The East and the West Are Not Two

Of course, one cannot say flatly that the West is like this and the East is like that and assign a character to each. Each is very plural when looked at one by one. Within the region called the East, India, China and Japan are entirely different. Even if there is something that runs through them, it is very doubtful that it can be united as "the East." The same can be said of the West.

That does not mean the view is meaningless. If we think again of the premise of one large tendency hidden there, we see that East and West approach things in entirely different ways. The real problem, if we are not caught by the superficial, mystical difference between East and West, comes down to the fact that thinking itself differs at the root.

Western medicine, put in a word, is "medicine of the battlefield." It has three main features: first, to find the enemy; second, to make a powerful weapon suited to that enemy; third, a framework to eliminate it.

Eastern medicine, put simply, is "medicine of agriculture." When crops do not grow, the root idea is not to force fertilizer on them but to improve the soil itself. The soil is the human constitution. The constitution here is not limited to the body but includes the spirit, the constitution of life as a whole. Eastern medicine has three features too: first, to look for the cause; second, to set the environment right; third, to nurture the power of natural healing. In short, "ask, set right, nurture."

The difference, simply: Western medicine is "find, develop, eliminate," and Eastern medicine is "ask, set right, nurture."

Western medicine focuses on the cause of illness and specializes in treatment, so it "sees the trees and not the forest." Eastern medicine looks at the whole condition of the body and improves it from the root, so it "sees the forest and treats the tree." There is a decisive difference in the approach itself. The decisive, root difference in "where one is looking" shows in medicine and shows, as it is, in the philosophical difference between East and West.

In Ayurveda, the prakriti that could once be grasped only vaguely is shown at the level of the genes through Ayurgenomics. On that basis you can identify which treatments suit you, and from the standpoint of Chinese medicine you can understand the regimens and kampo herbal remedies that suit you.

But unless Eastern medicine acquires the viewpoint of Western medicine, it cannot respond to the very complex conditions of today. The point I want to make is not to argue the pointless question of which is better in "medicine," Eastern or Western. It is that a fairly active opening of the way is required: seriously exploring where to follow, where to meet and where to take our stand among the medical characters of East and West, and then deciding.

To sum up: the question is not how to fit the Eastern view of "seek, set right, nurture" into the existing Western world of "find, weapon, eliminate" (fitting it in will always cause conflict). We must understand the good and the bad of both in both directions, and, evaluating the history of the last century or so in which attempts at such integration were made, think on a large scale and act on how we can reach the true ideal and truth of the world.

To put it plainly, we can frame the difference as one between the logically structured "language of the head" in the West and Japan's "language of the belly," which is enacted through practice.

A language culture of the belly places the highest weight on intuition, whereas a language culture of the head places the highest weight on logic. Philosophy and science, one might say, could only have been born from the latter.

I feel we have once again reached a moment that calls for the view that what is commonly thought of as Western universality is nothing more than something rooted in a particular place. That means the dismantling of the West itself—a reinterpretation recognizing that there is no such thing as the West—and it will appear symbolically through the dismantling of the East as well. When that happens, the very definition of the universal changes, exposing the fact that what has been believed to be universal until now was never universal to begin with.

So we have to think again, thoroughly, under a large frame, about what the great characters of East and West have been and where their crossing point lies. Then we keep considering where to place the point of meeting, and how we can actively create a state in which the two are non-separate. My own concern is that the framework of East and West is still separated, and to make it non-separate we need people with entirely new ways of thinking.

We live at exactly the turning point of the next shift from West to East. When we take the large view that the soil we set down now will decide the next several centuries and thousands of years, we will be asked why we chose this age to be born into.