Buddhist Critical Phenomenology

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 movements across the globe, across humanistic and social scientific disciplines, as well as within Buddhist practice communities. These are movements 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.

The three papers in this panel work together to present a coherent vision of what the program of Buddhist critical phenomenology can be and can do, while the panel’s respondent is a scholar housed in an English department who has written extensively in the field of critical phenomenology itself. Their response brings to the panel a perspective both beyond and responsive to the discipline of religious studies.

The first paper introduces a programmatic basis for a Buddhist critical phenomenology, grounded in central ideas of early Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, and then provides one major Buddhist philosophy-based intervention into the discipline of critical phenomenology that has been quite self-consciously developing in the academy over the past handful of years (with roots extending back to early heirs of the phenomenological movement who pushed beyond the works of Husserl, figures like Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon). The paper’s intervention is to argue that from the Buddhist perspective, the phenomenon that critical phenomenology often takes as power, emblematized in the figure of the individual person who occupies a normative subjectivity or dominant social class position, is better understood as a kind of weakness, insofar as it signals the presence of the kind of ignorance that forms an obstacle to the sorts of insights that characterize liberation and Buddhahood.

The second paper examines the question of how to think about the relationship of insight to karma within the Buddhist tradition, given the reality that social situatedness embeds us in shared forms of karma, which may not be able to be overcome by the individual’s insight. This paper works to show what Buddhist philosophy and critical phenomenology may offer each other, which should further motivate the engagement of the two disciplines of Buddhist studies and critical phenomenology.

The third paper offers a deep-dive into the critical phenomenology of one emotion—joy—based on the writings of the Buddhist philosophers Xuanzang and Kuiji. Engaging with contemporary critical phenomenology, this paper shows that these two Buddhist philosophers did not conceive of joy as a singular emotion with a fixed essence, but rather as a socially-embedded emotional state whose expression within an individual may vary depending on their own relationship to their own ego-states. As such, joy itself can further ignorance and ego-conditioning, or can be experienced in relationship to socially and individually liberatory processes. This paper, then, provides an example of the kind of new insights that the Buddhist philosophical tradition can introduce into the field of critical phenomenology.

The three paper authors are all Buddhist studies scholars and Buddhist philosophers. The respondent has written extensively on critical phenomenology, including in the new journal Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, as well as serving as one of the editors for the 2019 volume 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology.