Trends and Possible Future Developments in Asia

The combination of rising prosperity, assimilation of sustainable and environmentally sound technologies, global influence, and the revival of national and regional cultures could lead to a Renaissance of Asia's civilizations, akin in spirit to the flowering of the pan-Asian Buddhistic syncretism in the early centuries of the common era, which extended from Transoxiana to Japan and from Sri Lanka to Mongolia.

4-The corollary of Asia's regained and increasing influence and relative sovereignty after centuries of subjection to the West is that old threats are being revived. China is facing instability in its Western regions where Central Asian civilizations don't easily accept the PRC's "Han" domination and are restless. There are also tensions in the China Sea in which other countries are concerned about renascent Middle Kingdom expansionism. India likewise is under the continuing shadow of the Afghan-Pakistani North West, anciently known as the home of the Takshakas, which was more than two thousand years the source of many, often destructive invasions. As we pointed out before, both India and China were ruled for centuries by invaders from the Central Asian highlands and historical memories are long.

Additionally, the old western colonial powers, now aided or partly replaced by the United States, are projecting their remaining power, institutional, ideological, financial, technocratic, and cultural, and it may take one or two more generations to create enough "soft power" in Asia to replace or even out the intellectual hegemony of Ivy League Universities and their American and European-associated academic meccas. While Japan has been for decades a global pole of science and technology innovation, China is beginning to compete with the USA and Europe terms as its researchers now file more patents than their American counterparts, but the rest of Asia is still far behind. Furthermore, old internal sectarian, religious, and ethnic tensions are on the rise again, more so in West Asia and the Caucasus but increasingly in Central Asia, West China, the ASEAN area, and South Asia as well. If those tensions explode into open conflicts they could considerably delay or even reverse the growth and development of those Asian societies that require stability to increase their prosperity.

5-The outcome of those trends is that Asia is now not only aiming but also compelled to build international structures to support its regained prominence and carve out a place in the world whose last-century institutions, beginning with the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and even the G-20, not to mention the Internet, reflect the hegemony of the Euro-American West in particular and of the Anglo-Saxon countries in particular.

The many new institutions that have emerged as a result of the geopolitical change include the ten-nation ASEAN, which now has formed an association with China, Japan, and South Korea, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian Regional Forum, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Eurasian Economic Community (EURASEC), and finally the BRICS, which extends to four continents spanning the globe and expanding the old Russian geo-strategic concept of a Russia-India-China association in which Russia is well situated to play the role of a balancer and "honest broker" as well as providing a common axis of development that connects with Europe.

Implications of BRICS are more far reaching than was envisioned when it came into being as Brazil and China are now taking the lead to build an infrastructure for the Internet that would partly free it from effective US control (9). Sooner or later nations such as Iran, Korea (re-united or not), Japan, Turkey, and Indonesia could become members of the BRICS association as a de facto new OECD.

It is hence possible for Asia, which gathers more than one half of humanity, to build the core of global system that may soon replace the rapidly weakening Euro-American hegemony that lasted almost three centuries since a handful of western countries, in the wake of their rival ascents, effectively divided between them the rest of the planet.

The End

 

Notes:

1-Recent analyses of mitochondrial and nuclear DNAs on human remains belonging to the period between 2500 BC and 500 BC in the middle Euphrates valley have revealed the  prevalence of haplogroups also found in large numbers in the Indus valley region and in the present-day India and Tibet. The L haplotypes detected in preserved Y chromosomes appear to have spread some thirty to twenty five millennia ago from the South Asian region though they have now practically disappeared in the current population of the Iraq-Syrian area. The research published in the Open Source Journal (PLoS ONE) (www.pasthorizonspr.com on 28 September 2013), concludes that there were substantial population transfers between those two regions in a very remote past and this finding coincides with the abundant evidence of cultural and trading exchanges between Mesopotamian, Iranian, Anatolian and Harappan (South Asian) civilizations, recently increased by new discoveries in the prehistoric burial sites of the Jiroft area of Iran (specifically in Shahr e Sokhteh) and in Oman and Bahrein. Genetic similarities have also been detected with the Tokharian populations that dwelt in a large region of Eastern Central Asia in later centuries and played a significant role in the formation and evolution of Chinese culture.

2- The pioneer of many physical sciences, Nikola Tesla attested the great influence his dialogue with Swami Vivekananda had on his understanding of nature and several founding fathers of quantic physics and even of the nuclear reaction technology, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger and Julius Oppenheimer, were deeply inspired and even guided by Hindu, Taoist or Buddhist philosophical principles and symbols in their quest for the real nature of the physical world. The Hindu-Buddhist and Jain description of many vibrational planes of existence and inhabited worlds (lokas) preceded by several thousand years the contemporary scientific theory of m-branes and the multiverse that has been posited and is now being proved from the mapping of patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation as a result of the contributions of Feeney, Penrose, Gurzadyan, Mersini-Houghton, Holman and Perry. The theory of evolution also found a very early illustration in the Indian cosmological and mythological texts that describe a succession of ten avatars (descents) of Vishnu ("he that pervades all things") which, from the fish to the superhuman or divine being embody the progression of living forms in a rising scale.

In ancient times, India's understanding of certain physical laws and phenomena that have only been scientifically discovered or explained in the last hundred years was nothing short of astonishing. Aryabhata (c. 500 AD) calculated the diameter and circumference of the spherical earth and its rotation with commendable accuracy, the first Bhaskara defined time and space as infinite, Paramesvara spelt out a heliocentric cosmology and much before them, Sayana, one of the early commentators of the Rig Veda in the unknown past gave a fairly precise estimation of the speed of light, whether by chance or from an unknown source of information. Even more strikingly, Vedantic epistemology and various Buddhist metaphysical systems, although they quantified infinitesimal and immensely large units of measurement, only paralleled in the scientific literature of the last fifty years or so, describe the universe as being beyond time and space which they explain as illusory or purely subjective properties while the various Tantric schools, possibly inspired by the ritual geometric science of the Vedas represent the cosmos through geometric complex patterns known as yantras or mandalas.

One of the more exciting breakthroughs in physics is the amplituhedron depicted in an article of Quanta magazine dated September 17^th, 2013 by Nathalie Wolchover as "a jewel like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particles interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality".

This depiction reminds Indologists of the "jeweled net of Indra" alluded to in the Vedas and described in the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sutra in a manner which for some modern day mathematicians corresponds to the structures known as Schottky groups and for physicists to non-periodic quasi-crystals such as the diamond (vajra)like hexagon in three dimensions, which exist in a third state of matter, neither periodic nor amorphous and can be used to "pave" space according to a symmetry of the order of five, contrary to the laws of classical geometry. Such geometric structures. only recently discovered in crystallography may have been visualized in meditation by ancient seer-scientists in India.

 

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