Jessica X. Zu, "Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2025)

New Books in Religion · May 29, 2025 · 1h 20m

Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2025) uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogācāra, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworlds. This Yogācāra social philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Chinese intellectuals who struggled against the violent Social Darwinist logic of the survival of the fittest. Its proponents were convinced that…