Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition

ould recommend. It is mostly about philosophical and religious thinkers, but also covers some scientific ideas.

What I will say, however, is that you spend relatively little time with the individual thinkers. No thinker gets more than one lecture, and the lectures are relatively short. This makes it hard to remember everyone in detail, but you do get a good overall picture, a good “vibe check”, of the different ideas. It is also always valuable to look into different traditions, not only to see ideas similar to those you’ve heard from the Western tradition expressed through a different conceptual language, which can help illuminate them. As the saying goes, “The one who knows only one language knows no language.” This is doubly true for philosophical traditions.

It is also helpful to see assumptions that we make in the Western tradition but that are not made in Eastern traditions, leading to very different philosophical systems.