Abstract

In her first book, _Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought_, Leah Kalmanson draws on a wide range of Asian ritual and philosophical repertoires in making a case for the role of practical exercises of self-cultivation in the work of existential inquiry. This review considers some of the ways in which Kalmanson’s selection of sources is consonant with the intervention she seeks to make, and suggests some possible avenues for beginning to think in a similarly expansive way with and about western traditions.