Book Review : Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition audiobook
Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition is a course by Professor Grant Hardy of the University of North Carolina compiled for The Great Courses.
We listened to the audio book, Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition, on some recent long drives. Trips to Florida when the road stretched out lazily through central Georgia with its dusty fields of free range cattle, past buses brimming with watermelons and endless billboards selling nuts and preaching Jesus.
We were in no hurry to reach the end of the audio course, there was no climax that we impatiently fast forwarded towards still we were a little sad when the set of 36, approximately half hour talks, finished.
Along the journey through the aptly named Dõ (Japanese), Dao (Chinese) and Darshana (Indian) ‘hotels’, taught by the thoroughly delightful Professor Grant Hardy, we were introduced to the likes of Mencius, Tagore, Rumi, Confucius and Ashoka amongst many other pillars of Eastern philosophical thinking. You can live your whole life happily, prosperously and successfully without ever hearing of these people. It really doesn’t mean much to our modern way of thinking that Buddhists follow the ‘4 noble rules’ and adhere to an ‘eight-fold path’, or that Dong Zhongshu combined traditional Confucian morals with cosmological speculations rooted in nature or Sunzi promoted the merits of strategic, deceptive warfare.
Honestly the subject matter was such that I will not, without listening to the course probably a few times, be able to speak with much intelligence about what I learned. It spanned thousands of years, covered countless philosophers, poets, monks, explorers and influencers with names unpronounceable and ideas intertwined. But all that being said I am so very grateful for having listened . I was not only entertained on many levels but I found myself really thinking, questioning my own ideas on the meaning and origin of life, and learning fascinating facts of gunpowder, treason and plot. Truth (and the Eastern philosophers differ wildly on the definition) is almost always stranger than fiction and it is only by studying the past that one can define the future; and yes, that’s what Confucius said.
Grant Hardy is a highly entertaining speaker. He transformed a subject that could have been boring as hell into a highly informative heavenly intellectual journey blending cosmic growth with karmic brilliance and a healthy dollop of the Soto School of Zen.
