Just Awakening: Yogacara Social Philosophy in Modern China

Just Awakening uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogacara, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworlds. This Yogacara social philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Chinese intellectuals who struggled against the violent Social Darwinist logic of the survival of the fittest. Its proponents were convinced that the root cause of crisis in both China and the West was epistemic—an unexamined faith in one common, objective world and a subject-object divide. This dualistic paradigm, in their view, had dire consequences, including moral egoism, competition for material wealth, and racial war. Yogacara insights about plurality, interdependence, and intersubjectivity, however, had the capacity to awaken the world from these deadly dreams. Jessica X. Zu reconstructs this account of modern Yogacara philosophy, arguing that it offers new vocabularies with which to reconceptualize equality and freedom. Yogacara thinking, she shows, diffracts the illusions of individual identity, social categories, and material wealth into aggregated, recurring karmic processes. It then guides the reassembly of a complex society through nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and collaborative actions, sustained by new behavior patterns and modes of thought. Demonstrating why Chinese Buddhist social philosophy offers powerful resources for social justice and liberation today, Just Awakening invites readers to think with modern Yogacara philosophers about other ways of building egalitarian futures.