What Is Shared by Bodhisattvas and Their Target Audience? Second-Person Experience and Transformative Sociality in Chinese Yogācāra

In contemporary phenomenological discussions of sociality, shared experience has garnered much scholarly attention. The crux of this discussion concerns how to define shared experience given a plurality of subjects . Enriching this discussion, I suggest that it is more meaningful to consider the interdependency of the I and the we , rather than the primacy of the I or the we . To this end, I focus on the writings composed by a Chinese Yogācāra thinker, Kuiji (632–682). As I will argue, it is the second-person perspective that sustains the I−we interdependency, further making it possible to constitute, conserve, and transform a shared lifeworld in which a personal lifeworld is contextualized. Sociality, thus, is mutually constitutive and collaboratively transformative. The transformative aspect of sociality points to a possibility of reimagining how various types of injustice that have been perpetuated in communal history—sex discrimination, for instance—can be skillfully tackled and jointly corrected.