Eastern Thought Quotes

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly...

Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.

Life and human society are the chief concern of Confucianism and, through it, the chief concern of the Chinese people.

As Lao Tzu says, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao".

Often, everywhere we look, we seem to find obstacles and facades and smokescreens, so it was really nice to find things in the world that actually spoke to me. And I felt like Eastern thought really spoke to me. Because it isn't trying to cover up the pain in life; it's trying to deal with it and overcome it in an intelligent way. I think the reason I love Eastern thought so much, and mysticism in general - but especially Buddhism - is because it seems to me an attempt to look life squarely in the face, as it is.

Historically, the East was more concerned with understanding the mind and the West was more involved in understanding matter.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

Buddhism does not accept a theory of God, or a creator. According to Buddhism, one's own actions are the creator, ultimately. Some people say that, from a certain angle, Buddhism is not a religion but rather a science of mind.

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.

The western mind is linear, the eastern mind is circular.

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life...again I should point to India

The West is concentration of the mind: the East is meditation of the mind. The West is thinking: the East is non-thinking. The West is mind: the East is no-mind.

Yoga is a product of Eastern thought. A further complication is that the early Yoga teachers were both Indian and Hindu. So from the late 1800's and early 1900's the Yoga teachers who came across were as interested in Hinduism as in Yoga. Often what we were being taught was a mixture of two different systems.

I majored in Chinese. I was never really good at Chinese but I really, really benefited from having been exposed to Asian philosophy early in my life.

When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East--above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe--we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.

The future of humanity will move closer and closer toward the approach of Zen, because the meeting of the East and West is possible only through something like Zen, which is earthly and yet unearthly.

There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or the East that is not active in some Indian mind

Philosophically, I would say that I am Buddhist.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.

The human intellect has not been able to conceive of anything more noble and sublime in the history of the world than the teachings of the Upanishads.

If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries.

In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation.

My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.

In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.