Preface

This book is a collection of nine essays on Buddhist philosophy that we wrote from 2009 to 2016. We applied the research methodology of analytic philosophy to approach the major topics of Buddhism. We taught some of these essays in our classes on Asian philosophy and Buddhist philosophy. Other essays were prepared for public lectures and academic colloquia. We have also adopted contents from these essays for our Korean-language articles published in journals, anthologies, and magazines in 2009-2025.

We present this online publication as a possible textbook for Buddhist philosophy courses. When we wrote these essays over the past years, however, we did not initially intend to collect and transform them into a textbook. Each essay needed to stand alone for, say, a public lecture or a colloquium. This necessary independence resulted in some contents of the chapters of this book to overlap. But readers may choose to read the chapters in any order.

Each of the first six chapters is followed by a review section that has introductions to basic concepts of Buddhism, which are followed by questions and answers. These reviews, written in 2020-2022, are designed to assist readers to systematically learn Buddhist philosophy with no background knowledge. The review section of each chapter can also be used as a preview for the same chapter in preparation for reading it. We believe that the nine chapters of this book, six of which are supplemented by review questions, may well serve as an introductory book to Buddhist philosophy.

Buddhism is philosophy and religion of enlightenment. We start this book with ten questions to see if one can get enlightened. The first chapter that follows is about a Zen riddle on enlightenment. The ensuing chapters address philosophical topics such as Non-Self, dependent arising and emptiness, concepts of enlightenment, compassion, and transmigration and liberation. Both Indian and East Asian Buddhist traditions share these concepts; they are suitable topics for liberal education courses. The last three chapters on East Asian Buddhist traditions deal with Buddha-Nature, debates on sudden/gradual enlightenment, and Zen and its philosophical problems. These are more serious issues that may well be discussed in upper-level Buddhist philosophy courses.

Minnesota colleges and universities have initiated a movement to make their textbooks cost-free as much as possible. Instructors’ online publications of their books through Pressbooks, which is completely cost-free to students, is one of the major venues for this project. It is also a fortuitous outcome that this online publication lets us reach out to a wider audience for Buddhist philosophy outside the college classroom with no burden of fees.

As co-authors, Hong wrote the main texts of most chapters, and Yu is responsible for most reviews and their questions. Yu edited the book on Pressbooks. All chapters and reviews of this book have been revised with the questions and comments of various audiences of Buddhist philosophy in both the U.S. and South Korea. We thank them. Special thanks should be given to Athena and Ted Gracyk who kindly gave us written comments on the earlier drafts of several chapters. Tomoji Shogenji, our dear friend, meticulously read every single sentence of each chapter and always provided us with invaluable comments. This book would have been in much different shape without his contributions. And our daughter Jaehyun Hong, a graduate student in philosophy, copyedited the entire book for her parents. Thank you, Jaehyun.

Chang-Seong Hong and  Sun Kyeong Yu

Minnesota, U.S.A. August 2025