Hilda Gutierrez Baldoquin, ed., Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism (Berkeley, CA; Parallax Press, 2004) (Thich Nahat Hanh: "If you like to eat oranges, go ahead and eat oranges, but don't say that oranges are the best fruit. Besides oranges there are other fruits that are very good. You have the capacity to enjoy mangos, jackfruit, kiwis, and cherries. If in your whole life you only eat oranges, that would be a pity. If your whole life you can only be an American, and wherever you go you have to have a Hilton Hotel, it's a pity. You have to be free from this prison so you can live with others and explore other ways, other arts, cultures, and traditions. That is civilization. Civilization is an open mind. Civilization is a view that is open, an attitude that is free. Civilization is opening your two arms to embrace all races, all people, and all species." Id. at 70. Michele Benzamin-Miko: "My mother was Japanese and her roots religion was Shinto an Buddhist, later to be Catholic. Her family was made up of farmers on her mother's side and Samurai on her father's side. My father was born and raised in America of mixed parentage, Czechoslovakian and German Catholic on his mother's side, and on his father's side Moroccan Sephardic Jew and Egyptian, and English Jewish. He is Catholic." Id. at 81. "Biracial marriage is complex and brave. Racism was my playground battlefield as a child...." Id. at 81. "As I walk the path of the warrior, love and tolerance are my great teachers. I call myself a warrior because I am a woman who comes from a long line of female warriors and I am discovering my strengths on a path traditionally walked by men. I feel my role as a woman in Buddhism is to pay homage to, honor, and love deeply my own mother, grandmother, and the ancestral mothers and sisters within the Buddhist tradition. This earth is fertile ground for a woman warrior to walk upon." "To be able to love unconditionally is freedom. My loving myself and others, beginning each day with gratitude, and committing not to harm myself or others, I can let go of the clinging and craving that is at the root of may suffering. Each day, I can face the future without fear." Id. at 83.).
J. J. Clarke, Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient (London & New York: Routledge, 1994) ("[A] global understanding is a necessary condition for self-understanding, for just as it is the mark of a mature person to be open to, and able to integrate, new and strange experiences, so too is a mature community one that is able to assimilate a variety of perspectives." Id. at 51. "[I]t is hardly surprising that the West has shown a great interest in the theory and practice of yoga. As Jung saw it, yoga represented first and foremost a discipline of self-discovery and self-development, a path of spiritual growth which involves the disciplining of the instinctual forces of the psyche and a penetration into the unconscious mind. As such it offers a necessary counter-balance to the extraverted tendencies of the West, a way of exploring and activating regions of the psyche which, in the West, have been ignored or even suppressed. Jung emphasized this point in drawing attention to what he saw as a sharp antithesis between the psychological attitudes of the East and the West. While the West tends to think of the spiritual world as involving an upward movement, as appropriately symbolised om the heaven-aspiring steeples of Gothic churches, the Indian, on the other hand, thinks in terms of downward movement, of self-immersion or sinking in meditation, as symbolized by the location of altars beneath ground level....What the European needs most urgently is to achieve a greater balance between these two movements, not by negating the upward tendency, but by developing the capacity to move downwards, to explore the unconscious, and thereby to rediscover our lost psychological roots For all the great Western achievements in controlling nature, we have by some peculiar irony lost contact with it--in particular, with that aspect of nature which lies within the collective unconscious." Id at 109. "Herbert Guenther asserts that 'the point of meditation is not to develop trance-like states; rather it is to sharpen perceptions, to see things as they are'." Id. at 172.).
J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) ("None of this is to deny that orientalism may in some instances have proved to be a haven for the world-weary and the life-denying. It may also have offered to some a way of retreat from all things modern, from ideas such as those embodied in science, democracy, and progress. But it is important to counterbalance this with the recognition that orientalism endeavours have from the eighteenth century onwards often been directed towards goals which overlap with and support in certain respects the Enlightenment/modernist project, goals such as the eradication of narrow feudal attitudes and barriers, and the critique of indigenous religious and cultural traditions, and at the same time have defined and propagated the virtues of compassion, tolerance, non-violence, and humility. Orientalism has certainly opened the way for many who wish to tread the path to personal growth and spiritual fulfilment, a path which often conflicts with the extraverted demands and values of the modern world. But this is only a part of the picture which is extraordinarily rich and varied, and which has stimulate the mind and conscience of the West in so many different and fruitful ways." Id. at 204-205.).
J. J. Clarke, The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2000) ("Daoism in particular and the Orient in general have often taken on the counter-hegemonic role of critic and even subverter of Western beliefs and values. By virtue of its very cultural remoteness and difference, the traditional East has often been seen to stand as an especially sharp contrast with indigenous Western traditions, in particular those that we have come to call 'modern', and as such it has constituted a mirror in which the West has been able to scrutinise itself in a revealing and critical light. Its role as external commentator, reminding us of the historical contingency of our own world-views, philosophical assumptions and social practices, is one which...has a long history on orientalist discourse." Id. at 7. "Perhaps because of its perceived contrast with traditional European modes of thinking, the yin/yang theory has proved very attractive to Western minds and has been pressed into various kinds of polemical service. Most notoriously, the theory has been seen as offering some kind of solution to the gender imbalance believed to be endemic in the West, the Daoist cultivation of certain feminine qualities being seen to counterbalance the West's excessive masculinity." Id. at 72-73. "The admonition to live in accordance with the ways of nature certainly has great appeal in an age when we have not only cocooned ourselves in all kinds of prosthetic contrivances, but where these very contrivances, so promising of happiness and liberation, have begun to be a cause of harm and subjugation to their makers. Arguably, one of the great myths of modernity is that we can and should use all means in our power to control nature for the sake of human welfare, but we are now beginning to question whether the benefits of this new power outweigh the disadvantages." Id. at 85-86.).
C. G. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 by C G. Jung (Bollingen XCIX), edited by Sonu Shamsasani (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1996).
Nancy Wilson Ross, The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology, compiled, edited, and with an introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Vintage Books, 1960).
