Western and Eastern Culture
We live in an age of deep exchange between East and West, yet our understanding of each other often stays on the surface: blind admiration, outright rejection, or vague formulas such as “the West values reason, the East values intuition”. Real understanding has to reach the core of a culture.
What is the core of Western culture? From the philosophy and science of ancient Greece and the law of Rome, through the spiritual world of Christianity, to the reason, freedom and scientific revolution of the modern age, one thread runs through Western culture: the pursuit of universal truth, and the affirmation of individual spirit and freedom. And where does the charm of Eastern culture lie? The ethics and humanism of Confucianism, the naturalness and transcendence of Taoism, the wisdom and compassion of Buddhism, and the Chinese wisdom of wholeness, harmony and practice all carry a value nothing else can replace.
This series does not rank one culture above the other. It looks at Eastern and Western culture dialectically: seeing the depth and the limits of each, their opposition and their complementarity, and the human spirit moving along different paths toward a common truth. To understand the other is to understand ourselves more deeply.