Recently I wanted to explore a fascinating passage of the Daoist founder Zhuangzi, where the text recommends “sitting in oblivion” or “sitting and forgetting” (zuòwàng 坐忘). That passage bears striking similarities to mystical practices and experiences from around the globe.

To help figure it out, I turned to Sitting in Oblivion by the Daoism scholar Livia Kohn, which shows how “sitting and forgetting” was developed as a practice and taken up at great length by later Daoist thinkers. One passage of Kohn’s particularly struck me:

The most important aspects of the rather extensive Buddhist imports into Daoism for sitting in oblivion include the organizational setting of meditation practice in monastic institutions, the formalized ethical requirement in the taking of precepts and refuge in the Three Treasures, the doctrines of karma and retribution, the five paths of rebirth, and the various layers of hell, as well as the vision of the body-mind in terms of multiple aspects, defilements, hindrances, and purification. (107)

“Rather extensive” indeed! I knew that East Asian Buddhists had drawn a great deal from Daoism – I have sometimes uncharitably described Chan/Zen as “Daoists cosplaying as Buddhists” – but I hadn’t realized how much the influence went in the other direction. Karma, rebirth, meditation, monastic institutions, taking precepts, taking refuge? At that point you sure sound a lot like Buddhists without the name!

The point got me realizing just how incredibly extensive Buddhist thought came to be throughout Asia – at least the parts of the world we now typically refer to as “Asia”, which sometimes exclude the westernmost parts of the physical continent. Clearly Buddhism proper had a hugely extensive influence across the thinking of the continent, from Mongolia in the north to Borobudur in the south, from Japan in the east all the way to Kalmykia – so far west that it is usually considered a part of Europe. That much wasn’t news to me. But what Kohn got me thinking about is how much Buddhism set the philosophical agenda even for Asians who weren’t Buddhist.

Because it wasn’t just the Daoists. While Neo-Confucians like Zhu Xi criticized Buddhism at length, there was nevertheless an extensive Buddhist influence on their thought as well. In that respect, China mirrored India: while Buddhism eventually died out in most of the Indian subcontinent, Buddhist ideas were taken up in detail by the Indian schools that nominally opposed it. Possibly the most influential non-Buddhist thinker in India was Śaṅkara, who devoted a great deal of energy to attacking Buddhism – yet his philosophy wound up being so close to Buddhism anyway that other opponents called him a “secret Buddhist” (pracchanna bauddha).

Which all brings me to today’s title. One of the more famous attempts to summarize the Western philosophical tradition is this quote from Alfred North Whitehead:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. (Process and Reality 53)

If Western philosophical tradition (which is not only European) could be considered a “series of footnotes to Plato”, then could we not similarly consider Asian philosophical tradition as a series of footnotes to the Buddha? Such a claim would be less bold than a claim I’ve heard attributed to Charles Hallisey, namely that what defines Asia itself is Buddhism. It would also call into question a claim I made many years ago, that South and East Asian philosophy are so different from each other that speaking of “Asian philosophy” is merely a matter of political convenience.

But is that claim actually right? Is Asian philosophy just a series of footnotes to the Buddha? The claim does seem suspect given how many major Asian philosophies and philosophers – Confucius, the early Upaniṣads, and Zhuangzi himself, to name just some of the most prominent – predate the Buddha, or at least any possible contact with him and his thought.

The thing is, that same criticism can be applied to Whitehead’s original quote about the West. Nobody seriously considers Plato to be the first Western philosopher. (Nicholas Tampio once made such a claim but didn’t try to justify it and was roundly criticized for it, so I don’t consider that claim serious.) Plato acknowledged his own debt to Socrates, and both of them considered themselves part of a lineage of philosophers going back to Thales. And before Thales, Moses and the early Hebrew prophets were independently questioning the world around them in a way that can reasonably be called philosophical, just like Confucius and the sages of the Upaniṣads.

So the claim that Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato is itself not wholly true. It is a broad and shrewd generalization about the later scope and development of Western philosophy, the way Western philosophy after Plato has generally been done in his shadow, even when it rejects him. But in that sense – to the limited extent that we can say Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato – I suspect that we can indeed make the same generalization about Asian philosophy, that it is footnotes to the Buddha. In both South Asia and East Asia, once philosophy encountered the thoughts attributed to the Buddha, none of it would be the same again.