Philosophizing and Power: East–West Encounter in the Formation of Modern East Asian Buddhist Philosophy

This essay examines the life and thought of two East Asian Buddhist thinkers, Paek Sŏnguk 白性郁 (1897–1981) and Inoue Enryō 井上円了 (1858–1919), as paradigmatic examples of modern East Asian philosophy. In so doing it brings together two seemingly unrelated aspects of the East-West encounter in modern East Asian philosophy. That is, the beginning of philosophy in modern East Asia was inevitably influenced by the power imbalance between East and West. On the other hand, the forced encounter of the Eastern “thought” tradition with the Western genre called philosophy generated a new mode of philosophizing, which is also shared by some contemporary Western philosophers in their criticism of an institutionalized form of philosophy.