Indian philosophy and the West

pp. 369-380

in: Leroy Rouner (ed), Philosophy, religion, and the coming world civilization, Berlin, Springer, 1966

Abstract

In his paper contributed to the Symposium on Oriental Philosophy in The Philosophical Review,¹ Professor G. Watts Cunningham raises fundamental issues in intercultural understanding that need further consideration and criticism in order that there may be a better appreciation in the West of the nature and purpose of Indian philosophy. Choosing as his guide a modern expositor of Indian thought, he makes an experiment in understanding that thought, with a view to seeing if a meeting of minds between India and the West, so eminently desirable, is possible, and if Kipling's famous line about the unbridgeable gulf between East and West expresses only a superstition. The result of the experiment he finds disappointing to himself because, despite its eagerness to go Indiaward, the West, he discovers, cannot go far on account of an irreconcilable difference between the two metaphysical points of view. The trek eastward is halted when the West comes to a blind wall barring its way — the wall of unreasoned intuition which to the Westerner seems to be the mainstay of Indian philosophy. The mountain, therefore, cannot go to the prophet; it is the prophet that must move and meet the mountain.