Despite being from the west, I find Chinese and eastern philosophy in general pretty straight forward since they’re just talking about fundamental observations of the mind which are universal and can filter out the misunderstandings of the translators well enough I feel. Language aside, in the cases where it’s clear to me the translator doesn’t understand is normally when to comes to basic fundamental observations about the mind, it’s as though in the west there’s basically no knowledge of the mind itself, so I think the west would have an easier time with eastern texts after observing their minds a bit closer. Typically westerns confuse the mind with the biology of the brain and go off track that way. My observations at least.
> since they’re just talking about fundamental observations of the mind which are universal
I have to politely disagree. In fact there are lots of subjects in common between so called Eastern and Western philosophy. Maybe you are mostly thinking about Yoga. Just reading the beginning of this piece of text today https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=41979&remap=gb made me think about a phrase used by Jesus and then much later by Marx "Let the dead bury their dead."
More just the phenomena that happens when there is an honest investigation into the mind. The west has never attempted it, at least I’ve looked high and low, and the closest thing I could find was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. However still it’s superficial, like Yoga and western religions in that it never directly addresses the mind itself; it’s always focused on the content, as opposed to the commonality between content to understand the mind which is transparent. This might seem like a lofty claim, but is indeed what shaped the east fir thousands of years and is what makes it different from the west. That’s the root.
