March 4, 2015:

Buddhism in the West

“OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!” Rudyard Kipling

The world is often viewed, with little exploration or detail, in stark dichotomy – that is black or white, good vs evil, believers and non-believers, and so on.  We can be polarized and separated without understand that it is not either or – but both.  A balance, a totality, an intergrated world is diminished into conflicts and warfare of what is us and and them.

The East-West dichotomy is a philosophical concept of ancient origin which claims that the two cultural hemispheres, East and West, developed diametrically opposed, one from the particular to the universal and the other from the universal to the particular; the East is more inductive while the West is more deductive. Together they form an equilibrium.