A Yogācāra Buddhist Critical Phenomenology of Joy

In this paper, I elaborate on the approach to joy preserved in East Asian Yogācāra texts authored by Xuanzang and his disciple, Kuiji. I argue that these Yogācāra Buddhists propose a contextualist approach that does not presume joy to be an emotion with an essential property but rather perceives joy as always contextualized in lifeworlds at the personal and interpersonal levels. Upon delineating what joy is and how it is experienced, I continue to explore what joy can promise. For regular sentient beings, joy that arises in an egocentric mindset always acts to cohere the lifeworld of ignorance generation after generation; however, since joy does not have an inherent property, sentient beings can always make a collaborative effort to recontextualize joy for inclusion and emancipation. As such, I hope to draw on this analysis of joy to enrich the feminist discussion on happiness as presented in contemporary critical phenomenology.