“Mourning and Healing”
Jin Y. Park (American University)
The precariousness of existence is laid bare in moments of loss. Biological death, the end of relationships, and the erosion of social justice, all both symbolically and materially, expose how vulnerable life is. When a loved one dies, we mourn, or we do not. When an intimate relationship is disrupted, we may react or reflect. When social justice is weakened, we may withdraw or we may protest. Mourning, reflection, and protest are ways of searching for healing, and healing in this sense is not a form of passive quietism but a dynamic process of mending the ruptures that occur in life and of affirming the values we uphold concerning human existence, our relationships with others, and the society we seek to build. This talk explores mourning, reflection, and protest as practices that emerge from life’s precarity and how they urge us to transform ourselves and our society in order to move forward.
Bio: Jin Y. Park is the William Fraser McDowell Chair Professor of Philosophy and Religion and the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. She also served as the Founding Director of the Asian Studies Program from 2013 to 2020. Park specializes in East Asian Buddhism, Buddhist and comparative ethics, intercultural philosophy, and modern East Asian philosophy. Her research focuses on gender, violence, the politics of discrimination, and narrative philosophy. Marginality has been a consistent theme in her work, addressing the marginalization of the non-West and non-Western philosophy, women’s philosophy, and alternative forms of philosophizing. Her scholarship seeks to reveal power structures in philosophy and aims to amplify the voices of those at the margins.
Park has served as the President of the American Academy of Religion, the North American Korean Philosophy Association and the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy.
Park’s research in Buddhism focuses on the Zen and Huayan schools of East Asian Buddhism, with particular attention to issues of language, violence, and ethics. In her comparative studies, she engages Zen and Huayan Buddhism alongside postmodern thought in Continental philosophy, with a special focus on Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.
Park’s research on modern East Asian philosophy explores the emergence of philosophy in East Asia and the East-West encounter during this period.
In her monograph Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan, and the Possibility of Buddhist-Postmodern Ethics (2008), Park discusses Buddhism and continental philosophy on the topics of, among others, self, language, and violence. In this book, Park offers the “ethics of tension” as a potential ethical paradigm drawn from Buddhism and postmodern philosophy.
Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun (2014), is a translation of a book published in Korean in 1960 by Kim Iryŏp (1896-1971), a writer, first-generation Korean feminist, Buddhist nun, and philosopher. In this book, Kim Iryŏp offers a creative interpretation of Buddhist philosophy and practice.
In Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryop (2017), Park proposes a new mode of philosophizing based on the discussion of Kim Iryŏp’s life and philosophy.
Park is also the editor of volumes: Buddhisms and Deconstructions (2006), Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism (co-edited, 2009), Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy (2009), and Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism (2010).
