ABSTRACT
The central thesis advanced in this book is that there has been an Easternization of the West. As we have seen, this is taken to mean a basic shift or sea change in the nature of this civilization such that the worldview that has traditionally served to define it has come to be replaced by one that is in effect its mirror image; to wit, the worldview of the East. Since the justification for using these terms and the specification of their meaning are issues that have now been addressed, it is time to turn to a consideration of the evidence in favor of such a claim. One thing that can be seen immediately from the discussion in the previous chapter is that the West’s current enthusiasm for “things Eastern,” which was noted in chapter 2, is only one part of the evidence in favor of this process. The fact that beliefs and practices that are clearly Eastern in origin, such as Buddhism, feng shui, judo, and acupuncture, are being taken up enthusiastically by people in the West would appear to be evidence in support of the thesis. However, we can now see that whether beliefs, attitudes, and practices are to be considered Eastern is not simply a question of identifying their immediate place of origin. Rather, given the preceding discussion, and the schematic ideal typical constructs of alternative worldviews that we have derived from Max Weber, it can be seen that Eastern and Western are terms that specify a distinctive content and hence do not merely relate to questions of provenance. Thus, although it is the case that many, if not most, of those Eastern items specified in chapter 2 probably do indeed deserve that appellation, this does not mean that many other cultural items
currently popular in the West are not also to be similarly deemed Eastern. Thus, the search for evidence of Easternization now begins again, and this time our concern is less whether the cultural complexes, beliefs, attitudes, and practices in question originate in the East than whether or not they belong to an Eastern-style worldview as outlined in the previous chapter. If indeed this is the case, then the experience of a majority of people in the West should be, as Braden aptly expresses it, one that serves to “validate immanence rather than transcendence, monism rather than pluralism, reincarnation rather than resurrection, nirvana rather than heaven, maya rather than hell, ignorance rather than evil, liberation rather than salvation, and self-knowledge rather than grace, redemption or atonement” (Braden, 1967, p. 60). It will be the purpose of the discussion in this chapter and the next to demonstrate that this is indeed the case, and a natural place to begin is with the crucial central question of the nature of the divine.
