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
At this stage in history, we do
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
The axial age was a period in which several new religions
(“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.
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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
As a result, in the Middle Ages we find a number of local cults that
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).
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