Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Influences of Eastern and Western Philosophies in Literature: Exploring the Confluence of Cultural Thought
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

Where Zen Meets Hamlet: What Happens When East and West Start Reading Each Other’s Mail

Let’s just say it upfront: comparative literature is a terrible phrase. It sounds like something you’d study by accident, like a class you sign up for thinking it’s about drama and end up elbow-deep in Sanskrit poetics and Canadian post-structuralism. But what it is—when you actually lean in, when you stop worrying about getting the right quote from Bashō and just let the voices talk to each other—is electric. And confusing. And personal. Because when Eastern and Western philosophies crash into each other in literature, it’s not just about finding similarities. It’s about watching your worldview short-circuit in real time.

You open The Brothers Karamazov looking for God, and instead find doubt, sweat, and endless tea refills. You read The Tale of Genji expecting courtly drama, and get this quiet devastation wrapped in gauze, like heartbreak on mute. Somewhere between these two texts—one shouting into the existential void, the other whispering under twelve silk layers—is the real question: What do we want from our stories? Meaning? Suffering? Peace? Punishment?

And here’s the messy part: neither tradition offers a clean answer. Western lit often wants the arc, the hero’s journey, the aha! moment; it’s drunk on the idea that things progress, evolve, climax. But Eastern lit? It often just sits there. Observes. Evaporates. There’s no catharsis—only clarity, or the illusion of it.

I mean—read some Laozi after a semester of Shakespeare and tell me your brain doesn’t feel like it’s been unplugged from the Matrix.

Let’s talk philosophy, but not in the tweed-coat, pipe-smoking way. More like: what are the assumptions baked into the stories we love? Western thought, steeped in Greek logic and Christian guilt, tends to center the individual. The self matters. The self must do something. Fight a war. Solve a mystery. Save the girl. Sin and repent. It’s linear, even when it's ironic about it. There’s a destination—if not heaven, then insight. If not insight, then at least a dramatic monologue about why life is meaningless (hi, Hamlet).

Eastern thought, on the other hand, has a much more ambivalent relationship with selfhood. Buddhism says: the self is a trick. Daoism says: stop trying. Confucianism says: you’re not alone in this; behave accordingly. So you end up with stories where the characters don’t always do things in the Western sense. They endure. They return. They reflect. They dissolve.

And that tension—between the doer and the dissolver—is where things get interesting.

One of my favorite literary double-exposures is watching Mishima Yukio rewrite Nietzsche through a Noh mask. This man took hyper-Western ideas of willpower and self-overcoming and refracted them through Japanese aesthetics of impermanence and formality. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion doesn’t function like a European tragedy, even though it kind of wants to. It seethes like Camus but collapses like a Zen koan.

Meanwhile, in the West, you’ve got writers like Hermann Hesse dabbling in the East like tourists with journals. Siddhartha is basically a Western Bildungsroman trying on Buddhist robes—earnest, charming, but still deeply infatuated with the idea that enlightenment is something you go get, like a graduate degree. It’s a vibe, but it’s not emptiness in the real, terrifying sense.

And then there’s Murakami—who is neither here nor there, who builds magical worlds out of jazz records and cats that disappear, who writes about loneliness like it’s both a curse and a calling. His fiction isn’t quite Western or Eastern, but it speaks both dialects. He can move from Tokyo to Kafka in a single paragraph. And maybe that’s the future of literature—not a bridge, but a weird, flickering threshold.

People say Western lit is obsessed with death, but I think it's obsessed with legacy. All those tombs and testaments and tragic endings—there’s a weird desperation to make pain mean something. Even Beckett, who is supposedly all about futility, builds that futility into a kind of monument. A performance. A spectacle of suffering.

Eastern lit, on the other hand, often treats death not as a final punctuation mark, but as part of the texture. It’s the cloud passing. The flower falling. Look at Chinese classical poetry—Li Bai getting drunk and talking to the moon, Du Fu watching history crush his city like a slow-moving avalanche. These aren’t death-haunted works. They’re death-aware. The difference is subtle, but huge.

Which is why, when you read something like Dream of the Red Chamber, the emotional impact hits different. It’s not a moral warning or an epic tragedy—it’s a slow surrender. Things fade, and that fading is the point. It’s devastating, but not in a manipulative way. You don’t cry because a character dies. You cry because the world they lived in is slipping away, and no one’s fighting it.

Try putting that into a three-act structure.

The thing is, literature that straddles these philosophies forces you to hold contradictions. To not resolve them. To sit in them. Kazuo Ishiguro is basically the master of this. The Remains of the Day reads like a Western novel about duty and regret, but its emotional logic is pure stillness. Stevens doesn’t break down. He barely admits. He just... folds. And somehow, that reserve feels louder than a breakdown.

Meanwhile, when Western writers try to go “East,” it sometimes feels like they’re after serenity, not contradiction. Like they want Buddhism to save them from overthinking. But real Eastern philosophy is messier than that. It’s not an escape—it’s a dismantling. It doesn’t soothe you; it erases your frame of reference.

Ever read Kobo Abe? The Woman in the Dunes is like Kafka got dropped into a sand pit and handed a copy of the Heart Sutra. The man’s stuck, literally, but the story doesn’t build toward escape—it devolves into acceptance. And that acceptance is scarier than any twist ending. It's a kind of anti-climax that Western readers (myself included) are not trained for.

But okay, let’s step back for a second. What does this actually mean for us—readers who grew up mainlining Harry Potter and now pretend to like Bolaño? Why does any of this matter beyond being a cool lit seminar icebreaker?

Because the stories we consume shape our assumptions about how life should work. About what’s valuable. What’s heroic. What’s tragic. If we only read within one tradition, we internalize its biases. We start to think of action as virtue, of endings as necessary, of selfhood as stable. But when you throw Eastern philosophies into the mix—when you let literature dissolve your Western cravings for resolution—you get disoriented in the best way.

You stop needing meaning to be loud.

You start noticing the space between gestures.

You realize that stillness can be radical, that ambiguity is a kind of freedom, that not all roads lead somewhere—and maybe that’s okay.

There’s this myth that globalization makes everything the same. That cross-cultural lit is just fusion food—Buddha bowls with Shakespearean dressing. But honestly, what’s happening is deeper. We’re learning how to read differently. How to see narrative as plural. Not every story needs a climax. Not every character needs to arc. Sometimes a protagonist is just a guy walking through fog, thinking about a plum blossom, and that’s enough.

I think that’s what Gen Z—those meme-makers, those chaos poets—get instinctively. They don’t want morality plays. They want mess. They want fiction that reflects the fractured, hybrid nature of modern identity. And they’re more comfortable, maybe, with the idea that a story can mean many things at once—or nothing at all.

So yeah. Comparative lit? It’s not just academic busywork. It’s an emotional survival strategy in a world that keeps shifting under us. Reading across philosophies doesn’t make you smarter—it makes you softer. More attuned. Less desperate for final answers.

And that? That’s a pretty good reason to keep reading.