The problem with westerners seeking oriental enlightenment

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He – for it was mostly a he – usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres.

As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition. He identifies two ancient western perceptions of the ‘East’, by which he really means India, China and Japan. One conjures up images of sensual refinement, voluptuousness, sex, silks and spices, the kind of libertine temptations that Cleopatra employed to corrupt and undermine the Roman virility of Antony.