We Westerners have long loved to depict the East as fundamentally 'other.' We have done it at times to give ourselves airs of superiority, and at times to find a hidden wisdom that gives us a stick to beat our least favorite things about Western civilization with. I've certainly been guilty of both at certain times in my life. These days I don't think I really buy the whole 'Eastern' Label. We select what we want to see and label it Eastern, failing to give due attention to the multitude of Asian counter examples.
In 1977, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, drew attention to America's ongoing spiritual turn eastward. As we combed through the vast amount of information available to us about Asian religion and philosophy, we selected what we felt was the core of Eastern-ness, and in some ways we selected those strands that fit most naturally with the spirit of out time and place - and transcendental meditation, martial arts and Zen Buddhism sent their tentacles through our consciousness. The things we selected were indeed capable of being compared to European thought patterns in ways that pointed up significant differences. But Asia isn't meditation, Satori and Bushido. Asia is billions of people, living and dead, and thousands of individual cultures, religions and sects.
In my twenties, reading through the largely alien thought of Hinduism, I ran onto the split between Ramanuja and Shankara. In Ramanuja's Dvaita Vedanta I found a place in Hinduism that so resonated with my own spirituality that it almost felt like coming home. His dualistic approach to religion contained all that I had been taught to see as "Western" - the primacy of God's personal face over his immanent presence, the importance of relationship with the divine over mere identification with an impersonal "divineness." It was my first wake up call to the fact that life doesn't have two basic flavors, East and West. Human is human. Culture shapes us yes, but the same capacities and potentialities exist in us all, for better and for worse.
As I read through Nisargadatta I find his monism (advaita) to be, to be completely honest, boring. His guru taught him "you alone are" and he came to believe it. he sees the world as an illusion, God as an illusion, birth and death as illusions, even salvation is an illusion: "Saved from what?"
"I really do not see myself related to anybody or anything. Not even to a self, whatever that self may be. I remain forever--undefined. I am within and beyond--intimate and unapproachable."
Far more interesting is the faith of his Hindu challengers
"The world is; I am. These are facts...."
"You say the world is no use to us--only a tribulation. I feel it cannot be so. God is not such a fool. The world seems to me to be a big enterprise for bringing the potential into actual, matter into life, the unconscious into consciousness. To realize the supreme we need the experience of the opposites. Just as for building a temple we need stone and mortar, wood and iron, glass and tiles, so for making a man into a divine sage, a master of life and death, one needs the material of every experience. As a woman goes to the market, buys provisions of every sort, comes home, cooks, bakes and feeds her lord, we bake ourselves nicely in the fire of life and feed our God....A child goes to school and learns many things which will be of no use to him later. But in the course of learning he grows. So do we pass through experiences without number and forget them all, but in the meantime we grow all the time. And what is a jnani but a man with a genius for reality! This world of mine cannot be an accident. It makes sense. There must be a plan behind it. My God has a plan."
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