Dhamma as indispensible

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.

Sources of Buddhist Ethics

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...

Buddhist Morality and the Two Standpoints

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)

Clifford Geertz on Religion: GREAT QUOTE

"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.

Gethin poking some fun at modern revisionist scholars

...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

THE COSMOLOGICAL CONTEXT

"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

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...