A Social Ethics of Sickness: A Yogācāra Approach

This presentation explores a Yogācāra approach to sickness by drawing from Kuiji’s Commentary of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa. Reading the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa as a manual for bodhisattvas’ practice, Kuiji extends the Yogācāra theory of body to the embodiment of sickness. Instead of reducing sickness to a malfunction of material corporeality, Kuiji analyzes this embodiment to elucidate how illness for a person is karmically cohered into the saṃsāric cosmology of degeneration. When sickness is contextualized in the shared lifeworld of ignorance, a teleological life-trajectory becomes habitually indoctrinated to naturalize health and happiness as the social norms while stigmatizing sickness as a deviation or an inability. The transformation of ignorance to awakening recontextualizes the lived experience of sickness, through which bodhisattvas rehabitualize themselves to embody impermanence as a skillful means for criticizing and correcting social stigmas. It follows that the cultivation of compassion on the bodhisattvas’ path informs a critical-transformative social ethics.