My introduction to Asian spiritual traditions came from a Unitarian minister who had spent some time at the San Francisco Zen Center when the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was there. The Reverend Vaughn's talks often were based on literature from both Zen and philosophical Taoism. I was fascinated, and bought a copy of the Tao Teh Ching, which I puzzled over for some time before it began to "speak" to me.
As time went on I perceived more and more subtlety and depth in the simple verses. And about that time I also began Zen studies with the late John Daido Loori and became acquainted with masters such as Dogen, Hakuin, and Huineng. It felt as if I had walked through a door to an alternate world that was as infinitely rich and intricate as the old one but also different, in ceaselessly surprising ways.
And this was the beginning of my long-time grudge against the chauvinistic way western academia approaches Asian religion and philosophy.
Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, sees the same problem. He writes in the New York Times that in spite of talk about diversity, "non-western" philosophy still is included in the curricula only in token ways.
"Western philosophy is always the unmarked category, the standard in relation to which non-Western philosophy provides a useful contrast," Smith writes. "Non-Western philosophy is not approached on its own terms, and thus philosophy remains, implicitly and by default, Western." (Emphasis added.)
The part about non-western philosophy not approached on its own terms is what irritates me about academics such as Owen Flanagan and the "naturalized Buddhism" crowd. Their approach to Buddhism is to pick through it looking for whatever can be reconciled to current western metaphysical notions and dismissing everything else as backward and superstitious.
To me, this is only somewhat less chauvinistic than the old European conqueror/colonialists who imagined they were bringing the light of civilization to savage and backward nonwhite people around the world, even when those people had been "civilized" a lot longer than Europeans.
I agree that it can sometimes be a useful exercise to compare similarities in different philosophical systems. But if the only way you ever approach System X is by stuffing it into conceptual models established by System Y, you will never understand System X on its own terms. You will never appreciate System X for its own sake or learn what it might have to teach you that can't be found in System Y.
(This touches on one of my other gripes, about people who continue to insist that Buddhism is a philosophy and not a religion. Actually it's neither, if you stick to contemporary western definitions of "philosophy" or "religion." Then what is it? You'll never know until you stop trying to reconcile it to your prefabricated ideas and instead view it as-it-is.)
If philosophy has a purpose, it seems to me that purpose is to expand our perceptions, not to just perpetually reinforce them. The word philosophy is from the Greek philosophus, meaning "lover of wisdom." It seems unwise to assume that wisdom can only be found in what one already understands.
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