By James Whitehill
Stephens College
ISSN 1076-9005. Volume 1 1994
Abstract:
Contemporary Buddhism
increasingly seeks to make itself understood in modern terms and to respond to
contemporary conditions. Buddhism's legitimation in the West can be partially
met by demonstrating that Buddhist morality is a virtue-oriented,
character-based, community-focused ethics, commensurate with the Western
"ethics of virtue" tradition.
The recent past in
Western Buddhist ethics focused on escape from Victorian moralism, and was
incomplete. A new generation of Western Buddhists is emerging, for whom the
"construction" of a Buddhist way of life involves community
commitment and moral "practices." By keeping its roots in a character
formed as "awakened virtue" and a community guided by an integrative
soteriology of wisdom and morality, Western Buddhism can avoid the twin
temptations of rootless liberation in an empty "emptiness," on the
one hand, and universalistic power politics, on the other. In describing
Buddhist ethics as an "ethics of virtue," I am pointing to consistent
and essential features in the Buddhist way of life. But, perhaps more
importantly, I am describing Buddhist ethics by means of an interpretative
framework very much alive in Western and Christian ethics, namely, that
interpretation of ethics most recently associated with thinkers like Alasdair
MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas. The virtue ethics tradition is the Western
tradition most congenial to the assumptions and insights of Buddhist ethics.
Hence, virtue ethics provides a means of understanding Buddhist ethics... and,
reciprocally, Buddhist ethics also offers the Western tradition a way of
expanding the bounds of its virtue ethics tradition, which has been too
elitist, rationalistic, and anthropocentric. On the basis of this view, I
predict some likely, preferable future directions and limits for Buddhism in a
postmodern world.
Introduction
My purpose in this article is
to speculate about the optimal, future development of Buddhism in the West. To
speculate about the future is, of course, to reach beyond the narrow
protections of expertise into the vulnerability of guesswork. My guesswork
about Western Buddhism's future takes the form of two hypotheses for scholarly
consideration by interested philosophers and ethicists, Buddhist or not. The
two hypotheses can also be viewed by Western Buddhists as recommendations on
the future course of their Buddhist practices and communities.
The first hypothesis and
recommendation is that Buddhism must begin to demonstrate a far clearer moral
form and a more sophisticated, appropriate ethical strategy than can be found
among its contemporary Western interpreters and representatives, if it is to
flourish in the West. This hunch is to me almost certainly correct, so I will
treat it only briefly at the beginning.
My second conjecture is
that Buddhism's success in the West is most likely if Buddhist ethics is
specifically grafted to and enriched by the "ethics of virtue"
approaches of Western tradition, approaches recently revived in Christian
thinkers like MacIntyre and Hauerwas.[1] This second guess is more specific,
tentative, and provocative, and, therefore, more interesting, so it will be my
dominant theme.[2] Viewing Buddhist morality and ethics in the light of virtues
theory is, I believe, true to the central core of Buddhism. The virtues
approach also generates a wide range of analytical comparisons with Western
philosophical and theological tradition, and helps us foresee and plan for the
limits of Buddhism's Western pilgrimage.
Returning for a moment
to my first and most general hypothesis, I will begin by saying that I am
persuaded that Buddhism is on the threshold of a more significant future in the
West. It will increasingly play practical, heuristic, balancing, and liberating
roles in the lives of Western people and their societies. But, in order for
this to happen, philosophers, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, must help more to
clarify the moral and ethical terms of Buddhism's soteriological project, in
ways coordinate with Western intellectual tradition. For more than two decades,
Buddhist philosophical talent in the West has been focused almost exclusively
on ontology and hermeneutics. One result is that Buddhist philosophy in the
West has ballooned off into the clouds of "sūnyatā-focused dialectics. I
propose that our philosophical soaring needs the ballast of Buddhist moral
practices and the landmarks of a refreshed Buddhist ethics to bring Buddhist
philosophy more into a practical relationship with the on-the-ground, everyday
realities of people's lives. I am moved to this recommendation by my deductive
understanding of Buddhist teaching, but also by the fact that American
Buddhists, since the early 1980's, have increasingly puzzled over moral and/or
political choices and issues, without much help from Buddhist philosophers and
scholars who are also well-grounded in Western moral and political thought.
When Christians
translated their Gospel into Chinese contexts, the Greek "Logos"
became the Chinese "Tao," a daring and radical translation,
transmuting the Gospel as it transmitted it. A similar translation
problematique faces us now as Buddhism transmits the "Dharma" to the
West. But, in the matter of that part of the Dharma which can be called
"Buddhist ethics," no proposal in Western philosophical terms on the
shape of Buddhist ethics currently commands wide attention, much less
agreement.[3] As a result, the legitimization of the Buddhist Dharma as a whole
is at risk in the West, for no religious or soteriological philosophy without a
developed ethic can be fully and widely legitimized in Western culture.
A variety of
philosophical proposals relevant to the Western shaping of Buddhist ethics can
be seen across the spectrum of Buddhist thinkers. Happily, no one argues that
Buddhist ethics or morality are sui generis, a unique and inviolate form of
Buddhist tradition to be transplanted whole and entire into Western cultural
soil. Also, few are suggesting that Buddhist morality and ethics are so much
embedded in Asian cultures that they cannot be transplanted.
Both in theory and in
practice, most Western Buddhists appear to look for and accept a grafting or
hybridizing process, assimilating Buddhist moral stock to a plausible,
compatible Western moral root. Some are tempted to confuse this process, by
reversing it, as if the task is to graft Western moral concerns to a Buddhist
root of compassion or, worse, transcendental wisdom. This confusion is like
"growing a lotus without planting it in the mud," or "putting
the spiritual cart before the moral horse." More simply, this confusion
assumes that ethics follows spirit or theory, a rather un-Buddhist notion,
given the Buddha's existential impatience with metaphysical gymnastics.
In the 1960's, Buddhist
ethical reflection, and morality in the broad sense of "a way of
life," were grafted by Western apologists to the stem of existentialism
and to some branches of the human potential movement.[4] These early efforts
fell short of a satisfactory ethical development of Western Buddhism, in my
opinion, because they failed to include much critical, communal, or practical
guidance for would-be Buddhist existentialists (or existentialist Buddhists?)
and other Aquarians. Recently, more politically relevant splicings have been
attempted by several Buddhists within the peace, environmental, and feminist
movements.[5]
Only a few Western
philosophers have attempted grafting work recently in Buddhist ethics, usually
by asserting and working out conceptual analogies between Buddhist ethics in
general and particular Western philosophers and theologians. Examples of this
comparative work include David Kalupahana's proposal that Buddhist ethics melds
interestingly with William James' pragmatism, and Christopher Ives'
explorations of opportunities to develop a Zen Buddhist social ethic in
contrast with Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian social ethics. Also noteworthy, if
less comparative in its analysis, is Robert Thurman's proposal to find a
relevant recipe for contemporary social activism in a specific text of
Nāgārjuna.[6]
While I do not find
these proposals sufficiently developed to be compelling to Western ethicists,
they are thought-experiments that address some issues of interest to Western
philosophical and theological ethics, while taking interpretive risks for the
sake of Buddhist relevance. I regret that none of the proposals can withstand
the kind of friendly critique that comes quickly and easily from ethicists
grounded in Christian and Western ethical studies; Winston King, for example,
has long been helpful in raising a variety of critical and disturbing questions
about the strengths and weaknesses of Buddhist philosophy in a Western ethical
milieu dominated by demands for human rights and individual autonomy.[7]
Assuming the under-developed
condition of the domain of Buddhist ethics in Western context, I now address at
length my second, more tentative conjecture on the future prospect of Western
Buddhism. I propose that the most appropriate analogy, the most fruitful
grafting prospect for a Western Buddhist ethics, will be with the Western
tradition of the "ethics of virtue." By "ethics of virtue"
I mean simply an ethics that is character-based (rather than principle-driven
or act-focused), praxis-oriented, teleological, and community-specific. More
fully, I mean the complex tradition of ethics that stretches in the West from
Socrates and Aristotle to Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, and other
contemporary virtues theorists. increasing notice."[8]
This proposal does not
originate with me. The conceptual and heuristic linkage of Buddhist ethics with
Aristotle's is a key to Damien Keown's approach in his well-argued, revisionist
view of Buddhist ethics, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics.[9]
Earlier, Robert Bellah favored
grafting Buddhism to the virtues approach as a possible path to meet his
concern to renew an American ethic of community. Specifically, Bellah has
called for a "cultural symbiosis" of Zen and modern Aristotelianism
as a way of re-asserting "a teleological understanding of the order of
human life" and bringing about "the creation of actual
communities" that can resist:
a modern Western culture that
is destroying the natural habitat, undermining any kind of social solidarity,
and creating a conception of the individual person which is utterly
self-destructive.[10]
The utopian spirit of his call
for Buddhist-like communities of personal and civic virtue suggests that these
communities would almost certainly be "marginalized," growing only at
the edges of the dominant socio-cultural structures of Western individualism or
bureaucratic nation-states. Its utopian character does not seem to dissuade
Bellah from making his recommendation. Nor am I. Indeed, such "contrast"
communities already exist, however tenuous their rooting in the Western
"soul and soil."[11]
Before taking up this
proposal, that Buddhist "morality" and "ethics" can be
appropriately transplanted in the West by assimilating them to our own virtues tradition,
I need to define Buddhist morality more precisely, in the terms of
"awakened virtue." "Awakened, compassionate
virtue-cultivation" is a more accurate phrasing of what I mean, but, for
simplicity's sake, I will avoid using it. "Awakened virtue" usefully
describes the process and goal of Buddhist morality. It affirms the intertwined
correspondence of the moral and the spiritual, in fresh language, by referring
to Buddhist moral vision and praxis in the language of virtues theory, and by
retaining the Buddhist insistence on spiritual awakening as a necessary,
although not sufficient, condition of moral maturity. Second, I will simply
define Buddhist ethics as "philosophical reflection upon Buddhist
morality, including descriptive, normative and meta-ethical
reflections."[12]
My purpose in this essay
about "awakened virtue" is not to engage in historical and textual
analysis. I will not exegete the comparative analogies of "sīla or the
pāramitās[13] to phronesis, arete, or virtus.[14] My aim is more philosophical,
practical, and even policy-oriented: to probe constructively the implications
of "awakened virtue," the goal of Buddhist morality and the object of
Buddhist ethics, in connection with the future prospects of Western Buddhism.
The effort to construct a Western Buddhist ethics by means of a virtues
approach is not without exemplars. For example, Robert Aitken relies on it
often in his homiletical text, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist
Ethics. Aitken fashions refreshing sermons on Buddhist ethics, with a Zen
twist, framing most of his chapters as expositions of "The Ten Grave
Precepts" of Buddhist morality. He also writes briefly about the Six
Perfections, the six pāramitās of generosity, morality, patience, vigor,
meditation, and self-realization, and discusses "virtue" as a way of
understanding the Zen life.
Aitken opens his
chapter, "The Way and Its Virtue," with a saying of his teacher,
Yamada Koun Roshi: "The purpose of Zen practice is the perfection of
character." Aitken proceeds to discuss briefly but provocatively the six
pāramitās, relating them to contemporary experience and applications.[15]But
his teacher's saying is overlooked and the focus on virtue collapses as, in the
perennial fashion of most Zen interpreters, he concludes that:
At the same time,
"virtue," "the Six Pāramitās," "perfection of
character" -- these are simply labels for an organic process. Breathing in
and out, you let go of poisons and establish the serene ground of the
precepts.[16]
Aitken here falls into a
common pitfall in the path of ancient and contemporary Zen interpreters, what I
call "the transcendence trap." The trap misleads them and us into
portraying the perfected moral life as a non-rational expressiveness, something
natural, spontaneous, non-linguistic, and uncalculating. This is a
"Taoist-like" view of virtue as "natural, intuitive,
skill/power" (Chin., te; Jap., toku), a view Aitken shares with some
influential, but late Mahāyāna sūtras. This ethical conception results in the
kind of ontological dismissal of morality and ethics preached by Aitken at the
end of his chapter: "Thus, in the world, too, there is nothing to be
called virtue."[17] The common corollary, "there is also nothing to
be called character," is unstated by Aitken, although it is part of the
same syllogistic net of claims deduced ostensibly from "no-ego" and
"sūnyatā axioms. The net is true and helpful only within the
"deconstructive" mood and context of sunyata dialectics and
metaphysics. When the net of "no-self" is thrown to catch truth in an
ethical context, villains laugh and demons thrive.
A good beginning by
Aitken, in taking a virtues approach to interpreting Buddhist ethics, is later
swamped by the "sūnyatā-weighted dialectical anamorphisms of Mahāyāna and
Zen thought. Aitken is enmeshed in what I have called "the satori
perspective" in Zen philosophy, the position most clearly seen in DṬ. Suzuki's vigorous
anti-rationalism and antinomianism. The "satori perspective"
characteristically over-emphasizes the "awakening" dimensions of
Buddhist soteriology, to the detriment of the moral, "virtuous"
dimensions.[18] Consequently, a view of the Buddhist virtues from this
standpoint tends insistently to relativize and diminish the "virtue"
in the summum bonum of "awakened virtue," until there is only the
"awakened One," beyond good and evil.
A clear and egregious
example of this spiritualizing over-emphasis on "awakening," comes to
us in the writings of Gerta Ital, in her book, On the Way to Satori, where she
offers us this advice:
This is something that cannot
be repeated often enough: no one who has not completely erased themselves as an
ego can do anything to help liberate anyone else, and the attainment of the
goal is not easy. The journey is very long .... Until one is liberated oneself
one is simply not capable of helping anyone else.[19]
This is not a complete
Buddhism, I believe, and certainly not one that can expect a significant future
in the West, except as an individualistic, private, and mainly
"therapeutic" mysticism. Buddhism is far more and other than that.
A fuller and more finely
articulated virtues approach to Buddhist ethics guides Ken Jones' The Social
Face of Buddhism. I consider this the best available ethical manual on Buddhist
social ethics by a Westerner.[20] I recommend it, convinced that it is a
touchstone philosophical text in Buddhist ethics. It is unlike Aitken's,
because Jones' seriously pays attention to key philosophical, moral, and
psychological issues. Regrettably, Jones, like Aitken, walks into "the
transcendence trap," by devaluing the roles of will and deliberation in
the life of awakened virtue.
Jones affirms in good virtues
theory fashion that Buddhist morality is a matter of character and cultivation,
and that it focuses on cultivating character rather than evaluating particular
acts.[21] But quickly he slides toward "the transcendence trap,"
beginning with a too casual substitution of the word "personality"
for "character"[22]:
The emphasis in Buddhist
morality is therefore on the cultivation of a personality which cannot but be
moral, rather than focusing upon the morality of particular choices and acts.
But, to repeat, it is not the will that can create such a personality, no more
than I can pick myself up from the ground by my collar. It is to the training
that the will must be applied, from which virtue will naturally flow [emphasis
mine].[23]
Jones's disclaimer on the
power of will may only be a rejection of Nietzchean or Sartrean voluntarism. If
so, he would be correct from a Buddhist point of view, which dialectically
affirms both the deterministic weight of karma or character dispositions and
our freedom from them in the concomitant "emptiness" of
"sūnyatā. And he is certainly correct to assert that the will in Buddhist
practice, rather than serving a "creative" role in free
self-creation, serves mainly to restrain and hold oneself in the various forms
of moral and intellectual practice.
However, the fuzziness
of the phrase, "from which virtue will naturally flow," places Jones
on the lip of the "transcendence trap." He later falls in by
constructing virtue as a kind of natural "grace," emergent from the
forms of moral discipline and repetition,/yet different from them, somehow
transcendent, natural and free. As Robert Scharf suggests, this transcendent
view of virtuous activity is a mystification of what in Buddhist practice is
simply a repetitive and normal process of learning to perform in certain ways
with skill; Hee-jin Kim, discussing what he calls the "heart of Dogen's
thought," refers to the process of Buddhist practice as essentially
something prosaic, "the ritualization of morality."[24]
More than Jones can or
will admit, schooling in the forms of virtue is a social, emotional, and
cognitive process. Becoming good is hardly a natural process in the sense
suggested, of being the non-voluntary, non-deliberative unfolding of a natural
goodness. Aristotle would agree: "While it is Nature that gives us our
faculties, it is not Nature that makes us good or bad."[25]The goal of ethics
is to become a person who does good or virtuous things freely from the ground
of a well-tempered character, supported by a matured, resolute, and reasonable
knowledge of what one is doing. The path of Buddhism does not dissolve
character (which is different from ego and personality). It awakens and
illuminates moral character and establishes a "noble" selfhood in the
wide, deep, expressive freedom of creative forms of life and its perfections.
Jones's view of virtue
echoes the Christian moral doctrine of "infused virtue," but without
dependence on St. Thomas Aquinas' transcendent, theistic assumptions and absent
his clear sense of the endurance of the "natural" virtues in the
perfected saints. I venture the guess that, like Alan Watts and others who fall
into "the transcendence trap," Jones devalues the will in preferring
"natural expressiveness" (in the sense of what we are born with,
natus), in his beliefs about learning to be good, because of things that have
little to do with Buddhism, the Diamond Sūtra, and Mahāyāna dialectics. I
suspect that many a Westerner's "Taoist-like" misreading of Buddhist
ethics, as a form of individualistic naturalism, is mostly and often a reaction
to the West's residual Victorian morality -- a morality characterized by and
hated for its conceived overemphasis on individual, rational self-discipline,
strength of will, rigidity of personality, and psychophysical repressions --
and from which middle-aged and older Western Buddhists seem to be still trying
to make their escape. In their desire to escape, they share in a broader, late
20th century Western shift to a moral outlook that prizes a rather passive,
non-judgmental tolerance of others, combined with a preference for the
spontaneous or ecstatic expression of impulses ... at least and especially in
contrast with the much maligned Victorians.
To disdain the necessary
roles of will and reason in the Buddhist moral process is to overlook the
importance of both in early Buddhism. Early Buddhism did not abandon reason,
although it did not rely on reason alone. Neither did early Buddhists overlook
the necessity of a steady will, even in the stages of Buddhist meditation
training. That will and reason were requisite accompaniments of the good person
is also evident in later additions to the six pāramitās list, namely, the
pāramitās of resolution, determination, strength, and skillful means.
Obviously, strength of will is necessary even in samādhi exercises, in making
the Bodhisattva vow, or in responding to exhortations of the Zen masters to
throw one's whole self and attention into zazen or koan. Buddhist cultivation
requires a constant dose of what William James called "animal
spirits" and doing the difficult thing against our inclinations.
Now, having by-passed
the "transcendence trap" on the way to a Buddhist virtues
perspective, I wish briefly to describe what I mean by Buddhist "awakened
virtue" in the context of general virtues theory, distinguishing it
somewhat from traditional Western views. Following this description, I will
conclude by exploring some implications for the West of viewing Buddhist ethics
and the Buddhist "way of life" in a virtues perspective.
Buddhist Morality as Awakened
Virtue
The Buddha's Dharma or
teaching was authoritatively divided in early times into three groups, but they
were interdependent facets of one process leading to deliverance (vimutti). The
Buddhist investigated and cultivated "sīla (morality), samādhi (deep
meditation), and prajñā (transcendental wisdom).[26] Each of the three facets
of self-cultivation evolved appropriate practices ... of moral intention,
behavior, and correction; of meditation method and mapping; of transformative
shifts of consciousness. We may speak of these practices as the moral,
contemplative, and transformative pāramitās. The last, the transformative
pāramitās, are concerned with practices that alter consciousness on a
transcendental, "Nirvanic" level, while the contemplative pāramitās
have to do with the development of powers of concentration, stability, and tranquilization
in meditation. The moral pāramitās involve practices in which good intentions
are aroused and acted upon in the light of a right understanding of the good
and of situations. With repetition and correction these practices severally and
together nurtured the dispositions, both karmic and salvific, that together
constitute Buddhist character.
Why these pāramitās as
the specific Buddhist virtues, rather than others, invites a fuller treatment
than I will give here.[27] The pāramitās, as methods of attending, energizing,
pacifying and relating the self to others, work together to wean the self from
egocentricity. Beyond ego-weaning, the goal of the pāramitās is positive: to
foster a character that increasingly encounters each moment, each space, each
being, as a "mother" enjoys and protects her only child ... to use a
traditional simile attributed to the Buddha.
Since moral intentions
are always elastic, they need shaping by forms and disciplines, taught by
teachers and learned in communities. The virtuous practices that in Buddhism
characterize a good person were often defined as at least the six pāramitās of
generosity or gift-giving (dāna), morality or the Five Precepts ("sīla),
patience and forgiveness (kṣānti),
courage and vigor (vīrya), concentration (dhyāna), and wisdom (prajñā). Some
held that the six pāramitās constituted a progressive order of training in
virtue, from generosity to wisdom. These may be said to be the necessary moral,
mental, and spiritual touchstones of the Buddhist virtues tradition,
notwithstanding later additions to and analytical divisions of the six.
Enrichment of virtue-like practices beyond the pāramitās is seen in the
development of the well-known Four Immeasurables (the Brahmavihāras or
"divine abodes") of Buddhist friendliness, compassion, joy, and
peace, which further mapped out, stimulated, and idealized Buddhist moral
praxis.
These practices, moral
and otherwise, were more often than not "methodologized," that is,
formalized, ritualized and institutionalized in ways to promote habitual
performances in a general program of self-cultivation and character
development, conceived to stretch over many aeons of time (thus requiring the
pāramitā of patience!). Methods would differ somewhat between monk and layperson,
and from culture to culture. Some practices were Buddhist adaptations of
pre-existing practices and rituals in the surrounding non-Buddhist culture, as
Nath shows in her study of the Buddhist transformations of Hindu dāna,
gift-giving rites.[28]
Buddhist moral
self-cultivation tends to encompass not only the formation of good intentions
in the heart and mind (reminding us of Kant). Practices also include physical
postures and breath-speech techniques. This holistic
"psycho-pneumo-physical" approach to moral self-cultivation results,
for example, in attention to helping others not only by forming a good will,
but also by expressing kind words and offering the material things that they
also need. A more holistic self-training also opens a way to fuse moral
practice with aesthetic practice, as an early concern in Buddhism with how
gracefully to give gifts demonstrates.
Practice of the moral
pāramitās is said to create and accumulate "merit," or favorable
karma dispositions within the psyche, that lead to a better life and higher
rebirth. The "ethics of karma," focused upon by Melford Spiro and
Winston King as the key to understanding Theravādin Buddhist societies, is when
looked at closely but an "ethics of karma-cultivating virtues and practices."[29]
Spiro and King, reflecting an interpretation within the Theravādin tradition,
highlight the ostensibly traditional split between the karmic and the Nibbānic
motives in Buddhist life, one for goodness and reward, the other for salvation
and transformative liberation. The two motives are personalized in layperson
and monk, respectively.[30]
The tension between
moral and religious motives appears also in Mahāyāna Buddhism. At one point the
tension was reconciled in the bodhisattva image of a virtuous layman-sage,
Vimalakīrti. The Vimalakīrti Sūtra affirms that a breach between moral effort
and spiritual awakening constitutes bondage and delusion.[31] The center of
Buddhist tradition affirms that moral effort, mainly through practicing the
pāramitās, must be conjoined with meditative and transformative practices to be
ultimately effective for oneself and for others. It also affirms that the
practices of awakening have little foundation and less result, for oneself or
others, without the frame, skills, and habit of moral practice. Moral virtue
without "sūnyatā, or transforming liberation, may be shallow and weak; but
"sūnyatā without moral virtue is blind and dangerous. She who has
accomplished awakened virtue, the merging of skilled, well-disposed, rational
moral agency with self-transforming spirit, is, in contrast, deep, strong,
ever-maturing, and rational, ... by her character and deeds she reduces
suffering and promotes friendliness, compassion, joy, and peace.
In contrast with Western
virtues tradition, the Buddhist pāramitās viewpoint tends, in matters of self
and community, to be biocentric and ecological. First, Buddhism does not begin
with the premise of the substantial, separable, and distinctive self of
Aristotelian and Christian thought. In Buddhism, the idea of the atomistic,
self-empowering monad-godling of Western individualism is well known, but
understood as a delusion born of ignorant desires and fears, resulting in a
wish-fantasy for domination. Compared to Western concepts, the self-concept of
Buddhism is processional, relational, and "fuzzy."[32]
While the moral saint as
individualized hero, above and apart from others, is not unknown in Buddhism,
the open, relational nature of selfhood stresses the solidarity of those who
act virtuously with those for whom they act or, better, with whom they practice
the perfecting goods of generosity, patience, and so forth. For Buddhist
thought the self is fundamentally incomplete, evolving, and interpenetratively
co-dependent with others. Since we are imbedded in mutual dependent community,
training in the pāramitās, moral and otherwise, is necessarily a training with
others and for others. Because of this solidarity and because pāramitās
practice nurtures body, speech, and the mind-heart, the Buddhist believes her
moral efforts flow necessarily into the community on many levels, materially,
verbally, and mentally, in a subtle, looping reciprocity.
Second, Buddhist
tradition differs from the Western in defining membership in the moral
community, the "considered others" to whom pāramitās-defined
practices are to be extended. In the dominant traditions of Western culture, at
least since Aristotle, the community of character and virtue has clearly been
the human community. The politics in which an individual's ethics and virtue
find their completion is a human politics - almost always an anthropocentric,
urban politics. The Buddhist community of virtue is biocentric, far more
inclusive of animals and other sentient beings as objects of moral
consideration (in the practice of the six pāramitās, for example, giving aid to
animals) than Western virtues tradition.[33] Because of this biocentric
orientation, Buddhist moral practices must include specific training and
self-cultivation in our relations with nature, as well as human society,
extending dāna, "sīla, kṣānti,
and so on to non-human sentient beings and to the biosphere itself as a
community of communities.[34]
Given the exurban
settings of Buddhist monasteries and universities, and other factors, Buddhist
ethics did not elaborate itself often into urban, class-oriented political
theory, a theory of revolutionary change, or a theory legitimizing divine
rule... although Buddhist thinkers did propose all three. The community scale
imaged by the saṃgha was
smaller and more nurturing of personal development, perhaps that of a village
set within nature. Perhaps this goes to explain partially why even urban
Buddhists have tended to re-create or simulate in the grounds of their city
temples a contrasting, natural refuge, for people, animals, fish, birds, and
even insects. A Japanese tea ceremony garden and hut in the middle of Tokyo
express this microtopic, exurban focus most eloquently and ironically.
Like the Aristotelian
virtues tradition, Buddhist ethics tends to be ahistorical, in that it regards
human life as having an important and profound constancy in its nature and
goal, persistent amidst the general flow and struggles of actual personal and
historical forces. That constancy for the Buddhist lies not in a substantial or
eternal self, but in our common, almost irrefragable experience of suffering
and in our inherent capacity to work toward an awakened, moral virtuosity, in
wisdom and fellow-feeling.
With respect to the
question of historicity, I think that, in comparison with the Christian virtues
tradition, Buddhist ethics did not develop so extensive a quasi-historical
hagiography, a "sense of narrative," concerning the lives of the
virtuous and their exemplars, the saints. The Jātaka Tales, while we classify
them as "animal" fables, may be similar in appearance to a
"Lives of the Saints." But we should probably resist calling them
"narrative" because they display a narrow range of the Buddhist
reality picture, and we should hesitate to call them unqualifiedly Buddhist,
because the stories are from a pre-Buddhist tradition. This comparative absence
of emphasis on individual "drama," which may be more of degree than
type, applies even to the most obvious Buddhist saint, the Buddha, whose
"story" does not serve for Buddhists the whole range of functions
that we find centered in the Gospels, in Roman Catholic hagiography or in
Muslim hadith tradition.[35]
On another theme of
contemporary virtues theory, I begin by acknowledging without apology that
Buddhism makes moral claims that are universalistic. Buddhists have imagined
utopian times and settings for the virtuous, the perfected, the awakened ...
and projected a utopic future when "all beings are awakened." But,
like all ethical traditions centered on virtues, Christian, Muslim, Confucian,
or Aristotelian, the Buddhist pāramitā tradition looks to the establishment of
particular and appropriately designed communities to optimize favorable
conditions for self-cultivation and happiness in the good life. Virtue ethics
traditions, often focused in small groups engaged in voluntary training, tend
to spend little time on the ethical strategies necessary in non-voluntary,
pluralistic, very large, or coercive societies. Consequently and not
surprisingly, they tend to lack a viable social ethic in modern terms, that is
a policy-generating set of principles that can be institutionalized on a mass
scale, while protecting individual rights-claims with coercive means.
So, while espousing the
general tenets and principles of a universal ethics, Buddhist ethics tends, in
practice, to define and effectuate pāramitā-cultivation in community-specific
terms. At the mind-and-heart level, the broad intention "to help
others" may be similar across many communities, but at the levels of linguistic
and physical practice, the pāramitās have a local aspect, and in that sense
display a modest "historical" quality. For example, while the virtue
of giving, dāna-pāramitā, may show local nuances of expression in almsgiving
rites, these local forms are practiced with recognition of their universal
applicability in their intention, but not in their formal, material, local
features. A tolerant awareness of distinctions between inner and outer aspects
of Buddhist practices may result in much less zealous enforcement of verbal,
symbolic, and physical conformity in moral (and contemplative) practices in
Buddhist contexts. The resulting diversity, flexibility, and tolerance sustain
the Buddhist tradition, at the risk of appearing very soft and highly "contextual"
in social ethics and politics.
Nevertheless, one does
find conformity in the moral forms and practices within Buddhist voluntary
communities, of which the saṃgha
is the classical exemplar. Conformity is in keeping not only with the needs of
any community for the standardization and predictability of behaviors that
enhance trust and efficiency. Shared forms are especially necessary and
appropriate to a community guided by virtue ethics. The Buddhist's cultivation
of the pāramitās requires a community designed to respond to awakened virtue
practices with specific structures of support and correction.
Each Buddhist community
has a distinctive shape and style, governed primarily by a common goal, the
awakened virtue of each member-in-community. This perfectionist aim is
universalized and idealized by extending it to encompass the awakening of
"all sentient beings." But, on-the-ground, the community's purpose is
realized in the details ... of distinctive forms of etiquette, and in the characters
of exemplary individuals; in shared schedules, and a common submission to
rules; in rituals of giving and receiving, and procedures for correcting and
expelling delinquent members. These are communities where one learns and
practices what it quite precisely means, mentally and physically, morally and
psychologically, to act as an "awakened virtue being." That is, one
learns to act, to perform, to talk, walk, sit, sort things out, and take out
the garbage like a Buddha.
It should be obvious by
now that learning to act like a Buddha means something other than becoming
spontaneous, inventive, and free of Victorian inhibitions. The practice of
awakened virtue in Buddhist communities requires diligent learning of the forms
in and through which one can perform like an awakened virtue being. In the
moral sphere, these practices require repeated experiences in learning how to
give, to listen patiently, to call up courage in overcoming fear and desire, to
observe non-violence in the way one walks, to steady the mind and heart, to
make friends with the seasons, and so on. In the meditative sphere, similar
forms of practice are observed, submitted to, tasted, repeated, tested, and
perfected, in cultivation of the contemplative virtues.
Finally, the Buddhist
community, like any virtue-oriented community, is defined in the characters of
its persons, as well as in their stories and the forms of their practices. Its
continuation and success depend necessarily upon the degree to which community
members become successful practitioners of the community's full repertoire of
virtues. Thus, Buddhism will flower in the West only when Western Buddhists
take up a fully balanced Buddhist way of life, by cultivating both the moral
and the contemplative pāramitās in proper balance. "Awakened virtue"
is the balanced platform upon which to practice the ultimate, transformative,
Nirvanic virtues constituting the flowering of the spiritual life of Buddhists.
Implications for Buddhist
Ethics in the West
If we accept the propositions
that Buddhist ethics is ineluctably and essentially an "ethics of
virtue" and, second, that the Buddhist life is necessarily at every stage
integrative of moral and spiritual practices, several implications emerge for
Buddhism as it grows in the West. Some of these implications are corrective of
recent Western Buddhist troubles, while others may indicate real limits to
Buddhism's success in and impact on the West.
Soon, with the passing
away of the pioneering, older generations of Western Buddhists, I hope we will
see Buddhism in the West turning from its role as a raft carrying Westerners
away from the eroding shores of Victorian -- or Judaeo-Christian -- or
technological -- or imperialist --or patriarchal culture. While the function of
Buddhism as a means of liberation from suffering and oppression is a central
one, it is not the only one. The other function of Buddhism is to carry the
suffering to the Other shore, to awakened virtue, to becoming a Buddha in
Buddha fields where Buddhas flourish. This means working to construct and
preserve relationships and communities, as much as cultivating oneself. And
this means the renewal of a pāramitās-approach in Buddhist thought and life.
One corrective
consequence of renewing the pāramitās in Buddhist lives and communities will be
the denial of authority to imbalanced Buddhist teachers by the communities that
support them. Too many Buddhist teachers in the West in the 1980's have
demonstrated that they cannot balance well the moral and the spiritual.[36]
However, a virtues-oriented ethic has limitations in meeting problems caused by
the vices of individuals in the practicing community. This is because a virtue
ethic focuses on the person-as-agent developing over time, in a learning
process often of trial and error. This long-term focus devalues the moral
significance of particular acts, even transvaluing them into "teachable
moments," while often overlooking the consequences of flawed or vicious
acts for others and the community. A particular moral failure is excused as
"out-of-character." The result is a greater tolerance of isolated
acts of harming others, for example, unless the acts constitute an intolerable
"pattern" of vice that forces community or individual reaction ...
perhaps too late.
Every virtue ethics
guides us to the good life by means of models of "the good person."
The model may be a living person or a narrative character (i.e., the Buddha,
Vimalakīrti, Vessantara, Queen "Srīmālā, one's roshi, etc.). A focus on
character tends to obscure or override the role of general principles and rules
as guides to decision-making and mutual regulation.
But rules, however
flawed, sometimes have a place. For example, a rule-orientation is preferable
in some circumstances and relationships to counter teacher-disciple abuses and
distortions. Traditionally, Buddhism depends heavily on its teachers and on the
belief that profound qualities of an awakened teacher can be passed directly,
through "mind-to-mind" transmission, to her students. Of course,
teachers are capable of transmitting the forms of the pāramitās, moral and
contemplative, through imitation, familiarization, direct instruction, and, I
will grant, a kind of psychic "osmosis." But, far more difficult to
transmit to one's students and friends are the all-important balance and
integration of the pāramitās in a given person, because they are partly
contingent on the individuality of the novice's personality. It is wrong to
believe that this balance can be given to the student, rather than earned by
self-effort in the corrective view of a vital community.
Buddhist tradition poses
to each Buddhist a momentous question: "Who is Buddha?" How do we
know that someone is advanced in the practices of "awakened virtue"?
That she's a "good person"? The answer is critical, for it is these
people one turns to for instruction, advice, example, confidence, and even
faith. A pāramitās-oriented approach carries us some distance to the answer,
because of its dual focus on character and communally validated moral
practices. Consequently, the living meaning of awakened virtue is less
dependent on the character of single persons upon whom a community focuses, and
more dependent on several persons and the community (the saṃgha-community) in its
evolving solidarity. Viewing the practicing community as Buddha, as itself a
virtue-oriented awakening being, reduces personality cults and deepens
community resources.
The pāramitās emphasis I
am advocating will tend to develop protective standards of a more public nature,
to test those who seek to join or lead communities. But a Buddhist virtues
approach requires shoring up with useful ethical strategies developed in the
West both to assess particular acts and to generate moral rules. The Western
Buddhist milieu may also require a heuristic recovery of the Vinaya tradition
of Buddhist monastic regulation. The Vinaya may have strayed into the trap of
legalistic casuistry, but it did define and set procedures for adjudicating
particular acts of monks that could not be tolerated, that had to result in
suspension or expulsion. Western Buddhist communities are only now beginning to
face up to this kind of decision-making, for which a virtues-orientation is
sometimes inadequate.
Having said all this, I
acknowledge that act-evaluations and rule-adjudications must be secondary
instruments in Buddhist ethics, necessary as they may be in particular moments
of particular communities. Essentially, Buddhist ethics is centered in and on
"character in community." This focus needs to be kept, for upon it
depends the future development of a Buddhist ethics more aimed at relationships
than principles, more interested in mutual support than a defense of rights,
more empathic than rational, more compassionate than just.
Ethical strategies
focusing on rational rules and judgments of particular outward acts are the
essential feature of groups so large that they constitute a society of
strangers, threatened by the Hobbesian shadows of competition and governed by
laws of contract, restraint, coercion, property, and command.[37]Laws are
secondary to virtue in a Buddhist setting (and in this I agree with Western
Buddhists who resist "code" or rule-oriented moralizing as a dominant
approach to self- or community-discipline). Nevertheless, while secondary, they
are not dispensable.
The primary focus on
persons, character, and virtuous practices in Buddhist ethics cannot be
sustained without community, places where we know each other well enough to
call each other into the intimacies of an ethics of intention and practice, as
in a family. This means that Buddhist communities must ever be small, small
enough that people intimately know each other and the other sentient beings
sharing their life and death . I propose that they can be too small, in that a
group of four or six can hardly challenge and support the full range of
self-cultivation practices necessary to awakened virtue. The problem of size
for many Buddhists in the West lies at the "too small" end of the
spectrum. But that's better than to be at the "too large" end. I
cannot identify a practicing community that has become too large (say, more
than 200 active members), unless one looks at the large metropolitan
communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are arguably too large, too
complex, and too absorbed in the entropic tasks of organization maintenance of
buildings, mortgages, and so on.
We know from reading
Aristotle and MacIntyre that an ethics focused in virtue does not picture the
way to the good life in abstract or individual or universal terms. The paths of
virtue are marked by lived practices special to each community. Virtue-oriented
groups and communities, if we are to believe MacIntyre and Hauerwas, depend
more on their traditional "narrative" reality- frames, their memories
and stories of good persons practicing the good life, than on their laws or
universal principles.[38] But, we also know that Western Buddhists today live
in a post-Nietzschean world, where the "stories" are many and
"memory" is tattered. It is not at all clear to many Western people
that their chosen or inherited stories invoke human reality in a coherent and
compelling way.
In the postmodern West,
the Buddha's story or the life of awakened virtue can be told and tested only
in small, marginalized zones appropriately distanced from the dominant power
and value structures. The criteria of testing are two: 1) the plausibility of
the story of a person who, through specific practices in a certain kind of
community, "awakened, by and through virtuous practices, in wisdom and
compassion;" and 2) the evident goodness in the people and communities now
engaged in practices of the Dharma. These people are the Buddha. Their story is
the Buddha's story.
Acceptance of the virtues
approach in ethics presents specific challenges and advantages to Buddhist
thinkers and other scholars. For example, we need to develop a more historical
scholarship of the pāramitās dimension in Buddhism. But, hopefully, we can also
help people in today's Buddhist communities to think through the tensions among
the pāramitās, the problems of priorities, the meanings of practicing in lay
life, and a host of other on-the-ground issues. We need to help Western
Buddhists distinguish among therapeutic, aesthetic, moral, economic, political,
and spiritual practices and choices. What is the optimum balance of attention
and consideration between self and others? What is Buddhist friendship? Does it
include mosquitoes? How and why do Buddhists fail morally after years of
practice? How does a virtues orientation link up with social justice issues and
the development of a Buddhist social ethics? Far more moral and ethical
questions buzz in Western Buddhists' lives, awaiting creative, practical
inquiry by philosophers, new generation Buddhologists, and others.
I have been recommending
the virtues approach. It needs a fuller development, in order to carry Buddhist
morality into an inevitable, serious and mutually constructive dialogue with
Western philosophers and theologians. My recommendations may appear too
straitlaced, or even atavistically Victorian, but what seems clear to me so far
is this. The most constructive future of Buddhism in the West rests on its
manifestation in the characters of people, not in eloquent prose, fundraising
efforts, temple-building, or incomplete life modeling. Hopefully, a new
generation will increasingly take the path of balancing samādhi-exercise with
pāramitās-practices. Put simply, the future depends on a few good women and men
who reveal a balanced, integrative life -- of "awakened virtue"
practices, in families, jobs, and communities. It is through good lives that
the Buddha's Dharma can fully flower in the West, transforming our sufferings
and awakening in us, each and all, that which is best, inch by inch, moment by
moment, breath by breath.
Notes
[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984; Stanley
Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981). Return
[2] For my judgment that
Buddhism will fail to bear fruit in the United States unless it develops moral
practices and ethical reflection more in concert with American realities, see
James Whitehill, Enter the Quiet (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers,
1980), 60-74, and Whitehill, "Is There a Zen Ethic?," The Eastern
Buddhist (New Series) 20 (Spring 1987), 9- 33. Return
[3] A promising and
brief sketch of the philosophical roots of Buddhist ethics in the doctrine of
"dependent co-arising" (paṭicca-samuppāda),
with a good discussion of "moral agency", is Joanna Macy's
"Dependent Co-arising: The Distinctiveness of Buddhist Ethics," The
Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 7 No. 1 (Spring 1979), 38-52. But Macy did
not explicitly acknowledge the commensurability of Buddhist ethics with virtue
ethics, in terms of key similarities with respect to the nature of the self,
dispositions (kamma, sankhāras, etc.), and freedom. Return
[4] I think here first
of the San Francisco Renaissance figures of Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, but
also of Erich Fromm, William Barrett, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, and other
writers who probed parallels between Zen and their own home-grown existential
concerns. Return
[5] Relevant sources
include: (on feminism) Rita Gross, "Buddhism and Feminism: Toward their
Mutual Transformation," The Eastern Buddhist 19 (Autumn 1986), 62-74;
Sandy Boucher, Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988); (on environmentalism) Allan H.
Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990); J. Baird Callicott
and Roger T. Ames, eds., Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought (Albany: S.UṆ.Y. Press, 1989); James
Whitehill, "Ecological Consciousness and Values: Japanese
Perspectives," Ecological Consciousness, eds. J. Donald Hughes and George
Schultz (New York: University Press of America, 1980), 165-182; (on the peace
movement) Fred Eppsteiner, ed., The Path of Compassion: Writings on Socially
Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1988). Return
[6] See David J.
Kalupahana, "The Buddhist Conceptions of "Subject" and
"Object" and their Moral Implications," Philosophy East and West
33 (July 1988), 290-304; Christopher A. Ives, "A Zen Buddhist Social
Ethic," (Unpublished PhḌ.
dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1988) and Zen Awakening and Society
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992); Robert A. Thurman,
"Guidelines for Buddhist Social Activism Based on Nāgārjuna's Jewel
Garland of Royal Counsels," The Eastern Buddhist (New Series) 16 (Spring
1983), 19-51. For a Kantian approach, see Philip Olson, The Discipline of
Freedom: A Kantian View of the Role of Moral Precepts in Zen Practice (Albany:
State University of New York, Press, 1993). Return
[7] See Winston L. King,
"Buddhist Self-World Theory and Buddhist Ethics," The Eastern
Buddhist (New Series) 22 (Autumn 1989), 14- 26; "A Buddhist Ethic for the
West?" (unpublished manuscript, 1990). Return
[8] A large bibliography
of contemporary writings in virtues theory is in Robert B. Kruschwitz and
Robert C. Roberts, ed., The Virtues: Contemporary Essays on Moral Character
(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1987), 237-63. For a discussion
of the translatability and commensurability of one ethical tradition (e.g.,
Buddhist) with another (e.g., Western virtues tradition), see Stephen E. Fowl,
"Could Horace Talk with the Hebrews? Translatability and Moral
Disagreement in MacIntrye and Stout," The Journal of Religious Ethics Vol.
19 No.1 (Spring, 1991), 1- 20. Return
[9]Damien Keown, The
Nature of Buddhist Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). See especially
Chap. 1, "The Study of Buddhist Ethics," and Chap. 8, "Buddhism
and Aristotle." Return
[10] Robert N. Bellah,
"The Meaning of Dogen Today," Dogen Studies, ed. William R. LaFleur
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1985), 157-8. Return
[11] "Soul and
soil" because a complete virtue ethics not only refers to the capacities
of "human beings in general," but also the particular limitations for
expressing those capacities in terms of the "soil," literally and
metaphorically, in which those capacities for "humanity at its best"
are grown. Virtue is formed by "place," and a change of place or soil
requires appropriate transformation of the virtues. Ivan Illich and others have
called for a "philosophy of soil," because "our generation has
lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, we mean that shape,
order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by place, and
qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor; we mean
practice mutually recognized as being good within a shared local culture which
enhances the memory of a place." See, "Declaration of Soil,"
Whole Earth Review, No. 71 (Summer, 1991), 75. Return
[12] By
"awakened," I mean the process and state of an empowering liberation
of the self, by means of ego-transforming praxis. By "virtue," I mean
the ideal cultivated set of rational discernments, personal skills, and
dispositions of character regarded as ideal and relevant to relations with self
and others in a known and shared community, in this case the Buddhist
community. In Buddhism as I understand it, moral virtue and spiritual awakening
are coordinate and mutually necessary; neither alone is sufficient for
attaining Buddhahood. Return
[13] "Sīla,
"custom or manner," but usually referring to the Five Precepts,
avoidance dicta, such as, "Avoid harming living beings," etc.
Pāramitā, "high," "complete," or "perfect," but
usually in the context of a list of "perfections," akin to the
virtues, characterizing the praxis and character of those pursuing the Buddhist
goals of selflessness, insight, compassion, and liberation or
"salvation." Return
[14] Several works can
provide historical and textual framework for Buddhist ethics, including H.
Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethics (New York: George Braziller, 1970, and Gunapala
Dharmasiri, Fundamentals of Buddhist Ethics (Antioch, Calif.: Golden Leaves
Publishing Company, 1989). Lopez's recent discussion of virtues and sainthood
from the Mahāyāna bodhisattva perspective, with comparisons to Roman Catholic
tradition, is detailed enough to be helpful; Donald S. Lopez, Jr.,
"Sanctification on the Bodhisattva Path," Sainthood, eds. Richard
Kieckhefer and George S. Bond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Return
[15] For a classic
discussion of the pāramitās, "Sāntideva, The Path of Light, trans. LḌ. Barnett (AMS Press, 1990).
A more recent translation of "Sāntideva's Bodhicārya-avatāra is Marion
Matics' Entering the Path of Enlightenment (London: Macmillan Company, 1970).
Return
[16] Robert Aitken, The
Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1984), 158. Return
[17] Aitken, The Mind of
Clover, 159. Return
[18] See Whitehill,
"Is There a Zen Ethic?" Return
[19] Gerta Ital, On the
Way to Satori: A Women's Experience of Enlightenment, trans. Timothy Green
(Dorset, England: Element Books, Ltd., 1990), 276. Return
[20] Ken Jones, The
Social Face of Buddhism: An Approach to Political and Social Activism (London:
Wisdom Publications, 1989). Return
[21] Dharmasiri,
interestingly, argues that Buddhist ethics is best understood as a peculiar,
non-hedonic form of act utilitarianism; Fundamentals of Buddhist Ethics, 26-27.
Return
[22] Much confusion in
thinking about Buddhism in the West results because the Asian cultures from
which it comes focus morality in the "roles" people play in
hierarchical, organic relationships, while modern Westerners who have taken up
Buddhism are often urged by their traditions to view morality from the
perspective of the autonomous, isolated self, understood as an expressive
"personality." This cross-cultural difference needs to be more
carefully used and understood by Buddhist interpreters. On the contemporary
American shift of interest from "character" to
"personality," see Anthony Quinton, "Character and
Culture," in Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, ed. Christina & Fred
Sommers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, Publishers, 1989), 613-22. Return
[23] Jones, The Social
Face of Buddhism, 157. Return
[24] Robert H. Scharf,
"Being Buddha: A Performative Approach to Ch'an Enlightenment"
(unpublished manuscript, 1989). Hee-jin Kim, Dogen Kigen: Mystic Realist
(Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1987), 172-3. Martin Southwold
argues, in the instance of Sinhalese Buddhism, that ethical behavior is the
focus and vehicle of the "ritual impulse" for Buddhist laypeople in
Sri Lanka. Absent a transcendent focus of religious worship and ritual
reference, Buddhists have made of ethics and the Dharma the object of ritual
activity. Of course, the form of ethics most congenial to ritualization is, of
course, virtue ethics. See Southwold, Buddhism in life: the anthropological
study of religion and the Sinhalese practice of Buddhism (Dover, NḤ.: Manchester University
Peress, 1983), 162-80. Return
[25] Nicomachean Ethics,
Book I I, Chap. 4. See M.F. Burnyeat, "Aristotle on Learning to Be
Good," Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 69-92. Return
[26] I am taking a
rather casual approach to the spelling of these terms, choosing between the
Pali and the Sanskrit renderings on the basis of which seems easiest to pronounce
and remember in English. I am casual with an excuse however, for I think it
must soon be necessary to coin English phonetic neologues for these terms, and
I am merely choosing those I like (e.g., I think paññā is weak-sounding in
English when referring to a powerfully transforming insight, or
prajñā-insight.Return
[27] I hope someone with
perseverance can attempt an analysis of the pāramitās, in comparative light,
akin to Lee Yearley's arduous study of the theories of virtue in Mencius and
Aquinas. Yearley takes the study of virtue deep into comparative terrain,
marking assiduously more distinctions between Aquinas and Mencius than I care
to know, because I can't see readily what difference they make. Lee Yearley,
Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1990). Return
[28] Vijay Nath, Dāna:
Gift System in Ancient India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers,
1987). Return
[29] See Melford Spiro,
Buddhism and Society (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970); Winston L.
King, In the Hope of Nibbana (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1964). Spiro and King,
while admiring many of the personal qualities of Buddhist laypeople, tend to
diminish their moral achievements as self-regarding, because lay Buddhists link
good deeds and good character with favorable rebirths. Scholars from Christian
cultures that have given the highest moral value to self-sacrificing altruism,
agape, are not likely to regard the Buddha's injunction, to avoid the extremes
of self-indulgence and self-mortification, as the most heroic spiritual advice.
Return
[30] Some scholars
believe King and Spiro make too sharp a distinction between layperson and monk,
between kamma-motives and Nibbāna-motives, in Theravāda Buddhism. See, Harvey
B. Aronson, "The Relationship of the Karmic to the Nirvanic in Theravada
Buddhism," The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 7 No. 1 (Spring 1979),
28-36; Donald K. Swearer, "Bhikkhu Buddhadasa on Ethics and Society,"
The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 7 No. 1 (Spring 1979), 54-64. Southwold
makes his argument against this "elitist" and "modernist"
interpretation of a dualistic Buddhism the center of his work, Buddhism in
Life. See also, Damien Keown, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, 83-105. Return
[31] Robert A. Thurman,
trans., The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti (London: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1976). Return
[32] This self-concept
gives trouble to ethical systems, like Kant's, and social-political traditions,
like Western liberalism (of progressive or conservative varieties), that
function in terms of rights-claims, human rights, etc. Buddhist ethics, insofar
as it is grounded in the processional, ecological self-in-community, and
articulated teleologically in terms of the specific pāramitās and their
cultivation, must be in tension with Western tradition on this issue, so long
as Western ethics and legal structures are primarily designed to serve
individual and corporate property interests. This is not to claim that Buddhist
ethics overlooks or radically discounts individual human rights. The origins of
Buddhism clearly reflect a vision of human life that is prejudiced toward
individual release from social, as well as psychic, oppression of the human
spirit. Buddhist ethics supports democracy and human rights protection as a
preferable arrangement of social, legal, and religious tolerance. However,
Buddhist ethics views such tolerance and protection as only two of the
conditions for a good human life. Return
[33] See Joanna Macy,
"The Ecological Self: Postmodern Ground for Right Action," Sacred
Interconnections, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany: State University Press of New
York, 1990), 35-48. Return
[34] David E. Shaner
develops the Japanese Buddhist connection between cultivation of character and
a "biophilic" experience of nature in an excellent article, "The
Japanese Experience of Nature," Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, ed.
J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1989),163-82. Return
[35] See Shaner's review
of recent biographies of the Buddha, in which he discusses the nature and
limits of Buddhist hagiography; David E. Shaner, "Biographies of the
Buddha" Philosophy East and West 37 (July 1987), 306-22. Return
[36] Helen Tworkov's Zen
in America:
Profiles of Five Teachers discusses moral concerns in connection with the
behavior of some American Zen teachers, but avoids using the words
"moral" and "ethical" and makes little use of Buddhist
moral tradition to clarify the concerns discussed. Tworkov, Zen in America (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1989). Sandy Boucher reports moral concerns of
many American women growing out of their experiences in American Buddhist
centers; Boucher, Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism.
Return
[37] Frank Kirkpatrick
and I have ventured a comparative philosophical discussion of Buddhist and
Christian models of community in our "Mutual/Personal Community: Buddhist
and Christian Models" (unpublished manuscript, 1990). See Kirkpatrick's
Together Bound: God, History, and the Religious Community (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994). Return
[38] See, for example,
Alasdair MacIntyre's much referred to chapter, "The Virtues, The Unity of
a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition," in After Virtue. His
emphasis on the "narrative" quality of life is not common to all
virtue theorists. The Buddhist notion of "narrative" is, I presume,
sufficiently different from the Christian notion to offer a useful test of
MacIntyre's claims. For example, is the story of Jesus' life, death and
resurrection more "plausible" MacIntyre's criterion) than the story
of Siddhārtha Gautama? Return, Copyright 1994, http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/index.html
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Source: http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/