Learning to be a person – East and West

Abstract

This paper falls into two parts – a Western interpretation and an Eastern critique of the same process. The first part provides an interpretation of how we learn to become culturally embedded individuals. The paper notes the learning processes in the formation of the cultural and national self. We, in the West, have traditionally assumed that the process and its interpretation is universal because we have assumed the universality of human nature. Thereafter the paper seeks to adopt the philosophy of the East in which we move away from individualism and recognise that all people live in a universal network: this calls for a different interpretation of the process of becoming selves and so some of the implications of this Eastern approach are examined.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank the unknown reader of the first draft of this paper for the gentle encouragement to take my thinking a lot further and I hope that I have begun to do what was in the reader's mind.

Notes

From The Aatamska Sutra cited in Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra by Thomas H Cook, 1977, downloaded from Indra's Net, a metaphor for the non-dual nature of all, 14 July 2012, http://www.heartspace.org/misc/IndraNet.html.