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With funding provided by a grant from the US Depart­ment of Education, I was able to design a course for the San Diego State University Center for (now Department of) Asian Studies.¹ Initially the course, East Asian Philosophies: Logic and Language, focused on China, Korea, and Japan. A textbook of primary and secondary readings was com­piled, to which I added an introduction and background materials. Subsequently, both the course contents and the text were expanded to include India, Tibet, and Vietnam, as well as Mahayana Bud­dhism. The revised course title, Asian Philosophies: Logic, Lan­guage, and Aesthetics, reflects this expansion.

The key role played by the arts in Asia as the connecting link between logic and language became increasingly apparent as I taught the class. The arts, in various manifestations, reflect cultural assumptions about order inherent in forms of logic, language, and philosophy. Accordingly, each chapter of the text provides a discus­sion of the aesthetics underlying the culture or topic addressed. A contemporary connection was forged through discussions of sci­ence, the primary arbiter of order in today’s world, and the scien­tist’s obsession with beauty.²

This approach proved to be an ideal point of entry into the often mystifying world of Asian philosophy for students with limit­ed exposure to Asian culture. Aesthetics, derived from the Greek aisthëtikos (sensory, sensitive), involves the ability to perceive, be sensitive to, cosmic (from the Greek kosmos, order, harmony) pat­terns prior to processing them through human thought. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, may it not equally be the case that logic is in the mind of the thinker? Thus aesthetic theories are infused with cultural con­ceptions of order, whether expressed as beauty, harmony, or goodness (see diagram 1). The prominent role of Nature in Asian aesthetic principles must be especially recognized and appreciated.

I must hasten to add, how­ever, that the following discus­sion in no way encourages or supports a simplistic, reduction­ist reading of either Asian or non-Asian culture. It is not my intention to suggest that the artistic expressions dealt with here represent an encapsulation of aesthetics “East” and “West.” Following the lead of Hajime Nakamura (Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples), I reject the stereotypical East/West dichotomy of values, as well as the assump­tion that any culture can be readily subsumed under a single princi­ple.

To open the minds of students to the broad horizons of Asian philosophy, a cross-cultural, multi-media excursion encompassing alternative forms of architecture, garden design, musical composi­tion, and performance was provided. Japan’s Katsura Imperial Villa was chosen as an extreme manifestation of the Zen aesthetic, while the Palace of Versailles embodied an equally extremist view of “western” tastes. Although both were constructed during the same general time period, the seventeenth century, and were the pet pro­jects of royalty, the results are strikingly different in terms of design and interaction with the natural environment, a difference reflective of vastly diverse assumptions concerning aesthetics, logic, and order. Each stands as a unique testimony to a very specific concep­tion and expression of aesthetics possessed by the equally unique personalities involved in their construction.

Students were given a vicarious experience of each site. They then were asked to evaluate 1) the conceptions evoked by maps of the sites, as well as 2) their perceptions of video tours and accompa­nying musical selections. After analyzing their experiences, they attempted to synthesize the defining principles of each site guided by the following questions:

How are the sites planned and ordered? What is revealed about respective definitions of beauty and order? How does the music mirror the physical environment?

The amorphous layout of Katsura (fig. 1) and the simple elegance of its buildings (fig. 2) contrast sharply with the geometrical precision and intricacies of Versailles (fig. 3), distinguished by its grandiose multi-storied facades. Design with Nature is evident in the former site, just as the latter demonstrates the imposition of rigorous control to “improve” Nature in line with human desires.

The comparative experience evoked a variety of responses. One student succinctly noted the incongruities between these con­temporaneous art forms: from Versailles he concluded “one needs to be powerful to waste resources,” while Katsura was viewed as being “without much detail.” Similarly, the Japanese music selec­tion undulates sensuously, punctuated by silences; the French com­position reflects the mathematical patterns beloved by Baroque tastes. After discussing student reactions, we began to delve into the specifics of each site, seeking to uncover the underlying cultural assumptions responsible for the huge artistic differences. What fol­lows are some points of comparison—the what, who, how, why of architecture and garden design as well as musical composition and performance, along with comments on the respective ambiance and underlying aesthetic/philosophical/cultural principles of the designs.

Again, it is important to note that a multitude of styles are to be found among Asian cultures and within individual cultures over time, just as the symmetrical design principles characteristic of Ver­sailles are not the exclusive choice of the West. Sites in India (the Taj Mahal), China (the Forbidden City), Cambodia (Angkor Wat), and even Japan (Todai-ji) can readily be identified that reflect a preference for rigidly balanced, ostentatious, and extravagant designs. Similarly, an appreciation for naturalness and simplicity is not unknown in non-Asian cultures. The same diversity of tastes can be found in musical expression.

The above introductory glimpse of extreme aesthetic possibilities laid the ground for subsequent discussions of Asian logic, language, and aesthetics. We went on to explore eight themes/chapters outlining the richness of Asian thought and culture, beginning with India. This seemed a natural progression, given India’s link to European culture through examples of shared membership in the Indo-European lan­guage family, including Sanskrit, Pali, Hindi, Punjabi, Nepali, etc. A family resemblance also can be discerned between ancient Greek and Vedic assumptions concerning phenomena and noumena, body and mind, desire and reason. Discussions of beauty (rasa) highlight­ing the roles of emotion and physicality were balanced by epistemo­logical excursions into early Buddhism and the Nyaya logic of later Hinduism. These allowed for interesting comparisons with ancient Greek views of the same topics. We concluded this section with a provocative piece from twentieth century philosopher Krishnamurti, “What is Thinking?”

This prepared the way for more challenging presentations of Indian and Central Asian Mahayana Buddhism—The Lioness Roar of Queen ´Srimala expounding the seminal Tathagata (Suchness) concept, Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika logic (Middle Path Between Affirming and Denying), and the Lotus Sutra. Vajrayana Buddhism, the Diamond or Thunderbolt Vehicle, was explored within the Tibetan cultural context, including a sophisticated ritual symbolism steeped in the arts while informed by Tibetan Buddhist psychology. These insights were supported by philosophical contributions from both traditional philosophers, such as Milarepa, and contemporary proponents Chogyam Trungpa and the current Dalai Lama.

Moving on to East Asia, individual chapters were devoted to China and Japan, as well as the less often explored areas of Korea and Vietnam. Again, cultural contexts for their respective aesthetics were provided, then further expanded through philosophical discus­sions past and present. Thus the Chinese worldview was introduced through the fundamental Yin/Yang principles of the Yi Jing, then elaborated in the varying views of Xun Zi’s humanistic Confucian logic, Zhuang Zi’s Daoist critique of logic and language, and a con­temporary Chan Master. The Korean cultural aesthetics of möt (utter naturalness) was followed by excerpts from Buddhist Masters Chinul and T’aego. Vietnamese poetry represented the confluence of aes­thetics and Buddhist philosophy, also reflected in Thich Nhat Hanh’s profound yet unassuming teaching on interdependence in “The Almond Tree in Your Front Yard.” The primal “ah-ness” of Japan’s mono no aware aesthetic provided the prelude to K†kai’s philosoph­ically-infused Tantric poetry and Dogen’s Soto Zen, expressed both poetically and in the essay format of the Shobo-genzo.

The concluding chapter considered the connections between Asian logics and post-modern science, inclusive of Fuzzy Logic and Chaos Theory. Western scientists have been at the forefront of research linking ancient Asian traditions with the New Physics. The underlying insight here is that the mechanistic model of the universe assumed by Newtonian physics fails to account for the complexity of the workings of the universe, whether manifested in the forma­tion of a distant galaxy or the rhythms of the human heart. The order sought by science in the past is in many ways deficient, an enforced Procrustean fit that fails to illuminate the full range of real­ity. In seeking philosophies conversant with the fact of change we find promising candidates in the Yin/Yang complementarities of the Yi Jing, or Buddhism’s sophisticated analyses of Interdependent Origination (Pratitya-samutpada). Provocative questions arose:

Is logic one or many?

Can a science be founded on chaos?

Does order exist merely in the mind of the beholder?

If so, can the same be said for chaos?

What are limits of both logic and science in the broadest possible cross-cultural senses?

What might be learned by opening our awareness to other voices, other languages, other logics?

Each art form, aesthetic theory, and philosophical expression contains its own logic, encapsulating a language of the culture from which it originated. By deconstructing stereotypes of Asian art through an initial comparison with European examples from the same time period (Katsura versus Versailles), students were able to “empty their teacups” vis-à-vis Asian culture. This fresh perspective made them more receptive to the task of judging Asian philosophers on their own cultural terms, while seeking philosophical wisdom that transcends all cultures.