Is Chinese Philosophy easier to read (and understand) than

>>9269443
Well you need an exceptional grasp of traditional Chinese so it'd be out of reach for your average westerner

t. chink

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>>9269443
Men sywoos?

>>9269443
Well, you need to learn Chinese first, so...

Yes.
>inb4 muh mysterious universe
>inb4 muh true understanding

>>9269560
The difference being most Eastern philosophies require a dynamic change in lifestyle for a Westerner whereas the continentals often are the equivalent of "just be yourself :^)"

>>9269443
>>9269479
dude stop thinking lmao

>>9269560

Fine. I was planning on reading Eastern Philosophy as a light reading. It reads like a self-help book. Its fine for when I want to relax my brain.

>>9269763

How so? Does Continental Philosophoy promote conformism?

>>9271704

dude just read the bhagavad gita and the tao then be done with it

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You live Dao. You don't speak about Dao.
Amithaba.

>>9271137

t. guy who only read daoists

>>9269443
easier to read, harder to understand

>>9273740

you also need alot of commentaries to read alongside - and most of them aren't translated

>>9269443
the summit of eastern phil is about as hard to understadn as the pre-socratics (i.e. as the start of western thinking). it is fairly embarrasing, intellectually

>>9269443
Classical Chinese philosophy is fond of the aphoristic style of writing, in which philosophy is dispensed through very short sentences or anecdotes, similar to wisdom literature in the Bible, the fragments of the Presocratics and many writings of Nietzsche, and far from the lengthy treatises Aristotle left us.

This is taken to its logical extreme in the Daodejing, which is quite the enigmatic, challenging text even for Chinese speaking scholars.

The aphoristic style is also where the "Confucius says" parodies of all Eastern thought come from. Another way of parodying this style would have Confucius in conversation with an American, in which the former says an aphorism of one to three sentences, the latter replies with: "Can you elaborate on that?", and then the same thing repeats itself ad infinitum.

Chinese philosophy is - there is no way around this - foreign. Instead of the matter and spirit that you can find in Greek classics, you have the Yijing (I-Ching) in which everything is a flow of qi. It's what the Westerners called process philosophy, which despite having big names like Heraclitus, Hegel, Whitehead, the classical Pragmatists and Heidegger it has largely been ignored throught the history of Western thought.

Before anyone asks:

An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism by Jeeloo Liu
The Complete I-Ching by Huang
Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy by Philip J. Ivanhoe, Bryan W. Van Norde