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> I'd wager you will find far more Westerners who are familiar with (some of) the Eastern classics than the other way round. No idea how you would come to belie
by bane 3y ago
> I'd wager you will find far more Westerners who are familiar with (some of) the Eastern classics than the other way round. No idea how you would come to believe that the reverse is the case, or that correction is needed in that regard.
>In fact, I suspect that more people in the West have read the Tao Te Ching or The Art of War than the Iliad, by quite a margin (if only because of the difference in length). The former two are certainly much more common to see in bookstores than the latter.
It would be interesting to find out. My East Asian POV is adopted from a Korean direction. My wife and all of her siblings studied Journey to the West, and a few Chinese classics, as well as the Greek epics and Beowulf in grade school.
My personal anecdote is that I had heard of the Confucian classics in history class, and seen the Art of War mentioned in mid-80s Western media as a "tips for business" fad. I had never heard of Journey to the West, or the Tao Te Ching or I Ching until I was well into adulthood in the late 90s.
> Also, I'm not sure whether Beowulf should be counted among the "foundations of Western Civilization". It's very rarely read outside the Anglosphere, and even there its importance is primarily linguistic.
I think many historians would disagree with you. It's cited as the first written work in an ancient English dialect and has been taught to billions of school children, and
while in the dialect of the scribes who recorded it, it's well understood to represent northern Germanic people, places, and events, and captures a key historic period of the transitional period of Christianization of those people that predates many other records by hundreds of years, such as those produced by the court of Charlemagne.
Unless of course you don't think the Anglosphere or Germanic peoples have contributed anything to the formulation of Western Civilization and it's just a weird coincidence that it's assumed in most places in the world that when they see a Westerner, they assume they speak English on some level. Bah, no contribution of any kind.