Volume V is devoted to thirty-three of the Great Summas and treats their authors in strict chronological order. This system has the advantage of somewhat randomly making "neighbors" of thinkers who are global contemporaries but not usually associated with each other. In the Foreword, George Tanabe of the University of Hawaii says, "It is always interesting to find out who one's neighbors are, especially in a place of old-time residents. . . . John Plott's Global History is an excellent introduction to our neighbors. Actually it is more accurate to say that he creates a neighborhood by bringing together in a single text the major figures of the Western and Asian traditions. . . ."

I would love to delve into a number of the close juxtapositions of this volume, for example, Madhva the Hindu dualist of South India and Nichiren the militant Buddhist of Japan. However, the more exciting and significant thing to do, as it relates to my own work in Japanese language, culture, history, and philosophy, is to meditate upon one amazing parallel between the Western Inscription (see Section 11 of this homepage), a Neo-Confucian product of the 11th century, and the almost poetic introduction by the Japanese Buddhist Eisai (1141-1215) to his major work. Recall that the Western Inscription states that the nature of humanity directs the universe. Eisai in a remarkably similar vein claims that the human mind-and-heart (kokoro) transcends the heights of the heavens, plumbs the depths of the earth, and directs heaven and earth. Eisai represents an even more philosophically idealist view than the Western Inscription, but the parallels are real and call for explanation.

Plott as a historian and social scientist leans to the cultural diffusion theory for many such parallels. For example, military conquests, exploratory journeys, and commerce allowed ideas to spread along with physical artifacts and litter. "Silk and spices, and occasionally a monk or a philosopher, as well as diseases and ideas, all travelled the silk routes" (II, 98).

Since Eiji Hattori, an Advisor to the Director General of UNESCO, finds much of value in John Plott's approach to the silk routes, it is appropriate here to compare the two writers. While Plott emphasizes thought in its historical and geographical context, Hattori gives greater attention to the highly interactive context itself. Both work from a unashamedly global and globalizing perspective. My comment here is based primarily on Hattori's Bunmei no kousa de kangaeru [Thinking at the Crossroads of Civilizations] (Koudansha, 1995). The contrast I see is one of emphasis only; Hattori shows tremendous interest in both philosophical and religious thinking in all the civilizations whose interactions he surveys. Incidentally, his book may be translated into English. It is fervently to be hoped that this proves possible, the sooner the better.

Plott is not averse to considering a kind of convergence of ancient and medieval ways of thinking into an insight which some modern physicists and philosophers are summarizing as Arthur Eddington did in 1920 or so, "The universe is mind stuff." Incidentally, since Eisai is regarded as the founder of one of the two main versions of Zen, the Rinzai School, I have been urging Japanologists to translate into a Western language his classic Kozen Gokokuron so that it may become more than a mere bookmark in intellectual history. So far scholars have agreed with the justness of my call, but no one has stepped forward to undertake the difficult task.