The Eastern Worldview

The Western cultures rely on logic and reasoning very much. Logic and reasoning are the cornerstones of Western thinking, and indeed, the entire Western civilization. Particularly, if you ever studied philosophy in a U.S. college, you would deeply understand what I mean. Studying Western philosophy means delving deeply into words, into logic, and sometimes lost in reasoning out the deeper meanings to be conveyed. As one of my friends jokingly put it, "studying philosophy is unhealthy."

Unlike their Western counterparts, Eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Buddhism are quite different - perhaps the opposite. They don't rely on logic that much. There is no mind-boggling logic as seen in Western philosophy texts. Eastern philosophies, instead, rely more on intuition to get to the deeper meaning behind the logic and language. Logically faulty is not necessarily faulty altogether. Two logically contradictory statements are not necessarily one right and the other wrong. It might be, to the Eastern minds, both are right, or both are wrong. But is this possible?

In fact, Eastern worldview is complicated. The main difference from its Western counterpart is its emphasis on the interrelations between objects such as the sun, the earth, the moon, humans, animals, and plants - everything - rather than on the objects themselves and the attributes associated to these objects. In other words, the East believes that all phenomena in this world are the joint contribution of those interactions between seemingly disconnected objects. And it is because of these interrelations and interdependence that the Eastern minds believe that logic alone does not prove or disprove anything - the context from which the logic is drawn must also be taken into account.