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

In Genjōkōan, Zen Master Dōgen writes: “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be confirmed by the myriad things.” Read in light of anātman, this is not a call to annihilate the self but to transform how it is generated—from a subject organized around mastery to one capable of being corrected by texts, other lives, and material conditions. Zhanran’s claim that insentient beings possess Buddha-nature, the Zhuangzi’s fasting of the mind, and the Chan kōan’s turning of the question back upon the questioner offer distinct East Asian resources for asking how both the knower and the categories of knowing might be transformed.

Material ecocriticism insists that matter is not a passive object of discourse, yet recognizing material agency does not by itself transform the subject who recognizes it. Wildfire’s cross-jurisdictional agency can still be absorbed into anthropocentric management, forests into resources, and displaced animals into nuisances. An “ecological subject,” in this sense, names not an identity that professes concern for nature but a capacity for perception, judgment, and response generated through relations with material conditions, institutions, and other lives—a capacity that neither substitutes for institutional reform nor follows automatically from it.

Literature can bring material agency into a reader’s interpretive world without guaranteeing transformation. The dominant public reception of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which redirected attention from labor exploitation toward consumer food safety, shows how textual disturbance may be absorbed into an existing frame. Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl” poses a different possibility: the narrator’s identification with the animal can unsettle rather than secure cross-species empathy, but only if the axolotl’s irreducible difference is not converted into another form of human identification. These examples show not two fixed properties of texts but two possible fates of disturbance: absorption and sustained interruption. The question for criticism is therefore not only whether a reader feels, understands, or acts, but whether the encounter reformulates the reader’s questions—and whether that reformulation survives renewed encounters with texts, other lives, and material conditions.

Meditative ecocriticism holds together two nondual, mutually corrective pathways: material analysis, which reconstructs the textual, historical, institutional, and ecological conditions that obscure certain relations and costs; and meditative inquiry, which brings the inquirer’s own embodied habits of attention, affect, and categorization into the same field of investigation. Together they establish a double accountability: first, to the resistance of texts, histories, material conditions, and other lives; and second, for how the inquirer is being generated and transformed. The return to texts and the world begins rather than completes this second accountability: any claimed transformation must be tested in renewed reading and judgment, relationships, institutions, and public life.

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words in English or 500 Chinese characters and should be accompanied by a brief biographical note. Panels will consist of three or four papers. Presentations may be given in English or Chinese. Selected papers may be invited for peer review and inclusion in an edited volume or journal special issue after the conference.

• Dates: March 19–21, 2027
• Venue: The University of Hong Kong and Dharma Drum Mountain Hong Kong Center
• Submission deadline: 15 October 2026
• Contact and submission: chiajuc@gmail.com