302 CHAPTER TWELVEthings as a call to an activist approach to social and environmental reform. Be-
cause of the spread of Western values through modern education, this move-
ment has found fervent supporters not only in the West, but also among
activist groups in Asia.12.2.3 The Crisis of Cultural Relativism
Closely related to the issue of eclecticism is that of cultural relativism. The
eighteenth-century Enlightenment had advanced the argument that reason
and empiricism offered the only absolute truths, whereas the truths of religion
were culturally relative. Although this argument did not sway all of the West,
it did create a cultural crisis in terms of how the breach between reason and
religion could best be healed. Some early Buddhologists indicated their feel-
ings on the matter by referring to the Buddha's Awakening as his "enlighten-
ment." In the late nineteenth century, a number of writers, including Sir
Edwin Arnold in his poem The Light of Asia (1879), explicitly advanced the
case that Buddhism-with its tolerance, its rejection of blind faith, and its in-
vitation for all to test its doctrines in the light of experience-was much bet-
ter suited than Christianity to heal the breach. The spread ofWestern science
and rationalism to the East meant that Eastern thinkers were confronted with
the same problem, and many of them came to the same conclusion: Bud-
dhism, when stripped of its cultural accretions, was the most scientific of all
religions. In 1893, when Buddhist reverse missionaries came to America to
participate in the first World's Parliament of Religions (Strong EB, sec. 9.1),
this was the central theme of their message, and it remained a strong theme in
the writings of Buddhist polemicists throughout the twentieth century. K. N.
Jayatilleke, for instance, devoted books to the assertion that Buddhism was an
early version of logical positivism, and his student, David Kalupahana, has
been even more vocal in attempting to prove that early Buddhism and early
Madhyamika operated from the same presuppositions as Jamesian pragmatism.
A more modern version of the same theme animates the writings of Fritjof
Capra and Gary Zukav, who see parallels between the discoveries of quantum
mechanics on the one hand and the insights of Madhyamika and Zen on the
other. These parallels, they claim, prove that the breach between scientific
method and religious inspiration has been healed.
For many westerners in the twentieth century, however, this theme has
seemed irrelevant at best, because the work of Nietzsche, Freud, and their
contemporaries at the turn of the century used reason and empirical findings
to raise the issue as to whether reason and empiricism themselves were psy-
chologically and culturally relative. What human beings think they perceive
and what they regard as reasonable, these thinkers argued, is shaped by their
psychological and cultural background; thus any abstractions based on reason
and perception must be culturally relative as well. Westerners who accepted
these arguments found themselves faced with the question of how experience
freed from the taint of cultural prejudices might be achieved. In the early part
of the century, continental European philosophy-existentialism and phe-