This book is an investigation of the relationship between self and body in the Indian, Japanese, and Chinese philosophical traditions. The interplay between self and body is complex and manifold, touching on issues of epistemology, ontology, social philosophy, and axiology. The authors examine these issues and make relevant connections to the Western tradition. The authors’ allow the Asian traditions to shed new light on some of the traditional mind-body issues addressed in the West.

Thomas P. Kasulis is Professor of Comparative Studies in the Humanities at The Ohio State University. He has been the Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at the University of Chicago, a Japan Foundation Fellow at Osaka University, and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard. He has also served as the President of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. He is the author of Zen Action/Zen Person, and the editor and co-translator of The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, also published by SUNY Press.

Roger T. Ames is Professor of Chinese Philosophy at the University of Hawaii and edits the journal, Philosophy East and West. He is the co-author of Thinking Through Confucius (with David L. Hall), and co-editor of Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (with J. Baird Callicott), both published by SUNY Press.

Wimal Dissanayake is a research scholar in the Institute of Culture and Communication at the East-West Center in Honolulu.