Tao Jiang’s primary research interest is Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy (Madhyamaka and Yogācāra), classical Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) and comparative philosophy. In his book, Contexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (Hawaii, 2006), he proposes that a comparative approach to ideas needs to contextualize those ideas first in their indigenous backgrounds and then to recontextualize them by bringing them into the new comparative setting. The contextualization and recontextualization should be carried out by examining their contents (what), rationales (why) and ways of formulation (how), both respectively and comparatively. In this respect, Contexts and Dialogue brings together three conceptions of the subliminal mind as the book moves through a series of contexts, from the context of seventh-century Yogācāra Buddhism to that of twentieth-century modern psychology and eventually to the unfolding contemporary context of increasing cross-cultural dialogical engagement. His comparative study has shown that the Yogācāra notion of ālayavijñāna (the storehouse consciousness) and the unconscious in modern psychology operate within vastly different paradigms with regard to personhood, shedding new light on the cultures that have produced them. He is the translator of A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, and is co-editor of an anthology, The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China: China’s Freudian Slip (Routledge, 2013), with Philip J. Ivanhoe of City University of Hong Kong.

Jiang is writing a monograph on notions of freedom through a comparative lens and has published several articles on the subject, both in English and in Chinese. More recently, he is interested in the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary China and is conducting research on this topic.

Jiang’s interest in comparative approaches to idea involves both East-West comparison as well as East-East comparison. He is hosting an international conference on “Nature and Value in Chinese and Western Philosophies” in April 2013 and will be co-editing an anthology of the same title with Stephen Angle of Wesleyan University. He co-chairs with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad of Lancaster University (UK) “Religions in Chinese and Indian Cultures: A Comparative Perspective” Group under the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. He is the book review editor of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy, and is a co-chair of the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia University.

CV