Description:

This study reconstructs a care (karuṇā)-based philosophy for building an isonomic,
complex society preserved in Pāli texts. The Greek term isonomia (lit. equality), in
Karatani Kōjin’s sense of no-rule, means a categorical rejection of ruler-ruled social
hierarchy. I extend this use of isonomia to include spiritual cultivations that relinquish
habitual tendencies of ruler-ruled mentality such as domination and submission. To
better appreciate this kind of cared-based philosophy of isonomia, I argue that it is
necessary to sidestep the rights-based conversations, adopt a processual paradigm,
and rethink what counts as sociopolitical philosophy.
As the evidence reveals, one core feature of these relation-centered, care-based
sociopolitical philosophies is that they diffract seemingly stable categories such as
personhood, groups, communities, institutions, and nations into recurring patterns of
motivated actions, coactions, and consequences of actions and then guide the
reassembling of new patterns of thoughts, actions, habits, and social relations so to
build a more egalitarian, plural future.
This study is as much an effort to recover marginalized voices in the past as a
future-oriented project of testing out new ways of thinking about key issues concerning
the future of humanity and the planet. A baked-in flaw of extant social contract theories
is that they presume a rational, independent agent, which relegate the young, the old,
the sick, and the disabled into the realm of the unthought or after thought. In contrast, a
cared-based processual philosophy of isonomia starts its theorization from the
existential reality of interconditionality and vulnerability. Thusly, it offers vital insights into
how to reframe justice, equity, freedom, and pluralism in processual terms of care and
equal support for life and liberation.

Jessica Zu 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 transform the self, seek justice, build community,
and change the world. Her book, Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in
Modern China, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press on March 18, 2025.
Her next book-length project, Liberation Buddhology and its Elite Capture: Views
from Śantiniketan, investigates the philosophical innovations as well as its later
appropriation into mainstream nationalism that undergirded Buddhist anti-colonial, anti-
caste, and pro-democracy movements across Asia. Her initial examination of the
materials housed in Cheena Bhavana (the China Institute, founded 1935) at Viśva-
Bhārati University in Śantiniketan (a university founded by the 1913 Nobel laureate
Rabindranath Tagore) uncovered a vibrant hub for Asian Buddhist reformers who were
exchanging texts and ideas, learning from one another about anti-oppression tactics
and rhetoric, and collaborating on movements to Buddhisize the world with isonomia
(rulelessness; Skt: samatā; Ch: 平等; Tib: སྙོམས་པ་). Methodologically, Liberation
Buddhology calls into question the secular discourse that differentiates renunciation
from revolution and invites scholars to learn from Buddhist insight of equality as equal