Introduction to Thinking Through Sources 4: The “Good Life” in Asian Cultural Traditions

Many of the wisdom traditions of the second-wave era were fundamentally religious, focusing on human interaction with an unseen realm. Sometimes they expressed this realm as a world of divine beings, God or gods, as in Judaism, Christianity, and some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism. Alternatively, the more mystical expressions of these faiths, as well as Chinese Daoism, at times articulated the unseen realm in less personal ways, as a sustaining or pervasive Presence, located variously above, beyond, beneath, or within the human and visible realm. Some of these traditions, Chinese Confucianism and Greek rationalism, for example, were less overtly religious, expressed in more philosophical, humanistic, or rational terms. But what they all shared was an impulse to address the moral and social implications of their understandings of the cosmos, probing the nature of a “good life” for an individual person or a “good society” for a community of people. How should we live in this world? This was among the central questions that have occupied human beings since the beginning of conscious thought. And that question certainly played a major role in the emerging cultural traditions of the second-wave civilizations all across Eurasia. The sources that follow present a sample of this thinking drawn from Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern traditions.