<<  -- 5 --  Keith Bramich    Being truthful to the music

Can the West still learn from the East?

Chenyin learnt Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism after she came abroad, having the distance to look back objectively at her country and its real culture from a slightly detached point of view, and able to compare this with Western philosophies.

It seemed a good point in our conversation to ask my one difficult question! Can the West still learn from the East? 'Definitely, I think, but it's hard. The translations I've read are somehow distorted. Because you're not growing up with these concepts, they sound very foreign. This can give Western people the impression that Eastern culture is quite rigid and slightly unearthly -- somehow bending human nature.'

'The teaching asks you to improve yourself every day, and to discard parts of yourself that are less virtuous. It sounds quite easy, but to actually do it seems that you're breaking yourself apart and renewing yourself every day. Being all part of the self, this is very difficult. Many people then think "I'll forget about that -- I just want to be a human being, not what you're trying to be". That's actually the wrong way to see it, and this happens because people haven't looked deeply enough or allowed enough time to really understand. It's also easy to create misunderstandings when speaking about such a deep subject.

'There's a kind of internal or true culture laid under our Eastern culture. It's mainly Buddhism and Taoism. Buddhism was not originally our culture -- we took it from India, but it has grown very strong in China. It's marvellous when you can so openly acknowledge great teaching. Most people would think the things I've been talking about are religious things, but they are not -- they're ordinary teaching. The ancient Chinese went to school to learn these things, and it's not being particularly religious to do that.

'Nowadays we learn all the subjects in a kind of statistical way of gaining knowledge, but we have so little teaching on how to look into ourselves in our relationships with other people -- how to form a society and extending to the whole world. Our ancestors had all this, though, almost as a full study, and they learned and lived in a way that was firmer, somehow more self-contained, and with less of the fighting which occurs these days with everyone trying to fulfill their own desires.'

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