Buddhist Ethics

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Buddhism Entries

2011-06-11T03:40:00.000-07:00

Vasubandhu
Jonathan C. Gold
Gorampa [go rams pa]
Constance Kassor

Śāntarakṣita
James Blumenthal

Madhyamaka
Richard Hayes

Ethics in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism
Charles Goodman

Tibetan Epistemology and Philosophy of Language
Pascale Hugon

The Theory of Two Truths in Tibet
Sonam Thakchoe

Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy
Christian Coseru

Nāgārjuna
Jan Westerhoff

The Theory of Two Truths in India
Sonam Thakchoe

Language and Testimony in Classical Indian Philosophy
Madhav Deshpande

Logic in Classical Indian Philosophy
Brendan Gillon

Epistemology in Classical Indian Philosophy
Stephen Phillips

Kum ārila
Daniel Arnold

Abhidharma
Noa Ronkin

Buddha
Mark Siderits

The Concept of Emotion in Classical Indian Philosophy
Joerg Tuske

Analytic Philosophy in Early Modern India
Jonardon Ganeri

Perceptual Experience and Concepts in Classical Indian Philosophy
Monima Chadha

* Via Jan Westerhoff on H-Buddhism

Kant and the right to Lie

2011-06-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Kant's ethics surrounding truth and lies is quite complex, even though it is often taught with the simplistic example: if a murderer comes to your house and asks you where his desired victim is; and you're hiding that victim, Kant says it's wrong to lie. Ergo, according to Kant, you must tell the murderer where the person is. This example is at best horribly misleading. Here is an excerpt where Kant explains just such an example:

"I can also, however, commit a falsiloquium, when my intent is to hide
my intentions from the other, and he can also presume that I shall do so,
since his own purpose is to make a wrongful use of the truth. If an enemy,
for example, takes me by the throat and demands to know where my
money is kept, I can hide the information here, since he means to misuse
the truth. That is still no mendacium for the other knows that I shall
withhold the information, and that he also has no right whatever to de-
mand the truth from me...

Not every untruth is a lie; it is so only if there is an express declaration of my willingness to inform the other of my thought. Every lie is objectionable and deserving of contempt, for once we declare that we are telling the other our thoughts..."

From his Lectures on Ethics, p.203

[INDOLOGY] Summer courses in Oxford

2010-06-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

A wonderful opportunity for those in/around England this summer. I would definitely attend if I could. Next year...

The Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and the Society for the Wider

Understanding of the Buddhist Tradition are offering two free courses

in Oxford this summer.

1. Pali Summer School. The Society for the Wider Understanding of the

Buddhist Tradition (So-Wide) offers an intensive Pali course this

summer, 14-26 August inclusive.

Aim. At the end of the course you should be able, using the normal

aids available, i.e. dictionaries, grammars and translations, slowly

to read a Pali canonical text and understand it for yourself.

Is this really possible? I devised the course and have already given

it five times with great success. Pali can be learnt in twelve days

because the aim is only to read it, not to write or speak it â€“ though

you do learn to pronounce it and recite a few chants. There is also

much less emphasis on memorisation than in a traditional course: why

memorise things you can easily look up?

Method. Accordingly, the course is built on learning how to use the

Pali-English Dictionary published by the Pali Text Society (www.palitext.com

). The course begins with learning Pali alphabetical order (it is a

good idea to start on this before arriving) and throughout the course

each pupil is constantly using the Dictionary. Tables of the main

grammatical forms are supplied and, again, students constantly consult

them for themselves, until they become familiar.

You are strongly encouraged to buy your own copy of the Dictionary.

If you live overseas and do not want to carry it to Oxford, you may

ask the Pali Text Society, when you buy it, to post it to you at the

OCBS Office (address below).

Students and teachers sit round a table together

throughout the course. Students are urged to keep asking questions,

and to work in cooperation.

Organisation. The first day, 14 August, is in a sense preliminary.

Mr. Geoffrey Bamford will explain the grammatical terms and principles

you need to understand for the course. Experience has shown us that

unless you have already studied Latin, Greek or Sanskrit you

definitely should attend.

The rest of the course is extremely intensive. It is

cumulative, so that to miss an early lesson is disastrous. The one

rigid rule is that no one may miss a class in the first week. We

shall work out the precise timetable when we meet, but the general

pattern will be that there will be classes each day from 9.30 to 5.30,

with a long lunch break. There will be homework every evening.

The course will end at mid-day on Thursday 26th; I hope

we can then all lunch together.

Content. We shall start to read original texts from the first

Monday. I shall be open to suggestions about texts to read. Besides

the Pali language, the course will discuss the Pali canon and many

questions concerning the Buddhaâ€™s teaching and our evidence for it.

Practical Arrangements. The course will take place at the main

(Headington) campus of Oxford Brookes University. Students who do not

live locally will be housed in single rooms in Clive Booth Hall

(formerly Morrell Hall), which is ten minutes easy walk from the main

campus on the Gipsy Lane site, where the classes will be held

(http://www.brookes.ac.uk/studying/accommodation/halls/clivebooth

). I am afraid that normally there is no parking available.

There are cooking facilities at Clive Booth Hall, at no extra charge.

There are bar and cafeteria facilities, including breakfast, on the

Gipsy Lane site, except on Sundays, and we shall ourselves maintain a

supply of tea and coffee in the lecture room. The charge for the

bedroom is £25.00 per night, payable in advance for the whole course.

My tuition and course materials are provided free, but we

have to pay for some teaching assistance, the lecture room and some

other expenses. We are therefore charging each student £150.00.

Since this sum will not entirely cover our expenses, any further

donation will be very welcome.

Booking. Please apply to me, Richard Gombrich, at

Richard.gombrich@balliol.ox.ac.uk

, asap. When applying, please supply full contact details, including

telephone, and let me know your highest educational qualification. We

also need to know whether you require accommodation, and if so whether

you want it for the night of Friday 13 August. The closing date for

applications is 14 July and by that date we require payment in

advance. Normally that would be £325 for accommodation (if you are

staying the first Friday night) + £150 fee, total: £475.00. If you

feel you can afford to make that up to or towards £1,000, so much the

better. Please send a sterling cheque payable to the Society for the

Wider Understanding of the Buddhist Tradition. I am afraid it is too

expensive for us to accept payment in a foreign currency. Please

address your payment to OCBS Office attention Hazel Benyon, Wolfson

College, Linton Road, Oxford OX2 6UD.

Admittance will be first come, first served. No more than 14 will

be admitted, so hurry to book a place.

Bookings should be made through me, and all inquiries addressed to me.

Richard Gombrich (Richard.gombrich@balliol.ox.ac.uk)

Enlightened View, from Charles Goodman

2010-05-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

I'm working my way through Charles Goodman's excellent Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics, and finding gem after gem of clarity and wisdom.

That might be surprising considering I'm a Kantian (a la Wood) studying under a Virtue ethicist (Keown) and Goodman is a sturdy defender of Consequentialism. It just goes to show that wisdom can work its way around our silly (at times) categories of things.

Today I just wanted to share his brief statement on enlightened ethics:

.... enlightened beings act fully spontaneously, out of innate great compassion, without having to engage in practical reasoning. (p.125)

If asked though, such beings could quickly explain their actions based on the Buddhist scheme of their choosing (be it Kantian, Virtue based, or Consequentialist...).

A Comparative Study of Early Buddhism and Kantian Philosophy - reviewed

2010-03-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

Originally posted at American Buddhist Perspective here and here.

A comparative study of early Buddhism and Kantian philosophy by S.G.M. Weerasinghe

This is essentially the topic of my doctoral thesis, and here it is, all in 88 pages plus a glossary and index. Sadly though, I can't really recommend the book. Even though it's short (usually a plus in my world) and covers topics quite dear to my heart, it also has more than its share of flaws. To start, it's written from something of a Buddhist triumphalist standpoint. Statements like "Early Buddhist philosophy is a royal highway for all those who wish to attain the summum bonum. the ideal of human life. It is a remarkable religio-philosophy complete in every respect" (p.11) are nice, but they're a clear sign that scholarly objectivity (an ideal, never actualized) is not going to be present.

On the other hand, the suggestion that "The perfection of morality cannot be achieved without an innumerable number of rebirths (in saṃsāra). Thus the idea of rebirth is implied in Kantianism" (p.9) also shows a total lack of sensitivity to the context of Kant's writing. Particularly appalling is the claim, a few pages later that Kant's "kingdom of ends" is a "fairy tale" from a Buddhist point of view. The Kingdom of Ends is for Kant a sort of heavenly ideal - not a blissed-out happy-go-lucky heaven, but simply one in which all beings treat each other out of respect, i.e. all beings act fully morally.

There are many commendable points though.

The comparison of Kant's antinomies (pairs of opposing propositions that both cannot be true but could not be proved either way) and the Buddha's silence on certain metaphysical questions is helpful and informative. In Kant's works these include the propositions that

the world is infinite or finite,
all composite things are made up of simple parts, or there are no simple parts,
free-will or determinism is true, and
there is or is not a necessary being (God).

Discussing Kant's response, Weerasinghe writes:

Kant shows that both thesis and antithesis in the above ‘four pairs’ can equally be supported with a (seemingly) valid proof (CPR., A 426 B 454 - A 463 B 491). Therefore he concludes that they are all pseudo-rational assertions (Ger. vernünftelnde Behauptungen) appearing to rest on an empty concept (Ger. einen leeren Begriff ) (CPR., A 494 B 518). In other words Kant implies that they are all wrong propositions (i.e. judgements) originated from a wrong assumption (i.e. the concept of the world) based on the category of totality (CPR., A 426 B 454 - A 428 B 456) and consequently are having no validity in themselves. (p.31)

This sounds much like the analyses of Buddha's response to the wanderer Vacchagotta in The Grouped Sayings by the Buddha. Samyutta Nikāya. Book III 257-263 The Vacchagotta section 33. Thread on Not Knowing: Aññānā Sutta (1-55). As he points out, Vacchagotta posed similar questions to the Buddha out of "curiosity without any ethical aim" (p.33).

The chapter comparing the Epistemology (theory of knowledge) of Kant and the Buddha also furthers the Kant-bashing and Buddha-loving of previous chapters, while not failing to point out some central ideas of each.

Thus our empirical knowledge, according to Kant, is a reconstruction of what we experience in our daily life. In other words, it is a distortion of the true picture of the external world or, for that matter, anything which is experienced as knowledge. (p.41)

This is well-compared to the Buddha's concept of ignorance (avijjā) giving rise to our perception of the world of compound objects. To see without ignorance is to see the voidness of all things.

I'll stop there for tonight. Tomorrow I'll finish up with the Epistemology and the largest chapter, Ethics. Then, maybe, I'll get back to Buddhism, Brain, and Mind, a thought-stream I started over a week ago and left hanging. Oh, and then there are some Buddha-barn pics to post... Should be a fun Monday. :)

Part 2:

A comparative study of early Buddhism and Kantian philosophy by S.G.M. Weerasingh

One of the first things that drew me both to Kantian and Buddhist ethics was the notion of a morality that is at once transcendent and imminent. This means that there is a sense in which morality lies beyond our normal conceptions of the world and yet it is accessible to us always. In Buddhism it is beyond our normal conceptions because of egoic ignorance, fed by our clinging to pleasures and pushing away of negative feelings. Insofar as we are unenlightened, we all do this. Moments of awareness help break the habit-cycle.

In Kant's works we are dominated by heteronomy - other (hetero) laws (nomos). To be ruled by heteronomy is to be subservient, subservient to our desires for power, addictions, and even moral and political rules set down by others. It is by employment of reason that we begin to untangle ourselves from these laws - choosing those we follow instead of blindly following.

But hitherto I have seen little or no mention of the Pāli term papañca (Skt. prapañca), explained by Weerasinghe here in relation to Kant's use of 'phenomena':

The Kantian concept of phenomena immediately reminds us at the doctrine olpapa4ca in early Buddhism The word papañca (Skt. prapañca) derived from pra+√pañc, to spread out, conveys the sense of expansion, diffuseness and manifoldness (cf: PTS., Dic. q.v.). In doctrinal use it signifies expansion, diffuseness or manifoldness of the world we perceive with our senses. It may also refer to the ‘phenomenal world’ in general, and to the ‘mental attitude of worldliness.’ (p.48)

Keown's Oxford Dictionary of Buddhism (Danny Fisher informed me in January that "there's an App for that" - you can download the whole thing to your iPhone/iPod) has no entry for papañca but does have prapañca on page 220: "Term meaning 'proliferation', in the sense of the multiplication of erroneous concepts, ideas, and ideologies which obscure the true nature of reality...." NYANATILOKA MAHATHERA's great Buddhist Dictionary has a more detailed explanation, including references here:

Dhp. 254: "Mankind delights in the diffuseness of the world, the Perfect Ones are free from such diffuseness"(papañcābhiratā pajā, nippapañca tathāgatā). - The 8th of the 'thoughts of a great man' (mahā-purisa-vitakka; A. VIII, 30) has: "This Dhamma is for one who delights in non-diffuseness (the unworldly, Nibbāna); it is not for him who delights in worldliness (papañca).

So in Buddhism papañca appears to have a clearly negative flavor not found in Kant's understanding of phenomena, which in Caygill's Kant Dictionary is given a much more nuanced treatment than either Weerasinghe or I have presented. But they are similar in suggesting a 'this-world' (understanding) and a transcendent understanding - one which is fully in the flow/flux of reality free from conceptual proliferation.

ETHICS

The opening assertion that the:

Buddhist revolution in ethics consists of the discovery that "one is responsible for ones deeds (kamma)". That is that one is the cause of ones predicament. Hence one is the creator of oneself. So the solution to the problem of suffering is within oneself and not in the hands of a supposed creator-God. (p.58)

does indeed seem to resonate well with the teaching of Early Buddhism (later forms of Buddhism rely on the logic of not-self to move away from this teaching somewhat). Weerasinghe is unfortunately caught up by Kant's insistence in a belief in God even more than usual in this section. For Kant, God is simply the agent necessary for ensuring that deeds do have moral consequences, i.e. that good ultimately comes to those who are good and vice versa. It is quite different from karma but it serves much the same role in moral thinking. After ranting on about this for a couple pages, we find this conclusion:

Thus we may notice that the Kantian view of ethics is not consistent and systematic in comparison to the moral philosophy of early Buddhism which is consistent, systematic and founded on an ethico-psychological basis. (p.61)

In fact most modern scholars would say the opposite, that Kant is systematic and Early Buddhism is somewhat lacking in clarity (though clearly filled with various 'moral' teachings). Back to Early Buddhism, we find:

(i) Morality needs no religion to support it. (ii) This idea is well established in EB. which maintains that dhamma or morality is something independent and is discovered by the Buddhas from epoch to epoch. (iii) Morality in EB. [is] atheistic to the core has nothing to do with any divine being. (p.62)

And likewise in both Kant and Buddhism is found a teaching of morality as a discovery (not an invention, social norm, revelation, etc.). "According to Buddhism morality means, inter alia, to live in accordance with what is implicit in the nature of things" (p.64).

While Weerasinghe goes on to be overly harsh on Kant (and outright wrong in too many places to address) and praising of early Buddhism, his criticism that Kant is missing the applied aspect of ethics seems fair (cf. p.70). Kant was at the same time perhaps too confident in humanities ability to use reason to evaluate motivations and break free from superstition and manipulation, as well as pessimistic that one could ever truly do this in this lifetime.

But beyond this, Weerasinghe's accusations and confusions only continue - for instance lambasting Kant for his thoughts on human evil (suggesting that Kant painted a "pathetic picture of man"(p.65)), and praising him for his philosophy of the Good will, which is by it's own nature good as "a great teaching apparently unknown to, and unheard of in the then Western philosophy" (p. 77). One assertion, which would be merely amusing if it weren't in a supposedly academic text is that those aspects of Kant that are good and useful are "not European, but Indian in spirit" (pp. 85-86 emphasis in original). Sigh.

As I suggested in my last post, it's a hard book to recommend. The book didn't make any real splash in the Western academic world, so even academics seem to have ignored it. It has a fair number of typos, is not terribly easy to get ahold of, and sadly hacks up Kantian philosophy. Between the last comment I quoted and the one starting the book in my last post, "Early Buddhist philosophy is a royal highway..." you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Selected Q & A from the Comments:

From Tom:

Speaking of "kingdom of ends," the local library here tells me "Creating a Kingdom of Ends" is ready for me to pick up. I ordered the book based on a post in one of your other blogs from 2 1/2 years ago that reread a handfull of days ago.

Kind Mr. Whitaker, since you are more of a Kantian than Mr/Ms Weerasinghe, can you give me your response [on behalf of Buddhism] to the "kingdom of ends?"

Justin:

Great book, Tom - let me know what you think of it. If I understand your question correctly, you'd like me to give a Buddhist version of the Kingdom of ends. Such a kingdom would simply be the end result of the Bodhisattva's vow - where all beings are awakened from suffering and ignorance. Is this technically possible? Not really in any of our lifetimes - so some could call it an empty wish. But it's an ideal we do well to strive for, in this lifetime and, if there are more, in those as well.

Tom:

OK. I know I stupid as dirt, but put up with me for a moment.

Can you expound on this: "For Kant, God is simply the agent necessary for ensuring that deeds do have moral consequences, i.e. that good ultimately comes to those who are good and vice versa."

How does Kant perceive God!? A guy-like superbeing on a cloud with an intense aversion to sin? How does this agency function? Are gears or computers a part of God?

Worldliness is "diffuse," you say. I am trying to understand the sense in which that is so, employing my probably-diffuse mind. A good mind, then, is more focussed? Attentive? Won't have typos in his book?

Justin:

Oh much wiser than dirt, Tom: "How does Kant perceive God!?"

That's just it. He doesn't perceive God at all, for God (like morality) lies on the other half of the noumenal/phenomenal divide from perception. God is just an "idea" of perfection that we *need* to believe in in order to do the often hard work of being moral. In that sense he's more like the Buddha (as a perfectly awakened being, not just a great teacher) than he is like the action of karma.

A good mind, I think, is focused, and able to balance both the manifold world (conventional reality) and the world of flux and no-self-natureness (ultimate reality).

Dhammapada: life is hard

2010-03-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

244-245(accesstoinsight)

 Life's easy to live for someone unscrupulous,  cunning as a crow,  corrupt, back-biting,  forward, & brash; but for someone who's constantly  scrupulous, cautious,  observant, sincere,  pure in his livelihood,  clean in his pursuits,         it's hard.

Dhamma as indispensible

2010-02-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

The following from Bhikkhu Bodhi appears to present an argument against Aristotelianism or reducing or getting rid of cosmology/metaphysics:

The importance of this directly visible side of Dhamma practice cannot be underestimated, as it serves to confirm our confidence in the liberating efficacy of the Buddhist path. However, to downplay the doctrine of rebirth and explain the entire import of the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced self-awareness is to deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so one seriously risks reducing it in the end to little more than a sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy. - http://www.vipassana.org/resources/bodhi/dhamma_without_rebirth.php (emphasis mine)

Buddhist Publication Society Newsletter cover essay #6 (Spring 1987)
Copyright © 1987 Buddhist Publication Society

If we incorporate this into our understanding of Buddhist ethics, it means we must object (at least in par) to Damien Keown's (1992/2001) focus on the goal of nirvana "in this lifetime." Of course he does this to maintain a focus on a robust moral agent and avoid issues of rebirth and the moral nature of an awakened one. He does address both of these but seeks to keep the focus on moral conduct, sīla.

But arguments such as Bhikkhu Bodhi's above, and others, suggest that we broaden the discussion to understand Dhamma in its "full breadth and profundity." In doing so, we must examine Dhamma in all its metaphysical/cosmological complexity.

Peter Harvey in - Destroying Mara Forever

2010-01-31T21:01:00.000-08:00

coming soon... (sounds like a cheesy horror movie, I know)

Destroying Mara Forever 1

2010-01-31T15:38:00.000-08:00

I've completed the first chapter, "Śāntideva, Virtue, and Consequentialism" by the great Śāntideva and Buddhist ethics scholar, Barbara Clayton.

The chapter argues for a version of "character consequentialism" (p.15) or "perfectionist consequentialism" (p.15 and 26) to make sense of Buddhist --- specifically Māhāyana --- specifically Śāntideva ethics. I note that because it should be an open question whether and/or how Śāntideva deviates from prior Buddhist ethics.

Clayton nods to this question when suggesting that Keown has it right (in his 1992 The Nature of Buddhist Ethics and the 1996 article "Karma, Character, and Consequentialism") when he suggests that if Buddhist ethics is consequentialist, it must be a form of ethical egoism (an ethics based on consequences for oneself) and this is clearly wrong (p.17). Keown argues this because in early Buddhism the consequences one is seeking are the elimination of one's own greed, hatred and delusion (aka the roots of suffering). So if we call Buddhism consequentialist, we are saying it is quite selfish indeed. Keown argues, rightly, that this misses the point of early Buddhist ethics, which instead focuses heavily on cultivating right kinds of other-regarding behavior.

But, Clayton adds, this just the case for Theravādin Buddhism. Buddhists who focus on the bodhisattva ideal explicitly identify all suffering as equal - refusing to differentiate the suffering of oneself and others. The consequence sought is not merely removing one's own suffering, but that of all beings. She notes several instances of this, notable one from the Compendium:

"When fear and suffering are dear neither to me nor others, what is special about me, that I protect myself and not others?" - p.19; ŚS 2.10-11 (Cf. BCA 8.96)

Universalism and Agent-neutrality

Two related notions are discussed here: Universalism and "Agent-neutrality." Universalism means that ones ethics are concerned with all beings, clearly a trait of Māhāyana ethics. And arguably not a feature of Aristotelian virtue ethics - the analogue argued for by Keown. Agent-neutrality, expressed in Śāntideva's quote above, denies the possibility of privileging one person's pain or pleasure above others. Clayton clarifies that not all of Śāntideva's work is so clear on this issue, including, for example, the suggestion that it would be worse to impede the progress of a bodhisattva than to kill every man, woman and child in India! (p.20, ŚS 83.20 - 84.5)

This, it is worried, might disqualify Śāntideva from being a consequentialist. But, Clayton argues, the reasoning here is still consequentialist in nature. The reasoning is that the results of impeding a bodhisattva, even the slightest bit, is an incredibly horrible thing to do because a bodhisattva does so much good in the world.

My sense that Śāntideva's words here can only be religious hyperbole, to be read with reverence and gratitude to bodhisattvas, and not to be read as a rational argument. Thought about rationally, too many obvious questions arise.

Along similarly troubling grounds is Śāntideva's claim that even a transgression of precepts rooted in the defilement of passion (rāga) may be acceptable if it benefits others (somehow). (p.23) It is here that the consequentialist strain in Śāntideva becomes worrisome.

Moral Accounting

A third concept that Clayton brings up is moral accounting (pp.24-25). Moral accounting, weighing out the pros and cons of a given act or rule, is a hallmark of consequentialist theories. And Keown, rightly again, argued at length that this is not the way Buddhists derive their ethics. The first precept, for instance, is not there because "more or less" it reduces suffering.

Clayton argues, however, that Śāntideva engages in just this sort of moral reasoning. Quoting again from the ŚS, I paraphrase, "what good is one's happiness when the world is suffering? What good is it when a body is in flames to have a fingernail unburnt?" This, Clayton suggests, is Śāntideva's way of saying that a little suffering (on his part) should be accepted if it relieves more suffering in others.

However, it is not clear to me that this is the kind of reasoning going on. It may not be a case of ethical reasoning at all, but rather exhortational, "hey, I, we, you have got work to do!" Based on pan-Buddhist karmic theory, one's happiness is a result of past good deeds, and, according to pan-Buddhist psychological theory, unless we're awakened, we're ignorant and thus likely to misunderstand this and waste our lives and all the good karma in them. So Śāntideva is likely just rousing these obvious understandings in his reader as a pep-talk. Based solely on the lines quoted, we needn't read into this some deeper moral accounting, as Clayton does: "bodhisattvas should do whatever will ultimately yield the most benefit to sentient beings."

The problem, here, is that it presents a paradox. Either the bodhisattva is an ignorant chump like you or me and this cannot possibly know what will "ultimately yield the most benefit..." or he/she is awakened and thus will spontaneously, that is, without the need of moral reasoning of this kind, always act in ways that will ultimately yield the most benefit to sentient beings. If the bodhisattva is ignorant, then this "decision rule" is either empty or, like the above, exhortational. If the bodhisattva is awakened, it's just empty.

I'm not sure that this critique of mine holds water and I invite your thoughts on it.

Clayton's article concludes by agreeing with Keown on his critique of the Transcendency Thesis, but comes back to restate her position that this does not disqualify Buddhist ethics, at least in the case of Śāntideva, from being a form of consequentialism.

Update 2/1/10: on second thought, perhaps the paradox is not as intractable as it seems. Even mainstream consequentialists, who have great faith in people's ability to reason and thus make the best decisions, would admit that noone is omniscient and that mistakes happen. So Śāntideva could, too, be making a clearly consequentialist plea/argument here.

Sources of Buddhist Ethics

2010-01-26T09:48:00.001-08:00

The following are thoughts on Buddhist ethics... brainstorming roughly... based on the first sections of Peter Harvey's book, "An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics."

To begin, worldview finds a central place in our examination of Buddhist ethics. How does a Buddhist look out upon the world and view him/herself in it? We are familiar with materialistic or hedonistic worldviews as well as Christian/theist worldviews. But Buddhism is neither of these. Instead it inherits and modifies the Brahmanic worldview of its time, based on the beliefs in karma and rebirth.

Our ethics, our way of living in the world, is largely determined by how we give meaning to the world and events in it, our beliefs, and our environment. For early Buddhists, this was a mix of pre-Buddhist beliefs and the new paradigm of the triple-gem: the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, to which one would "go to for refuge" upon entering the Buddhist path.

The Buddhist path represents a transformation between two other common terms in pan-Indian thought of the time: samsara (the cycle of rebirth) and nirvana (or moksha, liberation). And Buddhist ethics can be considered all of the ways of getting on and staying on that path, from cosmological stories to Vinaya injunctions to meditation and devotional activities.

Harvey (p.10) mentions the Kalama sutta, a famous (in the West) discourse that directs the reader toward his/her personal experience in conjunction with the teachings of wise people. Countless other teachings also give specific directions for finding one's way and staying on the path. Each of these must be taken into account as part of the greater whole of Buddhist ethics. This is opposed to many -mainly Western- attempts to reduce Buddhist ethics to some simple axiom or ideal. Such reductions, such as "end suffering," "achieve nirvana," or "cultivate love" may be possible, but they may not be terribly helpful. Thus, while catchy, they might not get us anywhere in understanding the many ways that Buddhists behave in the world today and in the past.

Some other key terms and themes to follow...

Kant and Religion Review

2010-01-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

Today the following review appeared in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online:

Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Werner S. Pluhar (tr.), Stephen R. Palmquist (intro.), Hackett, 2009, 289pp., $16.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780872209763.

Reviewed by Anthony N. Perovich, Hope College

The review mostly concerns itself with comparing this edition with two previous English translations (and their introductions) of Kant's work. It also comments on Pluhar's other translations of Kant's works, noting that they were well received - so those familiar with his terminology and style can expect much the same here. Noteworthy also is the inclusion of "a glossary of important terms along with their English renderings, an extensive bibliography, and an index for which the German equivalents of the English entries are included" absent in other translations of this work.

Examples of the thoroughness of Pluhar's work include:

"At Ak. 27, Kant describes how the intention to allow no one to achieve superiority over us becomes transformed into an unjust desire to gain superiority over others. In Greene and Hudson the passage passes unnoted. In di Giovanni the reader is invited to compare Kant's comments with Rousseau's Emile, from which four lines are quoted in English translation. Pluhar quotes over seven lines in translation from Emile, including all of the passage cited by di Giovanni -- the additional material does in fact help the reader appreciate Rousseau's position -- and precedes it with the original French."

Of great interest to those seeking greater context is the helpful and brief comparison of the three introductions:

Silber's introduction [to Greene and Hudson's version] in particular contains helpful discussions of Kant's terminology and moral theory. The introduction (by Robert Merrihew Adams) to the paperback edition of the di Giovanni translation is the shortest of the three, but it includes an illuminating discussion of Kant's ideas in the light of his Reformation forebears. The introduction to Pluhar's translation by Stephen R. Palmquist is less concerned with the philosophical analysis of Kant's moral and religious ideas. It makes some attempt to place the work in the context of Kant's life and of his critical philosophy, and in assessing its relevance it offers useful reminders against moral reductionism in the interpretation of the Religion.

This short comparison makes it clear that, unless persuaded otherwise, I will seek out the introductions of both previous editions in addition to the full text of Pluhar/Palmquist.

The review concludes, "For the detailed study of Kant's text in English, this is surely the most informative translation that we have, or are likely to see."

My own interest in this comes, of course, in my work to compare Kantian and Buddhist Ethics. While they diverge more often than run together, each sees religion (in terms of views and beliefs) as secondary to morality (in terms of an innate rightness that we seek to awaken).

For Kant, simply put, morality is natural, innate, and spontaneous (it follows laws, but laws beyond our world of phenomena).

In Buddhism, morality is likewise shining, pure, and merely defiled by superficial unwholesome traits. As Peter Harvey (2000, p.35) notes:

Whatever a person is like on the surface, it is held that the depths of their mind are 'brightly shining' and pure (A. I.10). This depth purity, referred to as the 'embryo of the Truth-attained One' (Tathāgatha-garbha) - or 'Buddha-nature' - in the Mahāyāna, represents the potential for ultimate change: the attainment of enlightenment, and as such is a basis for respecting all beings.

Buddhist Ethics - Context

2010-01-15T18:01:00.000-08:00

First we must see the context in which Buddhism arose. I like using a comparison between the times of the Buddha and our own age as a way to engage the students, so that they think about contemporary society and what it might have been like to be alive in the age of the Buddha.

First we look at six aspects of the "Age of the Wanderers" as it has been called, a time of great change and social transformation in early India.

Then we wonder about similarities between then and now. It's pretty amazing when we put these side by side. We are in an age of incredible change, just as the Buddha was 2500 years ago. Who are the modern Brahmanas and Shramanas?

If the students understand just this, and engage with it intellectually and imaginatively, the rest will flow like the waters of the Ganges...

Notes on Buddhist Ethics, Day one

2010-01-15T14:56:00.000-08:00

Day one is about introductions and orientation. The students will have read much of Walpola Rahula's excellent book, "What the Buddha Taught." So they won't be in the dark about Buddhist concepts, but "Buddhist Ethics" will still be something new to them.

We'll begin with me, my background as a student of philosophy and Buddhist Studies; I could crack a joke about studying PS and BS, but I have a feeling I'd be the only one laughing. As such, I'm most interested in ideas (and hence texts). But I also see the importance of looking at what people actually do. So while we look at and examine texts, we should ask what contextual factors influenced these ideas and how the ideas were put into practice, if indeed they ever were.

I'm also a practitioner of Buddhism - having practiced in many traditions and never formally setting roots in any. That said, I'm mostly familiar with practices and texts of the Theravadin tradition.

Now for some Buddhist Ethics. What is it? Where do we find it?

Ethics might be:

a set of principles of right conduct, or
a theory or system of moral values.

Ethics also is:

The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy, and
The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession: e.g. medical ethics.

What we are doing here is the third one, and what we'll look at are the first two.

"Buddhism" is sometimes hard to pin down too. But as students or scholars, the usual convention is to start with the historical person, Siddhartha Gautama, the body of teachings attributed to him, and the community that formed around him in his lifetime and after. These are known to Buddhists as the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha; the three jewels, or the three refuges.

Because the tradition is so old, with the Buddha living approximately from 483-403 BCE, there have been countless historical developments in "Buddhism." Today we might wish to highlight the many different "Buddhisms" by pointing out the differences between Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, and Thai Buddhism, or between Sakya Tibetan Buddhism and Geluk Tibetan Buddhism, and so on. There are divisions, and divisions within divisions, so that we have to be careful not to think we ever know all of "Buddhism" - even when we know the early texts or the teachings of this or that great master very well.

On the other hand, it cannot be the case that "anything goes" in our definition of Buddhism. If a Westerner picks up and enjoys a book on Buddhism and begins to identify him/herself as a Buddhist, we might wonder: does this person take refuge in the 3 jewels? Does this person believe that good actions bring good rewards and bad actions lead to bad consequences? Does this person practice generosity with the understanding of no-self and/or interconnectedness?

It helps to keep in mind that "Buddhism" itself is a Western term, created by Europeans as they colonized India. There, people who identified themselves as followers of Ganesh or Shiva were lumped into the soup of Hinduism, while those who followed Buddha and Jina Mahavira were deemed different enough (as followers of human teachers rather than deities/gods) to get their own categories as Buddhists and Jains.

For our purposes, we'll stick pretty closely to the core texts. Keeping in mind what is covered in "What the Buddha Taught" we'll look at Peter Harvey's excellent, "Introduction to Buddhist Ethics." This book also traces out the contours of the early texts, and then moves us into some of the changes brought about in Mahayana Buddhism. Here we'll explore the concept of Upaya (or "skillful means") along with such developments as Tantra, Pure Land, Zen and Nichiren Buddhism.

Bases of Buddhist Ethics

2010-01-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

Hiri:

SN 1.18- PTS: S i 7-CDB i 96

Hiri Sutta: Conscience

translated from the Pali by

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Who in the world
is a man constrained by conscience,
who awakens to censure
like a fine stallion to the whip?
Those restrained by conscience
are rare —
those who go through life
always mindful.
Having reached the end
of suffering & stress,
they go through what is uneven
evenly;
go through what is out-of-tune
in tune.

Provenance:
©1998 Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
Transcribed from a file provided by the translator.
This Access to Insight edition is ©1998–2010 John T. Bullitt.
Terms of use: You may copy, reformat, reprint, republish, and redistribute this work in any medium whatsoever, provided that: (1) you only make such copies, etc. available free of charge; (2) you clearly indicate that any derivatives of this work (including translations) are derived from this source document; and (3) you include the full text of this license in any copies or derivatives of this work. Otherwise, all rights reserved. For additional information about this license, see the FAQ.
How to cite this document (one suggested style): "Hiri Sutta: Conscience" (SN 1.18), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, June 7, 2009, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn01/sn01.018.than.html.

8. Hirīsuttaṃ

18. ‘‘Hirīnisedho puriso, koci lokasmiṃ vijjati.

Yo nindaṃ apabodhati [apabodheti (syā. kaṃ. ka.)], asso bhadro kasāmivā’’ti.

‘‘Hirīnisedhā tanuyā, ye caranti sadā satā;

Antaṃ dukkhassa pappuyya, caranti visame sama’’nti.

See also this Hiri Sutta (Snp 2.3), (Pāli).

And this definition for Hiri and Ottappa:

hiri-ottappa [hiri-ottappa]:: "Conscience and concern"; "moral shame and moral dread." These twin emotions — the "guardians of the world" — are associated with all skillful actions. Hiri is an inner conscience that restrains us from doing deeds that would jeopardize our own self-respect; ottappa is a healthy fear of committing unskillful deeds that might bring about harm to ourselves or others. See kamma. [MORE]

Some notes/placeholders for my upcoming lectures in Buddhist Ethics...

Dhammapada 183

2010-01-05T11:14:00.000-08:00

The morality found in all the precepts can be summarized in three simple principles:
'To avoid evil; to do good, to purify the mind.' This is the advice given by all the Buddhas. --(Dhammapada, 183)

In Buddhism, the distinction between what is good and what is bad is very simple: all actions that have their roots in greed, hatred, and delusion that spring from selfishness foster the harmful delusion of selfhood. These action are demeritorious or unskillful or bad. They are called Akusala Kamma. All those actions which are rooted in the virtues of generosity, love and wisdom, are meritorious -- Kusala Kamma. The criteria of good and bad apply whether the actions are of thought, word or deed.

- Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera, "What Buddhists Believe"

How to Teach Buddhist Ethics

2010-01-03T02:25:00.000-08:00

The good news is that I've been invited to sunny southern California to teach Buddhist ethics (/philosophy?) to 50 college students over 5 days this month. The tough thing now is determining just how to go about teaching it.

In fact, the format is a bit up in the air (as far as I know), so some of my assumptions may be incorrect, but here is what I think I'm expected to do.

Give the students, who I assume will be fairly new to Buddhism, an overview of the entirety of Buddhist Ethics (Peter Harvey 2000 style) in 5 hours.

Yikes.

The fact is, I probably will teach right from his book, "An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics."

But I also had the odd notion of trying a dual chronological approach, starting in the 1960s with the publications of Winston King's "In the Hope of Nibbana" and (1970) Melford Spiro's "Buddhism and Society" - setting up the very simple dualism of kammic vs nibbanic Buddhism as an introduction. I could spend a whole lecture describing how these categories have been and could be used to describe the activities of Buddhists the world over (Geoffrey Samuel carefully utilizes them in his brilliant 1990 book on Tibetan Buddhism, "Civilized Shamans").

Then I would move forward to the late 1970s, when a panel at the American Academy of Religions, including Harvey Aronson and Donald Swearer, debunked the simplistic duality of kammic vs nibbanic Buddhism. Then again we could revisit Buddhist history to question the motivations behind certain words or activities by the Buddha and his followers.

Third, I could move forward to 1992 and Damien Keown's sweeping effort to categorize Buddhism as a species of virtue ethics and his critics. Here we would see the difficulties encountered with aspects of upaya (skillful means) which violate basic Buddhist Ethics.

Already I think I have enough for 5 days (easily) with just those three 'movements' in the history of the study of Buddhist Ethics. But I'm guessing this approach, basically saying, "let's look at Buddhist Ethics by seeing what Western scholars say it is," is not the best one, or the one that my employers will be satisfied with.

Perhaps an exploration of the study of Buddhist Ethics is a worthy project down the road. It would of course include folks like Hammalawa Saddhatissa and others who were influenced by and influential in the development of the academic discipline of Buddhist Ethics.

But for now, for students new to the religion, I think Harvey's approach is best.

Buddhist India by TW Rhys Davids

2009-11-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

Some light reading from the 19th century for when time permits:

Buddhist India

Buddhist Morality and the Two Standpoints

2009-11-20T10:49:00.000-08:00

Buddhism presents us with a particular orientation in the world. Another word for this broad sense of orientation in the world is cosmology. It seems that what unites Buddhist throughout history and geography is this shared cosmology: a cosmology in which we find “an ethically oriented “samsaric” cosmology coexist[ing] with an ethically oriented “Buddhic” cosmos brought into being by the achievements and teachings of the Gautama Buddha.” (1)

What that means is that the Buddhist, starting with the historical Buddha himself 2500 years ago, sees the cosmos from two standpoints (to borrow Kantian language). The first standpoint is normal everyday life, dominated by the eight worldly conditions (aṭṭha lokadhammā): gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. But the Buddha elucidated (we could say introduced but that would be incorrect) a path to freedom from all of these, or at least freedom from the “hedonic treadmill” of craving that goes with the former and the mental anguish that tends to accompany the latter.

This “Buddhic” or awakened standpoint is said to be one of perfect mental clarity, understanding of the “true nature” of all things and thus freedom from getting upset with life’s natural ebb and flow. The Buddha and his awakened followers, the arahats, still ate, slept, and had illnesses and died. Yet the difference between them and the unawakened has often been described both in terms of what they lacked, (greed, hatred, delusion) and what they had in terms of simple awareness along the lines of: “when they ate they were aware of themselves eating, when they walked they were aware of themselves walking, when they felt pain they were aware of feeling pain.”

Thus we find the two very different standpoints within Buddhism. Scholars who accuse Buddhism of being overly pessimistic and world or life-denying tend to look only at the former, “samsaric” perspective,(2) and those who find Buddhism to be overly dry and detached have probably only been exposed to the latter, “Buddhic” perspective.(3) A subtle example of the supposed tension between the two perspectives is found in a recent work by Donald Swearer. We begin with the canonical account of the Buddha just after his awakening: (4)

Enough with teaching the Dharma [this is the Buddha thinking to himself]
That even I found hard to reach;
For it will never be perceived
By those who live in lust and hate.

Those dyed in lust, wrapped in darkness
Will never discern this abstruse Dharma
Which goes against the worldly stream,
Subtle, deep, and difficult to see.

"Fortunately," writes Swearer, "Brahma Sahampati intercedes on behalf of the world by pleading with the Buddha: "The world will be lost, the world will perish, since the mind of the Tathagata, accomplished and fully enlightened, inclines to inaction rather than teaching the Dharma." Upon hearing Brahma's plea, the Blessed One "out of compassion for all beings surveyed the world with the eye of a Buddha" and decided to teach the supreme truth he had attained in his enlightenment."

Swearer concludes that, "The story demonstrates that although priority is given to the wisdom of enlightenment, the most complete expression of Buddhahood includes the compassion that motivates the Buddha to teach the dharma to a suffering humanity."

Swearer’s reading of wisdom having priority over compassion, while common, is both outdated and problematic. For instance it raises the obvious question, “did the Buddha not have compassion before his chat with Sahampati?” In his discussion of this question, Damien Keown (1992, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, pp.72-76) finds that, "The Buddha's moral concern was not a consequence of his enlightenment: it preceded it and, indeed, motivated it." (p.73). This conclusion is supported by Aronson in Love and Sympathy in Theravada Buddhism and argued against by Jones, "Theravada Buddhism and Morality" (JAAR 1979).

While still a matter of some dispute, further analysis of the Buddha’s awakening suggest that these two aspects must be fully realized (in fact, complete wisdom is none other than compassion and vice versa), and that textual preference of one over another was likely for pedagogical reasons. This particular instance was likely one of many cases in which aspects of the existing Brahmanic worldview were turned in service of a new Buddhist supremacy. We could go into further depth with the usefulness and difficulties of these analyses, but for the sake of time we will now simply look at a discourse from the Pāli Canon that brings wisdom and compassion as well as ethics and meditation together into a single sphere. (the Karaniya Metta Sutta)

1. Cosmology, Frank E. Reynolds & Jonathan W. Schofer in Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, (2005), p.121.

2. For instance as early as F. Max Müller, see Sully, James (1891) Pessimism: A History and A Criticism, pp.37-38.

3. Famously, Pope John Paul II stated in 1994’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope that Buddhism “in large measure an ‘atheistic’ system’.” He seemed to undercut constructive Catholic-Buddhist dialogue by further pointing out that the ultimate end of man for Christians is union with God, while for Buddhists it is Nirvana (complete detachment, or a state of nothingness).

4. Swearer, “Gautama the Buddha through Christian Eyes: Buddha Loves Me! This I Know, for the Dharma Tells Me So” (BCS 19.1, 1999)

Buddhism and Ecology - Dr. Brook Ziporyn

2009-11-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

(from the video page):

A leading scholar in Tiantai (Tendai) Buddhism will clarify the true nature of reality in relation to environmental concerns and the relevance of Buddhist practice for today.

Lecturer: Dr. Brook Ziporyn
Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Northwestern University

He specializes in Chinese Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. He earned the Ph. D in Chinese philosophy at the University of Michigan and has taught Buddhism and Chinese thought at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the Chung-hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies,Taiwan, and Northwestern University (since 1998).

An interesting journey through both Theravadin and Mahayana sources for a Buddhist Ecology, as well as the difficulties with such a concept (there is no Buddhist word for ecology, for instance). Each of the stories he tells should be ready at hand for students of Buddhism interested in dealing with our ecological crises. Highly recommended.

Clifford Geertz on Religion: GREAT QUOTE

2009-11-03T14:09:00.000-08:00

"what a given religion is-its specific content-is embodied in the images and metaphors its adherents use to characterize reality."

Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 2-3.

Gradual Path

2009-10-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

From the Buddhist Dictionary:

progress of the disciple

Gradual development of the Eightfold Path in the: In many suttas occurs an identical passage that outlines the gradual course of development in the progress of the disciple. There it is shown how this development takes place gradually, and in conformity with laws, from the very first hearing of the doctrine, and from germinating faith and dim comprehension, up to the final realization of deliverance.

"After hearing the law, he is filled with confidence, and he thinks: 'Full of hindrances is household life, a refuse heap; but the homeless life (of a monk) is like the open air. Not easy is it, when one lives at home, to fulfill in all points the rules of the holy life. How if now I were to cut off hair and beard, put on the yellow robe, and go forth from home to the homeless life?' And after a short time, having given up his possessions, great or little, having forsaken a circle of relations, small or large, he cuts off hair and beard, puts on the yellow robe, and goes forth from home to the homeless life.

Having thus left the world, he fulfills the rules of the monks. He avoids the killing of living beings and abstains from it; without stick or sword, conscientious, full of sympathy, he is desirous of the welfare of all living beings. He avoids stealing ... avoids unchastity ... avoids lying ... tale-bearing ... harsh language ... vain talk.

"He abstains from destroying vegetal germs and plants; eats only at one time of the day; keeps aloof from dance, song, music and the visiting of shows; rejects floral adornment, perfumes, ointment, as well as any other kind of adornment and embellishment. High and gorgeous beds he does not use. Gold and silver he does not accept ... keeps aloof from buying and selling things ....

"He contents himself with the robe that protects his body, and with the alms-bowl with which he keeps himself alive. Wherever he goes, he is provided with these two things, just as a winged bird in flying carries its wings along with him.

"By fulfilling this noble domain of morality (sīla) he feels in his heart an irreproachable happiness."

In what follows thereafter it is shown how the disciple watches over his 5 senses and his mind, and by this noble restraint of the senses (indriya-samvara) feels in his heart an unblemished happiness; how in all his actions he is ever mindful and clearly conscious; and how, being equipped with this lofty morality (sīla), and with this noble restraint of the senses (indriya-samvara), and with mindfulness and clear consciousness (sati-sampajañña), he choses a secluded dwelling, and freeing his mind from the 5 hindrances (nīvarana, q.v.) he reaches full concentration (samādhi, q.v.); and how thereafter, by developing insight (vipassanā q.v.) with regard to the impermanency (anicca), misery (dukkha) and impersonality (anattā, q.v.) of all phenomena of existence, he finally realizes deliverance from all cankers and defilements, and thus the assurance arises in him:

"For ever am I liberated,

This is the last time I am born,

No new existence waits for me."

Cf. D.1, 2f; M. 27, 38, 51, 60, 76; A. IV, 198; X, 99: Pug. 239, etc.

Ignatian Spiritual Exercises

2009-10-23T01:24:00.001-07:00

This is a bit off topic from Buddhist Ethics, but interestingly similar... Plus I'm working on a conference paper now comparing these with the Metta-Bhavana (Cultivation of loving-kindness).

Here are some resources I'm working from:

A breakdown of the practices by week/day.
The entire text in its 1914 translation on sacred-texts.
A very brief introduction at Loyola Press.
http://ignatianspirituality.com/

Some Wikipedia stuff (used for general information, not as a source!)

And a couple more:

I'm also using David L. Fleming, SJ's book, "What is Ignatian Spirituality"- available online for free by following that link. Guidance in my writing and research has come from my friend and occasional spiritual advisor, Larry, who himself is a lay Jesuit spiritual director (meaning that he leads people through the Spiritual Exercises). And lastly I have a couple dull historical texts. I'm hoping to get a copy of the original Spiritual Exercises in Spanish, but time and the fact that me Español es mierda may prevent much coming from that endeavor.

For those interested in looking at parallels between this and Buddhist practice, a good place to start is the examen:

This is a version of the five-step Daily Examen that St. Ignatius practiced.

1. Become aware of God’s presence.

2. Review the day with gratitude.

3. Pay attention to your emotions.

4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.

5. Look toward tomorrow.

For details about each step of the Examen, read How Can I Pray?

Ethics as a Path

2009-10-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

I am coming to the conclusion, or at least having the thought, that ethics must be about a path. Now, this is wrong immediately if we consider forms of ethics that at least seem to have nothing to do with a path or pathiness (to throw in a random neologism).

Prima facia Mill's Utilitarianism doesn't seem to be about a path, more of a set of reasonable guidelines for the individual to follow to live in an orderly society. Aristotle's is path-like. Kant's doesn't seem to be (but can be construed as such - and I'll do just that). Buddhism is probably the most obviously path-based. Scanning Rupert Gethin's book, "The Buddhist Path to Awakening" we get a quick set of reasons for understanding early Buddhism as a path:

In their own terms, the Nikāyas teach but two things: dukkha and the cessation of dukkha. In other words, they postulate a situation where there is a problem and a solution where there is no longer a problem, and are concerned with the processes and means involved in passing from the former to the latter. If this is the Nikāyas' ultimate concern then everything in them might be viewed as at least intended to be subordinate to that aim....

In other words we might say that Buddhist thought is about the Buddhist path -- a path that is seen as leading gradually away from dukkha towards its cessation, and as culminating in the awakening from a restless and troubled sleep. (p.18)

And he goes on, discussing the western scholarly attraction to philosophical concepts in early Buddhism:

The point is that in Buddhist thought discussion of paṭicca-samuppāda, anattā, and nibbāna is not pursued as an end in itself but subordinated to the notion of the spiritual path, which is hardly true of the discussion of causality, change and metaphysics in western thought. (p.19)

Some food for thought...

Sutta on Protection, Pali and English

2009-10-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

Maha-mangala Sutta: Protection

translated from the Pali by

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

(with Pāli from here)

4. Maṅgalasuttaṃ

Evaṃ me sutaṃ – ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā sāvatthiyaṃ viharati jetavane anāthapiṇḍikassa ārāme. Atha kho aññatarā devatā abhikkantāya rattiyā abhikkantavaṇṇā kevalakappaṃ jetavanaṃ obhāsetvā yena bhagavā tenupasaṅkami; upasaṅkamitvā bhagavantaṃ abhivādetvā ekamantaṃ aṭṭhāsi. Ekamantaṃ ṭhitā kho sā devatā bhagavantaṃ gāthāya ajjhabhāsi –

I have heard that at one time the Blessed One was staying in Savatthi at Jeta's Grove, Anathapindika's monastery. Then a certain deva, in the far extreme of the night, her extreme radiance lighting up the entirety of Jeta's Grove, approached the Blessed One. On approaching, having bowed down to the Blessed One, she stood to one side. As she stood to one side, she addressed him with a verse.

261.

‘‘Bahū devā manussā ca, maṅgalāni acintayuṃ;

Ākaṅkhamānā sotthānaṃ, brūhi maṅgalamuttamaṃ’’.

Many devas and human beings give thought to protection, desiring well-being. Tell, then, the highest protection.

262.

‘‘Asevanā ca bālānaṃ, paṇḍitānañca sevanā;

Pūjā ca pūjaneyyānaṃ [pūjanīyānaṃ (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī.)], etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

The Buddha: Not consorting with fools, consorting with the wise, paying homage to those worthy of homage: This is the highest protection.

263.

‘‘Patirūpadesavāso ca, pubbe ca katapuññatā;

Attasammāpaṇidhi [attasammāpaṇīdhī (katthaci)] ca, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Living in a civilized land, having made merit in the past, directing oneself rightly: This is the highest protection.

264.

‘‘Bāhusaccañca sippañca, vinayo ca susikkhito;

Subhāsitā ca yā vācā, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Broad knowledge, skill, well-mastered discipline, well-spoken words: This is the highest protection.

265.

‘‘Mātāpitu upaṭṭhānaṃ, puttadārassa saṅgaho;

Anākulā ca kammantā, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Support for one's parents, assistance to one's wife and children, consistency in one's work: This is the highest protection.

266.

‘‘Dānañca dhammacariyā ca, ñātakānañca saṅgaho;

Anavajjāni kammāni, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Giving, living in rectitude, assistance to one's relatives, deeds that are blameless: This is the highest protection.

267.

‘‘Āratī viratī pāpā, majjapānā ca saṃyamo;

Appamādo ca dhammesu, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Avoiding, abstaining from evil; refraining from intoxicants, being heedful of the qualities of the mind: This is the highest protection.

268.

‘‘Gāravo ca nivāto ca, santuṭṭhi ca kataññutā;

Kālena dhammassavanaṃ [dhammasavaṇaṃ (katthaci), dhammasavanaṃ (sī. ka.)], etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Respect, humility, contentment, gratitude, hearing the Dhamma on timely occasions: This is the highest protection.

269.

‘‘Khantī ca sovacassatā, samaṇānañca dassanaṃ;

Kālena dhammasākacchā, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Patience, compliance, seeing contemplatives, discussing the Dhamma on timely occasions: This is the highest protection.

270.

‘‘Tapo ca brahmacariyañca, ariyasaccāna dassanaṃ;

Nibbānasacchikiriyā ca, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

Austerity, celibacy, seeing the Noble Truths, realizing Unbinding: This is the highest protection.

271.

‘‘Phuṭṭhassa lokadhammehi, cittaṃ yassa na kampati;

Asokaṃ virajaṃ khemaṃ, etaṃ maṅgalamuttamaṃ.

A mind that, when touched by the ways of the world, is unshaken, sorrowless, dustless, at rest: This is the highest protection.

272.

‘‘Etādisāni katvāna, sabbatthamaparājitā;

Sabbattha sotthiṃ gacchanti, taṃ tesaṃ maṅgalamuttama’’nti.

Maṅgalasuttaṃ catutthaṃ niṭṭhitaṃ.

Everywhere undefeated when acting in this way, people go everywhere in well-being: This is their highest protection.

"The Khuddakapatha" (Khp 1-9), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, June 7, 2009, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/khp/khp.1-9.than.html.

Instruction is the Greatest Miracle

2009-10-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

Here the Buddha describes instruction as the highest miracle (over psychic powers and telepathy) because it helps many people, not only the one who has it. This is a refutation of the brahman's initial argument that his practice of communal sacrifices is better than the individual Buddhist practice of renunciation because it benefits multitudes.

It's a good passage to cite in refuting the tired old argument of Mahayanists that Theravada is individualistic (Mahayana may push the emphasis of karuna/compassion, but it is very evident in the Theravadin tradition).

I don't understand the Buddha's saying he is "affronted" by the brahmin's praise - perhaps I'm missing something there.

AN 3.60

PTS: A i 168

Thai III.61

Sangarava Sutta: To Sangarava

translated from the Pali by

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Then the brahman Sangarava went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, exchanged courteous greetings with him. After an exchange of friendly greetings & courtesies, he sat to one side. As he was sitting there he said to the Blessed One: "I say, Master Gotama. We brahmans perform sacrifices and get others to perform sacrifices. And whoever performs a sacrifice, whoever gets others to perform a sacrifice, they have all practiced a practice of merit — the business of a sacrifice — [that benefits] countless beings. But whoever, leaving his family, has gone forth from the home life into homelessness, and tames his single self, brings his single self into tune, brings his single self to Unbinding: his practice of merit — this business of going forth — is one [that benefits] only one being."

"Very well then, brahman, in that case I will cross-question you. Answer as you see fit. What do you think? There is the case where a Tathagata appears in the world, a worthy one, rightly-self-awakened, consummate in clear-knowing & conduct, one who has gone the good way, knower of the cosmos, unexcelled trainer of those who can be taught, teacher of human & divine beings, awakened, blessed. He says: 'Here! This is the path, this is the practice that, having practiced, I make known the unexcelled coming ashore in the holy life,1 having directly known & realized it for myself. Come! You, too, practice in such a way that you will remain in the unexcelled coming ashore in the holy life, having directly known & realized it for yourselves.' Thus the Teacher teaches the Dhamma, and others practice, for Suchness. And there are countless hundreds of them, countless thousands of them, countless hundreds of thousands of them. This being the case, is this practice of merit — this business of going-forth — one that benefits countless beings, or only one being?"

"This being the case, Master Gotama, this practice of merit — this business of going-forth — is one that benefits countless beings."

When this was said, Ven. Ananda said to the brahman Sangarava, "Of these two practices, brahman, which appeals to you as the less complicated, the less violent, the more fruitful, & the more rewarding?"

When this was said, the brahman Sangarava said to Ven. Ananda, "Just as with Master Gotama & Master Ananda, I worship them, I praise them [both]."

A second time, Ven. Ananda said to him, "I didn't ask you whom you worship and whom you praise. I ask you, 'Of these two practices, brahman, which appeals to you as the less complicated, the less violent, the more fruitful, & the more rewarding?'"

A second time, the brahman Sangarava said to Ven. Ananda, "Just as with Master Gotama & Master Ananda, I worship them, I praise them [both]."

A third time, Ven. Ananda said to him, "I didn't ask you whom you worship and whom you praise. I ask you, 'Of these two practices, brahman, which appeals to you as the less complicated, the less violent, the more fruitful, & the more rewarding?'"

A third time, the brahman Sangarava said to Ven. Ananda, "Just as with Master Gotama & Master Ananda, I worship them, I praise them [both]."

Then the thought occurred to the Blessed One, "Being asked a legitimate question by Ananda up to the third time, the brahman Sangarava evades it and does not reply to it. Suppose I were to get him out [of this dilemma]."

So the Blessed One said to the brahman Sangarava, "Brahman, what was the topic of conversation that arose today when the royal court sat gathered in the royal palace?"

"Master Gotama, this was the topic of conversation that arose today when the royal court sat gathered in the royal palace: 'In the past, there were fewer monks but more who, endowed with superior human attainments, displayed the miracle of psychic power. Now there are more monks but fewer who, endowed with superior human attainments, display the miracle of psychic power. This, Master Gotama, was the topic of conversation that arose today when the royal court sat gathered in the royal palace."

"Brahman, there are these three miracles. Which three? The miracle of psychic power, the miracle of telepathy, & the miracle of instruction.

"And what is the miracle of psychic power? There is the case where a certain person wields manifold psychic powers. Having been one he becomes many; having been many he becomes one. He appears. He vanishes. He goes unimpeded through walls, ramparts, & mountains as if through space. He dives in and out of the earth as if it were water. He walks on water without sinking as if it were dry land. Sitting cross-legged he flies through the air like a winged bird. With his hand he touches and strokes even the sun & moon, so mighty & powerful. He exercises influence with his body even as far as the Brahma worlds. This is called the miracle of psychic power.

"And what is the miracle of telepathy? There is the case where a certain person reads [another person' thoughts] by means of a sign (vision), [saying,] 'Such is your thinking, here is where your thinking is, thus is your mind.' And however much he may read, that's exactly how it is, and not otherwise.

"Then there is the case where a certain person reads [another person's thoughts], not by means of a sign or vision, but by hearing the voice of human beings, non-human beings, or devas, [saying,] 'Such is your thinking, here is where your thinking is, thus is your mind.' And however much he may read, that's exactly how it is, and not otherwise.

"Then there is the case where a certain person reads [another person's thoughts], not by means of a sign or vision; not by hearing the voice of human beings, non-human beings, or devas; not by hearing the sound of the directed thought & evaluation of a person thinking directed thoughts and evaluating; but by having attained a concentration devoid of directed thought & evaluation, and encompassing the awareness [of the other] with his own awareness, he discerns, 'Given the way the mental fabrications of this venerable person are inclined, the directed thoughts of his mind will immediately think about this.' And however much he may read, that's exactly how it is, and not otherwise.

"This, brahman, is the miracle of telepathy.

"And what is the miracle of instruction? There is the case where a certain person gives instruction in this way: 'Direct your thought in this way, don't direct it in that. Attend to things in this way, don't attend to them in that. Let go of this, enter and remain in that.' This is called the miracle of instruction.

"And these are the three miracles.

"Now, brahman, of these three miracles, which one appeals to you as the highest & most sublime?"

"Master Gotama, of these three miracles, the miracle of psychic power where a certain person wields manifold psychic powers... (and) exercises influence with his body even as far as the Brahma worlds: that is a miracle experienced only by him who does it; it belongs only to him who does it. It seems to me to be of the nature of an illusion.

"As for the miracle where a certain person by means of a sign or vision... by hearing the voice of human beings, non-human beings, or devas... by hearing the sound of the directed thought & evaluation of a person thinking directed thoughts and evaluating, [saying,] 'Such is your thinking, here is where your thinking is, thus is your mind.' ... [or] who by having attained a concentration devoid of directed thought & evaluation, and encompassing the awareness [of the other] with his own awareness, he discerns, 'Given the way the mental fabrications of this venerable person are inclined, the directed thoughts of his mind will immediately think about this.' And however much he may read, that's exactly how it is, and not otherwise: that is a miracle experienced only by him who does it; it belongs only to him who does it. It seems to me to be of the nature of an illusion.

"As for the miracle where a certain person gives instruction in this way: 'Direct your thought in this way, don't direct it in that. Attend to things in this way, don't attend to them in that. Let go of this, enter and remain in that': this is the miracle that, of the three, appeals to me as the highest & most sublime.

"It is amazing, Master Gotama. It is astounding, how well this has been said by Master Gotama. And we hold that Master Gotama is endowed with these three marvels: Master Gotama wields manifold psychic powers... (and) exercises influence with his body even as far as the Brahma worlds. Having attained a concentration devoid of directed thought & evaluation, and encompassing the awareness [of the other] with his own awareness, Master Gotama discerns, 'Given the way the mental fabrications of this venerable person are inclined, the directed thoughts of his mind will immediately think about this.' Master Gotama gives instruction in this way: 'Direct your thought in this way, don't direct it in that. Attend to things in this way, don't attend to them in that. Let go of this, enter and remain in that.'"

"Of course, brahman, you have affronted me with your personal statement, but nevertheless I will respond. Yes, I wield manifold psychic powers... (and) exercise influence with my body even as far as the Brahma worlds; having attained a concentration devoid of directed thought and evaluation, and encompassing the awareness [of the other] with my own awareness, I discern, 'Given the way the mental fabrications of this venerable person are inclined, the directed thoughts of his mind will immediately think about this.' I give instruction in this way: 'Direct your thought in this way, don't direct it in that. Attend to things in this way, don't attend to them in that. Let go of this, enter and remain in that.'"

"Aside from Master Gotama, is there another monk who is endowed with these three miracles?"

"Brahman, there are not only one hundred other monks... two... three... four... five hundred other monks: the monks who are endowed with these three miracles are many more than that."

"And, Master Gotama, where do those monks now live?"

"In this very same community of monks."

"Magnificent, Master Gotama! Magnificent! Just as if he were to place upright what was overturned, to reveal what was hidden, to show the way to one who was lost, or to carry a lamp into the dark so that those with eyes could see forms, in the same way has Master Gotama — through many lines of reasoning — made the Dhamma clear. I go to Master Gotama for refuge, to the Dhamma, & to the community of monks. May Master Gotama remember me as a lay follower who has gone for refuge from this day forward, for life."

Note

1.: The Commentary divides this phrase into two: the "unexcelled" refers to nibbana. The coming ashore (ogadha) in the holy life refers to the path of arahantship. The analogy here is that of crossing a stream: as one approaches the far shore, one reaches a point where one can touch bottom and gain a footing; even though one is not yet on the shore, one is safe from being swept away. Throughout the Canon, however, the word "gaining a footing" is frequently used in connection with Unbinding and the Deathless.

Transcribed from a file provided by the translator.

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How to cite this document (one suggested style): "Sangarava Sutta: To Sangarava" (AN 3.60), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, June 7, 2009, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.060.than.html.

The structure of the Dharma

2009-09-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

I just came across a good quote worth sharing as I journey through phd-thesis-land:

"It seems clear to me that the Buddha would not have been averse to later doctrinal innovation if it occurred within the fundamental structure of the Dharma, that is, if it was of spiritual benefit on the path to nirvāṇa." - 1989 version of his Mahāyāna Buddhism, pp.11-12.

This comes just after another quote worth copying in full - but I'm too lazy at the moment so lets just hope this link works for everyone.

The gist is, I think, in line with what many people argue about Buddhism, that it is anti-essentialist and thus, in a sense, hard to pin down. It does however set a criteria for change: that those changes are helpful/useful. If a doctrine no longer helps, it is to be discarded. Vigorous debate and analysis would thus seem to be encouraged, so that each new generation of students learned for themselves and understood for themselves the truth of things - rather than ever relying on teachings alone.

'Tis worth noting something else Paul writes (on p.3) regarding anti-essentialism in Buddhism [directly in regard to the essentialist fallacy of trying to lump all of Mahāyāna under certain sweeping labels]:

"An ability to look behind unities and see them as merely words, convenient but misleading linguistic constructs, has always formed an important factor in developing insight meditation, the spiritual cultivation which alone will lead to seeing things as they really are, the sine qua non of nirvāṇa, enlightenment, the cessation of moral obscurations and ignorance."

The lesson? While there is no absolute right and wrong out there for us to grasp onto, there are right and wrong (kusala/akusala) moments and ideas for us. Things that are not helpful, not morally wholesome, not conducive to wisdom --- these are wrong. That much we definitely can say about Buddhist ethics.

But we cannot say one MUST meditate, or tithe 10%, or live in a monastery, or this or that... If we know that meditation, generosity, etc will be helpful, wholesome, and/or conducive to wisdom, either for others or ourselves - then we may say they are right and should be done.

This distinction is crucial and should be understood (there I go with my shoulds!). Our ignorant habit of clinging wishes to find an Answer out there that is right and always right and never changing. No such answer is to be found. But there are "a" answers out there, moments of truth, concepts that help, suggestions and even stern admonishments that break us away from our unhealthy habits. These are right, but they are only right in that very moment. Tomorrow they may no longer work, they may in fact be wrong then.

Who knows? Do not cling...

Mighty is Morality - borrowed

2009-08-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Friends:

Morality is the Second Mental Perfection:

Avoiding all Harm;
Doing only Good;
Purifying the Mind;
This is the True Dhamma
of all the Buddhas!
Dhammapada 183

Morality is the foundation,
the initiator & the origin of all,
that is fine, good & very beautiful...
One Must therefore purify morality.
Theragatha 612

Clean morality cultivated to purity brings all success!
Theragatha 608

Morality is a mighty Power!
Morality is a forceful Weapon!
Morality is a supreme Jewel!
Morality is a marvelous Protection!
Theragatha 614

Harmless towards all living beings,
Speaking only kind & wise truths,
Taking nothing not freely given,
Enjoying only one's own partner,
Never abusing drinks or drugs.
Having given up & left all behind
the five harmful actions, such
One truly possess right moral...
AN III 205-6

Ananda once asked the Buddha:
What, Venerable Sir, is the rewarding advantage of morality?
Freedom from regret, Ananda.
And what is the advantage of freedom from regret?
Joy that produces bliss, Ananda.
Bliss then generates happiness.
Happiness enables concentration.
Concentration facilitates vision and knowledge.
Vision and knowledge brings disillusion & detachment
Disillusion & detachment induces direct knowledge of
Certain & Complete Mental Release, Ananda…
AN X.1

Intention always comes first.
Intention is of all states the primer.
By intention are all things initiated.
By construction of mind are all phenomena formed.
So - if with good intention one thinks, speaks or acts:
Joy & pleasure surely follows one like a never-leaving shadow
However!!! - if with evil intention one thinks, speaks or acts:
Pain certainly follows one, like the wheel follows the car.
Dhammapada 1+2

Both the moral & immoral doings;
Both the good & the Bad actions;
That human beings do here;
These are truly only their own possession...!!!
These, they take along with them, when they die & go,
These actions are what follows them, like the shadow,
that never ever leaves...
So do only what is admirable & advantageous,
as an accumulating investment for the future life.
Good prior doings are the only support & help for any being,
when they re-arise in the next world…
SN III 4

Here and now the good-doer rejoices... Even so
after passing away and re-emerging, the doer of
good, reaps only Joy, pleasure and satisfaction ...
So both here and there, the wise with merit well
done & stored, enjoys the purity of prior actions.
Dhammapada 15

Here and now the bad-doer suffers... Even so
after passing away and re-emerging, the doer of
wrong & evil, reaps only pain, despair and regret ...
So both here and there, the fool with wrong views
& bad behavior, suffers agony as the inevitable
effect of prior evil action.
Dhammapada 16

As the yak-ox watch her tail even onto death,
without breaking through, when caught in thorns,
guard your doings as your own life, by avoiding all
overstepping of this fine line, limiting right from wrong.
The Basket of Behaviour, Cariyapitaka

The Bodhisatta once as the Naga serpent King Sankhapala
guarded his precepts of moral habit, even when tortured:
Though pierced with sharp bamboo stakes and hacked with
hunting knives, I raged no anger against these hunters, as this
was my final perfection of Morality!
Sankhapala Jataka no. 524

The 5 precious precepts (pañca-sila):
I accept the training rule of avoiding all killing of breathing beings.
I accept the training rule of not to taking anything, that is not given.
I accept the training rule of abstaining from any sexual misconduct.
I accept the training rule of desisting from all incorrect speech.
I accept the training rule of shun drinks & drugs causing carelessness.

True Buddhists undertake these precious precepts also here:
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/sangha/Sangha_Entry.htm

These are timeless laws of only Good,
which all the mighty Seers of the past
have fully followed & made their Way!

This Virtue of Morality is like Rock.
A Solid Foundation for all Good States!
Immorality creates regret, and thus destroys Joy...
Purity creates calm, and thus the subtle concentration,
which is necessary for gaining all higher understanding!
Only higher Understanding sets completely Free...

More on this basic first cause of all Good: Morality (Sīla)!
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Sila_1_to_5.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Happy_Habbit.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/What_is_Virtue.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Best_Protection.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/III/The_Five_Basics.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/Best_Buddhist_Praxis.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/IV/Sila_Contemplation.htm

More of the 10 mental perfections (paramis):
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/IV/The_Ten_Perfections.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/The_10_mental_perfections_(parami)_in_three_levels.htm

Mighty is Morality!

from: http://what-buddha-said.net/drops/Mighty_is_Morality.htm

Pali Dictionaries - borrowed

2009-08-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

Pali Dictionaries Online

Jan 30th, 2009 by Manuel Batsching

The Pāli Text Society’s Pāli-English Dictionary. An unicode able search engine for the Pāli dictionary by Rhys-Davids and William Stede. This online version is part of the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia project.
Critical Pāli Dictionary. A still proceeding project, which was once founded by Vilhelm Trenckner.
Mettanet Dictionary Online (Pāli-English) (English-Pāli). This project provides a slightly extended html-edition of the concise Pāli dictionary by A.P. Buddhadatta Mahathera. The latter is also available as an offline useable dictionary tool, named Pali Lookup.
Nyānatiloka’s Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrins (English) (German)
Pāli Proper Names (English, Mirror) (Partly German). An abridged html-version of the very book by G. P. Malalasekera (Pāli Text Society).
English<->Pāli Dictionary by the Free Dictionary Project. I don’t know what’s the background of this one. At least it looks fun, as it works similar to LEO.

There is also a Pāli-English dictionary for StarDict.

Footnotes

2009-08-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

This is from Jan Nattier, via H-Buddhism:

There are many other uses of footnotes as well. The following is a brief
selection, from a handout I prepared for graduate students at Indiana
University in 1998:

FUN THINGS TO DO WITH FOOTNOTES*

1. Pre-emptive strike (self-defense)

Here you use the footnote to guess what objections to your line of
argument the reader might bring up, and to refute or defuse them. ("Yes, I
thought of that, but I don't think it holds up and here's why.")

2. Information service (bibliography)

Offer leads to the reader on what interesting and useful literature
exists concerning the subject you're discussing ("Here's an interesting item
you might want to read . . .").

note: this type of footnote also shows that you've read the relevant
literature yourself, and that your reasoning and line of argument is
therefore based on a solid awareness of what other people (and primary
sources) have to say on the subject.

3. Sidelights for specialists

Here you can put information that would not be of interest to your main
target audience (incidentally: a key part of writing a good research paper
or book is to be sure who your audience is!), but would be of great interest
to certain readers. It's better to put such material into a footnote than
in the main text, because it may be so specialized that it will confuse your
main readers, and may also disrupt the flow of the argument.

4. Musings and expressions of uncertainty

It's often best to put such statements as "It's difficult to determine .
. ." and "I have no idea why . . . " into footnotes. It shows you've
thought about these difficult issues, found them intractable, and would be
interested to hear what other people come up with. (If you put such
statements into the main text, it can have the subliminal effect of
weakening the power of your argument.)

5. Requests for work by others

For instance, you can point out that no critical edition of
such-and-such a text has been made, or that there is no useful study in any
western language of the life and times of so-and-so, etc. Such comments can
even inspire someone to write a Ph.D. thesis on the subject!

6. And finally, the standard one: sources

This one, quite simply, is to let the reader know where you got your
information (or quotation) on a specific point. The format of the footnote
should make it as easy as possible for the reader to go and find the book or
article himself/herself.

Note: there are different schools of thought about whether it is or is not
acceptable to put footnote numbers in mid-sentence (I think it's fine,
sometimes even essential; some scholars think it's irritating). The basic
rule is: make sure the footnote number is placed right next to the item to
which it refers. Do not follow the practice (apparently advocated by copy
editors at some presses) of putting footnote numbers only at the end of a
paragraph, even if the note refers to the material in the first sentence!
____________

* On the history of the genre see Anthony Grafton, *The Footnote: A
Curious History* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). For a
how-to-do-it guide see Frank A. Burkle-Young and Sandra R. Maley, *The Art
of the Footnote* (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996).

One last comment: as Richard Bowring has already mentioned, end-notes are
intensely irritating to specialists (and, in line with what I have already
written above, may not be appropriate even for more general readers). For
my part, I avoid publishing with any press that is not willing to set the
notes at the bottom of the page.

Sila, the root of Buddhist Ethics

2009-07-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

Sīla

More Chinese Philosophy

2009-07-08T18:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Amod's blog, I just found this from Manyul Im, a Chinese Philosopher.

I also have a new post at my main blog, American Buddhist Philosopher, on Buddhist Ethics and Kant. My apologies for the schizophrenic nature of my posts in Buddhist Ethics; some day I will merge my personalities of Buddhist Ethics and American Buddhist Philosopher (maybe).

Filial Piety and the Sigalovaada Sutta in China

2009-07-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

In preparation for my upcoming trip to China I'm boning up on Chinese Buddhism - an area where I am woefully ignorant.

As we know, Buddhism has changed to accommodate the particular cultures it has encountered through time. I am currently reading "The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism" by Kenneth Ch'en. In his chapter on Ethics he states that one of the greatest challenges Buddhism hit in China was the cultural propensity toward filial piety, Hsiao.

At first the Buddhists in China simply countered each claim that they were anti-hsiao, pointing to Chinese history to support the righteousness of their practices, such as shaving the head. Eventually though, a more 'positive' stance was taken, meaning that the Buddhists began reaching into their own scriptures and emphasizing those that supported filial piety. Chief among these is the Sigalovaada Sutta, which was translated numerous times by Chinese Buddhists (see p.19).

Several other texts were found as well, including Jataka tails, the lives of Saama (Pali, Shan-tzu in Chinese and Shyaama in Sanskrit) and Moggallaana (Pali, Mu-lien in Chinese and Maudgalyaayana in Sanskrit).

Only at page 50 do we move past the discussion of filial piety and on to Ancestor Worship, a closely related topic. Here we find the following:

There are no known notices of (Buddhist?) clerical participation in memorial services prior to the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 C.E.).
The first likely occurred in 628 CE.
The Chinese Buddhists subscribed to the same post-mortem description as the Tibetans; (the Sarvastivadin, I believe) wherein the 'soul' enteres an intermediate state where it may remain for seven days or seven times seven / 49 days. Buddhists in China turned the Confucian idea of memorials to celebrate gratitude for the departed into necessary merit-generating events to get the 'soul' of the dead to a good location.

Page 55 begins the discussion of the 5 precepts and the Chinese Buddhist attempt to harmonise these with the 5 Norms of Confucian thought:

human-heartedness
righteousness
propriety
knowledge
trust

Usually the 5 precepts were paired directly with these, but in some cases the 2nd precept (not to steal) is paired with the fourth Norm (knowledge), the 3rd (not to commit adultry) is paired with the 2nd Norm (righteousness), and the 4th precept (not to lie) is paired with the 3rd Norm.

The chapter concludes that Buddhism's wide acceptance in China is demonstrably due to its flexibility and creative assimilation of the existing norms (quite literally).

The next chapter is on Politics... ohh, ahh. More on that hopefully before I fly...

Is all Indian philosophy "ethics"?

2009-07-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

An excellent book review that sets up this question, which has been answered in various ways over the years, is here (ND reviews).

The issue usually rests on the meaning of Dharma - as it is accepted that all (Classical/pre-Classical) Indian philosophies are "Dharmic" in nature; that is, they have Dharma as an explicit Ultimate or Absolute. In Buddhism it may be a process-Absolute instead of a substantial one, but it is an absolute nonetheless. It is absolute in the sense that nothing is greater than or beyond it...

This review does a great job of arguing that we deeply question the ethical nature of Dharma, as it is a term that seems to be used in what we would today call ontological or phenomenological ways. And it would be meaningless question-begging to say that, "oh, that all is ethics too!"

Any thoughts?

Prudence

2009-06-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

From Philosoph-L, a summary of worthy contemporary and recent work on the concept of Prudence. Kant and Aristotle were mentioned a few times so I figured it's worth posting.

Literature on Prudence:

Aubenque, ‘La Prudence chez Kant’, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 1975
Bloomfeld, P. (ed.) Morality and Self-Interest.
Beiner, R., Political Judgement (Chicago 1983)
Borma, F.J. and C. Schroeder (eds.), Abwaegende Vernunft (de Gruyter 2004)
Bricker, P., ‘Prudence’. Journal of Philosophy 1980 (7)
Churchman, C.W., ‘Kant – a decision theorist?’ Theory and Decision 1, 1970
Davie, W.E., ‘Being prudent and acting prudently’ American Phil. Quarterly
10 (1), 1973
Fleischacker, S., A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgement and Freedom in
Kant and A. Smith (Princeton 1999)
Garver, E. Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (1987)
Grice, Aspects of Reason.
Hariman, R. (ed.), Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice
(Pennsylvania State U. Press 2003).
Hirschman, A., The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism
before its Triumph (Princeton 1977)
Luckner, A., Klugheit (de Gruyter 2005)
Mabbot, J.D., ‘Prudence’, Proceedings of the Aristot. Society, suppl. Vol.
XXXVI, 6, (1962)
Mabbot, J.D., ‘Reason and Desire’. Philosophy 28 (1953)
Nagel, T. The Possibility of Altruism (1978).
Nussbaum, M., Liberty of Conscience (2008)
Parellada, R., ‘Moral Judgement in States of Equilibrium’, Revista de
Filosofia 31 (2006).
Parrelada, R., ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Practical Wisdom’, Modern Schoolman:
A Quarterly Journal of Philosophy 83 (2005).
Pieper, J., Cardinal Virtues.
Rotenstreich, N., ‘Prudence and Folly’, American Phil. Quart. 22 (2), 1985
Scmidtz, D., ‘Self-Interest: what’s in it for me? Soc. Phil. & Pol. 14
(1), 1997
Steinberger, P. The Concept of Political Judgement (Chicago 1993)
Sturm, T. Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Paderborn: Mentis 2009)
Wieland, W., Kants Rechslehre der Urteilskraft

Snapshot of some Kantian Ethics resources

2009-06-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

Some books:

I would not waste your time with S.G.M. Weerasighe's "A Comparative Study of Early Buddhism and Kantian Philosophy." Even though it sounds fantastic, it's not. I have it. I might pull an idea or two for my thesis (which is practically based on the exact same topic), but probably not.

I WOULD have a look at Philip Olson's "The Discipline of Freedom: A Kantian View of the Role of Moral Precepts in Zen Practice." It is a very good, scholarly (even though the author is a lawyer and zen priest) approach to the topic - though written lucidly so that a lay reader will have no trouble.

Websites of present interest:

GUYER, PAUL (1998, 2004). Kant, Immanuel. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved June 11, 2009, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/DB047

Kant: An Overview

LibriVox - Kant's books read to you!

Lawrence Hinman's Ethics Site.

It all begins with Morality

2009-06-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

Passed on from an email from Bhikkhu Samahita: http://What-Buddha-Said.net

The Blessed Buddha once said:
The rewarding fruition of morality is freedom from regrets!
The rewarding fruition of freedom from regret is gladness!
The rewarding fruition of gladness is rapturous joy!
The rewarding fruition of joy is serene tranquillity!
The rewarding fruition of tranquillity is Happiness!
The rewarding fruition of happiness is concentration!
The rewarding fruition of concentration is knowing & seeing!
The rewarding fruition of knowing & seeing is realism!
The rewarding fruition of realism is disillusion!
The rewarding fruition of disillusion is release!
Step by step does morality thus lead to the highest!
Source: AN 10:1

About Fruition (Phala):
http://what-buddha-said.net/library/DPPN/wtb/n_r/phala.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/library/DPPN/wtb/s_t/saamanna_phala.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/library/DPPN/wtb/a/ariya_puggala.htm

Buddhism and Kant: Pisa 2010

2009-05-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.kant2010.it/index.php/kantkongress/kant2010

Worth a shot!

Dharma as a (transcendent?) foundation for ethics

2009-05-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

As stated in the Saṃyutta Nikāya II 25ff:

‘…whether there is an arising of Tathāgatas or no arising of Tathāgatas, that element still persists, the stableness of the Dhamma, the fixed course of the Dhamma, specific conditionality. A Tathāgata awakens to this and breaks through to it. Having done so, he explains it, teaches it, proclaims it, establishes it, discloses it, analyses it, elucidates it.’[1]

[1] Bhikkhu Bodhi 2000, p.551.

Compassion: Mahayana vs Theravada

2009-04-11T23:05:00.000-07:00

Roshi Robert Aitken (wiki) writes:

Nowhere among Mahayana practices is concern for other beings expressed more
clearly than in the metta practice of loving kindness in Theravada Buddhism. One
begins with a focus upon the self:
May I be free from danger.
May I have mental happiness.
May I have physical happiness.
May I have the ease of well-being. 8
Metta then is directed to those near and dear—may they be free from danger, and so on—then to those about whom one feels neutral, then to enemies, and so on to all beings. Under the guidance of a seasoned teacher, the resistance one feels to this compassionate practice is faced squarely and allowed to wither and disappear.

"Formal Practice: Buddhist or Christian" - Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002)

8) Sharon Salsberg, Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Boston: Sham-
bhala, 1995), p. 32.

Shin Buddhism

2009-04-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

Shin = aka Jōdo Shinshū (浄土真宗 "True Pure Land School")

Based on teachings of Shinran Shonin (May 21, 1173 – January 16, 1263).

Key teaching: gratitude to Amida Buddha. (See Jeff Wilson article here)

Shinran was a student of Hōnen (法然 1133-1212), founder of Jōdo shū "Pure Land."

Gethin poking some fun at modern revisionist scholars

2009-03-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

...the "ethical" portion of the discourse is to be preferred to the "mythic" precisely because it is ethical, and, as we all know, the earliest Buddhist teachings were simple, ethical teachings, unadulterated by myth and superstition; we know that early Buddhist teaching was like this because of the evidence of the rest of the canon. Here the argument becomes one of classic circularity: we arrive at a particular view about the nature of early Buddhism by ignoring portions of the canon and then use that view to argue for the lateness of the portions of the canon we have ignored. (p.215)

From "Cosmology and Meditation: From the Aggañña-Sutta to the Mahāyāna," Rupert Gethin, History of Religions, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Feb., 1997), pp. 183-217

Notes on Keown's review of Kalupahana's Book on Buddhist Ethics 1997

2009-03-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

I have not read the book, "Ethics in Early Buddhism", or anything (that I recall) of substance from David Kalupahana. This review makes me want to read it (eventually) just to see what NOT to do in my own work. I recall being warned to be wary of Kalupahana's ideas by Paul Williams in Bristol as well.

The review is in The Journal of Religion, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 337-340

Notes on Masao Abe's 1983 paper "God, Emptiness, and Ethics"

2009-03-22T15:31:00.000-07:00

Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 3. (1983), pp. 53-60.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.orgsici?sici=0882-0945%281983%293%3C53%3AGEAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0

1: key people:

Masao Abe: Japanese Pure Land practitioner in Kyoto School
Malcolm David Eckel: American, Boston U, philosopher / comparative relig.
Robert Thurman: American scholar of (primarily) Tibetan Buddhism
George E. Rupp: American educator and theologian
John Cobb Jr.: Process philosopher, Christian, social activist
- T.R.V. Murti: Indian Philosopher who wrote the "Central Philosophy of Buddhism..." which was too heavily filled with his own ideas to be a trustworthy source of knowledge of early Buddhism.

2: key themes:

Ultimate reality - ontology - metaphysics
Epistemology
Soteriology
Ethics
Eschatology
Two Truths, Samsara/Nirvana (n.b. this discussion shows the complexity of this doctrine in a way that is parallel to that of Kant's noumenal/phenomenal distinction. Each has both ontological and epistemic import throughout, and each has been misunderstood as applying to only one of these realms)
Buddhist-Christian Dialogue
kataphatic / apophatic (via-negativa)

3: argument:

Christian ethics are Eschatological, pointing to an end-time (judgment, coming of God, etc) and therefore temporal and historically oriented. "Buddhist ethics and its dynamism are
based on this dialectical tension of 'already' and 'not yet', a tension which is not future-oriented but absolute-present-oriented. Thus, in Buddhism, at each and every moment of history, a development toward the endless future is at once the total return to the root and source of history, that is, unchanging eternity." (p.60)

Rupp and Cobb, as per Thurman's criticism, misunderstand this ahistoricity as implying a certain death (or lack) of ethics.

Notable Quotes:

Thurman also emphasizes the inseparability of the insight of Emptiness from
ethical action and the interdependency of metaphysics and ethics in Buddhism. (p.54)

... Murti overlooks the discontinuity between samsara and Nirvana. In Bud-
dhism, samsara is realized as the beginningless and endless process of living-
dying. There is no continuous path from samsara to Nirvana; (p.54)

Buddha thus showed the way to attain Nirvana by realizing the dependent co-
origination of everything in the process of samsara. (p.56)

In order to make this point clearer, let me quote a well known discourse of a
Chinese Zen master, Ch'ing-yuan Wei-hsin of the T'ang dynasty. It runs as
follows:
Thirty years ago, before I began the study of Zen I said, 'Mountains are
mountains; waters are waters.' After I got an insight into the truth of Zen
through the instruction of a good master, I said, 'Mountains are not moun-
tains; waters are not waters.' But now, having attained the abode of final rest
(that is enlightenment), I say, 'Mountains are really mountains; waters are
really waters. ' (p.56)

Along the lines of Wei-hsin, we can state with full justification:
Before Buddhist practice, I thought 'good is good, evil is evil.' When I had
an insight into Buddhist truth, I realized 'good is not good, evil is not evil.'
But now, awakening to true Emptiness I say, 'good is really good; evil is
really evil.' (p.57)

As both Eckel and Thurman emphasize, Buddhist Emptiness is not merely
an ontological ultimate reality devoid of practical commitment. (p.57)

As I suggested before, ethics belongs to conventional truth. However, true
and genuine ethics may be in the mundane world, it cannot arrive at ultimate
truth as Emptiness. There is no continuous path from ethics to Emptiness. In
order to reach Emptiness ethics must be realized as "ignorance" and be turned
over completely. However, this is only the negative aspect of Emptiness. In its
positive and affirmative aspect, in which Emptiness empties itself, ultimate
truth expresses itself in the form of ethics and ethics is thereby reestablished in
light of Emptiness.

Accordingly, although ethics belongs to the conventional realm, it is not
subordinate to the realization of Emptiness, for ultimate truth can express itself
only in the mundane world. In this sense Emptiness may even be said to be
subordinate to ethics. In Madhyama-kakarika,Nagarjuna says, "The ultimate
truth is not taught apart from practical beha~ior."~ In Nagarjuna the ontologi-
cal realization of Emptiness is always connected with practical and soteriological
concerns. (p.58)

When Nirvana is simply taken as the goal, ethics may be dissolved in Emptiness and history may not be clearly realized. This is why throughout its long history Mahayana Buddhism has emphasized "Do not abide in Nirvana" and severely rejected an attachment to Emptiness as a "rigid view of nothingness' ' or a "literal understanding of negativity." (p.59)

Cobb says, "In the Bible, Yahweh is portrayed as righteous, and the appropriate response to Yahweh's righteousness is human righteousness." Due to the transcendent character of this divine righteousness, if I am not wrong, Christian ethics becomes an eschatological ethics which is somewhat future-oriented. (p.59)

Two new journals

2009-03-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

A couple new journals have popped up that may be valuable for those looking to get published in the academic (publish or perish) world:

The International Journal of the Asian Philosophical Association (IJAPA)

and

Public Reason: Journal of Public and Moral Philosophy

Notes from a talk with Damien

2009-01-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

I just had another meeting with Damien Keown, my advisor - this time at an Italian cafe near his home in North Lambeth, London.

A quick summary -

I'm on a good track with things so far.
Needn't worry about defending a holistic approach generally, just perhaps note that there is dispute in this area as a general methodological concern.
Avoid the Vinaya vs Kantian Casuistry area discussed before. Try to stick with the interesting elements that have come up out of the summaries.
Be balanced = equal parts Kant and Buddhism, then analysis and bringing them into discussion (this might be the hardest part)
Keep the focus on the values of each, don't be derailed by the metaphysics.

Ok, off I go...

Kant's Ethics Literature

2009-01-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

Just found this here and figured it would be worth posting.

Secondary Literature Available through JSTOR

Henry Allison, "Morality and Freedom: Kant's Reciprocity Thesis"
Stephen Darwall, "Autonomist Internalism and the Justification of Morals"
Stephen Darwall, "Kantian Practical Reason Defended"
Stephen Darwall, "Two Kinds of Respect"
David Gauthier, "The Unity of Reason: A Subversive Reinterpretation of Kant"
Barbara Herman, "Mutual Aid and Respect for Persons"
Barbara Herman, "On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty"
Barbara Herman, "The Practice of Moral Judgment"
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., "Humanity as an End in Itself"
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., "Kantian Constructivism in Ethics"
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., "The Hypothetical Imperative"
Christine Korsgaard, "Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value"
Christine Korsgaard, "Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations"
Christine Korsgaard, "The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil"
Andrews Reath, "Legislating the Moral Law"

Kant on Animals, not so different from Buddha?

2009-01-07T20:11:00.001-08:00

For both Buddhism and Kant, there is something special about humanity even though we clearly are (biologically) mere animals. One of Kant's key statements on the difference comes here

“Thus what remains to us for indicating the human being’s class in the system of living nature and thus characterizing him is nothing but this: he has a character that he himself makes, in that he has the faculty of perfecting himself in accordance with ends he takes for himself; whereby he can make himself, from an animal endowed with a capacity for reason (animal rationabilis), into a rational animal (animal rationale); and as such he first, preserves himself and his species; second; exercises, instructs and brings up his species for domestic society; and third, governs it as a whole that is systematic (ordered in accordance with rational principles) and fitted for society” (Ak 7:321-322).

(borrowed from Allen W. Wood's paper here) Wood goes on to say that, "Following Rousseau, Kant identifies as the distinctive feature of humanity the faculty of self-perfection. Kant rejects the traditional definition of the human being as animal rationale, allowing only that the human being is an animal rationabilis (Ak 7:321). "

This, it seems, is similar to Buddhist statements of animals: that they lack the potential for awakening. Or is this not so? Is this a later development perhaps? What do the early (Pali) texts say about animals and the difference between us (human-animals) and them (non-human animals).

THE COSMOLOGICAL CONTEXT

2008-12-29T13:50:00.000-08:00

"Cosmology orients us. It provides us a place within the universe, a home where
our story can be told in such a way that it makes sense to ourselves and the
people with whom we live. For millennia, the earth and water, the light, the
weather, and the heavens have been accounted for in myriad tales from diverse
cultures. Humans have found meaning in reading their own story against the story
of the place in which they find themselves. From the local shrines arising out
of archaic sensibilities to the elaborate Ptolemaic spheres and Dante-esque
hells of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, the study of the cosmos begins
and ends with an exploration of self. For the past 300 years there has been a
slow and steady erosion of cos- mological theory. "

Christopher Key Chappel - Thomas Berry, Buddhism, and the New Cosmology
Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 18 (1998), pp. 147-154

And so it is with our study of Buddhist Ethics. We must understand the cosmology of Buddhism, the story that orients us - oriented the Buddha and his earliest followers. Yes, the study of specific terms and doctrines will shed light on us and the meaning of Buddhist Ethics, but without the cosmology, the framework, we tend to be shining a particularly bright beam on tiny specks of earth before us. What is needed is a greater understanding of the path as a whole...

Meditation and the Moral Cosmology of Buddhism

2008-12-22T15:35:00.000-08:00

That's a title idea for a talk I will give at The University of Montana next spring. I want to discuss how meditation is filtering into modern society from the East (particularly from Buddhism, of course). But I also do want to cover some of the theoretical or cosmological significance of meditation and ethics from a Buddhist POV.

The notion will be that Meditation 'atunes' one to the cosmos, or the Dharma. It is a sort of 'turning away from' the mundane way of seeing life - a way dominated by greed, aversion, and delusion.

...

More to come...

Buddhist Ethics - is there one?

2008-12-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

This a question that has been posed, to some extent or another, by various writers over the years. One of those is Damien Keown (author of "The Nature of Buddhist Ethics" and various articles) and another is Georges Dreyfus (see his 1995 JBE article here). Both contend that Buddhism never developed an actual "ethics" as we in the West would see it.

One defender of the theory that Buddhists DID in fact have substantive ethical deliberation (and thus a real 'Buddhist ethics') is Amod Lele (unpublished 2007 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation - my gratitude to him for sharing this with me) in his work on Śāntideva.

What do we think?

Some questions:

What constitutes "Ethics"?
When did it arise in the "West"?
What prevented it from arising in Asian contexts (if in fact it didn't)?

Keown's claim (borrowed from Lele, p.49):

While Buddhist teachings include normative aspects, such as
the Five Precepts and the rules of the Vinaya, these are typically
presented simply as injunctions, rather than as conclusions
logically deduced from explicitly stated values and principles. In
other words, the Precepts are simply announced, and one is left
to figure out the invisible superstructure from which they are
derived. Thus although Buddhism has normative teachings, it
does not have normative ethics. (Keown 2005, 50)

Dreyfus's claim:

First, Tibetan Buddhist traditions did not develop systematic theoretical reflections on the nature and scope of ethics. This is not to say, as has been often misunderstood, that these traditions are ethically weak. Like other rich traditions, Tibetan Buddhist traditions have developed substantive ethical systems, at the personal, interpersonal and social levels, while lacking a theoretical reflection on the nature of their ethical beliefs and practices. This lack of theoretical ethics, what we could call second degree ethics in opposition to substantive ethics, affects not only Tibetan Buddhism, but Indian Buddhism and other related traditions, and is quite remarkable given the richness of Indian Buddhist philosophical reflection in general. Compared to domains such as the philosophy of language and epistemology, Indian Buddhist traditions never developed a similar systematic reflection on the nature of ethical concepts. This is not to say that notions such as virtue or goodness are unknown in Indian Buddhist traditions, but that they are not taken to be philosophically interesting. Ethical concepts are studied, but they are not thought to warrant a theoretical discussion. For example, in the Vinaya literature, which is often taken as the main reference in ethical discussions in many Buddhist traditions, there are extensive substantive discussions: what are the precepts, what is included in them, what is excluded, etc. Very little attention is devoted, however, to the nature of ethical concepts. Precepts are discussed practically, but their status is not systematically theorized. (p.28-9 in aforementioned article)

Keown's article cited by Lele is in:

Keown, Damien. 2005. Buddhism: Morality Without Ethics? In Buddhist
Studies From India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish, edited
by Damien Keown. London: Routledge.

Aristotle, Buddhism, Kant, and Happiness

2008-11-16T10:19:00.001-08:00

From a Buddhist discussion list I am on, there has been recent discussion of Aristotle's view of happiness:

From the Nicomachean Ethics (book 1):

"We are unwilling to call the living happy because changes may befall them and because we believe that happiness haws permanence and is not amenable to change under any circumstances."

"For it seems that to some extent good and evil really exist for a dead man, just as they may exist for a man who lives without being conscious of them, for example honors and disgraces, and generally the successes and failures of his children and descendents."

"Happiness, as we have said, requires completeness in virtue as well as a complete lifetime."

Additionally, I just found this:

Yet evidently, as we said, it needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. In many actions we use friends and riches and political power as instruments; and there are some things the lack of which takes the lustre from happiness, as good birth, goodly children, beauty; for the man who is very ugly in appearance or ill-born or solitary and childless is not very likely to be happy, and perhaps a man would be still less likely if he had thoroughly bad children or friends or had lost good children or friends by death. As we said, then, happiness seems to need this sort of prosperity in addition; for which reason some identify happiness with good fortune, though others identify it with virtue. (N.E. Book 1.8 - bolding mine)

This is opposed by Kant, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, wherein what is to be saught is not happiness but a good character (which, Kant assures, leads one to be worthy of happiness):

Good character, he wrote, should not be confused with
four other kinds of things we normally think of as good:
mental talents such as intelligence, wit, and judgment;
desirable temperamental qualities such as courage,
resoluteness, and perseverance; "gifts of fortune," as the
Greeks had called them, like power, wealth, health, and
honor; and, finally, what we all crave, happiness, that is,
"complete well-being and contentment with one’s state."(*)

Both Kant and Aristotle found unique value in the human capacity of reason. This is, at least prima facie, a far different starting point from Buddhism, which seems to focus on the path from suffering to its end (wherein reason Kant and Aristotle understand it lies in that journey is difficult matter to understand). Aristotle gave primacy to theoretical reason (theoria) and Kant to practical reason (morality).

As a Buddhist-Kantian I would suggest that the Buddha's emphasis was also on practical reason, the path to nirvana. But that could be too much splitting of hairs to be useful.

Anyhow, file this under rantings and ravings for now - no real point, just some points, perhaps to ponder.

* Roger Sullivan. The Review of Metaphysics Sept 1995 v49 n1 p77 (15)

A "Revisionist View of Buddhist Ethics" ?

2008-11-11T14:40:00.000-08:00

In his 1994 paper, Buddhist Ethics in Western Context: The Virtues Approach, James Whitehill describes Damien Keown's work on Buddhist Ethics as a "well-argued, revisionist view of Buddhist ethics."

In a later paper (1995) Keown seems to acknowledge this distance of his own work from traditional Buddhism when he asks:

In the context of human rights, which is the theme of this paper, an important preliminary question would seem to be whether traditional Buddhism has any understanding of what is meant by "human rights" at all. Indeed, it may be thought that since the concept of "rights" is the product of an alien cultural tradition it would be utterly inappropriate to speak of rights of any kind - "human" or otherwise - in a Buddhist context. (from here, emphasis mine)

By this they seem to mean that Keown is consciously breaking from the "traditional" approach found in Asian countries and attempting to formulate a broader, more theoretical and systematic understanding of Buddhist Ethics.

Given this definition, my work will also take on a "revisionist" approach to Buddhist ethics. What this means exactly, I'm not sure. Both the traditionalist and Keown (and me for that matter) want to describe the actual ethics of Buddhism, not just something we are making up.

Perhaps the traditionalist looks more at what Buddhists do? Or what is primarily taught in the monasteries as ethics? Perhaps the traditionalist even shies away from the use of the term 'ethics', knowing it is a Western category and that no clear slice of 'Buddhism' (yet another Western category) will fit into it.

Perhaps what makes his work, and mine when I do it, revisionist is that it attempts to explain things in a way that Westerners will understand - distanced, objective, disengaged. Whereas the traditionalist writes to move the reader/student forward on the path. The objectives are different. But this is simply the difference between scholarly and practical/practitioner-based Buddhist works. Are these the same categories? Are there other similar categories -- such as immigrant/convert Buddhism in the West -- that have similar lack of utility beyond the most superficial usage?

What does it mean to break from "traditional" Buddhist thought? What limits must still be in place? Much to ponder...

Subject matter for thesis

2008-11-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

I'm tossing around the idea a bit of narrowing my thesis material a small bit. You see, there are perhaps four great periods of writing on what we are shaping into 'Buddhist Ethics'.

The first great period lasted form the first century BCE (earliest likely start for the composition of the Pali Canon) until 450 CE (Buddhaghosa of 370–450 CE).

The second I will ignore for now, which overlaps a bit with the first, ranging from 100ish BCE and going until around 1930 (in Tibet). This period was the rise and expansion of Mahayana in its Asian form.

The third may begin in the 1500s, but nothing significant was produced until the 1800s and lasted until the late 20th century. This was the period of Western fascination with and interpretation of the Dharma.

The fourth began in the 1960s or 70s and continues to this day and is characterized by the writings of entrenched academics about Buddhism as an object of historical/philosophical (and most recently) anthropological curiosity.

I'm already cutting out the second phase (probably the largest, so that's good). And I'm thinking of avoiding as much of the third too (after some inconclusive dabbling and the feeling that I could go on many interesting but fruitless sideroads with it).

So - my thesis will focus on early Pali matieral, perhaps including some Abhidhamma and Buddhaghosa and recent scholarly work.

Yippee for cutting my reading assignment from 10,000 pages to 5,000. Read on, young Buddhist philosopher, read on.

Hammalawa Saddhatissa, a Father of Buddhist Ethics

2008-10-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm working again on my thesis (for real this time, really... really!), I should be posting more on that topic here.

One thing I'm working on is using wikipedia and wiki software elsewhere to develop and store my knowledge-base. I'll keep you updated on how that works out. For now, here is my first entry on wikipedia (it's on Hammalawa Saddhatissa, a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk an author of Buddhist Ethics, 1970):As Wikipedia is open to all, feel free to go in and add or change things that need changing. It is, as you will see, very bare-bones now, as I don't know much about the life or teachings of Saddhatissa (beyond what could be found in/on the cover of his book) and couldn't find much on the web.

And yet it is expanding even as I write this blog post...

Who Craves?

2008-09-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

'Who, now, Lord, is it who craves?'

'Not a fit question', said the Exalted One.

"I am not saying [someone] craves. If I were saying so, the question would be a fit one. But I am not saying so. And I not saying so, if you were to ask thus: 'Conditioned now by what, lord, is craving?' this were a fit question. And the fit answer there would be: 'Conditioned by feeling is craving.'" (S II 13)

(excerpted from fn.2 of W. S. Waldron's 2002 article on Cognitive Unconscious in Buddhism and Science in Contemporary Buddhism)

Such teachings, based on the radical Buddhist concept of anatta (or non-self, no-soul), cannot be ignored as we examine Buddhist ethics - even though many would discount them as unimportant to the action-guiding principles of the precepts or the cultivation of virtues (paramitas).

We should begin here with the idea that Buddhism is (like the Brahamanism, Jainism and other teachings of its day) most fundamentally a soteriological system, that is one that is constructed to teach a transformative path from point A to point B. We should also follow the realization or assertion that Buddhism is ethical through and through (somewhere in Gombrich 1988?).

Thus we come to the conclusion that all of Buddhism is Buddhist ethics. The metaphysics is ethics, the psychology is ethics, the practices are ethics. Ethics, for the Buddhist, are not a set of rules or commandments, or even training principles isolated from her total understanding of herself and reality.

That is to say that when we run up agains a teaching such as that on anatta, we must ask not whether this fits in to the Buddhist moral system, but how it fits in.

Such a wholistic orientation may dissapoint the Western mindset, which is so accustomed to parsing, to 'divide-and-conquor' methods of learning. But it is necessary if we wish to hold true to what Buddhism is, as opposed to what we would like it to be.

Who craves? "You crave, I crave, we all crave." Such is the whole Western understanding of Buddhism and life. But for the Buddha a more radical change took place and is needed in his disciples, to remove the underlying unwarrented assumption of the self or ego.

Kant described this problem of unwarrented assumptions in his writings on the Antinomies (in the Critique of Pure Reason). Yet, Kant did allow the key rationalist assumptions: in a soul, God and freedom as "regulative ideas." None of these could be known to us, but they act to organize our inquiry into life and our activities.

In Buddhism we find corrolaries in the pudgala (or conceptual person), dharma (as totality of being, like Kant's God), and karma, as a personal law which implicitely suggests freedom and the possibility of moral improvement.

Outline of a sketch of what categories or labels to use

2008-08-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

People often tell me a Ph.D. is a daunting task. Yup. Others say it's just like all those 20-25 page philosophy papers I've done, only times six or eight. While appealing, that analogy doesn't quite cut it. For such a paper about four-ten sources is sufficient, with about a third of those being used extensively. So, realistically, all of the source-material can be kept somewhere rattling around my noggin (that is, I can keep everything organized in my mind - no need for external organization skills or strategies).

The Ph.D. is a different animal though - I'm looking at hundreds of sources, with probably two dozen as primary. I'm sifting out primary materials (suttas mostly) from scholarly articles from books. I'm doing Kant scholarship, which involves ethics, history, aesthetics, and more. I'm doing general Ethics scholarship: classical virtue theory, Christian ethics, modern ethics: Kant and Mill primarily, and contemporary articles and debates. Thirdly, I'm piecing together "Buddhist Ethics," a category that really doesn't exist except in contemporary Western thought. That means we're making it up as we go. It's the "wild west" of the academic world, filled with wild men, straight shooters, and plenty of outlaws.

A daunting task indeed.

So here I hope to categorize things as best I can as I come across them. I suppose it will be of some help to begin by establishing a categorization system. (here goes)

By Time Period: All materials should be classified as following. These are subject to change and input is warmly welcomed.

early source (pre - 0 CE)
early medieval (0 CE - 700CE, covering everything pre-Shantideva)
middle medieval (700 CE-1200 CE)
late medieval (1200 CE - 1800 CE)
early modern (1800 CE - 1900 CE)
late modern (1900 CE - 1980 CE, covering everything pre-me - ha)
contemporary (1980 - current)

By type:

source (includes abhidhamma/abhidharmas)
commentary (includes such works as the Visuddhimagga and the lam rim chen mo)
scholarly (a somewhat 'false' distinction, as the commentaries are no-doubt 'scholarly' too, but nonetheless, this will denote early Western attempts to understand Buddhism, all the way through the current, as well as recent non-Western works who use the approach of Western scholarship to analyze Buddhism)

By Content: this will be the toughest category/label to manage. Here is a start.

metaphysics (broadly defined)
self (/no-self, anatman, anatta)
emptiness (sunyata, sunnata)
morality (sila)
virtues (perfections, paramitas)

More to come soon...

Categorizing people/work

2007-11-25T13:18:00.000-08:00

D. Keown (1992) opens his work with a great review of past writings in Buddhist Ethics. Some of that effort will have to be replicated in my own and should be sketched out here.

Keown himself: (p.1) "In the face of the complexity of Buddhist metaphysics it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Buddhism is a response to what is fundamentally an ethical problem - the perennial problem of the best kind of life for man to lead."

N.B. Keown clearly sets the stage with this sentence. In fact, if you agree with this it is very easy to follow Keown down the path to an Aristotelian interpretation of Buddhist Ethics. However, one must then ask what to do with all that darned metaphysics. Other thinkers, myself included, will find metaphysical issues central to Buddhist Ethics (not a red herring as Keown suggests, cf. p19)

p. 4 "Previous Research"

Most has been descriptive (not normative or metaethical).

Tachibana (1926) "So far as I know, no work is specifically devoted to this single subject" i.e. ethics in Buddhism.

Saddhatissa (1970, Buddhist Ethics)... Keown comments favorably.

Poussin (1927, La Morale Bouddhique) - based on the Abhidharmakośa, a record of debates; its as close as the tradition gets "to the discipline of moral philosophy."

(p.5)
Roderick Hindery (1978, Comparative Ethics in Hindu and Buddhist Traditions) "a 'lacuna' or 'perhaps a total gap' in the contemporary analysis of Mahāyāna Buddhist ethics (p.223)."

G.S.P. Misra (1984, Development of Buddhist Ethics); included work on psychology (Abhidharma) - ch.3; morality of the bodhisattva (ch.5); and transcendence of ethics in Tantra (ch.6).

~
more to come...

Buddhist Ethics is Born!

2007-11-25T13:14:00.000-08:00

In my ongoing efforts to use technology to overcome my inherent laziness and scatterbrainedness - a blog, devoted to Buddhist Ethics.

Goals:

To categorize previous thought in Buddhist Ethics (rationalist, romantic, essoteric, etc)

To categorize previous thinkers (")

To categorize my own thoughts

To think aloud

To (eventually) invite feedback from interesting people

and anything else related to the above.