Jessica Zu

Yogācāra, one of the two principal schools of Indian Mahayana Buddhism, arose in the first or second century CE and was introduced into Tibet and China in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, where it quickly became a dominant form. Roughly comparable to phenomenology in the West (and acknowledged as an influence by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), it rejects ontology in favor of experiential foundations and claims that knowledge is produced by individual or collective consciousness. In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, in response to the introduction of evolutionary theory and its specious corollary of Social Darwinism, Chinese Buddhists asked what kind of philosophy could both accommodate the scientific enterprise and enable a better understanding of a social dynamics that could oppose racial, class, and colonial hierarchies. They turned to yogācāra; thinkers like Lu Cheng called into question unexamined materialist and empiricist assumptions that naturalized moral/rational egoism and hierarchy. He argued that scientific and social-scientific findings could be established epistemically by intersubjective agreement, coherence, and causal efficacy. Jessica Zu recovers this influential yogācāra movement in premodern and modern China and in turn asks why it has had no purchase in the West. Part of the reason is the epistemic policing of the boundary between philosophy and religion and its colonialist privileging of Western thought-we don't speak of Kant or Hegel as "Christian" philosophers. If we expand our conceptual universe to include world philosophies, antiessentialist Chinese process thinking is a valuable resource for combating systemic oppression and fostering social justice.

_This article reconstructs from Pāli texts a care (karu__ṇ__ā)-based philosophy for building an isonomic, complex society. The Greek term isonomia (lit. equality), in Karatani Kōjin’s sense of no-rule, means a categorical rejection of any ruler–ruled social hierarchy. I extend this use of isonomia to include practices of spiritual cultivation that relinquish habitual tendencies of the ruler–ruled mentality such as domination, coercion, and submission. To better appreciate this kind of care-based philosophy of isonomia, I argue, one needs to sidestep rights-based conversations, adopt a processual paradigm, and rethink what counts as sociopolitical philosophy. _ _ __As the analysis in my article reveals, a core feature of relation-centered, care-based sociopolitical philosophies is that they diffract seemingly stable categories such as the inner psyche, personhood, group, community, institution, and nation-state into recurring patterns of motivated actions, coactions, and consequences of actions and then guide the reassembling of non-coercive patterns of thoughts, actions, habits, and social relations so to build a friendlier, more pluralistic future._ _ __This study is as much an effort to recover a marginalized voice from the past as it is a future-oriented project of testing out new ways of thinking about key issues concerning humanity and the planet. A baked-in flaw of established social contract theories is that they presume a rational, autonomous agent and in doing so relegate the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled to the realm of the unthought or the afterthought. In contrast, a care-based processual philosophy of isonomia has its theoretical origins in the existential__ reality of interconditionality and precarity. Thus, it offers vital insights into how to reimagine justice, equity, freedom, and pluralism in processual terms of care and equal support for life and liberation._ _ _.

Using Wang Enyang’s Yogācāra as a window, I analyze a modern recasting of Buddhist intersubjectivity as the foundation of an irrealist social ontology. Specifically, I investigate Wang’s use of adhipati (activating and amplifying influence; Chinese zengshang li, 增上力), a central Yogācāra doctrine that lays out the karmic mechanism of how different mental continuums could directly influence one another without presuming an “objective” outside. As I show, Wang superscribed onto adhipati a surprising social function—transformative nonviolence—when he struggles to make sense of intersubjective responsibility in events of murder and massacre. Joining the emerging studies of intersubjectivity in Buddhist traditions, I show that studying modern Yogācāra opens a new path to reconsider the premises of some Anglo-European debates, such as the realist versus idealist social ontologies, the ontological primacy of the individual versus the social, and the relationship between justice and nonviolence.