Begin with the objection to the category. "Eastern philosophy" covers Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Tibetan traditions across more than two and a half millennia. Confucius on the duties of a son, Nāgārjuna on the emptiness of all phenomena, and Zhuangzi on the uselessness of usefulness are not variations on a theme — they are separated by language, era, method, and subject. The term persists mainly because Western institutions needed a word for everything they were not teaching.
That said, some contrasts of emphasis are real, provided they are held loosely. Much classical Chinese philosophy is oriented toward practice — how to act, govern, and cultivate character — rather than toward the systematic metaphysics that preoccupied Greek thought. Several Indian traditions treat philosophical insight as bound up with transformation of the person rather than as a purely intellectual result. And a number of these traditions are more comfortable than the Western mainstream with the idea that the deepest truths resist propositional statement. None of this makes them "mystical" rather than rigorous: Indian logic and epistemology are formidably technical, and Buddhist philosophers produced argument as demanding as anything in Europe.
A live conversationWhere the traditions argue.
It is worth stressing that these traditions disagreed with each other, often sharply, and that the disagreements are philosophically interesting. Confucians thought Daoists irresponsible for withdrawing from the social obligations that make a person; Daoists thought Confucian ritual an artificial imposition on what was already fine. Mozi attacked Confucian partiality toward family with an argument for impartial concern that anticipates utilitarian reasoning by two thousand years. Buddhist philosophers rejected the Hindu ātman — an enduring self — and Hindu philosophers replied at length. Reading these as a single serene "Eastern view" erases the actual philosophy.
ConvergenceQuestions the traditions share with the West.
The overlaps are more striking than the exoticism suggests. Buddhist analysis of the self as a bundle of changing processes arrives at conclusions remarkably close to Hume's, by a different route and centuries earlier. Stoic and Daoist accounts of accepting what you cannot control resemble each other closely enough that comparisons are now standard. Debates in Indian epistemology about what makes a belief count as knowledge address the same problems that occupy contemporary analytic philosophy.
Approaching these traditions well means neither treating them as interchangeable wisdom nor as museum pieces, but as what they are: bodies of argument, with positions, objections, and internal disputes, that can be assessed on the same terms as any other philosophy. That is also the most respectful way to read them.