| When it comes to understanding the philosophies of a people across the barriers of radically different linguistic and cultural systems, a bit of common street knowledge is the best advice: "It takes one to know one." Throughout its long history, Buddhism has been one of the world's systematic formulations of reality as a social process, with everyone and everything being related to everyone and everything else in what Hajime Nakamura and Daisetz Suzuki call "the interrelatedness of existence." Until the present century, efforts in the West to understand the world with the same intensity and depth as Buddhism were all dominated by Plato's "accent on form,'' the substance- and being-centered thinking of the Greek tradition. Heraclitus had carried out a brief revolution against such thinking, but his exalting of change was smothered until some of his insights were resurrected by Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Gustav Theodor Fechner, tienne Boutroux, Henri Bergson, and Charles Renouvier, all of whom returned us to what James Wayne Dye terms "preanalytic modes of awareness."1 Systematic elaboration of this process orientation was achieved by Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne, providing for the first time in the history of Western philosophy insights giving us direct access to the Buddhist Way. |
| One of the leading physicists of our time, furthermore, indicates how fundamental the perspectives stemming from high-energy quantum physics can be in establishing a new way of thinking about our experience in the world. "If we think of the totality," David Bohm, writes, |
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