The Dude Testament

23. “Sometimes you eat the bar [bear]. And sometimes, the bar, wal, he eats you.”[21]

The Dude shrugs it off. “What is that, some kind of Eastern thing?” he grumbles. And of course it could be, though the cowboy demurs. We in the West spent the latter part of the disastrous 20th century looking eastward for inspiration because it seemed as if our Occidental canon had failed us. And yet the idea that the West is about achievement while the East is about contemplation is just a convenient fiction for target marketers. It may be true that Western religion and philosophy have created more anxiety on the whole than their Eastern counterparts, but the impulse toward moral indolence and meditative passivism has been at least as highly revered and developed by European scholars as it has by Asian ones. If there’s anything the Eastern “side” of civilization has done better, it’s to organize those impulses effectively into a common system of technique, and to officially sanction them as an “answer for everything.” Oh, and also, as is the case with Indian yogis, sometimes they even do tattoo it on their foreheads.