“Asia as method” as a quest of the spirit and finding we-togetherness: a collaborative autoethnography

Abstract

This paper responds to the special issue’s call for educators to examine the epistemological and ontological changes that happen to themselves after long-term working abroad and how this experience helps challenge theoretical and pedagogical norms in education. Employing collaborative autoethnography as our research method, we use our life stories of growing up in Asia and studying and working in the West to reflect on our journey of becoming scholars comfortable in engaging Chinese wisdom traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—in Western academia. We share how our experiences of encouraging Asian spiritual traditions and engaging in contemplative practices led us to embrace the ontology and epistemology of Eastern wisdom traditions, and come to understand Eastern philosophies as living wisdom, as a way of being and knowing. We further detail how comprehending Eastern philosophies at a heart-mind level has transformed our views on humanity, allowing us to see the common struggles of peoples in the East and West, Asia and North America. Our ontological and epistemological transformations brought about by Eastern contemplative practices have enabled us to see that there is not such a thing as “Asia” or “North America. ” Rather, we interare and we are Earth citizens. We end our inquiry by advocating for the need to engage spirit as method and conduct research and teaching with a heightened sense of we-togetherness, from a heart and mind that is open and boundless, for the benefits of all our relations—visible and invisible, human and more than human.