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What Zen?
Zen Critique is an aporetic approach to the challenges of the twenty-first century, one that understands aporia as a necessary interruption of inherited assumptions rather than a withdrawal from the world. Moving beyond intra-disciplinary debates within Zen or Buddhist Studies, it situates Zen within the contemporary condition of polycrisis—including hyper-individualism, overconsumption, digital–AI acceleration, and climate breakdown—and articulates Zen as a somatic praxis: a resource for socially engaged and pragmatic forms of critique and practice grounded in embodied experience.
Zen, Buddhist Philosophy, and Critical Zen
Alpert, A. (n.d.). A critique of post-critical Zen: On Bret W. Davis’s Zen Pathways.
Davis, B. W. (2022). Zen pathways: An introduction to the philosophy and practice of Zen Buddhism. Oxford University Press.
Hubbard, J., & Swanson, P. L. (Eds.). (1997). Pruning the Bodhi tree: The storm over critical Buddhism. University of Hawai‘i Press.
Ives, C. (2008). Critical sermons of the Zen tradition: Hisamatsu’s talks on Linji. University of Hawai‘i Press.
Van der Braak, A. (2011). Nietzsche and Zen: Self-overcoming without a self. Lexington Books.
Wirth, J. M. (2019). Nietzsche and other Buddhas: Philosophy after comparative philosophy. Indiana University Press.
Aporetic, Negative, and Critical Buddhist Theory
Aporetic, Negative, and Critical Buddhist Theory
Hattam, R. (2021). Awakening-struggle: Toward a Buddhist critical theory. Brill.
Hattam, R. (2022). Buddhism as a resource for reconciliation pedagogies. In H. Wozniakowski & S. K. Kim (Eds.), Buddhism and pedagogy: North American and continental perspectives (pp. 127–144). Springer.
Spellmeyer, K. (2010). Buddha at the apocalypse: Awakening from a culture of destruction. Simon & Schuster.
Thompson, E. (2020). Why I am not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.
Somatic Praxis, Phenomenology, and Embodiment
Somatic Praxis, Phenomenology, and Embodiment
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible. Northwestern University Press.
Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. Fordham University Press.
Loy, D. (1988). Nonduality: A study in comparative philosophy. Yale University Press.
Loy, D. (1996). Lack and transcendence: The problem of death and life in psychotherapy, existentialism, and Buddhism. Humanity Books.
Social Critique, Capitalism, and the Attention Crisis
Social Critique, Capitalism, and the Attention Crisis
Purser, R. E. (2019). McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. Repeater Books.
Han, B.-C. (2020). The disappearance of rituals: A topology of the present. Polity Press.
Stiegler, B. (2019). The age of disruption: Technology and madness in computational capitalism. Polity Press.
Loy, D. (2008). Money, sex, war, karma: Notes for a Buddhist revolution. Wisdom Publications.
Loy, D. (2010). The world is made of stories. Wisdom Publications.
Ecological Crisis, Interbeing, and More-than-Human Ethics
Ecological Crisis, Interbeing, and More-than-Human Ethics
Loy, D. (2019). Ecodharma: Buddhist teachings for the ecological crisis. Wisdom Publications.
Murphy, S. (2023). A fire runs through all things: Zen koans for facing the climate crisis. Shambhala.
Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press.
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