Intersubjective Empathy
Chinese Buddhism has always been integral to communal life. To confine it in the private sphere is to refuse to recognize the ever-present demand for transcendence in building an equitable society,
- Jessica Zu
- Jessica Zu
In our time of polycrises, two habits of thought often stand in the way of responding constructively to the many crises we face. One is what Alfred North Whitehead called scientific materialism: the reduction of the world—and indeed the cosmos—to mere matter in motion, to entities colliding with one another without intrinsic value, feeling, or inwardness. The other is hyper-individualism, bordering on solipsism: the assumption that the self is fundamentally isolated, self-contained, and detached from the lives of others.
Jessica Zu proposes that Yogācāra Buddhism, particularly as interpreted by the renowned Chinese Buddhologist Lü Cheng (1896–1989), offers a way beyond both scientific materialism and hyper-individualism. It does so by emphasizing our capacity for intersubjective empathy: our ability to feel the feelings of one another and to respond in ways that help build just and equitable communities.
Importantly, Zu argues that Yogācāra Buddhism does not overcome materialism and solipsism by offering a competing “realistic ontology” or a new metaphysical picture of external reality. Instead, it begins with a disciplined examination of consciousness itself—its structures, habits, relationality, and transformations. This was also Lü Cheng’s proposal. Through practices of introspection, ethical cultivation, and meditative awareness, people can come to recognize that consciousness is never isolated or self-enclosed, but always relationally constituted.
In Zu’s interpretation, two key Yogācāra ideas become socially and politically significant. The first is the doctrine of no-self (anātman), which undermines philosophical solipsism and repudiates possessive individualism. The second is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), according to which all things arise relationally and interdependently. Under Lü Cheng’s interpretation, these ideas helped refashion social evolution itself as a form of collective spiritual progress: the cultivation of forms of social life grounded in empathy, mutual responsiveness, and democratic participation.
Zu therefore interprets Yogācāra Buddhism as a processual philosophy. In this respect, her approach overlaps considerably with the process philosophy of Whitehead. Both perspectives reject substance-based individualism. Both understand human beings not as isolated substances but as streams or occasions of experience constituted through relations with others. Both emphasize becoming rather than static being, relationality rather than isolation, and feeling or prehension rather than detached cognition as central to human existence.
There are, of course, important differences between Yogācāra and Whitehead. Yogācāra begins with an analysis of consciousness and often stresses the transformation of awareness through contemplative practice. Whitehead, by contrast, offers a more ontological account of things, albeit in ways that are grounded in the idea that the actualities of the universe are 'occasions of experience.' He was deeply influenced by early quantum theory and by the emerging scientific realization that the universe may be better understood as consisting of events rather than enduring substances. He developed a process metaphysics in which the fundamental units of reality are not static things but momentary acts of subjective becoming—what he called “actual occasions.” In this way, Whitehead extended process thinking beyond human consciousness to the universe as a whole. Yet despite their differences, both Yogācāra and Whiteheadian philosophy point toward a vision of life in which empathy is ontologically deep, relationality is fundamental, and social transformation depends upon awakening to our interconnectedness.
This page is intended as an introduction to Zu’s work and to the interpretation of Yogācāra Buddhism she develops through Lü Cheng. It also seeks to draw connections between Yogācāra processual thought and Whiteheadian process philosophy, suggesting that these two traditions, despite their differences, converge in offering resources for responding to the crises of our time with greater empathy, relational awareness, and care for the common good.
Jessica Zu proposes that Yogācāra Buddhism, particularly as interpreted by the renowned Chinese Buddhologist Lü Cheng (1896–1989), offers a way beyond both scientific materialism and hyper-individualism. It does so by emphasizing our capacity for intersubjective empathy: our ability to feel the feelings of one another and to respond in ways that help build just and equitable communities.
Importantly, Zu argues that Yogācāra Buddhism does not overcome materialism and solipsism by offering a competing “realistic ontology” or a new metaphysical picture of external reality. Instead, it begins with a disciplined examination of consciousness itself—its structures, habits, relationality, and transformations. This was also Lü Cheng’s proposal. Through practices of introspection, ethical cultivation, and meditative awareness, people can come to recognize that consciousness is never isolated or self-enclosed, but always relationally constituted.
In Zu’s interpretation, two key Yogācāra ideas become socially and politically significant. The first is the doctrine of no-self (anātman), which undermines philosophical solipsism and repudiates possessive individualism. The second is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), according to which all things arise relationally and interdependently. Under Lü Cheng’s interpretation, these ideas helped refashion social evolution itself as a form of collective spiritual progress: the cultivation of forms of social life grounded in empathy, mutual responsiveness, and democratic participation.
Zu therefore interprets Yogācāra Buddhism as a processual philosophy. In this respect, her approach overlaps considerably with the process philosophy of Whitehead. Both perspectives reject substance-based individualism. Both understand human beings not as isolated substances but as streams or occasions of experience constituted through relations with others. Both emphasize becoming rather than static being, relationality rather than isolation, and feeling or prehension rather than detached cognition as central to human existence.
There are, of course, important differences between Yogācāra and Whitehead. Yogācāra begins with an analysis of consciousness and often stresses the transformation of awareness through contemplative practice. Whitehead, by contrast, offers a more ontological account of things, albeit in ways that are grounded in the idea that the actualities of the universe are 'occasions of experience.' He was deeply influenced by early quantum theory and by the emerging scientific realization that the universe may be better understood as consisting of events rather than enduring substances. He developed a process metaphysics in which the fundamental units of reality are not static things but momentary acts of subjective becoming—what he called “actual occasions.” In this way, Whitehead extended process thinking beyond human consciousness to the universe as a whole. Yet despite their differences, both Yogācāra and Whiteheadian philosophy point toward a vision of life in which empathy is ontologically deep, relationality is fundamental, and social transformation depends upon awakening to our interconnectedness.
This page is intended as an introduction to Zu’s work and to the interpretation of Yogācāra Buddhism she develops through Lü Cheng. It also seeks to draw connections between Yogācāra processual thought and Whiteheadian process philosophy, suggesting that these two traditions, despite their differences, converge in offering resources for responding to the crises of our time with greater empathy, relational awareness, and care for the common good.
Jessica X. Zu
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Jessica X. Zu is Assistant Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. 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. |
A Spiritual Evolutionism: Lü Cheng, Aesthetic Revolution, and the Rise of a Buddhism-Inflected Social Ontology in Modern China
Jessica X. Zu
This study examines the early career of the renowned Buddhologist Lü Cheng as an aspiring revolutionary. My findings reveal that Lü’s rhetoric of “aesthetic revolution” both catapulted him into the center of the New Culture Movement and popularized a Buddhist idealism—Yogācāra (consciousness-only school)—among thinkers who sought alternatives social theories. Lü aimed to refute social Darwinism and scientific materialism, which portray humans as mechanized individuals bereft of moral agency. He theorized an antirealist social ontology, i.e., a social oneness grounded in intersubjective resonances, from which subjective interiority and objective exteriority arise. Lü turned to Buddhism to further his revolution. Buddhist soteriology supplied powerful tools for theorizing the social: The doctrine of no-self refuted philosophical solipsism and curtailed individualism; dependent-origination refashioned social evolution as collective spiritual progress. Lü’s spiritual-evolutionism-cum-socialontology broadens the field of Buddhist philosophy that has a long-standing blind spot on social philosophies developed in the Global South.
- Jessica X. Zu
Chinese Buddhism has always been integral to communal life. To confine it in the private sphere is to refuse to recognize the ever-present demand for transcendence in building an equitable society, for which faith-based communities have always provided vital inspirations and crucial justifications. Lü’s social theory in the early 1920s not only fundamentally reframed the philosophical basis of collective future in terms of intersubjectivity and soteriology but also heralded a social turn of Buddhist soteriology that belied the discourse of secularization and called into question the myth of disenchantment.
- Jessica X. Zu
Buddhist Socio-Soteriology
Yogacara philosophers suggest that we don’t need to assume an external objective reality to explain shared experiences. Instead, they argue that our experiences are interconnected and shaped by causal and karmic influences.
Jessica X. Zu’s Just Awakening: Yogacara Social Philosophy in Modern China explores the dimensions of this philosophy through an unexpected lens: the early 20th-century Chinese art teacher-turned-Buddhologist Lu Cheng. Lu’s interpretation of Yogacara led to a new form of social philosophy which Zu calls “socio-soteriology,” emphasizing the idea that collective liberation leads to a just society.
Zu skillfully blends history and philosophy, first tracing the development of Yogacara social thought in China through Lu’s writings and related sources. She then presents a philosophical analysis of socio-soteriology, using Lu’s arguments to explore new perspectives on the concepts of revolution, liberation, and democracy.
- Constance Kassor, review of Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China by Jessica X. Zu, Lion’s Roar, January 29, 2026, “Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China”
Interview with Jessica Zu
on New Books Network
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.
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.
About Lü Cheng
Yogācāra is one of the most philosophically sophisticated schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Often translated as “Consciousness-Only” (Vijñaptimātra) or associated with “Mind-Only” (Cittamātra), it explores how experience is constituted through consciousness, perception, karmic conditioning, and imagination. Rather than claiming that nothing exists outside the mind in a simplistic idealist sense, Yogācāra investigates how what we take to be an independently existing world is always mediated by cognitive processes, habits, and conceptual constructions. Important classical figures include Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. (Wikipedia)
Lü Cheng (often romanized Lu Cheng, 1896–1989) was one of the most important modern Chinese interpreters of Yogācāra Buddhism. He helped revive serious Buddhist philosophical scholarship in twentieth-century China and sought to recover what he regarded as the rigor and depth of Indian Buddhist thought. He mastered multiple languages—including Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Japanese, and several European languages—in order to engage Buddhist texts philologically and comparatively. (Lion’s Roar)
Several themes are especially important in Lü Cheng’s approach:
For someone interested in process philosophy, there are striking affinities between Yogācāra and Whiteheadian thought:
A particularly interesting bridge between them is the idea that the world we inhabit is partly shaped by inherited patterns of feeling, interpretation, and habitual response. In Whitehead these are prehensions and subjective forms; in Yogācāra they are karmic seeds and transformations of consciousness.
Lü Cheng (often romanized Lu Cheng, 1896–1989) was one of the most important modern Chinese interpreters of Yogācāra Buddhism. He helped revive serious Buddhist philosophical scholarship in twentieth-century China and sought to recover what he regarded as the rigor and depth of Indian Buddhist thought. He mastered multiple languages—including Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Japanese, and several European languages—in order to engage Buddhist texts philologically and comparatively. (Lion’s Roar)
Several themes are especially important in Lü Cheng’s approach:
- Yogācāra as rigorous philosophy rather than mysticism alone
Lü Cheng treated Yogācāra as a sophisticated epistemological and phenomenological system. He emphasized careful analysis of consciousness, cognition, illusion, and karmic conditioning. He resisted reducing Buddhism to vague spirituality or romantic intuition. (PhilPapers) - Critique of substantialized metaphysics
Like classical Yogācāra thinkers, Lü Cheng stressed that what we experience as solid, independent entities are deeply conditioned constructions. Consciousness is dynamic and relational rather than static substance. This often resonates with process-relational philosophies, since both reject isolated substances in favor of interdependent becoming. - Social and ethical implications
Modern scholarship has shown that Lü Cheng linked Yogācāra ideas to social philosophy and cultural transformation. He believed Buddhist concepts such as dependent origination and non-self could challenge possessive individualism and support collective transformation. (globalbuddhism.org) - Critique of “Original Enlightenment” theories
Lü Cheng was skeptical of forms of East Asian Buddhism that, in his view, drifted into metaphysical absolutism or vague notions of innate enlightenment. He wanted a more disciplined and analytic Buddhism grounded in experience and practice. (PhilPapers) - Modernity and consciousness
Lü Cheng saw Yogācāra as relevant to modern discussions of psychology, science, social theory, and culture. Rather than retreating from modernity, he sought dialogue between Buddhist philosophy and contemporary intellectual life. (Lion’s Roar)
For someone interested in process philosophy, there are striking affinities between Yogācāra and Whiteheadian thought:
- both reject simple substance metaphysics,
- both emphasize relational becoming,
- both see experience as fundamental,
- both stress that perception is interpretive and constructive,
- both understand the self as dynamic rather than fixed.
A particularly interesting bridge between them is the idea that the world we inhabit is partly shaped by inherited patterns of feeling, interpretation, and habitual response. In Whitehead these are prehensions and subjective forms; in Yogācāra they are karmic seeds and transformations of consciousness.
A Note on Whitehead
and Yogācāra Buddhism
In the twentieth century, writes Jessica Zu, “Yogācāra idealism enabled many Buddhist intellectuals to forge a new social vision, which not only refashioned social evolution as collective spiritual progress but also promised to build a deliberative democracy.” It did so especially through the work of thinkers such as Lü Cheng and others influenced by modern Yogācāra Buddhism in China.
As interpreted by Zu, this vision did not depend upon a worldview claiming to present a perfectly objective picture of the cosmos to which all must conform. Rather, it began with an analysis of consciousness itself and the diverse, personalized streams of experience in which consciousness is nested, of which human lives are examples.
It proposed that people, through heightened awareness of the dynamics of consciousness—cultivated through practices such as meditation—could learn to empathize with one another and help build non-hierarchical, deliberative democracies in which no one is left behind. This Yogācāra vision is a kind of process philosophy,emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things and the absence of substantial selves.
In this way, it resembles the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, which likewise understands human beings as streams of experience and locates at the heart of experience a capacity for empathic feeling: the ability to “feel the feelings of others.” Both perspectives begin not with isolated substances but with relational processes of becoming, and both suggest that spiritual transformation and social transformation are inseparable.
True, Whitehead did believe in an objective world. He was a critical realist, not a subjective idealist. This may or may not resonate with the Yogācāra tradition, depening on how it is interpreted. But he also believed that the objective world is composed of subjects and subjects alone: actual entities or occasions of experience. “Apart from the experiences of subjects,” he writes in Process and Reality, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.” The world is objective in the sense that these many experiences are real and publicly effective, influencing one another in complex webs of relation. But what is ultimately real are not inert substances existing in isolation, but streams and moments of feeling, perception, response, and becoming.
There are, in fact, many parallels between Whitehead’s philosophy and Yogācāra thought. Both reject the idea of self-subsistent substances existing independently of relations. Both understand reality in terms of dynamic processes rather than static things. Both emphasize that what we call a “self” is not a fixed essence but a continuing stream of experience shaped by memory, relation, and response. Both give central importance to feeling, perception, and pre-reflective awareness. Both recognize that our ordinary ways of perceiving the world can be distorted by habits of consciousness, and both hold that transformation involves cultivating new ways of experiencing and responding.
One of the most important concepts in Yogācāra is the ālaya-vijñāna, often translated as “storehouse consciousness.” Developed especially by figures such as Vasubandhu and Asaṅga, the ālaya-vijñāna names a deep, ongoing dimension of consciousness in which karmic “seeds” (bīja) are stored. Every experience leaves traces, and these traces shape future perception, emotion, habits, and actions. Consciousness is thus layered, historical, and relational. What we experience in the present is conditioned by accumulated inheritances from the past.
Whitehead’s philosophy contains a surprisingly similar intuition. For Whitehead, every moment of experience—every “actual occasion”—inherits the world of experience that came before it through what he calls “prehensions,” or felt relations to the past. Many of these felt relations, along with the past itself, are unconscious and thus 'stored' in a 'house' of collective unconscious, otherwise named, in Whitehead, "the past actual world." Thus the past is not dead. It is carried forward into the becoming of the present. In this sense, every act of experience is shaped by inherited patterns of feeling, memory, and response.
The comparison becomes especially intriguing when the ālaya-vijñāna is placed alongside Whitehead’s understanding of continuity within streams of experience. Whitehead does not posit a single enduring soul-substance. Instead, a person is a “personally ordered society” of momentary acts of experience that inherit from one another over time. Much as the ālaya-vijñāna carries karmic traces forward,Whiteheadian occasions inherit emotional tones, habits, aims, and relational patterns from the past. In both systems, continuity exists without requiring an unchanging self.
Thus we have two kinds of process philosophy—Yogācārin and Whiteheadian—pointing in a similar direction. Each begins with experience rather than substance, with becoming rather than static being, and with relationality rather than isolated individuality. Each suggests that consciousness is not a sealed container locked within the private self, but a dynamic field of interdependence in which we are continually shaped by and responsive to one another. And each implies that spiritual awakening and social transformation belong together.
Both perspectives also challenge rigid hierarchies and atomistic individualism. They encourage forms of community grounded in empathy, mutual responsiveness, and shared flourishing. In both cases, democracy is not merely a political arrangement but a spiritual and civilizational practice: a way of cultivating forms of life in which people learn to feel with others, listen across differences, and participate in patterns of coexistence in which no one is left behind.
- Jay McDaniel
As interpreted by Zu, this vision did not depend upon a worldview claiming to present a perfectly objective picture of the cosmos to which all must conform. Rather, it began with an analysis of consciousness itself and the diverse, personalized streams of experience in which consciousness is nested, of which human lives are examples.
It proposed that people, through heightened awareness of the dynamics of consciousness—cultivated through practices such as meditation—could learn to empathize with one another and help build non-hierarchical, deliberative democracies in which no one is left behind. This Yogācāra vision is a kind of process philosophy,emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things and the absence of substantial selves.
In this way, it resembles the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, which likewise understands human beings as streams of experience and locates at the heart of experience a capacity for empathic feeling: the ability to “feel the feelings of others.” Both perspectives begin not with isolated substances but with relational processes of becoming, and both suggest that spiritual transformation and social transformation are inseparable.
True, Whitehead did believe in an objective world. He was a critical realist, not a subjective idealist. This may or may not resonate with the Yogācāra tradition, depening on how it is interpreted. But he also believed that the objective world is composed of subjects and subjects alone: actual entities or occasions of experience. “Apart from the experiences of subjects,” he writes in Process and Reality, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.” The world is objective in the sense that these many experiences are real and publicly effective, influencing one another in complex webs of relation. But what is ultimately real are not inert substances existing in isolation, but streams and moments of feeling, perception, response, and becoming.
There are, in fact, many parallels between Whitehead’s philosophy and Yogācāra thought. Both reject the idea of self-subsistent substances existing independently of relations. Both understand reality in terms of dynamic processes rather than static things. Both emphasize that what we call a “self” is not a fixed essence but a continuing stream of experience shaped by memory, relation, and response. Both give central importance to feeling, perception, and pre-reflective awareness. Both recognize that our ordinary ways of perceiving the world can be distorted by habits of consciousness, and both hold that transformation involves cultivating new ways of experiencing and responding.
One of the most important concepts in Yogācāra is the ālaya-vijñāna, often translated as “storehouse consciousness.” Developed especially by figures such as Vasubandhu and Asaṅga, the ālaya-vijñāna names a deep, ongoing dimension of consciousness in which karmic “seeds” (bīja) are stored. Every experience leaves traces, and these traces shape future perception, emotion, habits, and actions. Consciousness is thus layered, historical, and relational. What we experience in the present is conditioned by accumulated inheritances from the past.
Whitehead’s philosophy contains a surprisingly similar intuition. For Whitehead, every moment of experience—every “actual occasion”—inherits the world of experience that came before it through what he calls “prehensions,” or felt relations to the past. Many of these felt relations, along with the past itself, are unconscious and thus 'stored' in a 'house' of collective unconscious, otherwise named, in Whitehead, "the past actual world." Thus the past is not dead. It is carried forward into the becoming of the present. In this sense, every act of experience is shaped by inherited patterns of feeling, memory, and response.
The comparison becomes especially intriguing when the ālaya-vijñāna is placed alongside Whitehead’s understanding of continuity within streams of experience. Whitehead does not posit a single enduring soul-substance. Instead, a person is a “personally ordered society” of momentary acts of experience that inherit from one another over time. Much as the ālaya-vijñāna carries karmic traces forward,Whiteheadian occasions inherit emotional tones, habits, aims, and relational patterns from the past. In both systems, continuity exists without requiring an unchanging self.
Thus we have two kinds of process philosophy—Yogācārin and Whiteheadian—pointing in a similar direction. Each begins with experience rather than substance, with becoming rather than static being, and with relationality rather than isolated individuality. Each suggests that consciousness is not a sealed container locked within the private self, but a dynamic field of interdependence in which we are continually shaped by and responsive to one another. And each implies that spiritual awakening and social transformation belong together.
Both perspectives also challenge rigid hierarchies and atomistic individualism. They encourage forms of community grounded in empathy, mutual responsiveness, and shared flourishing. In both cases, democracy is not merely a political arrangement but a spiritual and civilizational practice: a way of cultivating forms of life in which people learn to feel with others, listen across differences, and participate in patterns of coexistence in which no one is left behind.
- Jay McDaniel