Several of the Mahāyāna scriptures, in particular Chapter Eight of the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, argue passionately in favour of vegetarianism. The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra is celebrated for its doctrine of the consciousness-only school, which posits that all external objects are simply projections of our consciousness. The sūtra meticulously delineates the various levels of individual consciousness, culminating in the tathāgata-garbha (ālāyavijñāna), which underpins one’s profound awareness of and connection to the cosmos. The tathāgata-garbha doctrine can be interpreted as an expression of pratītya-samutpāda, also known as the doctrine of dependent co-arising. When beings purify their tathāgata-garbha and attain this enlightened state, they genuinely grasp the inherent relativity in human consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, or “flesh,” illuminates our authentic existence in the world. He sees the flesh as the quintessential element from which everything emerges. His ontology of flesh emphasizes the significance of the physical body and proposes a paradigm for ethical relations and for the world’s body to flourish. He aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the world, others, himself, and their interrelations. His work offers a potentially significant contribution to ethical concerns, supporting contemporary efforts to gain new ontological insights into animal life. This study explores how the ethical vegetarianism presented in the sūtra, especially in its eighth chapter (“Do Not Eat Meat”), resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s animal rights-inclined flesh phenomenology. It concludes that the religious teachings of the sūtra and Merleau-Ponty’s flesh phenomenology provide a strong foundation for the aspiration of humanity to create a more ethical world for all species.

This article explores the difficulty of saying “you” in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” to demonstrate how Bishop creates a poetic subjectivity that allows another subject to exist in her narrative. This creative subjectivity distinguishes Bishop’s poems from her poetic contexts: her narrative is more capable of intersubjective love than the confessional poetics, and her narrator turns the poetic description into an affectionate opening to others. To explicate the significance of Bishop’s poetics, this article engages with Jacques Lacan’s theory of female subjectivity and Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts on signs in relation to the formation of an individual. This article proposes that Bishop’s poem creates a subjectivity that can include a heterogeneous other through three aspects: firstly, the urgent need for writing and the impossibility of encompassing the lost other in her own narrative; secondly, the contingency of traits of the other that constantly restructures the subject; and lastly, the necessity of writing recreated as a practice of losing. The subjectivity Bishop creates in this poem is a subject who practices losing in order to fundamentally open herself to the other.

Spring is the third installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, which, like the other three installments, explores social issues in the UK following the Brexit referendum. Among these issues, migration is a recurring theme in the quartet. In Spring, Smith interweaves three storylines featuring five characters to present diverse perspectives on migrant experiences in the UK. These storylines converge at the end of the novel with Florence’s narration of her dilemma in UK society. As the child of an illegal migrant parent, Florence lives as an outsider in the UK. Florence’s presence challenges the conventional understanding of inclusiveness within Englishness and its connection to British identity. This paper will use Derrida’s notion of hospitality to argue that Florence represents a resistance to the exclusiveness of Englishness, providing a new perspective on the migrant issues in the UK.

Shifting the focus from the prevalent issues including the environmental, political, and historical connections that have been extensively explored in the recent scholarship on Hong Kong protest documentaries, this article reconsiders and reevaluates the less-examined domain of documentary filmmaking paradigms, with a particular emphasis on “cinéma vérité” and “direct cinema.” It focuses on the analysis of two pivotal Hong Kong protest documentaries, Yellowing, centered on the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and Inside the Red Brick Wall, which documents the events during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement. This article investigates how the two documentaries manifest the distinctive characteristics of cinéma vérité and direct cinema respectively, shedding light on the modes and strategies of documentary filmmaking in these two works. More specifically, the first section of the article critically examines Yellowing, illustrating how this documentary embodies the participatory, reflexive, and interventionist dimensions of cinéma vérité, reassessing the problems and limitations of this paradigm in documentary filmmaking. In the second section, the focus shifts to Inside the Red Brick Wall, which examines the observational approach of direct cinema employed by the filmmakers and how this documentary transcends the conventions of direct cinema through the documentary filmmakers’ editorial and transformative strategies. Ultimately, this article argues that these two representative Hong Kong protest documentaries, Yellowing and Inside the Red Brick Wall, embody the characteristics of cinéma vérité and direct cinema respectively, offering a perspective through which to analyze the relation between documentary filmmaking techniques and the representation of reality. By explicating these two exemplars of Hong Kong cinema, this article seeks to provide theoretical contributions with critical insights into the paradigms of cinéma vérité and direct cinema.

Book Review: Critical Plant Studies in Taiwan, edited by Iping Liang, Lexington Books, 2024, 228 pp., ISBN 9781666935363.