Project MUSE®: Journal of Buddhist Philosophy - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Buddhist Philosophy.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Buddhist PhilosophyTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Buddhist Philosophy2374-24882374-247XLatest articles in Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Special Issue on Society, Karma, Truth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974961
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The articles in this issue of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy all present some vision of a Buddhist social philosophy. Given Buddhist philosophy’s thoroughgoing commitment to the analysis of persons into component forces, we might think it lacks apt resources for a social philosophy. How can a philosophical tradition committed to the concept of no self build up a theory of the social collective of persons, or of the broader collective of sentient beings? And how can Buddhist thought make sense of reality as differently perceived and mediated not just by individual beings, but by those differently situated within society, or of a concept of truth capacious enough to account for differently situated beings, their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallSpecial Issue on Society, Karma, Truth2025-11-19text/htmlen-USSpecial Issue on Society, Karma, Truth2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®52592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19Karma, Intersubjectivity, and Collectivity in Buddhist Thought
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974962
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Here is a story I heard recently from another Buddhist studies colleague about how karma is interpreted. They relayed that a Tibetan Buddhist scholar-monk, himself a Tibetan man, had recently come to speak at their American educational institution. During the question-and-answer session after his talk, one of their students, a Black woman, asked what her own oppressed position as a Black person here in the United States meant for her, in the language of Buddhist thought. The visiting scholar-monk answered her by saying: “I am sorry, but that is your own bad karma.” My colleague shared this story to convey both their experience with the dominance of the notion of individualized karma in contemporary accounts and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallKarma, Intersubjectivity, and Collectivity in Buddhist Thought2025-11-19text/htmlen-USKarma, Intersubjectivity, and Collectivity in Buddhist Thought2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®961912026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19What Is Shared by Bodhisattvas and Their Target Audience? Second-Person Experience and Transformative Sociality in Chinese Yogācāra
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974963
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In contemporary phenomenological discussions of sociality, shared experience has garnered much scholarly attention. Indeed, humans are social beings who can participate in joint actions to constitute a community and share experiences within such a community. The crux of this discussion concerns how to define this shared experience given the plurality of subjects qua the we.1 Most scholars agree that the we-experience does not presume the we to be a meta-ego where all the participants merge and lose their singularities in an “undifferentiated unity” (Brinck et al. 2017, 133) or a “collective singular[ity]” (Schmid 2018, 238). Nor is it “a mere summation or an aggregation of individual intentionality,” as if all
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallWhat Is Shared by Bodhisattvas and Their Target Audience? Second-Person Experience and Transformative Sociality in Chinese Yogācāra2025-11-19text/htmlen-USWhat Is Shared by Bodhisattvas and Their Target Audience? Second-Person Experience and Transformative Sociality in Chinese Yogācāra2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®1008182026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19Karma, Adhipati, and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Wang Enyang’s (1897–1964) Yogācāra Theory of Transformative Nonviolence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974964
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The current study investigates a new form of Buddhist philosophy and a new branch of social philosophy, which I term “Yogācāra social philosophy,” using Wang Enyang’s (1897–1964) commentaries as a case study. Since the early twentieth century, Chinese Buddhists have self-consciously compared Buddhist philosophy with imported Western and Indian thought systems, especially on issues related to social ontology.1 Recently, many scholars have not only examined the Chinese Buddhist critiques of Western philosophical and moral systems but also have analyzed the perceived (in-) compatibility of Buddhism with materialism, idealism, ontology, epistemology, and the philosophy of science (He 2013; Makeham 2014; Murthy 2011).
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallKarma, Adhipati, and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Wang Enyang’s (1897–1964) Yogācāra Theory of Transformative Nonviolence2025-11-19text/htmlen-USKarma, Adhipati, and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Wang Enyang’s (1897–1964) Yogācāra Theory of Transformative Nonviolence2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®1174262026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19The Problem of Karma in B. R. Ambedkar’s Buddhism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974965
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On October 14, 1956, in the central Indian city of Nagpur, at what is now called in Hindi the Dīkshabhūmi (“ordination ground”), Dr. B. R. Ambedkar formally converted to Buddhism and simultaneously presided over one of the largest mass conversion moments of the twentieth century in which he added some 500,000 people into the Buddhist fold (Zelliot 2004, 169). The reverberations from this act of conversion are still felt today, though perhaps curiously, these effects are largely limited to India.1 While Ambedkar’s accomplishments in the fields of law, economics, political philosophy, and social movement building have been well documented by social scientists, major religious studies treatments of Ambedkar’s unique
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallThe Problem of Karma in B. R. Ambedkar’s Buddhism2025-11-19text/htmlen-USThe Problem of Karma in B. R. Ambedkar’s Buddhism2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®1081022026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19Is Truth a Story?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974966
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The question that is the title of this article can be read in two ways. First, the title asks whether the thing we call truth can be characterized as a narrative that unfolds in time as opposed to some other kind of entity, such as a static property that is conveyed through language and other truth-bearers. This question reveals an inquiry into the kind of thing that truth is. Second, perhaps a bit more cheekily, the title implies that the thing we call truth might be a fiction. This way of reading the question prompts us to consider the possibility that truth itself might be unreal or at least might not possess the kind of reality that we usually associate with the term.The two ways of reading the question
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallIs Truth a Story?2025-11-19text/htmlen-USIs Truth a Story?2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®1138812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste by Pradeep P. Gokhale (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974967
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For much of the last hundred years, scholars of Buddhism (particularly in the West) have largely operated as if the statesman, Dalit activist, legal theorist, and philosopher B. R. Ambedkar had no say in academic attempts to reimagine the world of early Indian Buddhist practices and their philosophical underpinnings. Following as it did in the wake of the Western colonial obsession with Buddhist origins, the discipline of Buddhist studies viewed the interpretive frameworks of social reformers, such as Ambedkar, who were distant in time from the world of the Buddha, as irrelevant to the philologically grounded tasks of translation and intellectual history. The discipline of Buddhist studies, though it claimed to be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallClassical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste by Pradeep P. Gokhale (review)2025-11-19text/htmlen-USClassical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste by Pradeep P. Gokhale (review)2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®122802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination by Melissa Anne-Marie Curley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974968
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Pure Land Buddhism is often viewed as philosophically uninteresting, a tradition tailored to the needs of uneducated people looking for an easy path to nirvana (hence the dearth of coverage of it in journals of Buddhist philosophy). Readers harboring such a notion of Pure Land Buddhism will find surprises in Curley’s book, which examines how three leading twentieth-century Japanese intellectuals put Pure Land Buddhist ideas to work in their efforts to resist totalitarianism and imagine alternative social orders. Here, the Pure Land is not a mere promise of future happiness in some other world but rather, in illustration of Adorno and Bloch’s views on the utopian imagination, a potent source of ideas inspiring
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallPure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination by Melissa Anne-Marie Curley (review)2025-11-19text/htmlen-USPure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination by Melissa Anne-Marie Curley (review)2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®118012026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World by Daniel Capper (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974969
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Daniel Capper’s Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World follows in the footsteps of his earlier book, Learning Love From a Tiger: Religious Experiences with Nature (Capper 2016), and explores some of the ways Buddhist traditions engage with the environment and its nonhuman inhabitants. In Learning Love From a Tiger, Capper examines the various world religions to find where each falls along the spectrum of anthropocentrism, zoacentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. When he arrives at an analysis of Buddhist traditions, he uses Himalayan notions of the yeti and a Vietnamese Buddhist center in the USA to evaluate where Buddhist views of nature fall along this spectrum. These two cases provide only a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallRoaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World by Daniel Capper (review)2025-11-19text/htmlen-USRoaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World by Daniel Capper (review)2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®222492026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation by Rima Vesely-Flad (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974970
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From this self-love and inner spaciousness extends an outpouring of communal love that responds to the historical and contemporary suffering of Black people and the suffering of peoples throughout the world (269).In Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation, Rima Vesely-Flad draws from over forty interviews with Black Buddhist teachers and long-time practitioners, more than half of whom “identified healing racially induced trauma as a motivation for investing in the practice of Buddhism” (1). She documents the historical background and spiritual traditions that inform Black Buddhists’ understanding of liberation, highlights the ways in which Black
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/702/image/coversmallBlack Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation by Rima Vesely-Flad (review)2025-11-19text/htmlen-USBlack Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation by Rima Vesely-Flad (review)2025-11-192025TWOProject MUSE®123092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-19