Where and Why do Eastern and Western Schools of Thought Diverge?

Roughly speaking, in the West, the tradition, really from Socrates on (with some problems in the Middle Ages) has been to question pretty much everything. Socrates sacrificed his life to start that tradition, and it has more-or-less stuck. That is, the Western traditions of philosophy, leading to the scientific revolution, have fairly explicitly included the idea that one must not take any explanation, nor its assumptions, for granted. Overthrowing schools of thought, replacing them with syntheses, with deeper analyses, or with simply radically different schools is, overtly at least, encouraged.

This, in the main, is not true in traditional Eastern thought. That latter is for the most part religiously motivated, in the following sense. While various schools of "philosophy" may elaborate greatly on some tradition, questioning the bases of that tradition is almost always forbidden. Thus one may work within a particular school of Buddhism, try to understand and elaborate on it, but to attempt to go to its roots with the idea of altering, improving, destroying, or in any way radically changing them is just not (traditionally) done. There is almost always a "dogma", a set of underlying assumptions, which practitioners of a particular school must follow. Since I follow the Western tradition, and indeed believe it is better, in that sense at least, I do not consider traditions which discourage that type of ultimate questioning as philosophy, but as dogmas, usually religious. Inasmuch as that is changing, and allowing that kind of questioning, as it is in many places, it is indeed philosophy. Now if you want the difference there between Eastern and Western thinking, I would be much harder put to characterize it, except to say that much of Eastern philosophy is heavily influenced by the religious roots it now questions. Thus, in Japan, for example, phenomenology is extremely popular, because of its natural fit with Zen practices and the Japanese meditative traditions. Inasmuch as it may question those traditions, it is philosophy. Inasmuch as it is adapted only to further those traditions, it is not, in my opinion, philosophy.