The Second International Conference on Meditative Humanities第二屆「冥觀人文學」國際研討會

In “Genjōkōan,” from the Shōbōgenzō, Zen Master Dōgen writes: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.” These lines often serve as a starting point for Zen ecological discourse. They bring anātman (no-self) and ecological subject formation into a single field of vision. What no-self loosens is an autonomous, self-sufficient center of experience that enjoys epistemic privilege. The subject still feels, understands, and acts—only it no longer occupies the center of the world. “Forgetting the self” means that possession and mastery no longer govern the relation between subject and world. The subject is formed in encounters with texts, other lives, and the material world; it learns to respond, and it allows its understanding to be revised.

Interpretive authority over the world is thus released from the subject’s unilateral grasp. Materials, other lives, and myriad things take an active place in inquiry. Their respective forces, differences, and resistances intervene in the process of knowing, making it difficult for established classifications and judgments to operate as usual.

Dōgen’s thought arises from Japanese Sōtō Zen, yet the questions he raises cross sectarian boundaries: How does the inquirer leave the position of privileged knower, and how is the inquirer re-formed through inquiry? East Asian thought offers multiple approaches. Tiantai thinker Zhanran unsettles the boundary between the sentient and the insentient with the claim that “insentient beings possess Buddha-nature”; Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream deprives the divisions between self and other, human and nonhuman, of their stability, loosening fixed intentions and habitual modes of knowing; Chan kōans return questions about the self and Buddha-nature to the questioner. In these doctrines, narratives, and practices, both the knower and the categories it uses are subjected to examination.

These traditions differ from one another and cannot be assembled into a single cosmology or ecological philosophy. Beginning from their differences, this symposium invites comparative work across philosophy, literature, religious thought, and critical theory, in dialogue with contemporary material ecocriticism. The focus falls on how different traditions treat inquiry into the self, and under what conditions such inquiry may bring about transformation.

Contemporary material ecocriticism provides important resources for this discussion. The material turn emphasizes matter’s effects on bodies, perception, thought, and action, correcting the research habit of treating matter as a passive object of human discourse. This acknowledgment completes only a first step. Researchers may accept material agency in theory while leaving their own frameworks of understanding unchanged. Matter has already produced disruption, yet researchers may still explain it along familiar classifications and value orders.

Wildfire makes the problem concrete. Drought, strong winds, vegetation, electrical infrastructure, and land management together form the fire. Heat and smoke enter human bodies, cross administrative boundaries, and force cities and governments to revise prior arrangements. Wildfire clearly has the power to alter bodies, spaces, and institutions. Yet when fire is reduced to a problem of technical management, forests are understood as resources awaiting restoration, and displaced animals are treated as urban nuisances, the shock fire brings falls back into an anthropocentric order.

Systems analysis, actor–network theory, and multispecies studies can reconstruct the causal, institutional, technological, and cross-species relations involved in wildfire, correcting the presumption that only humans possess agency. Such analyses make visible how humans are embedded in larger material networks. Meditative ecocriticism goes further by placing the inquirer back into this relational map, examining how the inquirer’s perception, classification, and values limit what analysis can see. Making relations visible is only the starting point of the work. Subject transformation becomes a genuine question when materials begin to unsettle the inquirer’s established position.

Environmental crisis involves gaps in knowledge and failures of technology; it also exposes habitual modes of perception, value judgment, and world-organization that themselves continually produce crisis. At the same time, it highlights human indifference toward other lives and an insufficient ethical commitment to the shared world and to future generations. These modes operate across scales and inhabit bodily habits, cultural imaginaries, legal institutions, and political economy. A person may fully understand climate change and still treat forests as resources in daily life. When established patterns go unexamined, new environmental knowledge is easily absorbed by the old order, and ecological action is easily reduced to momentary reaction, personal consumer choice, or technical management.

By “ecological subject,” this essay means capacities for perception, judgment, and response that gradually take shape in relations with material conditions, institutions, and other lives. Such a subject can recognize the conditions that shape it. When established ways of living are called into question by the relational world, it can also revise its understanding and respond in sustained, concrete ways.

Institutional reform and subject transformation move each other. If habits of perception, desire, and response remain unchanged, new institutions may continue to operate along developmentalist and anthropocentric logics. Inward experiences of empathy or unity alone also struggle to show whether transformation has occurred. The criterion lies in whether experience has altered understanding, judgment, and actual response.

The inquirer’s underlying values matter especially. Which lives deserve care? Which losses are acceptable? Whose suffering counts as urgent? What future counts as reasonable? These values are often left unstated, yet they surface in how researchers read materials, regard other lives, and participate in the public world. Displacements and omissions in response also expose them.

Humanities texts can bring distant or obscured material conditions, forms of life, and historical harms into the reader’s feeling and imagination. Relations that were once abstract thereby acquire texture, even making it difficult for the reader to continue using familiar explanations. Subject transformation may begin from such disturbance; how it develops afterward remains highly contingent.

Sinclair’s The Jungle brought Chicago’s slaughterhouses into public view. Workers’ labor exploitation, animals’ condition under slaughter, industrial filth and its harm to bodies—all entered readers’ feeling through the novel. After publication, the work caused widespread shock; the Roosevelt administration promptly sent investigators to Chicago’s meatpacking industry. The findings and public pressure helped secure passage of the 1906 Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act. Reading here produced visible institutional consequences.

The direction of those consequences still requires analysis. Sinclair hoped to awaken social concern for labor exploitation and class conditions; public attention quickly turned instead to food contamination and consumer safety. Although workers and animals entered public view, the core of what was finally protected remained the consumer. Emotional shock and institutional action both matter, and both may still advance along an existing order of values.

Meditative ecocriticism returns to the text to trace how that shock was organized. Why did contaminated meat so quickly become a public crisis, while the conditions of workers and animals receded into the background? This tracing also brings the reader’s own reaction into the reading. What was previously overlooked reappears and begins to recalibrate the boundaries of concern. Subject transformation involves this layer of change: the framework of response itself is questioned by the materials, and the reader is willing to revise an initial judgment.

Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl” carries the problem into the interior of perception and interpretation. The narrator gazes for a long time at the axolotls in an aquarium and finally claims to have become one of them. If the story is treated as a literary kōan for ecological inquiry, cross-species identification itself becomes a question. Has the narrator approached the axolotl’s world, or occupied its place through human imagination?

Meditative reading remains with this unresolved tension. The animal’s silence and irreducible difference gradually loosen the grip of “I understand it.” Cross-species empathy may contain another form of human projection, even obscuring the animal before one’s eyes. Reading then extends outward to examine the axolotl’s material conditions and how the aquarium displays, classifies, and produces knowledge about it. The categories through which the inquirer understands animals also become objects of reading.

Wildfire, The Jungle, and “Axolotl” offer evidence at different levels. Wildfire invades bodies and lives directly, yet an existing order can still normalize it. The Jungle enters public action and institutional reform, yet the direction of response is displaced. The work of “Axolotl” occurs in the process of reading, making readers suspicious of their own ways of understanding animals. What all three leave are partial forms of evidence, each with its limits.

Subject transformation must be judged along a longer process. The difference and resistance of materials first obstruct established understanding; the inquirer’s original questions then change, and attention, classification, judgment, and response are also set in motion. New understanding must still return to texts, material conditions, other lives, institutions, and the public world, to be tested by subsequent encounters and actual consequences. A single emotional reaction, a new interpretation, or one public action can account only for a fragment of the process.

“Actualized by myriad things” thus acquires methodological significance. The subject has no unilateral authority to declare that it has been transformed by the world. Whether understanding and action respond to myriad things must still face repeated testing against materials, others, institutional realities, and public consequences. The work of meditative ecocriticism is to keep the inquirer, over time, in a position where it can be touched, obstructed, revised, and re-formed by the world.

Meditative ecocriticism places material analysis and meditative inquiry within a single research process. Researchers must reconstruct texts, history, institutions, and material conditions, and also examine how they themselves feel, understand, and respond to these materials. Whether knowledge can enter action, and whether the inquirer has the capacity to bear and respond to knowledge, belong to the same question.

Material analysis constitutes the first pathway. It reconstructs obscured relations, examines textual, institutional, historical, and technical conditions, and also presents the costs borne by other lives. This work keeps research answerable to evidence and prevents inward experience from detaching from the concrete world.

Meditative inquiry constitutes the other pathway. It brings the inquirer’s habits of attention, affect, classification, and desire into the research, observing how these habits shape the way materials appear. Researchers may also protect themselves when they encounter resistance—quickly explaining, appropriating, or dissolving the unease materials provoke. Meditative inquiry makes these movements visible.

Each pathway retains its own work and continually corrects the other. Material analysis holds meditative inquiry to history and evidence; meditative inquiry brings the knower back into the field of research. Only through repeated movement between them do the resistances of texts, materials, and other lives have a chance to remain, rather than being immediately absorbed by familiar explanations. Understanding may be obstructed by the world—and from there may open again, even becoming “actualized” (genjō) in the encounter.

Subject transformation has no automatic procedure and cannot validate itself. Meditative ecocriticism attends to what happens after obstruction: whether original questions loosen, whether judgment and response are reorganized, and how new understanding enters institutions and public life. The world re-forms the inquirer; the inquirer brings altered understanding back to the world. This reciprocal movement constitutes the methodological meaning of being “actualized by myriad things.”