Shape God: Mystical Atheism and Buddhish Womanist Subjectivity in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series

Topoi · 2026-04-04

Abstract This study takes seriously Octavia Butler’s Parable series as an unfinished treatise of processual social philosophy. My analysis highlights Butler’s skillful weaving of a wide range of processual traditions, from the mystical atheism in the Chinese classic Daodejing , to the kinship worldview in Africana processual-relational ontologies, to the practice of relational nondomination inspired by womanist philosophies. It further demonstrates how Butler’s art of storytelling enfleshes this philosophy of relational nondomination into a collaborative, decentralized liberation movement: by inventing a fictional religion, Earthseed, Butler formulates a processual atheist theology that unshackles human imagination from the substance metaphysics–informed question of how to build a better society with flawed building blocks such as selfish human beings or selfish genes. In doing so, Butler’s processual social philosophy raises a paradigm-shifting inquiry: how to build a friendlier future with new patterns of collective actions, relations, and organizations despite flawed human beings. After all, if nature selects not only genomes or biological individuals but also relations or holobionts, then Butler’s social evolutionary theory encourages us as humans to self-select into new patterned relationalities among ourselves and our lifeworlds. Simultaneously, Butler skillfully assembles what Brook Ziporyn terms “compensatory” and “emulative” atheisms. The Books of the Living (a collection of opening verses from the chapters of the Parable series), as the seed of an atheist experiment, has the concrete yet conditional purpose to cohere people—that is, to start Earthseed in other solar systems. It likewise enacts a global mimesis of purposelessness—a self-conscious masking of its ontological indeterminacy as an open-ended interstellar travel adventure and a womanist story of how humans can leave the nest and grow up to break the cycle of violence and domination and start a new cycle of noncoercive co-becoming. This atheist experiment calls into being a Buddhish womanist subjectivity of nonduality-cum-nondomination, reconceiving of subjectivity and agency as an emergent phenomenon interconditioned among an infinite yet dynamic network of human and nonhuman, sentient and non-sentient factors. The Parable series convinces readers the truth of its philosophical insight and the viability of its vision through the art of storytelling and thereby has initiated many cautious yet hopeful collaborative liberation movements intending to lead humanity out of the dualistic epistemic trap of “either we need ‘more God’ or ‘less religion’,” which Ziporyn identifies as a dilemma endemic to academic conversations. By taking seriously the Parable series as a philosophical treatise, this study contributes to two trends shaping a broader effort: first, to decenter academia as the main site for doing philosophy; and second, to turn to relational-processual ontology in quantum physics, biology, feminist anthropology, and social justice organizing by opening a new subfield—processual social ontology.

Karma, Adhipati , and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Wang Enyang’s (1897–1964) Yogācāra Theory of Transformative Nonviolence

Journal of Buddhist philosophy · 2025-01-01

Abstract: 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.

Adhipati, Yogācāra Intersubjectivity, and Soteriology in Kuiji’s Commentaries

Sophia · 2024-06-05 · 1 citations

Abstract This study sheds light on a key concept of Yogācāra intersubjectivity that played a significant role in medieval Chinese Yogācāra. Specifically, it analyzes how Kuiji 窺基 (632–682) reinterprets adhipati (activating and amplifying influence; Ch: zengshang 增上 or zengshang li 增上力 or zengshang yuan 增上緣) to account for intersubjective karmic interactions across different lifeworlds in the events of teaching and killing. As this line of investigation shows, Kuiji’s theory of adhipati attempts to sidestep the entanglement of the problems of intersubjectivity and incommensurable worlds in Yogācāra. Extant scholarship on intersubjectivity often presumes one spatio-temporal world populated by sentient beings and insentient objects, which is fundamentally at odds with the Yogācāra tenet that each mental stream generates its distinct lifeworld. To address the pragmatic question of how different mental continuums of consciousnesses can impinge into each other’s lifeworlds, Kuiji employed adhipati in a specific way to account for intersubjective interplay across different, potentially incommensurable worlds. In this framing of intersubjectivity, the problem of one world or many worlds is explained non-dualistically: these lifeworlds are neither the same nor different, neither one nor many, but karmically interconnected. Expanding on recent discussions of the puzzle of intersubjectivity in Yogācāra, this paper shows that Kuiji’s deployment of adhipati provides an account of genuine intersubjectivity in which different mental continuums are recognized as subjects and engage in causal interactions among different spatio-temporal worlds. In Kuiji’s framing, this genuine intersubjectivity gives rise to the sense of one shared world.

Liberation Buddhology for Postracial Worldmaking

Religious Studies Review · 2024-03-01

CASTING INDRA'S NET: FOSTERING SPIRITUAL KINSHIP AND COMMUNITYBy Ayo Pamela Yetunde. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2023Pp. xx + 219. Paperback, $19.95. LOVE AND RAGE: THE PATH OF LIBERATION THROUGH ANGERBy Lama Rod Owens. New York: North Atlantic Books, 2020Pp. xviii +285. Kindle, $17.95. AMERICA'S RACIAL KARMA: AN INVITATION TO HEALBy Larry Ward. Berkeley: Parallax Press: 2020Pp. x + 132. Kindle, $6.99. How can Buddhist wisdom alleviate the ongoing racial suffering? How can Buddhist spirituality initiate structural change to build a better world that supports all lives? These are the central inquiries of all three monographs under review. All three authors draw from their rich experiences as spiritual leaders and activists while adapting ancient Buddhist practices to do effective antiracist work. Among all possible ways to appreciate their work, here, I chose to highlight not only how all three monographs are actively reshaping philosophy into a “dialogue about important unsolved problems” but also how this new paradigm of philosophizing can push forward conversations about scholarship and social change (van Norden 2017, 142). Because these thinkers seamlessly weaved together spirituality, scholarship, and social change, I term their way of doing philosophy “liberation Buddhology.” Since liberation Buddhology breaks away from the mainstream Western misconception that “Buddhism is apolitical,” I anticipate many discussions about their “authenticity.” To better orient readers unfamiliar with the history of Buddhist traditions and their modern developments, in this review, I first sketch out the rise of this misconception and the current scholarly consensus on Buddhism and politics. Then I zoom in on each monograph, highlighting its intellectual lineages and showcasing how their philosophies weave together spirituality, scholarship, and social change. In the forward-looking conclusion, I discuss how these three scholar-cum-activists challenge academics to reflect upon the task of scholarship and the social responsibility of knowledge production. The popular modern misconception that “Buddhism is apolitical” is one of many spinoffs of past and ongoing Orientalist appropriations of Buddhist traditions. The Orientalist gaze, broadly speaking, is a colonial mentality that conjures up some unchanging Ur-Buddhist teachings that had been corrupted by its Asian practitioners throughout the centuries and that had been rescued by modern Western “enlightened” thinkers.1 To disrupt this Orientalist reproduction, in the last several decades, scholars of Buddhist studies have produced much new knowledge, including essays written for the general public.2 Further, the scholarly consensus is that Buddhism has never been apolitical, and different groups have historically deployed and developed different sets of Buddhist teachings to advance their own sociopolitical agendas. Within this long, entangled history of Buddhism and politics, the monographs under review, penned, respectively, by Yetunde, Lama Rod, and Ward, represent a new form of Buddhist political philosophy, liberation Buddhology. Liberation Buddhology refers to the use of Buddhist knowledge and practice to fight for equality and justice in a nonviolent manner. Liberation Buddhology is new because, in mainstream Buddhist traditions, the message of spiritual equality has historically been employed to justify social hierarchy (e.g., monarchy, patriarchy, racism, neoliberalism) in the sense that women or other marginalized groups could be granted spiritual equality as long as their spirituality does not challenge the status quo.3 The only well-known exception to this long Buddhist history of spiritual equality for social hierarchy is “engaged Buddhism”—a term popularized in the 1960s by the Vietnamese monk-cum-activist Thich Nhat Hanh's peace movement, but with a much deeper pan-Asian root (e.g., Queen, Keown, and Prebish, eds. 2003). I use liberation Buddhology as a broader term to highlight not only the prehistory of engaged Buddhism, that is, the long durée, worldwide Buddhist social justice movements started in the late eighteenth century, but also the new forms of Buddhist sociopolitical philosophy proposed by contemporary liberation Buddhologists.4 One prominent shared feature of liberation Buddhology is that these movements have deployed the Buddhist message of spiritual equality to fight for social equality, in a nonviolent manner and with the power of knowledge. Their unique combination of spirituality, scholarship, and social change not only offers new ways of building a postracial world but also challenges readers to rethink the very meaning of spirituality, scholarship, and social change. To begin, for all three authors, spirituality grows from embodied experiences, rejecting the Cartesian mind–body dualism. Second, scholarship, instead of being measured against the colonial benchmark of “objectivity,” serves the larger purpose of dismantling unjust systems and building a better future for all. Or, to borrow the feminist philosophers' framing, all three authors see their scholarship as part and parcel of an “ameliorative project” of figuring out how to produce knowledge to build a better world.5 Last, social change is not merely about revamping systems and institutions but must start from a revolution of the heart. Or, to borrow the renowned activist and Zen practitioner Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams's words, “Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters” (2020). With this information in mind, let us take a closer look at each monograph. I start with Ayo Pamela Yetunde's Casting the Indra's Net because it integrates spirituality, scholarship, and social change with a special focus on building a beloved community, as suggested by its subtitle, “fostering spiritual kinship and community.” It not only offers a well-thought-out path forward to reclaim the interconnectedness of all humans and all sentient beings but also exemplifies a new form of process social philosophy informed by Buddhist notions of relationality and mutuality. For readers unfamiliar with these philosophical concepts, please allow me to explain. In broad terms, process philosophy is a fundamentally different paradigm of understanding humanity and the world. In contrast to the mainstream substance metaphysics in academia that sees the world as consisting of eternal, unchanging, mutually exclusive substances (be it fixed categories in biology or atoms in physics and chemistry), process philosophy seeks to understand the self and the world in terms of processes, events, or flows and sees stable phenomenon (e.g., a mountain, a river, an institution) as arising from anchoring processes that reproduce the stasis. By and large, the Greco-European philosophical tradition is a vein of substance physics with pockets of process thoughts (Seibt 2023). In contrast, the Buddhist philosophical tradition can be seen as a river of process philosophy occasionally joined by tributaries of substance metaphysics. Like process philosophy, process social philosophy is a new paradigm of understanding sociality: instead of seeing social facts and social kinds as stable, mutually exclusive categories, process social philosophy seeks to understand social phenomenon, social kinds, and social facts as arising from aggregated processes and events. This change of perspective also flips traditional sociological inquires on their heads: instead of asking why institutions fall apart or why social kinds disintegrate, process social philosophy takes change to be the norm and instead asks: what are the anchoring schemas that keep reproducing similar social kinds such as institutions (Josephson-Storm 2021, 47–146). Informed by these philosophical insights, readers can gain a deeper appreciation of Buddhist philosophy and the innovations of these three scholar-cum-activists. To begin, traditional Buddhist soteriology can be understood as a process philosophy that posits the seemingly stable sense of personhood as arising from the aggregated karmic processes anchored by ignorance, hatred, and greed. The liberative practices are, unsurprisingly, cleansing the negative emotions of ignorance, hatred, and greed. The most striking innovation of these contemporary thinkers is this: they all have extended the ancient soteriological focus from the psychological to the social realm and argue that societal-wide sufferings are likewise aggregated collective karma/action anchored by intersubjective affirmations of epistemological ignorance, mutual repulsion between in-group and out-group, and moral egoism. Let us examine the social philosophy that underpins Yetunde's proposal for building a postracial world. First, she argues that not all interconnectedness can lead to liberation. Therefore, in the first chapter of Casting Indra's Net, Yetunde clarifies for the reader that interconnectedness grounded in “anger, energy, and power,” which she terms “mobbery,” is nothing more than “personal anger” aggregated into “collective anger” that often adopts its own dynamics and sweeps individuals along (26). This line of argument extends the Buddhist diagnosis of personal suffering into social suffering. Social suffering, as seen in mobbery, is reproduced by mutual repulsion of “us” against “them” and its fundamental premise is moral egoism, that is, it is justifiable to protect oneself or one's own group by eliminating others. Mobbery is also abetted by epistemological ignorance because most people see themselves as immune from such mobbery behavior. But Yetunde is clear on this: No country, no institution, no one is immune from mobbery, the sort of collective suffering caused by aggregated anger that often lies at the heart of large-scale human rights violations (29). The reason that no one is immune from mobbery is simple. In the Buddhist processual worldview, all individuals and groups are mere aggregated karmic processes: as long as the anchoring schemas, that is, cycles of actions fueled by ignorance, anger, and greed, continue to turn, these chains of deluded actions will continue to reproduce and amplify suffering, at both the individual and societal levels. Of course, Yetunde's goal is pragmatic: after identifying the anchoring schemas of mobbery, she offers powerful contemplation exercises to cleanse these emotional bondages at both the individual and collective levels (38–43). In the rest of her monograph, in each chapter, she offers a new perspective for understanding mobbery and a new set of contemplative tools to ameliorate the suffering of mobbery. These new perspectives are necessary because Yetunde is attentive to readers with diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. She repackages her new social philosophy in the respective terminologies of different traditions. But the philosophical thrust remains the same: she invites each reader to see process thought in their own cultural inheritance and guides them away from the mentality of mobbery and toward spiritual kinship grounded in interconnection and compassion. Again, this passage is a process philosophical upcycle of the traditional path of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. The philosophical underpinning is again relationality and mutuality that attends to both psychological and interpersonal processes. There may be many more philosophical innovations in her monograph, for example, her rereading of The Book of Job in Chapter Five and her letter to Dr. King in Chapter Eight. These are innovations that should be analyzed by more qualified scholars with proper training. That said, I hope my analysis of her philosophical innovation with regard to Buddhism is enough to invite other scholars to apprise similar new pragmatic projects of philosophizing for a postracial world that is flourishing outside the Eurocentric academic discipline of philosophy. Sometimes being a good person or my attachment to being a good person actually gets in the way of me looking at all the rough spots, at all the shadows that I'm working with. I don't even go there anymore. I don't care about being good. I care about actually being in relationship to the shadow, to the hurt, to the woundedness, to the rage, and to the ways in which I'm really addicted and attached to power. (18) There's no liberation without actually leaning forward and looking at the things that we habitually run away from, in order to see things as they really are, not as we have imagined them. This is the path of liberation through anger. (18) This path of liberation through anger is timely because we live in a deeply racialized world. Many scholars have pointed out how and why colorblindness only reifies the current racist systems: “It tries to overcome racial differences by assuming them away and by imposing its colorblind presumption of sameness” (Goldberg 1993, 6–7, emphasis in original). In contrast with scholars who have repeatedly pointed out the problems of colorblindness at the intellectual level, in Lama Rod's monograph, you find concrete how to guides to fight racism without pretending to be free of racism. Recall that, in the Buddhist processual worldview, personhood arises from aggregated karmic processes. In a racialized world, no person can be entirely free from the racialized thinking, speech, and action that permeates everyday life. Rather than divvying up the world into another binary of racists and antiracists, Lama Rod shows readers how to do the antiracist work with the commitment to fight racist thought, speech, or action wherever it manifests, including in ourselves. I conclude this review with Ward's America's Racial Karma because it combines meditative instruction with a self-conscious philosophizing project that throws into relief the implicit social theory of many similar Buddhist social justice movements, including Yetunde's and Lama Rod's. Like Yetunde, Ward is deeply influenced by the renowned engaged Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, who was, in turn, partially inspired by the Chinese activist monk Taixu (DeVido 2015). Yet unlike Yetunde, who picked up Thich Nhat Hanh's retheorization of Theravāda traditions, Ward accentuated Thich Nhat Hanh's retheorization of Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially Yogācāra (the school of consciousness only). Within us are infinite variety of seeds: seeds of suffering, happiness, hatred, delusion, jealousy, joy, kindness, justice, greed, forgetfulness, and enlightenment. The seeds of racialized consciousness are also present in our internalized trauma, racial perceptions and names, and our social habits. The seeds of racialized consciousness and its karmic effects are part of the very fabric of American life, so much so that many don't know how to breathe outside the climate of white supremacy. How sad a retribution that is. These seeds or potentials manifest themselves as a living presence in the individual and collective thinking, speech, and behaviors fueling the turning of America's karmic wheel. These seeds are all stored in our deepest consciousness. Some seeds are innate; others are handed down by our evolutionary and immediate biological ancestors. Some were sown while we were still in the womb, others were sown when we were children. Very importantly, whether transmitted by family, friends, society, or education, all our seeds are, by nature, both individual and collective. These seeds or possibilities are in what is called “store consciousness,” the reservoir, the warehouse, or museum of our individual and collective consciousness. The quality of our lives individually and collectively depends on the quality of the seeds that lie deep in our consciousness (88) [my emphasis]. All the bold-faced texts show the Yogācāra roots of Ward's sociopolitical philosophy. But it is in the un-bold-faced parts where readers can find his innovation: he deployed Yogācāra to decode the anchoring schemas that continue to reproduce America's racial karma: “the turning of America's karmic wheel” is fueled by the seeds of racialized consciousness, internalized trauma, social habits, in the individual and collective thinking, speech, and behaviors. Individual and collective karmic seeds are ancient notions, but Ward is the first to employ this ancient philosophical toolbox to bring into focus a new paradigm to understand how racial karma works and how to disrupt its anchoring schemas. In this review, I can only briefly treat their rich philosophies. A comprehensive philosophical analysis of their thought must wait for another occasion. But I hope that what I have presented has compelled some scholars to ask: What is the task of academic knowledge production? All three authors have advanced degrees; some have a PhD or a PhD equivalent, and some have multiple advanced degrees. Yet, none of them chose the academic path. Instead, they decided to use their academic knowledge to build a postracial world from the ground up. The most meaningful question is not whether scholars themselves made culpable mistakes while developing their Orientalist readings. I am not suggesting that it is entirely pointless to question scholars in those terms. It is just that this kind of questioning can distract us from confronting the far-reaching legacies of Orientalist scholarship in academia.7 (Lu-Adler 2023, 334-335, paraphrased) Such a position [referring to the continuing use of “objectivity” as the only benchmark of scholarship], we believe, is both naive and irresponsible, ignoring the fact that Buddhist studies as a field has always been involved in the construction of its object of study. Our choice is not to have impact or not, but rather what impact we will have. Will our scholarship merely reproduce and re-center preexisting social and religious power dynamics and demographics or will it give voice to those at the margins? (Brennan and Gleig 2023, 52-53, my emphasis) The notion of an essential Buddhism (and in all its variations, e.g., apolitical Buddhism, secular Buddhism, McMindfulness), once invented and taken up by socially situated meaning makers, can profoundly and how people and one another of as those into tools for anchoring social and social with power are on that better to such and their of Buddhism in the past and at present this kind of position because we are the who have the to and tools the as academic of some (Lu-Adler 2023, paraphrased) What Gleig and to when they choice is not to have impact or not, but rather what impact we will is the fact that many of the apolitical or secular their to on past Orientalist scholarship, some of which are by more scholarship but continue to because the political of these of knowledge. scholars of Buddhism do not actively Orientalist past or scholars of Buddhism continue to reproduce the or social dynamics that had the of past Buddhist traditions, scholars of Buddhism continue to amplify preexisting tools for and Buddhist practices or and Buddhist teachings scholars of Buddhism continue to marginalized past and what these kinds of academic practices what we In this review, I invite all scholars to with Yetunde, Lama Rod, and the fact that knowledge is how can academics the use of knowledge to ameliorate collective suffering and to bring a more just The for is to these kinds of in the I have all three and all three to with my to very good The I is that these show us how to so as to social suffering. them has into the and about such problems and them to about the that them (Lu-Adler 2023, my there has to be more we can do to disrupt the continuing of America's racial I will this review can more and deeper conversations on scholarship and social change.

Collective-Karma-Cluster-Concepts in Chinese Canonical Sources: A Note

Journal of Global Buddhism · 2023-12-20

This is a preliminary research note on the cluster concepts of collective karma in Chinese Canonical sources. The goal is to draw scholarly attention to this vast, understudied area of research and to invite more scholars to join this collective effort.

Introduction: Critical Notes on the Lived Karma Conference

Journal of Global Buddhism · 2023-12-20 · 1 citations

No abstract available.

War, Public Letters, and Piety: The Making of a New Pure Land Patriarch in Modern China

History of Religions · 2023-08-01 · 1 citations

This article traces the rise of a Pure Land movement in twentieth-century China and the canonization of its leader, Monk Yinguang, as a patriarch and an emanation of Bodhisattva Great Power, one of the two bodhisattvas flanking Buddha Amitābha in the Western Pure Land. Although scholars have long recognized this influential tradition of practice, its lack of institutions such as direct master-disciple transmission has posed methodological challenges to the study of this distinct yet decentralized Buddhist tradition. How has this movement reproduced itself over the last century and around the globe? How do scholars make sense of the patriarchs of a tradition without lasting institutions? Using the materials collected by Yinguang’s followers, this article uncovers the anchoring schemas that canonized Yinguang as the thirteenth Pure Land patriarch when China was plagued by war, poverty, and colonial intrusion. I argue that Yinguang’s rise hinged crucially on a refashioning of the bodhisattva spirit as poor people’s philanthropy (PPP). PPP’s simple guidelines reformulated the premodern nonelite soteriology into a spiritual blueprint for commoners who wished to secure Great Power’s protection through their daily pious actions and to establish local civil society organizations. In contrast to other movements that established centralized organizations, Yinguang’s indifference toward institutionalization, far from being a disadvantage, opened up new possibilities. By disseminating ideas instead of institutions, PPP both remade Yinguang into a spiritual leader who transcended any particular organization and ensured that the flourishing of the movement was not tied to the success or failure of any particular group.

Differentiating the pearl from the fish-eye: Ouyang Jingwu and the revival of scholastic Buddhism <b>Differentiating the pearl from the fish-eye: Ouyang Jingwu and the revival of scholastic Buddhism</b> , by Eyal Aviv, Leiden, Brill, 2020, xii, 214pp. $160.00 (hard cover), ISBN 978-90-04-43790-6

Studies in Chinese Religions · 2022-08-18

Objective Humanities, Reflexive Humanities

Religious Studies Review · 2022 · 2 citations

• Sociology
• Humanities
• Sociology

METAMODERNISM: THE FUTURE OF THEORYBy Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021 Pp. xiii +328. Hardcover, $63.80, Paper $26.68. Metamodernism launches a movement to restart the scholarly enterprise by calling for “a new model for producing humble knowledge that is capable of tracing the unfolding of de-essentialized master categories in their full complexity” (ix). What is at stake is none other than the future of human sciences. Storm's project to save the human sciences is ambitious and expansive. Rather than merely using reflexivity to explode fundamental concepts such as religion, science, and society, he goes further. Throughout the chapters, he maps out a few of the next steps in several new directions toward doing reflexive humanities: a process social ontology, hylosemiotics, and an alternative to the entrenched dualistic myth of realism vis-à-vis anti-realism. There are many reasons to praise Storm's work. It is rich, complex, and often witty. I chuckled along when he lays out time-honored “strategies for demolition” (65-77). Humor aside, Metamodernism carefully explains various forces at work in producing the sorry state of all human sciences in which scholars find themselves today. Chief among them is an enduring faith in the idea of “objective” scholarship1 and the ensuing deconstructive scholarship that calls everything into question, which, according to some critics, is corrosive and has ushered in the post-truth era. Other than the concrete steps to build new models, Storm's methodological solution to get out of this quandary is reflexivity,2 which I understand to be a classic Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka move—“to be skeptical about skepticism itself” (211). I could continue to sing many praises for Storm's courageous moves to incorporate Buddhist philosophical toolboxes into the Euroatlantic-centric field of critical theory. But, if we were to get serious about saving human sciences, I suggest that, at the bare minimum, we ought to start asking what philosophers in the Global South, past and present, have to say on these crucial issues about human knowledge that matter to everyone on this lonely planet. Or, extending Charles Hallisey's provocative question, I posit that reflexive humanities, instead of merely asking “what we can learn about others,” must sincerely ask “what can we learn from cultures in the Global South?”3 Let me share two Yogācāra insights that shed crucial light on the unexamined ontological presumptions underpinning all “objective” research. As a living tradition, Yogācāra traces its origin to the founders of 4th and 5th century India, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, and posits that everything perceptible is mere conscious processes. For those who instinctively see Yogācāra as absurd, I beg you to give me two more minutes. At the risk of stating the obvious, all forms of knowledge (past, present, and foreseeable future) are mediated and produced by human consciousness, collectively or individually. Therefore, all forms of knowledge, especially those produced by disciplinary studies such as math, physics, biology, literary critique, religion, critical theory, and so on, are human knowledge and can never be mind-independent. At the very least, those committed to the epistemological framework that objectivity involves cognizing or perceiving self-evident or mind-independent “objects” or “principles” should bear the burden of proof.4 They must provide convincing evidence to refute the following Yogācāra counterargument: the conception of “an objective world outside human consciousness” is merely a convenient fiction conjured up by human consciousness for the interests of specific persons or groups.5 Scholars familiar with the Buddhist philosophy of no-self would immediately recognize the parallel philosophical move to dismantle a constellation of entrenched, seemingly natural concepts such as “self,” “ego,” “subjectivity,” or “inner psyche” as convenient fictions.6 Seeing through the colonial myth of objectivity is crucial not only for the future of the human sciences but also for the survival of humanity. Generations of scholars have incisively pointed out how the enterprise of “objective” knowledge production had instigated, validated, or at least been implicated in the colonial obliteration of the native populations of South America, North America, and Australia, the Atlantic Slave trade that halved the African population, and the defilement of the Chinese population who were drugged into submission by the violent Opium Wars and the ensuing destructive “free trade” of opium. From Frantz Fanon's 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, Edward Said's 1979 Orientalism, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to the ongoing discussions in feminist theory, critical race theory, and critical caste theory, generations of scholars have exposed the untenability of “objective” research and repeatedly offered viable alternatives. And yet, the myth of “objective” human knowledge keeps reproducing and proliferating. Most recently, Marco Armiero lamented that “so-called objective research is so entrenched in mainstream discourse that we cannot even detect how biased it is” (Armiero 2022). Why? I do not know for sure. But I know that keeping the scholarly conversations enclosed within the Global North and for the Global North will not help. It is time to open up, let the subaltern speak, and listen with care. When I looked into a similar discussion about human knowledge production in early twentieth-century China, when the misguided debate about the dualism between religion and science was imported, I found a more informative meta-question: what sort of social ontology could both accommodate the scientific enterprise and enable a better understanding of different collectivities and social dynamics (Zu 2021). Of course, the potential answers to this meta question are many. Two decades ago, the feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger pointed out one, that is, distinguishing the descriptive (finding out the objective truths) versus the ameliorative (finding out what we value and how to enact those human values) projects (Haslanger 2005). Storm's answer is social process philosophy, a new philosophy that drew crucially from the Buddhist Madhyamaka concept of niḥsvabhāva, lack of self-nature or interdependence (94). Similarly, a century ago, in 1920s China, the modern Yogācārins pointed out another path: having rejected the problematic ontological dualism of the object and the subject and the false account of knowledge as mind-independent, impartial representations of an “objective” reality, they argued that scientific findings could be established and systematically distinguished from pseudo-scientific claims if we follow the Yogācāra epistemology first articulated by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. The core premise of their non-dualist épistémè is that knowledge is always mediated and produced by a conditioned human mind that exists in a state of interdependence with the world. Complementing the incisive post-colonial analysis of how “objectivity” has been wielded as a weapon for colonial domination,7 the 1920s Chinese Yogācāra critique pierced right into the heart of the philosophical untenability of the colonial épistémè. More crucially, this modern interpretation of Yogācāra epistemology showcases the second Yogācāra insight that could help us further the project of metamodernism: after abandoning the imported, misguided conception of objectivity as the gold standard of scholarship, the future is not a chaotic, post-truth era of “anything goes.” Instead, these modern Yogācārins reformulated Vasubandhu's critiques of realism in Twenty Verses (Viṃśikākārikā). They further argued that what we conceived as objective reality and valid scientific findings could be systematically distinguished from false claims by three epistemic standards of intersubjective corroboration,8 coherence, and causal efficacy (or karmic efficacy), in short—the three C's. Significantly, more than recycling the premodern methods such as the Prāsaṅgika move of being skeptical of skepticism, these modern Yogācārins also drew from Asaṅga's instructions on how to engage in intersubjective conversation and invented something akin to the modern scientific practice of organized skepticism (Asaṅga 2000, 251-2). Borrowing Naomi Oreskes's eloquent explanation, scientists practice organized skepticism because (1) they do it collectively and (2) they do it from the position of distrust, that is, the burden of proof is on the person with a new claim.9 This way, the modern Yogācāra epistemology calls on all scholars to practice organized skepticism grounded in the three C's. What is radically different in the Yogācāra form of organized skepticism is the conviction that scholarly conversation and knowledge production must begin with an honest acknowledgment of two basic facts about human experience: (1) its intersubjective and interdependent nature and (2) its limitedness and conditionality. With this honest starting point in sight, the goal of knowledge production is not merely about knowing a world out there but also crucially about enriching humanity by recognizing and learning from genuine human and inter-species differences. Indeed, this century-old Chinese Yogācāra project finds many resonances in Storm's “revolutionary happiness” (265). To enact this revolutionary happiness, Storm draws from a well-known Confucian adage, “I focus on those who are good and seek to emulate them, and focus on those who are bad in order to be reminded of what needs to be changed in myself” (263). To gain a fuller picture of this Confucian way of being reflexive and of cultivating empathy, readers can benefit from Paul Goldin's insight, that is, paying attention to the core concept of shu in the Confucian golden rule of “doing unto others as you would have others do unto you if you had the same social role as they” (2020, 38). As a way of life, reflexivity requires one to adopt a developmental concept of personhood, be it underpinned by the Buddhist no-self or Confucian ideals of human becoming. Under this developmental paradigm of being human, reflexivity necessitates clear comprehension of both one's own social role (or positionality) and that of others. We emulate others' good behaviors or avoid others' bad behaviors when we are positioned similarly in society as they. This rational assessment of each other's social positionalities enables one to cultivate a radical empathy that allows us to be morally alive and to make proper decisions under different circumstances.10 When applied to the scholarly enterprise, the rule of thumb is that we ought to study others in the same way as we would like to be studied. Without this radical empathy, we risk producing the same kind of rubbish knowledge as exemplified in Umberto Eco's parodies, such as “Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society” (1993, 69-94).11 I doubt any scholar today will disagree with me on this in principle. That said, I want to alert readers to a gaping double standard in mainstream scholarly practice. On the one hand, in studying canonical Western thinkers or texts such as Locke's or Hume's empiricism, or Balzac's literature, there's an entrenched reluctance to contextualize ideas, philosophies, or literary productions within the larger socio-political milieu (e.g., the thinkers' ideological justifications for monarchism, slavery, or racial theory) and an equally entrenched investment in the “inherent” merit of these theories or texts (Said 2003, 13).12 This sort of collective hermeneutics of trust regarding Western traditions and ideas is termed by Charles Mills as “epistemology of ignorance” (1997, 93). On the other hand, when studying thinkers or texts in the Global South, using Sinology as an example, the prevailing practice is a hermeneutics of suspicion that rejects the idea that “a text was produced because the authors of the past were inherently interested in the ideas embodied therein,” but rather unwaveringly remains vigilant against ideologies or hidden agendas that are somehow “sedimented throughout tradition” because it must have advanced “the interest of the individual or an institution” (Xiang 2018, 26-7). Although Mills did not explicitly comment on Sinological practices, I think he would agree that hermeneutics of suspicion regarding non-Western traditions constitutes the other face of the mainstream epistemology of ignorance. However, what happens if we follow the instructions from the modern Yogācāra epistemology? In that case, it seems that the best practices in reflexive humanities should incorporate both hermeneutics of trust and hermeneutics of suspicion and equally apply them to both the objects of study and the studying subjects. This rational and empathetic reflexivity, as seen in both the Buddhist and Confucian cases, is crucial, especially when we know that facts are infinitely malleable according to perspectives imposed on them by interpreters. More than getting things right, reflexivity is vital for us to learn how to take back our human freedom to envision and enact other forms of becoming human and other ways of living together. If we could take back this basic human freedom, maybe human dwellers on this lonely planet could summon enough political will to motivate effective strategies to deal with the climate crisis and save ourselves from ourselves.13

Three plays and a shared socio-spiritual horizon in the modern Buddhist revivals in India and China

International Journal of Asian Studies · 2021-06-18

Abstract The current study reveals that the Buddhist egalitarian spiritual message found global resonance in an era of globalized inequality. By comparing three modern retellings of an ancient romance between an outcaste (untouchable/Dalit) maiden and the Buddha's attendant Ānanda, this study showcases a shared socio-spiritual horizon that emerged in the Indian and Chinese Buddhist revivals and that thwarted colonial epistemic domination and offered powerful social critiques. More specifically, this study shows that the Indian and Chinese afterlives of the romance display innovative formations of Buddhist social consciousness. The authors reinterpreted equality and freedom on Buddhist terms, creating a new standard of civilization. Employing this “already democratic” Buddhist civilization, they launched critiques of the Indian caste system and Chinese patriarchy. This socio-spiritual horizon subverts the typecast images of “spiritual India” and “rational China.” Whereas these images reflect the limits of the comparative lens based on political regimes – namely, Indian democracy and Chinese socialism – the current study goes beyond regime types by examining diverse formations of universal religion in the cultural sphere. More broadly, a critical strategy for provincializing Europe is to block the colonial gaze and instead showcase the vibrant cultural productions and meaning-making that circulated at the margins of empire.