Just Awakening

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 the root cause of crisis in both China and the West was epistemic—an unexamined faith in one common, objective world and a subject-object divide. This dualistic paradigm, in their view, had dire consequences, including moral egoism, competition for material wealth, and racial war. Yogācāra insights about plurality, interdependence, and intersubjectivity, however, had the capacity to awaken the world from these deadly dreams.

Jessica Zu reconstructs this account of modern Yogācāra philosophy, arguing that it offers new vocabularies with which to reconceptualize equality and freedom. Yogācāra thinking, she shows, diffracts the illusions of individual identity, social categories, and material wealth into aggregated, recurring karmic processes. It then guides the reassembly of a complex society through nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and collaborative actions, sustained by new behavior patterns and modes of thought. Demonstrating why Chinese Buddhist social philosophy offers powerful resources for social justice and liberation today, Just Awakening invites readers to think with modern Yogācāra philosophers about other ways of building egalitarian futures.

Jessica X. Zu is assistant professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California, Dornsife. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University in 2020, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the Pennsylvania State University in 2003.

She is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist philosophy. Her research uncovers surprising ways that ancient Buddhist processual philosophy was reinvented by marginalized groups to seek justice, build community, and change the world.

Books Referred to in This Interview:

William Waldron, Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters. Wisdom Publications, 2023. (Waldron’s interview with Jessica Zu: https://newbooksnetwork.com/making-sense-of-mind-only)

Lei Ying, Our Shared Karma: Buddhism, Literature, and the Modern Chinese Revolution (under contract with Harvard University Asia Center). https://www.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/leiying

David Stasavage. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Thomas D. Seeley. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2010.

James C. Scott. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press, 2010.