After centuries of neglect, Yogācāra—a complex and technical school of Buddhist philosophy centered on the analysis of consciousness—enjoyed a wave of renewed fascination in modern China following the reintroduction of a series of lost texts from Japan. Yogācāra thought provided important resources to a disparate host of figures and their projects as they engaged with various aspects of modernity. These included not only lay and monastic Buddhist intellectuals, but also the thinkers of the New Confucian movement. Despite its historical importance, there has been no book devoted to the topic until now. One obstacle has surely been the daunting range of thinkers and issues involved. To address this, John Makeham assembled a diverse and international group of scholars for a three-year series of workshops that has yielded Transforming Consciousness. The result is a volume that is not only quite comprehensive but also remarkably integrated, not simply a collection of essays but the fruit of a collective project.

The volume comprises twelve chapters divided into six parts. Part 1 focuses on the Indian and Japanese roots of the modern Chinese encounter. John Power's chapter offers a lucid primer on the basics of Yogācāra thought that any reader not already versed in the tradition will be grateful for. John Jorgenson's essay brings the reader to the late Qing using Zhang Taiyan as a lens through which to examine the modern Yogācāra movement's inception. Jorgenson goes beyond the traditional narrative in which Chinese interest was sparked simply by the recovery of lost texts to demonstrate that Japanese Buddhist scholarship and reformism also played a formative role.

Part 2 takes up early Chinese appropriations. Scott Pacey's essay on Tan Sitong demonstrates that Yogācāra's architecture of consciousness was key to both his engagement with science and his utopian thought. Although quickly superseded in its particulars, the legacy of Tan's vision lived on in Buddhist reformism. Viren Murthy's chapter on Zhang Taiyan, the most theoretically oriented of the collection, argues that Zhang's thought was a response to antimonies arising from the structures of global capitalism. He sees in Zhang's commentary on the Zhuangzi a liberatory project that uses Yogācāra epistemology to shield particulars from subsumption into hegemonic universals.

Part 3 examines Yogācāra's role in Buddhist encounters with science. In his second contribution, Scott Pacey examines Taixu, a leading monastic reformer. Using several examples, Pacey shows that Taixu used Yogācāra to establish Buddhism as modern by demonstrating that the religion was not only compatible with Western science and philosophy but reached beyond their limits and corrected their deficiencies. Erik Hammerstrom's offering focuses on psychology, showing how the failure of scientific attempts to localize complex mental processes in specific areas of the brain opened up space for Buddhist thinkers associated with Taixu's first seminary to use Yogācāra to address cutting-edge debates over memory, instinct, and behaviorism. Hammerstrom terms this group the “Wuchang school” to highlight the collaborative character of their work and to recover voices often drowned out by Taixu's.

Part 4 examines the role of Yogācāra in New Confucianism. Thierry Meynard argues that Liang Shuming found in Yogācāra epistemology a critique of the limits of reason that prefigured Kant but also a transcendence of ethics that turned him toward Confucianism. Meynard finds his thought to be distinctly modern in its self-reflexive critique of reason and differentiation of ethics as an independent sphere as well as distinctly Buddhist in its faith that critical reason will open up an experience of transcendent ontology. John Makeham's chapter turns to Xiong Shili. Whereas Xiong's critique of Yogācāra has been taken by many as evidence of Buddhism's marginal role in his thought, Makeham argues that it is central. The Confucian concepts for which he is remembered are articulated through his critique of Yogācāra as an elaboration of the Madhyamaka dialectics of emptiness informed by the Awakening of Faith and the doctrine of nature origination.

Part 5 examines lay intellectuals' attempts to recover “genuine Buddhism.” Eyal Aviv pushes back in his chapter against one-sided views of the scholar Ouyang Jingwu. Though Ouyang is often portrayed as “sectarian and polemical,” Aviv demonstrates that his ideas were nuanced and developed over time in a complex dialogue with foreign and Chinese traditions. This is followed by two chapters on Lü Cheng. Dan Lusthaus uses a series of examples to illustrate Lü's understanding of “genuine Buddhism” as a mode of reasoning founded upon legitimate texts and aimed at the elimination of error, contextualizing it within the discovery of new or lost texts in India, Tibet, and Japan and the encounter with new forms of historical and philosophical criticism. Lin Chen-kuo's essay highlights Lü's philological accomplishments, but argues that Lü's textual criticism was not undertaken for its own sake but in the service of philosophical critique of Original Enlightenment, which he thought had blocked social progress.

Part 6, “Dénouement,” consists of only one chapter by Jason Clower. Clower seeks to explain the ebb of the Yogācāra tide within New Confucianism as represented primarily by Mou Zongsan. In Clower's view, both intellectual and emotional factors are at work. Intellectually, Mou regarded Yogācāra as a spent force, its insights long ago digested by Chinese thought. Emotionally, Mou was focused on a rivalry with the West driven by the ressentiment of cultural nationalism in which an Indian philosophy was simply extraneous.

Collectively, these essays easily succeed in the task that Makeham stakes out in his introduction: “to demonstrate (1) the nature and significance of the revival of Yogācāra thought as a response to the challenges of modernity … and (2) its broader impact on the development of modern Chinese philosophical thought” (p. 3). Overall the essays are strong, and each makes a contribution to our understanding of the period, but different readers will no doubt wish that the balance of the collection had been a bit different. Some might wish for more theoretically engaged essays along the lines of Murthy's piece. Others might wish for more of the attention to institutions and social networks shown in Hammerstrom's and Jorgenson's contributions. No book can do everything, however, especially a first book. Transforming Consciousness will be a point of departure and orientation for future studies for a long time to come. It belongs on the shelf of scholars of modern Buddhism, Confucianism, and Chinese intellectual history, and on the reading lists of graduate students in those fields. Many of the chapters, however, will be too dense for all but the brightest and most determined undergraduates, though some might be used in the classroom.