This panel marks a collective effort in initiating a paradigm shift: away from post-positivist research paradigm, into a critical Yogācāra social philosophical paradigm. It calls on scholars of Buddhism to address a hermeneutical-moral imperative: if we take seriously the Buddhist goal of ending Duḥkha, then scholarship is compelled to address the conditioning of real-world suffering, especially the disproportionate, identity-based suffering inflicted on marginalized peoples everywhere.
Together, the four panelists outline a Buddhist critical social theory based on the teachings of the Yogācāra traditions and then apply it to real-world problems such as systemic social exclusion and marginalization and the ethnic and racial conflicts that ensue from that—the specter of climate crisis beclouding a livable future. We argue that Yogācāra Buddhism is necessarily a critical Yogācāra social theory that not only describes how sentient beings experience the world but also re-organizes the self while remaking the world.
This paper examines passages from two classical Yogācāra Buddhist texts, the Samdhinirmocana Sūtra and Yogācārabhūmi, and applies them to questions of racial and group identity. Applying the Three-Nature Theory, essentialized racial and ethnic identities are Falsely Imagined ‘illusions,’ that—though unreal—nevertheless produce real-world effects. These illusions arise from cognitive processes (Dependent Nature), that give rise to the unconscious construction of our collective realities (the ālaya-vijñāna/bhājana-loka locus), based on false ideas, images and distorted facts—the very categories people have been socialized and acculturated into. Most people are deeply attached to these constructed identities (kliṣṭa-manas), which, collectively, underlie and influence our inequitable social and cultural institutions. Liberation (Real Nature) therefore requires recognizing and remedying these sources of suffering at both individual and collective levels.
This paper develops a Yogācāra account of racial formation as karmically conditioned processes embedded in social institutions. To occupy a social position—police officer, immigrant, student—is to inhabit a structured field of expectation that trains attention, assigns salience, and routinizes response. Drawing on the Yogācāra concepts of vāsanā, bīja, and ālayavijñāna, I argue that racial perception is sustained through socially distributed karmic infrastructures that stabilize conditioned patterns of recognition and response across time. Śūnyatā, understood through the framework of the two truths, reveals race as empty of intrinsic essence yet conventionally real as a historically sedimented causal formation shaping vulnerability, opportunity, and perception. Examining institutional forms that employ procedural role fluidity, e.g. the Incident Command System (ICS), I discuss how systems that refuse the reification of roles can interrupt karmic inertia and loosen racialized conceptual reification. Yogācāra thus provides both a diagnosis of racial marginalization and a framework for institutional transformation.
This essay is motivated by a broad question: what is a Buddhist approach to the prison industrial complex, an expansive, violent institution that targets vulnerable community members and is sustained by taxpayer funding, private corporations, and the brutal use of force? The prison industrial complex that encompasses county jails, state and federal prisons, as well as immigrant detention centers, is an extension of previous policing and prison systems. How then should contemporary Buddhist ethicists understand the phenomenon of surveillance, mass incarceration, and deportation? How should Buddhist practitioners respond? This essay aims to theorize and articulate a Buddhist response to the prison industrial complex by employing Yogācāra Buddhist doctrine. By unpacking theories of conditions and conditioning alongside contemporary interpretations of critical race theorists, this essay aims to offer a Buddhist response to the prison industrial complex.
While Tina Turner’s Buddhist practice is widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to the specific Buddhist teachings that she offered. In this paper, I examine the conception of the subconscious mind that emerges from her attempts to explain how the social trauma of being raced, gendered, and classed adversely affected the person, alongside liberative practice to overcome these traumas. I argue that Turner’s conceptions most closely align with how Asaṅga explains the ālaya-vijñāna (storehouse consciousness) in his Mahāyānasaṃgraha. I proceed by engaging in a comparative close reading of Turner’s descriptions of the subconscious mind alongside the Mahāyānasaṃgraha. I conclude by reflecting upon how such a comparative close reading that centers Turner, a Black Buddhist teacher who I contend is marginalized as a Buddhist thinker, while placing her in dialogue with Asaṅga, one of the most important “traditional” Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophers, advances a critical Yogācāra social theory and practice.