continue to develop even now, retaining aspects of a single entity but with their own unique features and style of practice. The Japanese school of Zen is the most well-known in the West among all the schools of Buddhism, although historically Chinese Chan is considered to be its predecessor (Buswell 1992, p. 21). 9 Nikolaeva 1996, p. 5-13. 10 In the interpretation of the term “civilisation” we adhere to the views of Arnold Toynbee, who believed that civilisation is something more than the nation-state: it is primarily a spiritual and cultural unity (Toynbee 1991, p. 14-34). www.cclbsebes.ro/muzeul-municipal-ioan-raica.html / www.cimec.ro
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