How should we live?

I climbed a hill as light fell short,
And rooks came home in scramble sort,
And filled the trees and flapped and fought
And sang themselves to sleep;
. . . . .
I heard them both, and oh! I heard
The song of every singing bird
That sings beneath the sky,
And with the song of lark and wren
The song of mountains, moths and men
And seas and rainbows vie!
I heard the universal choir,
The Sons of Light exalt their Sire
With universal song . . . . . 

tum te tum? The long, relentless poem of which I've abstracted ~6% is Song of Honour by Ralph Hodgson (1871 - 1962). When I was a droopee, unhappee, wannabee poet aged 16, I transcribed the whole poem as an alternative to writing my own. I transcribed A Lot of other poetry at the time [imagine a world without ctrl-C, ctrl-V] & developed a neat and (thereby) efficient cursive hand. A couple of years later, I graduated to hammering away at an Olivetti manual typewriter which, even at two working fingers, was yet more speedy and legible. Ralph Hodgson is forgotten now, but he was at the centre of The Arts before WWII. Many of his contemporaries looked to The East for inspiration but Hodgson actually lived and worked in Japan for most of the 1930s.

Ralph Hodgson doesn't warrant even a sentence in The Light of Asia A History of Western Fascination with the East (2024) by Christopher Harding. I've just finished reading this weighty tome. There are nods to Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Matteo Ricci [prev] and even Lafcadio "Tramore's Own" Hearn but the book really focuses on three 20thC adepts: 

• Alan Watts (L 1915-1963), 
• Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) and 
• Erna Hoch (1919-2003).

Alan Watts, looking suitably Mephistophelean [L] has been threading through my life since I was a twenty-something. He went to the same English school as me [not at the same time, I'm not that old] and was often on the wireless with wry, chuckly, profound lectures when we tuned into the BBC or later NPR in Boston. He departed this incarnation early having serially shagged himself to death often in a haze of alcohol. I liked the chuckles [last para]: they made Zen and a contemplative life more accessible to spotty-poet me. Harding's book reminds me that Alan Watts was right at the hub of the Beats [Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder] in 1950s California. Sausalito hot-tubs & Howl.

I knew much less about Alan "Bede" Griffiths; an Anglo-Catholic Benedictine who went to India to spread the gospel but found himself consuming the local culture and writing inter alia River of Compassion: A Christian Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (1983). Westerners bought his many books which found commonality among Western and Eastern religions. We would now probably cancel the poor man for cultural appropriation.

And I knew nothing at all about Erna Hoch, a Swiss physician and psychiatrist who went to India and finished up running The Madhouse at Lotus Lake and transforming it into an effective psychiatric hospital. There they employed Western and Eastern practice to do the best they could to alleviate distress - mental and physical. There is no entry for Erna Hoch in Wikipedia - neither the en. de. nor fr. editions - someone should rectify that.

The Light of Asia focuses on a) What is reality? and b) How should we live? - the meat and potatoes of philosophy since Confucius was a chap. The author Harding is a cultural historian not a philosopher, so you're not going to get the answers here; you're going to watch other, long dead, people wrestle with these eternal conundrums. A bit like getting seats in Centre Court Wimbledon, Athens.