Balance and Chance is the story of the True Life in the light of western, mainly European, thinking and eastern, mainly Chinese, thinking.
Human thinking has undergone many variations but has generally begun with the inner side of reality which has been the fountain and inspiration for life in the world.
Lao Tzu and Confucius can be seen as fountain-heads for original inner-outer thought on the one side and Plato and Aristotle on the other.
Before them and beside them the multitudinous religious creeds were the source and background of all thought. Similar inner-outer paradigms generated East and West which can be followed through history, but while the eastern paradigm has remained basically the same, the western paradigm has undergone a tumultuous dialectic, leading oftentimes to an one-sided outer paradigm. By presenting his personal example, the writer manifests that the inner-outer balance is as attainable today as in bygone times.
Olof G. Lidin, Professor Emeritus, University of Copenhagen, former President of the European Association for Japanese Studies. He studied for years with Professor Bernhard Karlgren at the University of Stockholm and received his Ph. D. degree at University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. After retirement from University of Copenhagen in 1996 he served as Acting Professor at University of Tübingen and Humboldt University in Berlin. His recent works are /Ogyû Sorai's Discourse on Government/ (2000), /Tanegashima - The Arrival of Europe in Japan/ (2004) and / From Taoism to Einstein/ (2006). The last work is a precursor of the present book.
