This panel will be the inaugural panel at the American Academy of Religion (and perhaps anywhere) introducing a new program for Buddhist philosophy: a program of Buddhist critical phenomenology. The overarching goal of such a program is to be intellectually responsive to burgeoning and reinvigorated movements— across the globe, across humanistic and social scientific disciplines, as well as within Buddhist practice communities—that are attentive to the kinds of topics thematized by critical phenomenology, namely the ways that conditioned, historically contingent identity structures and subjectivities shape perception, cognition, and experience for individual people and collectives of people in shared social spaces and lifeworlds.
Abstract: This paper uses early Yogācāra Buddhist philosophical sources to outline a programmatic basis for a Buddhist critical phenomenology. This paper argues that the early Yogācāra textual tradition’s concept of the “entry into mind only” should be understood as a call for an individual to occupy their own subjectivity as it unfolds in relation to internal and external objects of perception and cognition, where these include one’s own body, thoughts, feelings, and dispositions, and also one’s relations to other beings, to time and space, and to one’s lifeworld. This occupation of one’s own subjectivity should then lead to what early Yogācāra texts call the attainment of “no mind,” which this paper argues is the capacity to live with the reality of one’s social subjectivity and its many implications and entanglements, without being bound by the delusions of that subjectivity.
With regard to spiritual transformation Buddhists have struggled over the relationship between liberatory insight and the operations of karma. That the liberatory process results in the transcendence of the need to attend to karma is both defended and critiqued. We see something similar in the history of critical theory and phenomenology, whereby social theorists like Adorno criticize Husserlian phenomenology for not taking seriously the socially and historically conditioned person. This split is particularly important when attempting to theorize the reproduction and transformation of social behavior. Might the resolution of this tension be located in the potential transformation of sedimented intentionality, a concept foundational to both traditions? This paper will theorize that Buddhism may provide the field of critical phenomenology with a means by which to understand a transformative mechanism for the sedimented nature of intentionality. In turn, Buddhism’s own engagement of collective karma would be augmented by the tradition of social critique within Critical Phenomenology, opening Buddhist conceptions to a robust theorization of social and historical reproduction.
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.
| Gayle Salamon | gsalamon@princeton.edu | View |