Assistant Instructional Professor, Associate Director, Undergraduate Religious Studies Program and Core Sequence, UChicago Divinity School

This is a draft of the opening chapters of a forthcoming book on dialogue and dialectic, followed by an outline of some later chapters. The audience for the book is undergraduate students who are taking a course in philosophy, communication studies, rhetoric, or theology. At present, I am not aware of any accessible primers on dialectic for that readership, so this book is being written to invite novices into the dialogical tradition. I welcome any input you have, but I would especially solicit comments and questions about the definitions I offer of dialectic and the thirty reasons I provide for why someone would write a philosophical dialogue. Are there other dialogues I should engage with, or other affordances of the genre I neglected? Does the connection between political polarization and philosophical dialogue make intuitive sense? What else needs to be said to help students not feel disoriented when they encounter the term “dialectic” in the wild?

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MA student, UChicago Divinity School

This paper examines Shinran’s radical reframing of evil within the context of Pure Land Buddhism, particularly in relation to Other Power (他力 tariki). Drawing on Tiantai and Pure Land sources such as Zhili, Genshin, Shandao, and Tanluan, it argues that Shinran articulates a vision of “thoroughgoing commitment” in which Amida’s vow universally infringes on all possible acts, leaving no remainder of jiriki (self-power). In Shinran’s soteriology, evil is not overcome through human effort—indeed, any effort to overcome evil is itself evil, entangled in greed, anger, and ignorance. Instead, Amida’s vows operate as the sole guarantor of liberation, extending even to those who commit the five gravest transgressions. This stance marks a decisive shift from earlier Chinese Pure Land interpretations by rejecting the salvific efficacy of auxiliary practices and radicalizing exclusive reliance on Amida’s primal vow.

The paper demonstrates this through a close reading of Shinran’s creative manipulation of the story of Ajase in the Nirvana Sutra. By reinterpreting Ajase’s patricide and eventual salvation, Shinran foregrounds the paradoxical dynamic by which the deepest expressions of evil are already encompassed by Amida’s compassionate activity. In doing so, Shinran both affirms the universality of Buddha-nature and dismantles the notion of moral qualification for salvation. This reading also demonstrates that Shinran’s distinctive soteriology resonates with Tiantai Zhiyi’s nuanced response to antinomianism: evil is neither negated nor excused but enfolded within the workings of a vow that renders all beings, without exception, the site of liberation.

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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.”