East vs. West w/ extra-credit religion

I had an interesting conversation w/ my brother on the telephone last night, in which, in addition to discussing yi quan and xing yi, we batted back & forth our ideas of what the differences between the Orient and Occident really were. (I'm using the terms Orient vs. Occident instead of East vs. West because it makes the regions more clear -- we weren't including, for example, the Turkic or Russian worlds.) I told him about my Zen teacher's statement that the West parameterizes things in terms of time while the East parameterizes things in terms of space, and Russ proposed that the Occident is primarily underpinned by philosophy, specifically that there should be a philosophy for everything. For example, the question "Is punk dead?" harrows the souls of people who would otherwise just listen to music and get stoned, not the kind of folks you normally think about tagging with the term "philosopher". We have sports-ology, musicology, even ology-ology. He proposes, and I agree, that this stems from the fundamental question of the Occident: "What happened?", with it's inherently narrative basis. He further proposed that perhaps the fundamental question of the Orient is "What's up?". It seems to me that while "what's up?" sufficiently avoids the narrativity of the Occident, it doesn't fully capture why the Orient is so much more concerned with function over mechanism and correllation over causality. So instead I'd like to humbly proffer the following fundamental question of the Orient:

How does all of this stuff relate to each other, or, what does this have to do with that?

This also helps to explain how the Orient was able to come up with the Buddhist insight, aka "what do you mean other?" "Other" makes perfect sense within a narrative hermaneutic, but from the perspective of interbeing and relation it only makes sense as a working assumption, one that rapidly falls apart upon examination. Also interesting (perhaps only to me?) is that two out of three of my theological guideposts, namely the doctors John of the Cross and Catherine of Sienna (but not Thomas a Kempis, or, at least not in Imitation of Christ, which was the principle work of his I followed), in naming God "WHO AM" point directly at an interessential hermaneutic, albeit not the one the Buddhists derived from their Hindu forebears. It raises an interesting extra-credit question:

How much of Buddhist practice & philosophy is not only compatible with, but in direct accord with Catholicism?

If, as Karl Rahner said, God is, among other things we may know nothing about, the Fundamental Ground of All Being, where "All Being" is inherently singular, then working to understand the non-duality of nature is part and parcel of seeking to understand creation. Given how Buddhist practice, by helping one to directly perceive non-duality, is very helpful for following the second Great Commandment, someone who, unlike me, has any faith at all to speak of, might be able to make good use of it as a part of their Christian, um, practice? uh, behavior? uh, whatever you'd call it. Not as I do, with "hmm, the 2nd Great Commandment is cool, that should be included", but as a real Christian aught, with this part of a fully God-centered, worshipful program.