Monsoon Asia

Introduction

Great Books programs and Western civilization courses have understandably emphasized the Greco-Roman and Hebraic origins of Western civilization, while moving on to a European focus, with some material relating to the Western Hemisphere usually brought in for good measure. After all, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for such landmark inventions as democratic thought and Euclidean geometry, while the ancient Romans have inspired much of our law and architecture. Yet we have done this in a context in which we rely every day upon the decimal system in mathematics that was first developed in India and a paper and printing technology invented in China.1This article suggests how the two leading civilizations in Monsoon Asia—India and China—may be smoothly incorporated into a Great Books or world civilization program, and moves on to propose how a two-semester course