ABSTRACT
This chapter compares British writer Aldous Huxley’s novel, Island (1962), with Japanese Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki’s social thought mainly after World War II, and demonstrates that these contemporaries reached a similar form of utopianism in terms of their idea of making the best of the Eastern and the Western as well as of their Buddhist, pacifist, and ecological visions. Because of its use of concepts of ‘East(ern)’ and ‘West(ern)’, Huxley’s and Suzuki’s utopianism may be problematized with regard to Orientalism. However, the core of their utopianism is neither to exclude nor to control the East and the West but to overcome and deconstruct this opposition. Huxley and Suzuki principally employed ‘East(ern)’ and ‘West(ern)’ not in a geographically or biologically determined sense but to represent the two aspects of every human, the analytical and the intuitive, both of which they believed are necessary and should be harmonized. In many ways, their utopianism is relevant to our time, in which ethnocentrism and androcentrism have severely impacted humanity and the planet, and human intelligence has become increasingly specialized and fragmented.
