PhD candidate, UChicago Divinity School

Exactly 1000 years ago, in what is now the present-day city of Ningbo, China, a dramatic break-up unfolded between the great Song Dynasty Tiantai Buddhist thinker, Siming Zhili 四明知禮, and his brilliant disciple and de-facto Dharma-heir, Jingjue Renyue 淨覺仁岳. As legend tells it, sometime in the year 1025, Renyue became violently ill in the middle of a supplication ritual. From this point on, he “renounces all his prior convictions,” and begins to openly advocate for a doppelgänger position closely resembling that of the heretical Shanwai faction both of them had spent a good part of the last decade, and spilled a great deal of ink, refuting. In a series of four exchanged polemical texts, Renyue stages a remonstrative intervention with Zhili over the status of a strange body, unique to Tiantai Buddhist Pure Land theory, called “zunte” 尊特. This peculiar, errant body leaves an ambiguous, self-contradictory trace in the Classical Tiantai corpus. On the one hand, the de-facto founder of the tradition, Zhiyi (aka 智者大師) sometimes speaks of the zunte body as if it were its own discrete entity, to be placed within or alongside the traditional three bodies of a Buddha (i.e. the response (or born) body, the recompense (or enjoyment) body, and the dharma-body). And yet, on the other, he seems to ascribe prima facie mutually contradictory predicates to it, identifying it sometimes as a ‘response’ body (nirmāṇakāya, Ch. yingshen 應身) and sometimes as a ‘recompense’ body (saṃbhogakāya, Ch. 報身). The problem of this strange body and its contested status forms the fault line along which the doctrinal stakes of Zhili and Renyue’s split come into relief. Renyue and Zhili put flesh to two mutually incompatible envisionings of the zunte body of Amitābha Buddha; and concomitantly with each of these respective envisionings, each of Renyue and Zhili gives a wildly divergent reading of the same Tiantai tradition. Along the way, we walk an ever bifurcating path (liangxing 兩行) through a series of contested terrains, surrounding problems of triplicity, paradox, and the “Middle” (zhong 中)—as well as the “relation” between finitude and infinity, and between Nagarjuna’s Two Truths. This is a story about, among other things, two birds, a beetle, and a body “like all of space.”

Professor of Hebraic Studies, University of Lille, France

State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel explores the relations between post-Holocaust Jewish thought and postcolonial thought through the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In the last decade, thinkers have criticized Levinas for his Eurocentrism; however, author Elad Lapidot argues that Levinas anticipated this critique and, from the 1960s onward, began setting the foundations for decolonial Jewish thought—and for decolonial Zionism.

State of Others offers an innovative analysis of Levinas’s intellectual project as articulated around a turn in the year 1968. This turn relates to the relationship between Judaism and Western civilization. Prior to 1968, Levinas considered the historical Jewish collective, Israel, as the avant-garde of Western humanism. After 1968, with the rise of decolonial discourse, Levinas’s concept of Israel shifts roles and becomes the paradigmatic victim of Western imperialism.

State of Others demonstrates how Levinas simultaneously developed his dual narratives—before and after the pivotal year of 1968—across his philosophical and Jewish writings, with a special emphasis on the Talmudic Readings. It presents for the first time a cohesive overview of Levinas’s writings, both early and late, as interconnected components of a singular intellectual endeavor. The ethical principles concerning the other, as articulated by Levinas, are conceptually linked to his reflections on the State of Israel.

Faculty of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

This paper offers the first English‑language philosophical treatment of Master Liu (Liuzi 劉子)—a treatise that gives a unique insight into the intellectual life of sixth‑century China. Most probably written by Liu Zhou (d. 565) and known at the Tang court, the work was later neglected due to its eclectic label. This article argues that Liuzi integrated Confucian moral philosophy with selected Daoist ideas and responded to post‑Buddhist transformations of key categories of Chinese thought in a manner that anticipates many solutions characteristic of neo‑Confucian lixue. This includes an innovative understanding of such categories as spirit (shen) and heart‑mind (xin), feelings (qing) and desires (yu), and, finally, reliability (xin) and balancing (quan).