The Gift of the West
Although the wisdom passed down by the Taoists and other Eastern philosophers can help fill in the gaps of Western knowledge, I also feel the opposite can be true. I believe the West has an important gift that can help in our understanding of health, wellbeing and who we are.
Traditionally in China when these arts were taught questions were frowned upon. One day I asked my own teacher why he needled a certain way, his reply "because that's how my teacher did it". I remember he once told me "students in China don't ask so much, students here want to know everything". I understand the discipline behind this art and how the Master knows best approach has kept these arts alive for centuries. A master can gently guide you, ensuring wrong turns are few and your ultimate destination is reached with the minimum of wrong turns. The drawback with this approach is that we can get bogged down in rules and tradition. Personally I feelthe answer "because that's how my teacher did it" isn't good enough, and maybe that is the point.
The West has an opportunity to approach these fields with new eyes, with no dogma or tradition to influence our understanding. Of course the West has its own dogma and to fully approach this subject with an open inquisitive mind we must also acknowledge that.
The following 20minute talk is by a gentleman called Rupert Sheldrake, he worked at Cambridge University as a Cell Biologist and is now an Author. His talk highlights the problems of tradition and dogma in our own scientific approach, and also points to a scientific renaissance as the old Newtonian theories are superseded by a deeper understanding.