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Books

Becoming Bamboozled

Chris Arthur reviews Robert E. Carter’s Becoming Bamboo: Western and Eastern Explorations of the Meaning of Life.

“Western philosophy”, writes Ninian Smart in his foreword to Becoming Bamboo, “remains particularly tribal in its interests” (p.ix). By this he means that philosophy as it is conducted in Europe and America has been, and to a large extent still is, ignorant of the rich philosophical traditions of the East. Most philosophers engage in their discipline as if India, China and Japan did not exist. Robert Carter’s book, says Smart, is a piece of creative cross-cultural thinking which expresses “with poetry and good sense a way in which Eastern and Western philosophy can grow together” (p.

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