East-West Literary Relations: The “Wisdom” of the “East”

One of the more promising ways to go about comparing the literatures of Asia and the West is to focus on the phenomenon of wisdom literature. The Western view that Asia is the repository of a special wisdom may occasionally be found from the earliest imaginative and historical encounters between the “West” and the “East.” Thanks to Jesuit missionaries, the French Philosophies, Schopenhauer, and Max Müller, “the wisdom of the East” receives growing attention from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, and reappears under various guises during the twentieth. Before discussing what is meant by wisdom, and what is behind this Western habit of reading Asian texts as wisdom literature, we need to recognize that words such as “East” and “West” ought to be placed in quotation marks, as a first step in contemporary wisdom, if you will. Distinctions between “East” and “West” are partly whimsical, depending quite literally on where one is when the sun rises or sets, and partly matters of adoption and convenience, whereby the extra-European world has borrowed “Orient” and “Occident” from European vocabulary, where these words originate and properly belong. In fact, anachronistic language such as “East” and “West,” “Orient” and “Occident” is both arbitrary and revealing, belonging to what Edward Said has called “imaginative geography,” which differentiates between familiar and unfamiliar space that is considered “ours” or “theirs.” ¹ My “East,” determined by historical precedent and academic interests, includes those Far Eastern and South Asian cultures whose literatures are the subject of this volume, namely, China, India, and Japan, while “West” signifies countries where the major language is English or a European language. The discourse on wisdom in this essay is that of Western authors, scholars, travelers, and missionaries who write about this “East,” as well as that of some Asian commentators.