“Philosophy of religion often carries on almost as if there were only one religion” (McKim). Given the truthfulness of this assessment and the unjustifiability of the approach it describes, this paper builds on efforts to globalise philosophy of religion through the diverse philosophical prisms of the Buddhist tradition. More specifically, I begin undoing the erasure of Buddhism from philosophy of religion by proposing a form of philosophy of religion that is centred upon the Buddhist episteme. I thus theorize what forms a philosophy of religion structured according to Buddhist principles and paradigms might take, address various theoretical and methodological considerations, and survey a range of candidate schemas under textual, sectarian, and doctrinal rubrics. Overall, this project is undertaken on the understanding that the study of Buddhism, among other global traditions, need not and should not replicate conceptual structures imposed upon it from without, and that philosophy of religion is enriched by attention to the resolutely plural philosophies of religions worldwide.
Rafal K. Stepien is a philosopher and scholar of religion based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he is a Principal Researcher and European Research Council Principal Investigator leading a team of researchers studying Chinese Buddhist philosophy.
He is concurrently Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. Rafal holds degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, and the University of Western Australia, and he has completed further studies at Harvard, Bologna, Damascus, Tehran, Esfehan, Peking, and Fo Guang Universities, among others.
He was the inaugural Cihui Foundation Faculty Fellow in Chinese Buddhism at Columbia, the inaugural Berggruen Research Fellow in Indian Philosophy at Oxford, a Humboldt Research Fellow in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg, and the Soudavar Memorial Research Scholar in Persian Studies at Cambridge.
Rafal’s research is inter-disciplinary, cross-regional, and poly-glottic, ranging among Buddhist and Islamic philosophical, religious, and literary texts composed in Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, and Persian.
His publications include Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford, 2024) and Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature (SUNY, 2020).
