The Olive Press is a new publishing house just starting out in the field of Asian and comparative studies in the Humanities. It is situated in Amsterdam, Holland, and its policy is to stimulate a philosophical and intercultural dialogue between thinkers of the European and Asian traditions.
Olive Press began a year ago when a `young doctor' from Leiden university discovered
that a PhD no longer opens the gates to the world. After a few years of unemployment, it
seemed to him that in finding an academic job only your sex and age are relevant (male
and over forty, who will pity you, for aren't you privileged?) and your ideas and
abilities do not count. There was a manuscript, a background in philosophy, and a tender
sympathy for some kinds of mentality you only seem to find along the south and east
coasts of Asia. What is it that the West is missing and that may in due time obstruct its
cultural development? As the first step on the way to finding an answer the Olive Press's
first born was published: A Survey of Buddhist Thought from the hand of
Alfred Scheepers. It focuses on the concept of mind, the concept of time, the concept of
causality. It pursues these concepts through Buddhist history in India, in China, and in
Japan. In the West these concepts represented topics for thought, in Buddhism these
things were part of experience. The interpretation of the central notions of Buddhism
shows a world-view in which experience is not replaced by the intellectual constructions
that so often in the West are held without question to be reality. In the interpretation of
the central notions of Buddhist culture care is taken to delineate the restrictions of
traditional Western cosmology, and this is done more clearly than is achieved by those
critics of the Western intellectual tradition who are themselves its children, and can criticize only by using the very notions they want to attack. So Buddhist thought sheds its
light too on the thought of some important critics of the twentieth century, for example
Husserl and Whitehead.
Besides a meeting of thoughts, the Survey is also a work providing a wealth
of information on the development of Buddhist philosophy. To our knowledge, so far no
other work has covered the whole tissue of Buddhist thought from the fifth century BC
until the 18th century AD in three different cultural contexts (India, China, Japan). Of
course, the `whole' is exaggerated. We will have to wait for this, but come what may an
endeavour has been made to sketch an outline. Most books do not advance beyond the
sermons of the Buddha at the beginning and the odd ways of Zen at the end. What lies
between are some penetrating studies, but often so detailed and difficult that they are
hardly likely to appeal to the public. Taking up the gauntlet, the Survey treats
such topics as the Abidharma, Madhyamaka, Buddhist Idealism, Xuanzang, the Chinese
Garland School, Lotus School, and the Japanese Zen Buddhism of Dogen in a comprehen-
sive manner.
The universality of values
While most studies on Asia are sociological, anthropological, philological or even
agricultural, for the Olive Press what counts is the philosophical treatment of ideas about
the world, the mind, and society, whether religious or not. For the Olive Press this does
not mean extolling the ancient wisdom of Asia but pertinently the fostering of a genuine
intellectual dialogue between the exponents of the leading centres of our world.
The Olive Press is a publishing house born out of dissatisfaction with traditional
Orientalism. It wants to publish about the thoughts, societies, cultures and world-views of
South and East Asia in the critical tradition of the Humanities and in the mirror of Asia it
wants to confront Europe with its own limitations. It wants interpretation, confrontation,
and self-scrutiny, thus opening up the discussion on the universality of values, instead of
focusing on ethnic idiosyncrasies.