The Stone Monkey

The Stone Monkey relentlessly question our most basic assumptions and with equal force reorients us to a healing other way. It takes a place of honour alongside the work of Roszak, Schumacher, Capra, Zukav, and Castenada.

Bruce Holbrook, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist, offers a provocative and searching diagnosis of the deficiencies of the Western scientific outlook, detailing its profoundly harmful effects on the individual and society. He maintains that our Western attitude is basically anti-sensual and anti-democratic and is responsible for a wide range of ills — from radioactivity and lowered disease resistance to the inhumanity of government and man's alienation from his own deepest nature.

Holbrook [argues] that the traditional Chinese way of knowing can save us from the consequences of our skewed vision, and in The Stone Monkey he guides us surely and authoritatively along that alternative path. He is uniquely qualified to do so, for he stands simultaneously in two realities: one, of a Westerner educated in that scientific mind-set; the other, a traditionally educated Chinese. For several years the author — fluent in Mandarin Chinese — studied intensively with a traditional Chinese physician-scholar.

His 'Chinese high-medical prescription' offers a theoretically unitary science to replace the fragmenting Western science and a radical alternative to almost every major modern scientific theory. In the Chinese scientific view, the brain is connected to the heart, science becomes art, the whole is known before the part, human beings are the only accurate measuring instruments, and the ultimate product of science is not mere understanding but actualization of the full human potential. While this may sound romantic or mystical, today's avant-garde physics and advanced microscopic techniques are arriving at a similar unitary view, albeit some three thousand years after the Chinese.

Author: Bruce Holbrook

Publisher: Morrow

Released Date: 1981

ISBN: 0688006655