Comparative (i.e., East-West) philosophy is an extraordinarily broad and multi-faceted topic. I first became familiar with it in 1974, when an academic journal called The Journal of Comparative Philosophy: Philosophy East and West began. Perhaps the title was quite unfortunate, though, because a quarterly publication called Philosophy
East and West (from the University of Hawaii) had already been running since 1951.
However, by 1975 I found out that comparative (meaning East-West) philosophy had already established itself in the academic world as one of the four or five current branches of contemporary philosophy. The reason these were considered to qualify as "contemporary" was that a philosopher could basically be guaranteed to win any argument against anyone employing conceptual worldviews and conceptual strategies from any philosophical approach coming from a prior time. (The philosopher only had to turn the issue into a clash between different underlying worldviews in order to achieve that.)
I remember that one of the four major reasons the Chief Editors gave for starting that journal in 1974 was how the public and the press had demonstrated their apparently complete ignorance of comparative philosophy, at the time, by the kind of reception they gave to Robert Pirsig's best-selling book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
That book was written as a detective story of ideas. Mr Pirsig dwelt initially on Western society's apparent great unwillingness to reconcile or integrate the romantic with the classical, the subjective with the objective. The trouble was, though, that Mr Pirsig kept declaring how he was the first person to seriously attempt, in his book,
to do this, But in fact the subject of how to do it (in various different ways) was, in many respects, the very most central topic in the current academic study of Indian philosophy. And that also included in various ways that Mr Pirsig had apparently not even thought of, at least in his book.
One reason why I found comparative philosophy interesting was then fact that in most Asian countries there were continuous periods, lasting for a substantial number of centuries or more, where the peasants in the field would give over a very substantial part of their conversation time to discussing philosophical questions. And much of
that discussion would be at what today would be considered a graduate level of sophistication.
Another interesting feature is that in such discussions, philosophy would often be seamlessly integrated with psychology and with spirituality, and with practical living. In fact, psychotherapy is itself originally an Asian invention, because in their advanced forms the spiritual traditions usually were, among other things, psychotherapies.
By contrast, Western society has undergone centuries of dominance by Christianity. Very unfortunately, Christianity is the only major world religion whose original followers were mostly illiterate. The word "bishop" comes from the Greek word for someone who can read. And up until at least 240 AD (or maybe 290 AD), the great majority of the bishops were in fact ex-Pharisees who decided that Yeshua had been their true High Priest.
Fortunately, though, there have been many individual philosophers and philosophical movements in the West that can be compared to Asian counterparts. In fact, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance we see frequent quotes from Thoreau, who was an American Transcendentalist, and I think the quotes are intended to link up with the Taoist concepts the book eventually builds up to.
On the other hand, whereas most contemporary Chinese individuals, at least those living abroad, still consider they have an intimate soul-connection with Taoism (and Buddhism, and Confucianism), I wonder if most Westerners consider they have a similar connection with Christianity or Judaism or whatever. Two of the three founders and initial Chief Editors of the Journal of Comparative Philosophy were Chairmen of Comparative Philosophy departments. A number of months after the Journal began, one of them mentioned that near the end of the academic year, some of his students came to him with an (entirely unsolicited) announcement. This was that, although they had started the course as devout Christians or Jews, the majority of the class had now decided to "convert" to Buddhism. The other Chief Editor who was also the head of a Comparative Religion department then said that although he had not mentioned this before, the same thing happened, quite unsolicited by him, with his first year class every year.