100 Books Like Eastern Philosophy

I think of myself as an adventurous traveler, but Dervla Murphy travels in a way that I would never even consider.

So, it’s a pleasure to sit in a comfortable chair and read about places I’ll never visit and people who I’d love to meet, but never will. Murphy writes so vividly I feel as though I am right beside her as she fends off wolves, struggles to drag a bicycle uphill through mountain snow, and shares tea with nomads.

This was her first book and every book that follows is equally compelling.

In this book, one of the great philosophers of the first half of the 20th century sketches his take on two central philosophical tasks -- explaining what kinds of things exist in reality, and how they are related, and delineating what we can know and how we know it.  In so doing, Russell illustrates the new method of logical and linguistic analysis he used in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918), to lay the foundations of an epistemological and metaphysical system rivaling the great systems of the past. A key transitional figure linking the history of the subject to contemporary concerns, he raised logic and language to central subjects of philosophical study in their own right, without losing sight of their relevance for more traditional philosophical quests.

This book continues to astound me. Flann O’Brien puts together such a surreal set of circumstances for his unnamed narrator that the book is hard to put down.

O’Brien doesn’t strike me as the Hunter Thompson type; this book made me wonder what they were brewing into the whiskey on the Emerald Isle. The improbability of the narrator’s criminal activity and the law enforcement response often seems like a fever dream, albeit a very entertaining one. Even though I now know the M. Knight Shyamalan twist, I still can re-read this book, thinking, “What’s next? What’s next?”

Jay Griffiths is a gorgeous writer, sparky and original. When I was working on my book, a friend gave me this book, and I gobbled it down. It was definitely the perfect companion along the way: funny, tender, quirky, passionately informed. The back cover features praise by both Fritjof Capra and Gary Snyder. “Amusing and erudite, fascinating and spirited,” says the Times Literary Supplement. “Bravo!”

The book shows some of the remarkable ways that Eastern and Western thought differs. I read the book 10 years before a brilliant Chinese student named Kaiping Peng came to work with me and told me right off the bat that I thought linearly and logically and he thought non-linearly and dialectically. That sounded like an exaggeration, but Nakamura’s book encouraged me to take Peng seriously. Our research together showed he was absolutely right. East Asian thought was shown by our experiments to be radically different in many ways from Western thought.

This book masterfully uses six archetypes to show that we are not just the Thinker and the Warrior at work and the Dreamer and the Lover at Home; we have these big four personalities within all of us, and it shows us a way to integrate them simply and sustainably.  

This book changed my life. The philosophy behind it helped me accept a holistic mindset and, with it, update my belief system. By integrating my Emotional and Spiritual  Energy with my physical and mental, I gained stronger access to my intuition and creative power. I started to become the writer of my own story, rather than others writing it for me. There is no such thing as emotional compartmentalization. When it comes to emotions, 

there is one switch: On & Off. When you turn off the “Lover” at work for a long and sustained period, you end up numbing all… show more.

Holt writes that the best learning experience in his life wasn’t a “learning experience” at all, but serving on a submarine during World War 2. Success – and sheer survival – manifestly hinged on quickly bringing even the rawest and supposedly least educable of the crew to function at the highest level. In such purposive settings, everything about “teaching and learning” is different. School as we know it, Holt argues, is hypocrisy-inducing and soul-crushing, plus stupendously inefficient, but you can take this angry book as also a provocation to rethink pedagogy in a radical but still constructive way... even in, yes, something like school.

This classic of Eastern philosophy endures for a reason: it contains timeless, essential teachings for living with a full heart, with ease, and in peace. The passages in this book reverberate with universal truths that can be easily applied to the parent-child relationship. The truths in The Bhagavad Gita are universal because they are self-evident, and the reader will likely have the experience not of acquiring new concepts, but of remembering what is known on a soul level but may have been forgotten.

The problem with a lot of academic philosophy is that it can feel overly cerebral or divorced from any urgent sense of the common suffering of mankind.

What I admire about David Loy’s work is that, despite his incredible erudition about languages and religions, he speaks from the heart about the need for a spiritual path that is accessible to everyone.

Like John Suler, I value Loy as a cultural translator; he effortlessly makes the insights of Eastern and Western philosophy legible in such a way that I feel less alone in the world.    

Susanna Barkataki is a teacher, inclusivity promoter, and yoga culture advocate with an active social media presence who compassionately and playfully nudges the West to honor the original tradition of yoga. Her book takes many of her teachings and presents them in one place. Her wisdom is essential for anyone who wants to understand what yoga is beyond the physical practice. For Westerners, her book is a generous offering and necessary to ensure we are being reverent with the practice of yoga and not appropriating it.