This volume offers a fresh exploration of the enduring dialogue between Confucianism and Buddhism, two traditions that have profoundly shaped East Asian thought. Reviving an exchange long neglected in modern scholarship, it proposes a new comparative approach in the philosophy of religiona way of understanding how these traditions have long coexisted through seeming opposition, continually shaping, challenging, and enriching each others visions of truth and virtue.
Contributors examine diverse encounters where Buddhist and Confucian thinkers debated life and death, emotion and morality, self-cultivation and governance, while finding inspiration across traditions. Through discussions of ethics, political order, meditation, music, and humility, the chapters reveal how this dialogue generated creative syntheses that transformed both traditions over time. Together, they show that the interplay between Buddhism and Confucianism remains a living source of insight into the cultivation of virtue and human flourishing today.
Chapter 1.- Jinmu Kim, Yongbin You, and Jae-young Seo, Confucianism and
Buddhism in Dialogue: A Historical and Philosophical Survey.- Part I:
Contrapuntal Tension.
Chapter 2 Maki Sato, On Death and Burial: In the View
of Nakae Tju and Kumazawa Banzan.
Chapter 3 Jea Sophia Oh, Korean Womens
Jeong / (Emotions) in Buddhism and Confucianism: Korean Nuns Seon Practice
as Eco-dharma for Self-Cultivation and Planetary Love.- Part II: Contextual
Adoption.
Chapter 4 Steven Heine, Key Aspects of Chan Moral Discourse
Impacted by Confucianism.
Chapter 5 Diana Arghirescu, Fostering Good
Governance Through Interconnectedness: Contemporary Insights from Chan
Scholar-Monk Qisong and Neo-Confucian Thinker Zhu Xi.- Part III: Creative
Synthesis.
Chapter 6 Albert Welter, An Investigation into the Parameters of
Buddhism in China: Hanhua (Han Ways Transforming the Barbarians) vs. Huahan
(Barbarian Ways Transforming the Han).
Chapter 7 Youngho Lee, The
Interaction Between Confucianism and Buddhism from the Perspective of the
Exegetical Tradition of the Analects.
Chapter 8 Suk Gabriel Choi, A
Reflection on Korean Traditional Music from Confucian and Buddhist
Perspectives.
Chapter 9 Leah Kalmanson, Let Us Give up Our Meditation
Cushions!: A Confucian-Buddhist Conversation on the Power of Mental
Cultivation.
Chapter 10 Doil Kim, A Paradox of Humility: Reflections on
Confucian Self-Cultivation and the Three Nos in Chan Buddhism.
Doil Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Confucian Studies, Eastern Philosophy, and Korean Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea. He directs the Center for the Contemporary Study of East Asian Classics and Critical Confucianism, supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea, and leads the Brain Korea 21 FOUR program, funded by the Ministry of Education, Korea. He also serves as editor of the Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture and is the author of The Art of Seeing Beyond Oneself: A Confucian Perspective on Humility (OUP, 2025).
Leah Kalmanson is Associate Professor and Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. She is author of Local Gods: A Philosophy of Spiritual Diversity (Columbia, 2026), Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (Bloomsbury, 2020), and co-author with Monika Kirloskar Steinbach of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury, 2021).
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