Lessons from Chinese Philosophy Departments for North America

During the silk route era, hundreds of Chinese scholars traveled to India and learned Indian languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit to translate hundreds of Buddhist and other texts into Chinese. Most famously, Faxian and Xuan Zang traveled on foot for more than a thousand miles across China, and Central Asia to reach India. and many others followed in their footsteps and became key bridges between the two most ancient Asian civilizations. In that period, Chinese scholars turned Indian knowledge systems into uniquely Chinese systems by mixing them with Daoism and Confucianism. Their translation was so perfect that today India has lost some of its ancient knowledge systems but thanks to Chinese preservation efforts, we still have access to that lost knowledge. Chinese ethics of translation did not have the colonizing tendencies that the Western systems sometimes have tended to demonstrate.

China seems to be doing the same with Euro-American knowledge systems currently. Chinese philosophers are meticulously learning Euro-American systems and are combining this with their own indigenous systems like they did with Indic systems more than 1000 years ago.

Compared to Chinese openness for American scholarship, we in the American philosophy departments appear pretty xenophobic even before Trump came to the scene. We have a long way to go to truly understand and embrace “alien” ideas and Chinese scholars are good role models for us. Almost 90% of our students, even today, do not take any course on Eastern thought. Aren’t we producing new generations of Eurocentric scholars who continue to remain ignorant about the intellectual history of major Asian civilizations that are becoming increasingly important today?

For further reading: Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. Columbia University Press, 2017: https://books.google.com/books?id=Lmk6DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=taking+back+philosophy+a+multicultural+manifesto&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjO25OPup3bAhVBd6wKHXhoCkYQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q&f=true