Eastern sacred music is often based on perfect cycles which repeat indefinitely though usually additive (5+3) and not usually divided in half as in (4+4).One article I read said that if one were allowed to make sweeping generalizations, the eastern position comes from a fear of foreign people and ideas or at least negative spiritual influences and a willfull denial of the death of the individual personality wishing it to continue after the death of the body in some imagined magical relationship with geometric perfection. About 1/4 of westerners explored the world in the age of exploration and seem to embrace the alien other/foreign neighbor and ideas or at least are willing to entertain them and therefore must deal with both the positive and negative aspects of admitting the enemy.
However, not all eastern music or easterns fit this generalization and neither do westerners. As if a fine line could ever be drawn. Another point was that symmetry in art and music usually comes only after the establishment of city states. The Mongolian shaman riding on horseback playing his spike fiddle took his aesthetic from the natural environment unconsciously.
Trees, mountains and rocks are not perfectly symmetrical and neither was his musical form. I imagine the Nomadic aesthetic of musicians in the deserts of Africa and Arabia are assymetrical as well.This is also related to Japanese music which was purposefully/consciously assymetrical. This was desirable to Zen Buddhists (those that didn't denounce music entirely) because the surprising changes caused by extreme assymetry represented egolessness to them.
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