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About Jessica Zu
Jessica Zu is the author of Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2025). Her research uncovers surprising ways that ancient Buddhist processual philosophy was reinvented by overlooked groups to transform the self, seek justice, build community, and change the world. She is working on two new book-length projects, Liberation Buddhology and its Elite Capture: Views from Śantiniketan, and Quantum Consciousness: Spirituality for a Scientific World (1930–2008). Both projects combine in-depth studies of archives preserved by marginalized groups with analytic inquiries into these historical actors’ own philosophical critiques of the secular, scientific, epistemological paradigm. While Liberation Buddhology problematizes the secular discourses that differentiate renunciation from revolution, Quantum Consciousness questions the scientific discourses that set apart the subjective silo against a universalized objectivity. More than exposing the impoverished imaginations undergirded the dominant secular-scientific discourses, both projects invite scholars to exit the tunnel vision of the secular-scientific bubble by showcasing how historical actors offered alternative ways of theorizing the self, the social, and the world relationally and interdependently.Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California.
NBN Episodes hosted by Jessica:
March 29, 2026
Ìwà: the Process-Relational Dimension to African Metaphysics
Correction: In the interview, the host mistakenly mentioned that Prof. Ofuasia is teaching the University of Pretoria. In reality, Prof Ofuasia is cur…
January 13, 2026
All Things Act
All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, m…
January 5, 2026
Poet-Monks
Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of me…
January 4, 2026
Chinese Cosmopolitanism
A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastr…
November 4, 2025
The Notbook of Kabir
Kabir is the most alive of all dead poets. He is a fabric without stitches. No centres, no edges. Anand threads his way in. Over the years, as a publi…
August 22, 2025
Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition
Finalist, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective Studies, given by the American Academy of ReligionExplores how Black …
July 9, 2025
Myth and Identity in the Martial Arts
Myth and Identity in the Martial Arts: Creating the Dragon (Lexington Books, 2025) is a study of the role of myth and ideology in the formation of soc…
June 16, 2025
Experiments in Mystical Atheism
A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism.Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two a…
May 13, 2025
Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism
An open access Asia Shorts edited volume from AAS. The spring of 2020 will remain etched in collective memory as a moment of profound upheaval. The C…
March 23, 2025
Consciousness Mattering
Consciousness Mattering (Bloombury, 2023) presents a contemporary Buddhist theory in which brains, bodies, environments, and cultures are relational i…
October 20, 2024
Confucian Feminism
In Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee expands the theoretical horizons of feminism by using ch…
October 9, 2024
Of Ancestors and Ghosts
In Buddhist cosmology, pretas make up one of several categories of rebirth. They are best known as "hungry ghosts," pitiful beings with miniscule mout…
September 24, 2024
Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy
Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside …
July 20, 2024
The Women Who Ruled China
In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she h…
July 6, 2024
Karma and Grace
Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who …
May 23, 2024
Embodying Xuanzang
Xuanzang (600/602–664) was one of the most accomplished and consequential monks in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Celebrated for his sixteen-year…
May 17, 2024
Esoteric Buddhism in China
During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particul…
April 4, 2024
Making Sense of Mind Only
Through engaging, contemporary examples, Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023) reveals the Yogacara sch…
March 18, 2024
A Part Apart
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, he…
November 10, 2023
Dancing in My Dreams
If you don’t know Tina Turner’s spirituality, you don’t know Tina.When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s, sh…
October 16, 2023
Tagore's University
Swati Ganguly's book Tagore's University: A History of Visva-Bharati, 1921-1961 (New India Foundation, 2022) is for anyone who is searching for tangib…
September 19, 2023
Moral Relativism and Pluralism
Today I talked to David B. Wong about his book Moral Relativism and Pluralism (Cambridge UP, 2023). The argument for metaethical relativism--the view…
July 30, 2023
Nonexistent Objects in Buddhist Philosophy
Can we know what there is not? Zhihua Yao's Nonexistent Objects in Buddhist Philosophy: On Knowing What There is Not (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the…
June 16, 2023
Dust on the Throne
Received wisdom has it that Buddhism disappeared from India, the land of its birth, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, long forgotten un…