they can authentically hear.’ He continues, ‘The presentation of Buddhism in a
culturally alien way of thinking often fails to totally communicate the teachings,
thereby leaving us existentially untouched’ (ibid.). His involvement with Buddhism
is apparently inseparable from his keen awareness of the spiritual crisis of our days.
Reading the works of existential theologians and philosophers such as Paul Tillich,
Gabriel Marcel, John Macquarrie, and Martin Heidegger, he finds that they as
Christians were trying to deal with precisely the same problem that he was facing as
a Buddhist. And he states, ‘Their writings not only gave me many ideas for a means
to help resolve these conflicts, but also opened my eyes for the first time to the richness
of the Judeo-Christian tradition.’
What is the East?From the discussion so far we can see that it is never self-evident that Buddhism and
psychotherapy belong to the East and the West respectively. Our situation talking
about them is more complicated than we imagine. It has become quite possible to
speak of Western Buddhism or Eastern psychotherapy. We must however go on to
question even the terms, ‘East’ and ‘West’.
We know well that the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ are in essence relative. An object to
my left will be on my right, when I turn around. It is called left or right according to
the direction of my attention. This is true of all the words denoting directions in
space such as ‘before’ and ‘behind’, ‘above’ and ‘beneath’. All of them are used only
relatively.
On the contrary, the words ‘east’, ‘west’, ‘north’, and ‘south’ are not relative but
absolute. Tokyo is to the east of Kyoto where I work, but does not become to the
west of Kyoto even when I turn my back to Tokyo. It remains to the east of Kyoto
so long as I work in Kyoto, whatever I may do here. Even when I go to Nagoya,
Tokyo for me is in the east. But when I go to Chiba, Tokyo for me is in the west.
‘For me’ is not an exact expression because ‘east’ and ‘west’ don’t depend upon my
action but upon the place where I am. The latter itself is independent of me. I only
happen to be in the place. In geography we use neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’ but ‘east’ and
‘west’.
But when these words are written with capital letters as in ‘the East’ and ‘the West’,
they become important basic concepts in history. East and West have never referred
to any fixed geographical area. Areas called the East or the West have changed in the
course of history. For Europeans, the East at first was only the region we today call
Arabia or the Near East. With the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the area meant
by the East was expanded to include India. Later China was discovered and called
the East, until Japan became the Far East, i.e. the farthest country of the East.
The concept of the East is therefore relative to the expansion of the European
consciousness in history. It is no wonder that we Japanese find it somewhat unnatural
to call Persia or India, even China, countries of the East. When we use the word East
we have already introjected, though in most cases unconsciously, the European
viewpoint into ourselves. Our consciousness has been, in so doing, partly
20 SHOJI MURAMOTO