The division of cultures into eastern and western ones captures not only their territorial location, but also the characteristics of the methods and ways of knowing the world, value orientation, basic worldviews, socioeconomic and political structures.
In modern cultural studies, “West” means European and American culture, and “East” means the cultures of the countries of Central, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
For the Middle Ages, this division depends on whether this issue is considered from a Eurocentric or global point of view. In the first case, the East means the cultures of Byzantium, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and the West means the cultures of the developed states of Europe — France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England. Within the framework of world culture, the East is, first of all, China, India, Japan, Persia; European culture and its successor Byzantine belong to Western cultures.
Despite such differences in the division of countries into West and East, these two “opposite” types of cultures can distinguish their inherent features.
Western culture is focused on the values of technological development, a dynamic lifestyle, and the improvement of culture and society. The idea of personal significance, the priority of initiative and creativity is fixed in constitutional forms.
The sociodynamics of Western culture are characterized by undulation, jerking, unevenness. The process of transition to a new one proceeds as a breakdown of outdated value systems, socioeconomic and political structures. The West, being the bearer of the beginning of creativity, potency, constant search, rebellion, boldness and, at the same time, showing a desire for constant analytical knowledge of the Universe, more often takes the side of the earthly, bodily being, thereby destroying the harmony, constancy and organicity of its own life.
Denis de Rougemont, in his book The Challenge of the West, names two outstanding ideas that are characteristic of Western culture: the individual and the machine. This is important because the personality and the machine are opposed to each other, and therefore the West is undergoing tremendous psychological stress.
“A person implies individuality, personal responsibility, while a machine is a product of intelligence, abstraction, generalization, totalization, group life.” (D. Suzuki “Lectures on Zen Buddhism”).
Moreover, the concept of personality in this context should not even be understood as a monad (of the ancient Greeks), but as the principle of an infinite, comprehensive impulse, the flight of the Spirit beyond all conventions and boundaries. With all this, one can not fail to note another important feature of the Western mentality — its tendency to scientific research of the world.
Western science is busy weaving networks of complex methodological research and expertise, enveloping the object of its study, it is trying to understand it and its nature. D. Suzuki writes: “No matter how small the cells of a network are, as long as there is a network, there is something that slithers through it, namely that which cannot be measured in any way. The numbers go to infinity, and once the sciences admit their own inability to lure reality into their network. “
It turns out that Life itself — this amazing mystery, for the knowledge of which science was created — inevitably escapes from under the lenses of microscopes and sensors of other scientific instruments.
The East is the embodiment of a kind of irrationality, transcendence, the accepting, feminine principle-principle, it never receded from the commandments of existence in the spiritual world (at the same time, sometimes, infringing on the existence of the flesh, but, nevertheless, by its nature, striving for balance and harmony). In the East, the new does not reject and does not destroy the old, the traditional, but organically fits into it.
Western culture is aimed outside, while Eastern culture is characterized by immersion in the inner world of man. Many Eastern thinkers were convinced that improving the world can only be achieved through wholeness and harmony in oneself. If Western culture has taken the path of creating technology that mediates relations with nature, then eastern culture is characterized by a desire for harmony with nature, development in a natural way.
The East is compactness, depth, silence. In this regard, a particularly illustrative example is Japanese haiku poetry. Famous English researcher of Japanese culture R. Kh. Blace wrote about this:
“Haiku is the shortest poetic genre in which the poem still has a form and rhythm. Reducing a poetic work to seventeen syllables, we approach an invisible, indescribable poetic experience, until each characteristic of the object becomes inalienable to it, until the poem itself becomes transparent and as if written without words. “
The East proclaims the principle of knowledge or, rather, comprehension of the world through identification, merging with it. To dissolve in the surrounding, in Being, in an instant appear. To all and at the same time the smallest particle of Everything.
The key concepts in comprehending this are “Void” (shunyata (Sanskrit.)) Or “Inaction” (uviy (Chinese)). These terms do not mean the denial of the world or the denial of anything at all, rather the opposite: they speak of the beyond, super reality and at the same time the only Reality, moreover, it is inextricably merged with everyday reality, which is its source and mouth. Satprem spoke of Hinduism: “The so-called Hinduism is an invention of the West; Hindus only speak of “eternal law”
Sanatana Dharma, which exists for Muslims, Negroes, Christians, and even Anabaptists.
What seems to the man of the West to be the most important part of religion — namely, the structure that “distinguishes” it from all other religions and establishes that the person is not Catholic or Protestant, if he does not consider himself this or that, and does not agree with some paragraphs of faith, is for the Hindu the most insignificant aspect, for he instinctively seeks to discard all external differences in order to rediscover all where everything converges at one central point.