Peter Harvey in - Destroying Mara Forever

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

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...

Kant and Religion Review

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.

Notes on Buddhist Ethics, Day one

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.

How to Teach Buddhist Ethics

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.