Recently, Buddhist Studies scholars have shown increased interest in intersections between Buddhist thought and practice and contemporary social issues made salient by the current global political climate. This panel illustrates a few ways in which Buddhist philosophical resources in particular might fruitfully be put into conversation with work in contemporary social and political philosophy concerning these same issues. One of the aims of this panel is to add to the small but growing body of this type of work already begun by a handful of scholars of Buddhist philosophy. As interest in this research area increases, it is crucial that scholars begin carefully and intentionally building concrete and specified approaches for doing this kind of work. Therefore, a second aim of this panel is to theorize, constructively critique, and showcase a variety of possible approaches.
This paper asks whether Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy can contribute to social and political projects that depend on robust concepts of difference. Using a grammatical heuristic, it asks in what syntax must liberation be spoken. First-person authority over one’s own attitudes and the irreducibility of the second-person address indicate a crucial asymmetry in ethical relations to ourselves and others. This asymmetry does not stand in the way of genuine care but as the condition for it. Yogācāra’s three natures doctrine comes into tension with this asymmetry, posing the threat to reduce persons into subpersonal causal processes or inexpressible nonduality. This flattens precisely the asymmetries so vital to our political and ethical projects by resolving instead of recognizing alterity. The paper argues, however, that Yogācāra’s account of multiple, incommensurate worlds offers a more promising path, preserving genuine difference without retreating into the essentialism.
This paper illustrates one way in which premodern Buddhist philosophy can be brought to bear on pressing socio-political questions debated in feminist philosophy. I identify a lacuna in an influential account of the social construction of human kinds developed by Ásta, a philosopher at Duke University. She claims that, by drawing a metaphysical distinction between people and their social properties, her “conferralist” account offers a plausible anti-essentialist story of the phenomenon of misgendering. Drawing on Dharmakīrti’s (c. 7th century CE) theory of perceptual ascertainment (niścayajñāna) and the notion of erroneous cognition (bhrāntijñāna) as articulated in the Pramāṇavārttika and the Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti, I argue that conferralism cannot give a compelling story of misgendering because it lacks a robust notion of error. Further, by incorporating an element resembling Dharmakīrti’s notion of conceptual error, Ásta’s account could give a plausible story of misgendering.
At several places in his Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa) and its auto-commentary (Bhāṣya), the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (4th cent. CE) discusses the features in virtue of which humans are differentiated into men, women, and various “third-sex” categories. This paper examines these passages and attempts to articulate Vasubandhu’s understanding of sex and gender. Much of Vasubandhu’s discussion of sexed and gendered traits is situated within the context of Abhidharma discourse on the category of “controlling faculties” (indriya), and more broadly within the context of philosophical theorizing about the reproduction and development of living organisms. I will argue that Vasubandhu’s theory of sex and gender is driven by his view of the relationship between biology and religious cultivation. Any satisfactory theory of the sexed condition of humans, for Vasubandhu, is conditioned by the Buddhist insistence on the possibility of changing the conditions of human life through meditative practice and spiritual attainment.
In this paper, I argue that the Mādhyamaka Buddhist brahmavihārā (virtue) of karuṇā could function as the civic virtue of solidarity (rather than compassion) in a republican form of government. First, I elucidate the role of civic virtue in the neo-Roman republican tradition and that of the brahmavihārā of karuṇā in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra. Second, I discuss how karuṇā shares affinities with the broader concept of solidarity in Western thought and how Mādhyamaka Buddhism could address the issue of the “is-ought” gap that arises in theories of solidarity based on the mere fact of social interdependence. I show that this problem is avoided through the “Three Trainings,” based on a pratyakṣa (realization) of pratītyasamutpāda (interdependence). Finally, I discuss how karuṇā could function specifically as the civic virtue of solidarity, upholding the state’s legitimacy, and showing that karuṇā shares similar moral-psychological grounds (ālambana) with civic virtue in the European republican tradition.