Skip to main content

Eastern Philosophy Explained: From the Buddha to Confucius and Haiku to the Tea Ceremony

There was a time, not so long ago in human history, when practically no Westerners looked to the East for wisdom. But from our perspective today, this kind of philosophical seeking has been going on long enough to feel natural. When times get trying, you might turn to the Buddha, Lao Tzu, or even Confucius for wisdom as soon as you would to any other figure, no matter your culture of origin. And here in the 21st century, introductions to their thought lie closer than ever to hand: on The School of Life’s “Eastern philosophy” Youtube playlist, you’ll find primers on these influential sages and others besides, all playfully animated and narrated by Alain de Botton.

De Botton himself has written on many subjects, but has found some of his greatest success in one particular area: presenting the work of writers and thinkers from bygone eras in a manner helpful to modern-day audiences. That his best-known books include The Consolations of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life suggests a personal inclination toward the Western, but throughout subsequent projects his purview has widened.

With the School of Life’s Youtube channel he’s cast an especially wide cultural and intellectual net, which has pulled in not just the ideas of Plato, Kant, and Foucault but the principles of rock appreciation, kintsugi, and wu wei as well.

Who among us couldn’t stand to cultivate a little more appreciation for rocks, or indeed for the other seemingly mundane elements of the world we pass our days ignoring? And surely we could all use a bit of the worldview behind kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery in such a way as to brilliantly highlight the cracks rather than hide them, or wu wei, a kind of flexibility of being comparable to slight drunkenness.

If these concepts appeal to you, you can go slightly deeper with the School of Life’s introductions to such historical personages as Zen poet Matsuo Bash?, acknowledged as the master of haiku, and Sen no Riky?, who developed the Japanese “way of tea.” These would once have seemed unlikely subjects to interest people from the other side of the world; but as the popularity of these videos underscores, that era has passed. And as the School of Life expands, might it not find an even more robust audience of Easterners getting into Western philosophy?

Watch nine videos here.

Related Content:

“The Philosophy of “Flow”: A Brief Introduction to Taoism

In Basho’s Footsteps: Hiking the Narrow Road to the Deep North Three Centuries Later

Buddhism 101: A Short Introductory Lecture by Jorge Luis Borges

What Ancient Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About Living the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Popular Professor, Michael Puett

A Visual Introduction to Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Broken Pottery and Finding Beauty in Imperfection

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beauty of Traditional Japan

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Eastern Philosophy Explained: From the Buddha to Confucius and Haiku to the Tea Ceremony is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3k1r6aG
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...