Oh, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
at God’s great Judgment Seat...

S o began Rudyard Kipling’s famous and oft-quoted poem, “The Ballad of East and West,” dating from 1889. But how to interpret these lines? Did Kipling mean that East and West pose such fundamentally opposite worldviews as to never meet or even intersect? Or did he imply not that Asia and the West might never cooperate, but that each would and must keep its own unique identity and remain true to itself? Merging one’s way of life with another culture might easily result in loss of one’s identity and integrity. East would no longer be East; West no longer West—but some hodge-podge syncretic blend lacking perhaps the best of either and combining the worst of both. Someone has suggested that East and West neither meet, nor even collide. Rather they pass by each other, pursuing their own illusory expectations.

The other two lines of Kipling’s opening verse, however, suggest another possibility. Interestingly, few people have heard the full stanza, as follows:

Oh, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West,
Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
though they come from the ends of the earth!

Here Kipling presents the idea that distinctions based on geography (East or West), culture and environment (breed and birth) are all false and superficial. The apparent differences and contrasts between East and West, Asian and American fall away when “two strong men stand face to face.” The use of the metaphor “face” suggests an intriguing line of thought. In Buddhism, the term “original face” refers to one’s Buddha-nature—the innate and universal capacity for enlightened wisdom possessed by all living beings. Thus, the Buddha upon his enlightenment proclaimed, “All living beings have the Buddha-nature; all can become Buddhas.” All that separated Buddhas from living beings was attachments born of confused thinking. Face to face, so to speak, Buddhas and living beings are one, not two. Remove the false coverings of muddled thought and grasping habits and there is a meeting of the common and the sagely, of living being and Buddha. Analogously, remove the artificial dividers of “border, breed, and birth,” and there is a meeting of East and West.

I would argue that it is at this level, the “face to face” or the “original face,” that an important and fruitful American encounter with Oriental religion and philosophy has occurred and is continuing to occur. Moreover, out of this face to face meeting will emerge a distinctly American Buddhism that is likely to have a profound impact on significant aspects of American culture and development. This “meeting,” contrary to common misconceptions, is neither a recent phenomenon nor solely the result of a “foreign import.” There is, as Henry David Thoreau reminds us, “an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.” The roots of American interest in Asian philosophy lie deeper in the American soil than most of us realize. The flowering of interest witnessed in the 1950’s and 1960’s represents only a more recent manifestation of that restless searching. The purpose of this series of articles is to explore the more distant roots of the American encounter with Asian religion. And again, contrary to both the received wisdom and popular notions of this encounter, Oriental religion and philosophy are neither new nor foreign to the American mind and character. There is, in fact, a remarkable natural resonance between certain quintessentially “American” thinkers and the teachings of the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and Hindu sages. The American “meeting” with the East is nearly as old as America itself; it was in full bloom less than fifty years after the American Revolution.

→To be continued