By James Whitehill
Stephens College
ISSN 1076-9005. Volume 1 1994
Abstract:
Contemporary Buddhism
increasingly seeks to make itself understood in modern terms and to
respond to contemporary conditions. Buddhism's legitimation in the West
can be partially met by demonstrating that Buddhist morality is a
virtue-oriented, character-based, community-focused ethics, commensurate
with the Western "ethics of virtue" tradition.
The recent past in
Western Buddhist ethics focused on escape from Victorian moralism, and
was incomplete. A new generation of Western Buddhists is emerging, for
whom the "construction" of a Buddhist way of life involves community
commitment and moral "practices." By keeping its roots in a character
formed as "awakened virtue" and a community guided by an integrative
soteriology of wisdom and morality, Western Buddhism can avoid the twin
temptations of rootless liberation in an empty "emptiness," on the one
hand, and universalistic power politics, on the other. In describing
Buddhist ethics as an "ethics of virtue," I am pointing to consistent
and essential features in the Buddhist way of life. But, perhaps more
importantly, I am describing Buddhist ethics by means of an
interpretative framework very much alive in Western and Christian
ethics, namely, that interpretation of ethics most recently associated
with thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas. The virtue
ethics tradition is the Western tradition most congenial to the
assumptions and insights of Buddhist ethics. Hence, virtue ethics
provides a means of understanding Buddhist ethics... and, reciprocally,
Buddhist ethics also offers the Western tradition a way of expanding the
bounds of its virtue ethics tradition, which has been too elitist,
rationalistic, and anthropocentric. On the basis of this view, I predict
some likely, preferable future directions and limits for Buddhism in a
postmodern world.
Introduction
My purpose in this
article is to speculate about the optimal, future development of
Buddhism in the West. To speculate about the future is, of course, to
reach beyond the narrow protections of expertise into the vulnerability
of guesswork. My guesswork about Western Buddhism's future takes the
form of two hypotheses for scholarly consideration by interested
philosophers and ethicists, Buddhist or not. The two hypotheses can also
be viewed by Western Buddhists as recommendations on the future course
of their Buddhist practices and communities.
The first hypothesis and
recommendation is that Buddhism must begin to demonstrate a far clearer
moral form and a more sophisticated, appropriate ethical strategy than
can be found among its contemporary Western interpreters and
representatives, if it is to flourish in the West. This hunch is to me
almost certainly correct, so I will treat it only briefly at the
beginning.
My second conjecture is
that Buddhism's success in the West is most likely if Buddhist ethics is
specifically grafted to and enriched by the "ethics of virtue"
approaches of Western tradition, approaches recently revived in
Christian thinkers like MacIntyre and Hauerwas.[1] This second guess is
more specific, tentative, and provocative, and, therefore, more
interesting, so it will be my dominant theme.[2] Viewing Buddhist
morality and ethics in the light of virtues theory is, I believe, true
to the central core of Buddhism. The virtues approach also generates a
wide range of analytical comparisons with Western philosophical and
theological tradition, and helps us foresee and plan for the limits of
Buddhism's Western pilgrimage.
Returning for a moment
to my first and most general hypothesis, I will begin by saying that I
am persuaded that Buddhism is on the threshold of a more significant
future in the West. It will increasingly play practical, heuristic,
balancing, and liberating roles in the lives of Western people and their
societies. But, in order for this to happen, philosophers, Buddhist and
non-Buddhist, must help more to clarify the moral and ethical terms of
Buddhism's soteriological project, in ways coordinate with Western
intellectual tradition. For more than two decades, Buddhist
philosophical talent in the West has been focused almost exclusively on
ontology and hermeneutics. One result is that Buddhist philosophy in the
West has ballooned off into the clouds of "sūnyatā-focused dialectics. I
propose that our philosophical soaring needs the ballast of Buddhist
moral practices and the landmarks of a refreshed Buddhist ethics to
bring Buddhist philosophy more into a practical relationship with the
on-the-ground, everyday realities of people's lives. I am moved to this
recommendation by my deductive understanding of Buddhist teaching, but
also by the fact that American Buddhists, since the early 1980's, have
increasingly puzzled over moral and/or political choices and issues,
without much help from Buddhist philosophers and scholars who are also
well-grounded in Western moral and political thought.
When Christians
translated their Gospel into Chinese contexts, the Greek "Logos" became
the Chinese "Tao," a daring and radical translation, transmuting the
Gospel as it transmitted it. A similar translation problematique faces
us now as Buddhism transmits the "Dharma" to the West. But, in the
matter of that part of the Dharma which can be called "Buddhist ethics,"
no proposal in Western philosophical terms on the shape of Buddhist
ethics currently commands wide attention, much less agreement.[3] As a
result, the legitimization of the Buddhist Dharma as a whole is at risk
in the West, for no religious or soteriological philosophy without a
developed ethic can be fully and widely legitimized in Western culture.
A variety of
philosophical proposals relevant to the Western shaping of Buddhist
ethics can be seen across the spectrum of Buddhist thinkers. Happily, no
one argues that Buddhist ethics or morality are sui generis, a unique
and inviolate form of Buddhist tradition to be transplanted whole and
entire into Western cultural soil. Also, few are suggesting that
Buddhist morality and ethics are so much embedded in Asian cultures that
they cannot be transplanted.
Both in theory and in
practice, most Western Buddhists appear to look for and accept a
grafting or hybridizing process, assimilating Buddhist moral stock to a
plausible, compatible Western moral root. Some are tempted to confuse
this process, by reversing it, as if the task is to graft Western moral
concerns to a Buddhist root of compassion or, worse, transcendental
wisdom. This confusion is like "growing a lotus without planting it in
the mud," or "putting the spiritual cart before the moral horse." More
simply, this confusion assumes that ethics follows spirit or theory, a
rather un-Buddhist notion, given the Buddha's existential impatience
with metaphysical gymnastics.
In the 1960's, Buddhist
ethical reflection, and morality in the broad sense of "a way of life,"
were grafted by Western apologists to the stem of existentialism and to
some branches of the human potential movement.[4] These early efforts
fell short of a satisfactory ethical development of Western Buddhism, in
my opinion, because they failed to include much critical, communal, or
practical guidance for would-be Buddhist existentialists (or
existentialist Buddhists?) and other Aquarians. Recently, more
politically relevant splicings have been attempted by several Buddhists
within the peace, environmental, and feminist movements.[5]
Only a few Western
philosophers have attempted grafting work recently in Buddhist ethics,
usually by asserting and working out conceptual analogies between
Buddhist ethics in general and particular Western philosophers and
theologians. Examples of this comparative work include David
Kalupahana's proposal that Buddhist ethics melds interestingly with
William James' pragmatism, and Christopher Ives' explorations of
opportunities to develop a Zen Buddhist social ethic in contrast with
Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian social ethics. Also noteworthy, if less
comparative in its analysis, is Robert Thurman's proposal to find a
relevant recipe for contemporary social activism in a specific text of
Nāgārjuna.[6]
While I do not find
these proposals sufficiently developed to be compelling to Western
ethicists, they are thought-experiments that address some issues of
interest to Western philosophical and theological ethics, while taking
interpretive risks for the sake of Buddhist relevance. I regret that
none of the proposals can withstand the kind of friendly critique that
comes quickly and easily from ethicists grounded in Christian and
Western ethical studies; Winston King, for example, has long been
helpful in raising a variety of critical and disturbing questions about
the strengths and weaknesses of Buddhist philosophy in a Western ethical
milieu dominated by demands for human rights and individual autonomy.[7]
Assuming the
under-developed condition of the domain of Buddhist ethics in Western
context, I now address at length my second, more tentative conjecture on
the future prospect of Western Buddhism. I propose that the most
appropriate analogy, the most fruitful grafting prospect for a Western
Buddhist ethics, will be with the Western tradition of the "ethics of
virtue." By "ethics of virtue" I mean simply an ethics that is
character-based (rather than principle-driven or act-focused),
praxis-oriented, teleological, and community-specific. More fully, I
mean the complex tradition of ethics that stretches in the West from
Socrates and Aristotle to Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, and other
contemporary virtues theorists. increasing notice."[8]
This proposal does not
originate with me. The conceptual and heuristic linkage of Buddhist
ethics with Aristotle's is a key to Damien Keown's approach in his
well-argued, revisionist view of Buddhist ethics, The Nature of Buddhist
Ethics.[9]
Earlier, Robert Bellah
favored grafting Buddhism to the virtues approach as a possible path to
meet his concern to renew an American ethic of community. Specifically,
Bellah has called for a "cultural symbiosis" of Zen and modern
Aristotelianism as a way of re-asserting "a teleological understanding
of the order of human life" and bringing about "the creation of actual
communities" that can resist:
a modern Western culture
that is destroying the natural habitat, undermining any kind of social
solidarity, and creating a conception of the individual person which is
utterly self-destructive.[10]
The utopian spirit of
his call for Buddhist-like communities of personal and civic virtue
suggests that these communities would almost certainly be
"marginalized," growing only at the edges of the dominant socio-cultural
structures of Western individualism or bureaucratic nation-states. Its
utopian character does not seem to dissuade Bellah from making his
recommendation. Nor am I. Indeed, such "contrast" communities already
exist, however tenuous their rooting in the Western "soul and soil."[11]
Before taking up this
proposal, that Buddhist "morality" and "ethics" can be appropriately
transplanted in the West by assimilating them to our own virtues
tradition, I need to define Buddhist morality more precisely, in the
terms of "awakened virtue." "Awakened, compassionate virtue-cultivation"
is a more accurate phrasing of what I mean, but, for simplicity's sake,
I will avoid using it. "Awakened virtue" usefully describes the process
and goal of Buddhist morality. It affirms the intertwined correspondence
of the moral and the spiritual, in fresh language, by referring to
Buddhist moral vision and praxis in the language of virtues theory, and
by retaining the Buddhist insistence on spiritual awakening as a
necessary, although not sufficient, condition of moral maturity. Second,
I will simply define Buddhist ethics as "philosophical reflection upon
Buddhist morality, including descriptive, normative and meta-ethical
reflections."[12]
My purpose in this
essay about "awakened virtue" is not to engage in historical and textual
analysis. I will not exegete the comparative analogies of "sīla or the
pāramitās[13] to phronesis, arete, or virtus.[14] My aim is more
philosophical, practical, and even policy-oriented: to probe
constructively the implications of "awakened virtue," the goal of
Buddhist morality and the object of Buddhist ethics, in connection with
the future prospects of Western Buddhism. The effort to construct a
Western Buddhist ethics by means of a virtues approach is not without
exemplars. For example, Robert Aitken relies on it often in his
homiletical text, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics.
Aitken fashions refreshing sermons on Buddhist ethics, with a Zen twist,
framing most of his chapters as expositions of "The Ten Grave Precepts"
of Buddhist morality. He also writes briefly about the Six Perfections,
the six pāramitās of generosity, morality, patience, vigor, meditation,
and self-realization, and discusses "virtue" as a way of understanding
the Zen life.
Aitken opens his
chapter, "The Way and Its Virtue," with a saying of his teacher, Yamada
Koun Roshi: "The purpose of Zen practice is the perfection of
character." Aitken proceeds to discuss briefly but provocatively the six
pāramitās, relating them to contemporary experience and
applications.[15]But his teacher's saying is overlooked and the focus on
virtue collapses as, in the perennial fashion of most Zen interpreters,
he concludes that:
At the same time,
"virtue," "the Six Pāramitās," "perfection of character" -- these are
simply labels for an organic process. Breathing in and out, you let go
of poisons and establish the serene ground of the precepts.[16]
Aitken here falls into a
common pitfall in the path of ancient and contemporary Zen interpreters,
what I call "the transcendence trap." The trap misleads them and us into
portraying the perfected moral life as a non-rational expressiveness,
something natural, spontaneous, non-linguistic, and uncalculating. This
is a "Taoist-like" view of virtue as "natural, intuitive, skill/power"
(Chin., te; Jap., toku), a view Aitken shares with some influential, but
late Mahāyāna sūtras. This ethical conception results in the kind of
ontological dismissal of morality and ethics preached by Aitken at the
end of his chapter: "Thus, in the world, too, there is nothing to be
called virtue."[17] The common corollary, "there is also nothing to be
called character," is unstated by Aitken, although it is part of the
same syllogistic net of claims deduced ostensibly from "no-ego" and
"sūnyatā axioms. The net is true and helpful only within the
"deconstructive" mood and context of sunyata dialectics and metaphysics.
When the net of "no-self" is thrown to catch truth in an ethical
context, villains laugh and demons thrive.
A good beginning by
Aitken, in taking a virtues approach to interpreting Buddhist ethics, is
later swamped by the "sūnyatā-weighted dialectical anamorphisms of
Mahāyāna and Zen thought. Aitken is enmeshed in what I have called "the
satori perspective" in Zen philosophy, the position most clearly seen in
DṬ. Suzuki's vigorous anti-rationalism and antinomianism. The
"satori perspective" characteristically over-emphasizes the "awakening"
dimensions of Buddhist soteriology, to the detriment of the moral,
"virtuous" dimensions.[18] Consequently, a view of the Buddhist virtues
from this standpoint tends insistently to relativize and diminish the
"virtue" in the summum bonum of "awakened virtue," until there is only
the "awakened One," beyond good and evil.
A clear and egregious
example of this spiritualizing over-emphasis on "awakening," comes to us
in the writings of Gerta Ital, in her book, On the Way to Satori, where
she offers us this advice:
This is something that
cannot be repeated often enough: no one who has not completely erased
themselves as an ego can do anything to help liberate anyone else, and
the attainment of the goal is not easy. The journey is very long ....
Until one is liberated oneself one is simply not capable of helping
anyone else.[19]
This is not a complete
Buddhism, I believe, and certainly not one that can expect a significant
future in the West, except as an individualistic, private, and mainly
"therapeutic" mysticism. Buddhism is far more and other than that.
A fuller and more
finely articulated virtues approach to Buddhist ethics guides Ken Jones'
The Social Face of Buddhism. I consider this the best available ethical
manual on Buddhist social ethics by a Westerner.[20] I recommend it,
convinced that it is a touchstone philosophical text in Buddhist ethics.
It is unlike Aitken's, because Jones' seriously pays attention to key
philosophical, moral, and psychological issues. Regrettably, Jones, like
Aitken, walks into "the transcendence trap," by devaluing the roles of
will and deliberation in the life of awakened virtue.
Jones affirms in good
virtues theory fashion that Buddhist morality is a matter of character
and cultivation, and that it focuses on cultivating character rather
than evaluating particular acts.[21] But quickly he slides toward "the
transcendence trap," beginning with a too casual substitution of the
word "personality" for "character"[22]:
The emphasis in Buddhist
morality is therefore on the cultivation of a personality which cannot
but be moral, rather than focusing upon the morality of particular
choices and acts. But, to repeat, it is not the will that can create
such a personality, no more than I can pick myself up from the ground by
my collar. It is to the training that the will must be applied, from
which virtue will naturally flow [emphasis mine].[23]
Jones's disclaimer on
the power of will may only be a rejection of Nietzchean or Sartrean
voluntarism. If so, he would be correct from a Buddhist point of view,
which dialectically affirms both the deterministic weight of karma or
character dispositions and our freedom from them in the concomitant
"emptiness" of "sūnyatā. And he is certainly correct to assert that the
will in Buddhist practice, rather than serving a "creative" role in free
self-creation, serves mainly to restrain and hold oneself in the various
forms of moral and intellectual practice.
However, the fuzziness
of the phrase, "from which virtue will naturally flow," places Jones on
the lip of the "transcendence trap." He later falls in by constructing
virtue as a kind of natural "grace," emergent from the forms of moral
discipline and repetition,/yet different from them, somehow
transcendent, natural and free. As Robert Scharf suggests, this
transcendent view of virtuous activity is a mystification of what in
Buddhist practice is simply a repetitive and normal process of learning
to perform in certain ways with skill; Hee-jin Kim, discussing what he
calls the "heart of Dogen's thought," refers to the process of Buddhist
practice as essentially something prosaic, "the ritualization of
morality."[24]
More than Jones can or
will admit, schooling in the forms of virtue is a social, emotional, and
cognitive process. Becoming good is hardly a natural process in the
sense suggested, of being the non-voluntary, non-deliberative unfolding
of a natural goodness. Aristotle would agree: "While it is Nature that
gives us our faculties, it is not Nature that makes us good or
bad."[25]The goal of ethics is to become a person who does good or
virtuous things freely from the ground of a well-tempered character,
supported by a matured, resolute, and reasonable knowledge of what one
is doing. The path of Buddhism does not dissolve character (which is
different from ego and personality). It awakens and illuminates moral
character and establishes a "noble" selfhood in the wide, deep,
expressive freedom of creative forms of life and its perfections.
Jones's view of virtue
echoes the Christian moral doctrine of "infused virtue," but without
dependence on St. Thomas Aquinas' transcendent, theistic assumptions and
absent his clear sense of the endurance of the "natural" virtues in the
perfected saints. I venture the guess that, like Alan Watts and others
who fall into "the transcendence trap," Jones devalues the will in
preferring "natural expressiveness" (in the sense of what we are born
with, natus), in his beliefs about learning to be good, because of
things that have little to do with Buddhism, the Diamond Sūtra, and
Mahāyāna dialectics. I suspect that many a Westerner's "Taoist-like"
misreading of Buddhist ethics, as a form of individualistic naturalism,
is mostly and often a reaction to the West's residual Victorian morality
-- a morality characterized by and hated for its conceived overemphasis
on individual, rational self-discipline, strength of will, rigidity of
personality, and psychophysical repressions -- and from which
middle-aged and older Western Buddhists seem to be still trying to make
their escape. In their desire to escape, they share in a broader, late
20th century Western shift to a moral outlook that prizes a rather
passive, non-judgmental tolerance of others, combined with a preference
for the spontaneous or ecstatic expression of impulses ... at least and
especially in contrast with the much maligned Victorians.
To disdain the
necessary roles of will and reason in the Buddhist moral process is to
overlook the importance of both in early Buddhism. Early Buddhism did
not abandon reason, although it did not rely on reason alone. Neither
did early Buddhists overlook the necessity of a steady will, even in the
stages of Buddhist meditation training. That will and reason were
requisite accompaniments of the good person is also evident in later
additions to the six pāramitās list, namely, the pāramitās of
resolution, determination, strength, and skillful means. Obviously,
strength of will is necessary even in samādhi exercises, in making the
Bodhisattva vow, or in responding to exhortations of the Zen masters to
throw one's whole self and attention into zazen or koan. Buddhist
cultivation requires a constant dose of what William James called
"animal spirits" and doing the difficult thing against our inclinations.
Now, having by-passed
the "transcendence trap" on the way to a Buddhist virtues perspective, I
wish briefly to describe what I mean by Buddhist "awakened virtue" in
the context of general virtues theory, distinguishing it somewhat from
traditional Western views. Following this description, I will conclude
by exploring some implications for the West of viewing Buddhist ethics
and the Buddhist "way of life" in a virtues perspective.
Buddhist Morality as
Awakened Virtue
The Buddha's Dharma or
teaching was authoritatively divided in early times into three groups,
but they were interdependent facets of one process leading to
deliverance (vimutti). The Buddhist investigated and cultivated "sīla
(morality), samādhi (deep meditation), and prajñā (transcendental
wisdom).[26] Each of the three facets of self-cultivation evolved
appropriate practices ... of moral intention, behavior, and correction;
of meditation method and mapping; of transformative shifts of
consciousness. We may speak of these practices as the moral,
contemplative, and transformative pāramitās. The last, the
transformative pāramitās, are concerned with practices that alter
consciousness on a transcendental, "Nirvanic" level, while the
contemplative pāramitās have to do with the development of powers of
concentration, stability, and tranquilization in meditation. The moral
pāramitās involve practices in which good intentions are aroused and
acted upon in the light of a right understanding of the good and of
situations. With repetition and correction these practices severally and
together nurtured the dispositions, both karmic and salvific, that
together constitute Buddhist character.
Why these pāramitās as
the specific Buddhist virtues, rather than others, invites a fuller
treatment than I will give here.[27] The pāramitās, as methods of
attending, energizing, pacifying and relating the self to others, work
together to wean the self from egocentricity. Beyond ego-weaning, the
goal of the pāramitās is positive: to foster a character that
increasingly encounters each moment, each space, each being, as a
"mother" enjoys and protects her only child ... to use a traditional
simile attributed to the Buddha.
Since moral intentions
are always elastic, they need shaping by forms and disciplines, taught
by teachers and learned in communities. The virtuous practices that in
Buddhism characterize a good person were often defined as at least the
six pāramitās of generosity or gift-giving (dāna), morality or the Five
Precepts ("sīla), patience and forgiveness (kṣānti),
courage and vigor (vīrya), concentration (dhyāna), and wisdom (prajñā).
Some held that the six pāramitās constituted a progressive order of
training in virtue, from generosity to wisdom. These may be said to be
the necessary moral, mental, and spiritual touchstones of the Buddhist
virtues tradition, notwithstanding later additions to and analytical
divisions of the six. Enrichment of virtue-like practices beyond the
pāramitās is seen in the development of the well-known Four
Immeasurables (the Brahmavihāras or "divine abodes") of Buddhist
friendliness, compassion, joy, and peace, which further mapped out,
stimulated, and idealized Buddhist moral praxis.
These practices, moral
and otherwise, were more often than not "methodologized," that is,
formalized, ritualized and institutionalized in ways to promote habitual
performances in a general program of self-cultivation and character
development, conceived to stretch over many aeons of time (thus
requiring the pāramitā of patience!). Methods would differ somewhat
between monk and layperson, and from culture to culture. Some practices
were Buddhist adaptations of pre-existing practices and rituals in the
surrounding non-Buddhist culture, as Nath shows in her study of the
Buddhist transformations of Hindu dāna, gift-giving rites.[28]
Buddhist moral
self-cultivation tends to encompass not only the formation of good
intentions in the heart and mind (reminding us of Kant). Practices also
include physical postures and breath-speech techniques. This holistic
"psycho-pneumo-physical" approach to moral self-cultivation results, for
example, in attention to helping others not only by forming a good will,
but also by expressing kind words and offering the material things that
they also need. A more holistic self-training also opens a way to fuse
moral practice with aesthetic practice, as an early concern in Buddhism
with how gracefully to give gifts demonstrates.
Practice of the moral
pāramitās is said to create and accumulate "merit," or favorable karma
dispositions within the psyche, that lead to a better life and higher
rebirth. The "ethics of karma," focused upon by Melford Spiro and
Winston King as the key to understanding Theravādin Buddhist societies,
is when looked at closely but an "ethics of karma-cultivating virtues
and practices."[29] Spiro and King, reflecting an interpretation within
the Theravādin tradition, highlight the ostensibly traditional split
between the karmic and the Nibbānic motives in Buddhist life, one for
goodness and reward, the other for salvation and transformative
liberation. The two motives are personalized in layperson and monk,
respectively.[30]
The tension between
moral and religious motives appears also in Mahāyāna Buddhism. At one
point the tension was reconciled in the bodhisattva image of a virtuous
layman-sage, Vimalakīrti. The Vimalakīrti Sūtra affirms that a breach
between moral effort and spiritual awakening constitutes bondage and
delusion.[31] The center of Buddhist tradition affirms that moral
effort, mainly through practicing the pāramitās, must be conjoined with
meditative and transformative practices to be ultimately effective for
oneself and for others. It also affirms that the practices of awakening
have little foundation and less result, for oneself or others, without
the frame, skills, and habit of moral practice. Moral virtue without
"sūnyatā, or transforming liberation, may be shallow and weak; but
"sūnyatā without moral virtue is blind and dangerous. She who has
accomplished awakened virtue, the merging of skilled, well-disposed,
rational moral agency with self-transforming spirit, is, in contrast,
deep, strong, ever-maturing, and rational, ... by her character and
deeds she reduces suffering and promotes friendliness, compassion, joy,
and peace.
In contrast with
Western virtues tradition, the Buddhist pāramitās viewpoint tends, in
matters of self and community, to be biocentric and ecological. First,
Buddhism does not begin with the premise of the substantial, separable,
and distinctive self of Aristotelian and Christian thought. In Buddhism,
the idea of the atomistic, self-empowering monad-godling of Western
individualism is well known, but understood as a delusion born of
ignorant desires and fears, resulting in a wish-fantasy for domination.
Compared to Western concepts, the self-concept of Buddhism is
processional, relational, and "fuzzy."[32]
While the moral saint
as individualized hero, above and apart from others, is not unknown in
Buddhism, the open, relational nature of selfhood stresses the
solidarity of those who act virtuously with those for whom they act or,
better, with whom they practice the perfecting goods of generosity,
patience, and so forth. For Buddhist thought the self is fundamentally
incomplete, evolving, and interpenetratively co-dependent with others.
Since we are imbedded in mutual dependent community, training in the
pāramitās, moral and otherwise, is necessarily a training with others
and for others. Because of this solidarity and because pāramitās
practice nurtures body, speech, and the mind-heart, the Buddhist
believes her moral efforts flow necessarily into the community on many
levels, materially, verbally, and mentally, in a subtle, looping
reciprocity.
Second, Buddhist
tradition differs from the Western in defining membership in the moral
community, the "considered others" to whom pāramitās-defined practices
are to be extended. In the dominant traditions of Western culture, at
least since Aristotle, the community of character and virtue has clearly
been the human community. The politics in which an individual's ethics
and virtue find their completion is a human politics - almost always an
anthropocentric, urban politics. The Buddhist community of virtue is
biocentric, far more inclusive of animals and other sentient beings as
objects of moral consideration (in the practice of the six pāramitās,
for example, giving aid to animals) than Western virtues tradition.[33]
Because of this biocentric orientation, Buddhist moral practices must
include specific training and self-cultivation in our relations with
nature, as well as human society, extending dāna, "sīla, kṣānti,
and so on to non-human sentient beings and to the biosphere itself as a
community of communities.[34]
Given the exurban
settings of Buddhist monasteries and universities, and other factors,
Buddhist ethics did not elaborate itself often into urban,
class-oriented political theory, a theory of revolutionary change, or a
theory legitimizing divine rule... although Buddhist thinkers did
propose all three. The community scale imaged by the saṃgha was smaller and more nurturing of personal development,
perhaps that of a village set within nature. Perhaps this goes to
explain partially why even urban Buddhists have tended to re-create or
simulate in the grounds of their city temples a contrasting, natural
refuge, for people, animals, fish, birds, and even insects. A Japanese
tea ceremony garden and hut in the middle of Tokyo express this
microtopic, exurban focus most eloquently and ironically.
Like the Aristotelian
virtues tradition, Buddhist ethics tends to be ahistorical, in that it
regards human life as having an important and profound constancy in its
nature and goal, persistent amidst the general flow and struggles of
actual personal and historical forces. That constancy for the Buddhist
lies not in a substantial or eternal self, but in our common, almost
irrefragable experience of suffering and in our inherent capacity to
work toward an awakened, moral virtuosity, in wisdom and fellow-feeling.
With respect to the
question of historicity, I think that, in comparison with the Christian
virtues tradition, Buddhist ethics did not develop so extensive a
quasi-historical hagiography, a "sense of narrative," concerning the
lives of the virtuous and their exemplars, the saints. The Jātaka Tales,
while we classify them as "animal" fables, may be similar in appearance
to a "Lives of the Saints." But we should probably resist calling them
"narrative" because they display a narrow range of the Buddhist reality
picture, and we should hesitate to call them unqualifiedly Buddhist,
because the stories are from a pre-Buddhist tradition. This comparative
absence of emphasis on individual "drama," which may be more of degree
than type, applies even to the most obvious Buddhist saint, the Buddha,
whose "story" does not serve for Buddhists the whole range of functions
that we find centered in the Gospels, in Roman Catholic hagiography or
in Muslim hadith tradition.[35]
On another theme of
contemporary virtues theory, I begin by acknowledging without apology
that Buddhism makes moral claims that are universalistic. Buddhists have
imagined utopian times and settings for the virtuous, the perfected, the
awakened ... and projected a utopic future when "all beings are
awakened." But, like all ethical traditions centered on virtues,
Christian, Muslim, Confucian, or Aristotelian, the Buddhist pāramitā
tradition looks to the establishment of particular and appropriately
designed communities to optimize favorable conditions for
self-cultivation and happiness in the good life. Virtue ethics
traditions, often focused in small groups engaged in voluntary training,
tend to spend little time on the ethical strategies necessary in
non-voluntary, pluralistic, very large, or coercive societies.
Consequently and not surprisingly, they tend to lack a viable social
ethic in modern terms, that is a policy-generating set of principles
that can be institutionalized on a mass scale, while protecting
individual rights-claims with coercive means.
So, while espousing the
general tenets and principles of a universal ethics, Buddhist ethics
tends, in practice, to define and effectuate pāramitā-cultivation in
community-specific terms. At the mind-and-heart level, the broad
intention "to help others" may be similar across many communities, but
at the levels of linguistic and physical practice, the pāramitās have a
local aspect, and in that sense display a modest "historical" quality.
For example, while the virtue of giving, dāna-pāramitā, may show local
nuances of expression in almsgiving rites, these local forms are
practiced with recognition of their universal applicability in their
intention, but not in their formal, material, local features. A tolerant
awareness of distinctions between inner and outer aspects of Buddhist
practices may result in much less zealous enforcement of verbal,
symbolic, and physical conformity in moral (and contemplative) practices
in Buddhist contexts. The resulting diversity, flexibility, and
tolerance sustain the Buddhist tradition, at the risk of appearing very
soft and highly "contextual" in social ethics and politics.
Nevertheless, one does
find conformity in the moral forms and practices within Buddhist
voluntary communities, of which the saṃgha
is the classical exemplar. Conformity is in keeping not only with the
needs of any community for the standardization and predictability of
behaviors that enhance trust and efficiency. Shared forms are especially
necessary and appropriate to a community guided by virtue ethics. The
Buddhist's cultivation of the pāramitās requires a community designed to
respond to awakened virtue practices with specific structures of support
and correction.
Each Buddhist community
has a distinctive shape and style, governed primarily by a common goal,
the awakened virtue of each member-in-community. This perfectionist aim
is universalized and idealized by extending it to encompass the
awakening of "all sentient beings." But, on-the-ground, the community's
purpose is realized in the details ... of distinctive forms of
etiquette, and in the characters of exemplary individuals; in shared
schedules, and a common submission to rules; in rituals of giving and
receiving, and procedures for correcting and expelling delinquent
members. These are communities where one learns and practices what it
quite precisely means, mentally and physically, morally and
psychologically, to act as an "awakened virtue being." That is, one
learns to act, to perform, to talk, walk, sit, sort things out, and take
out the garbage like a Buddha.
It should be obvious by
now that learning to act like a Buddha means something other than
becoming spontaneous, inventive, and free of Victorian inhibitions. The
practice of awakened virtue in Buddhist communities requires diligent
learning of the forms in and through which one can perform like an
awakened virtue being. In the moral sphere, these practices require
repeated experiences in learning how to give, to listen patiently, to
call up courage in overcoming fear and desire, to observe non-violence
in the way one walks, to steady the mind and heart, to make friends with
the seasons, and so on. In the meditative sphere, similar forms of
practice are observed, submitted to, tasted, repeated, tested, and
perfected, in cultivation of the contemplative virtues.
Finally, the Buddhist
community, like any virtue-oriented community, is defined in the
characters of its persons, as well as in their stories and the forms of
their practices. Its continuation and success depend necessarily upon
the degree to which community members become successful practitioners of
the community's full repertoire of virtues. Thus, Buddhism will flower
in the West only when Western Buddhists take up a fully balanced
Buddhist way of life, by cultivating both the moral and the
contemplative pāramitās in proper balance. "Awakened virtue" is the
balanced platform upon which to practice the ultimate, transformative,
Nirvanic virtues constituting the flowering of the spiritual life of
Buddhists.
Implications for
Buddhist Ethics in the West
If we accept the
propositions that Buddhist ethics is ineluctably and essentially an
"ethics of virtue" and, second, that the Buddhist life is necessarily at
every stage integrative of moral and spiritual practices, several
implications emerge for Buddhism as it grows in the West. Some of these
implications are corrective of recent Western Buddhist troubles, while
others may indicate real limits to Buddhism's success in and impact on
the West.
Soon, with the passing
away of the pioneering, older generations of Western Buddhists, I hope
we will see Buddhism in the West turning from its role as a raft
carrying Westerners away from the eroding shores of Victorian -- or
Judaeo-Christian -- or technological -- or imperialist --or patriarchal
culture. While the function of Buddhism as a means of liberation from
suffering and oppression is a central one, it is not the only one. The
other function of Buddhism is to carry the suffering to the Other shore,
to awakened virtue, to becoming a Buddha in Buddha fields where Buddhas
flourish. This means working to construct and preserve relationships and
communities, as much as cultivating oneself. And this means the renewal
of a pāramitās-approach in Buddhist thought and life.
One corrective
consequence of renewing the pāramitās in Buddhist lives and communities
will be the denial of authority to imbalanced Buddhist teachers by the
communities that support them. Too many Buddhist teachers in the West in
the 1980's have demonstrated that they cannot balance well the moral and
the spiritual.[36] However, a virtues-oriented ethic has limitations in
meeting problems caused by the vices of individuals in the practicing
community. This is because a virtue ethic focuses on the person-as-agent
developing over time, in a learning process often of trial and error.
This long-term focus devalues the moral significance of particular acts,
even transvaluing them into "teachable moments," while often overlooking
the consequences of flawed or vicious acts for others and the community.
A particular moral failure is excused as "out-of-character." The result
is a greater tolerance of isolated acts of harming others, for example,
unless the acts constitute an intolerable "pattern" of vice that forces
community or individual reaction ... perhaps too late.
Every virtue ethics
guides us to the good life by means of models of "the good person." The
model may be a living person or a narrative character (i.e., the Buddha,
Vimalakīrti, Vessantara, Queen "Srīmālā, one's roshi, etc.). A focus on
character tends to obscure or override the role of general principles
and rules as guides to decision-making and mutual regulation.
But rules, however
flawed, sometimes have a place. For example, a rule-orientation is
preferable in some circumstances and relationships to counter
teacher-disciple abuses and distortions. Traditionally, Buddhism depends
heavily on its teachers and on the belief that profound qualities of an
awakened teacher can be passed directly, through "mind-to-mind"
transmission, to her students. Of course, teachers are capable of
transmitting the forms of the pāramitās, moral and contemplative,
through imitation, familiarization, direct instruction, and, I will
grant, a kind of psychic "osmosis." But, far more difficult to transmit
to one's students and friends are the all-important balance and
integration of the pāramitās in a given person, because they are partly
contingent on the individuality of the novice's personality. It is wrong
to believe that this balance can be given to the student, rather than
earned by self-effort in the corrective view of a vital community.
Buddhist tradition
poses to each Buddhist a momentous question: "Who is Buddha?" How do we
know that someone is advanced in the practices of "awakened virtue"?
That she's a "good person"? The answer is critical, for it is these
people one turns to for instruction, advice, example, confidence, and
even faith. A pāramitās-oriented approach carries us some distance to
the answer, because of its dual focus on character and communally
validated moral practices. Consequently, the living meaning of awakened
virtue is less dependent on the character of single persons upon whom a
community focuses, and more dependent on several persons and the
community (the saṃgha-community)
in its evolving solidarity. Viewing the practicing community as Buddha,
as itself a virtue-oriented awakening being, reduces personality cults
and deepens community resources.
The pāramitās emphasis
I am advocating will tend to develop protective standards of a more
public nature, to test those who seek to join or lead communities. But a
Buddhist virtues approach requires shoring up with useful ethical
strategies developed in the West both to assess particular acts and to
generate moral rules. The Western Buddhist milieu may also require a
heuristic recovery of the Vinaya tradition of Buddhist monastic
regulation. The Vinaya may have strayed into the trap of legalistic
casuistry, but it did define and set procedures for adjudicating
particular acts of monks that could not be tolerated, that had to result
in suspension or expulsion. Western Buddhist communities are only now
beginning to face up to this kind of decision-making, for which a
virtues-orientation is sometimes inadequate.
Having said all this, I
acknowledge that act-evaluations and rule-adjudications must be
secondary instruments in Buddhist ethics, necessary as they may be in
particular moments of particular communities. Essentially, Buddhist
ethics is centered in and on "character in community." This focus needs
to be kept, for upon it depends the future development of a Buddhist
ethics more aimed at relationships than principles, more interested in
mutual support than a defense of rights, more empathic than rational,
more compassionate than just.
Ethical strategies
focusing on rational rules and judgments of particular outward acts are
the essential feature of groups so large that they constitute a society
of strangers, threatened by the Hobbesian shadows of competition and
governed by laws of contract, restraint, coercion, property, and
command.[37]Laws are secondary to virtue in a Buddhist setting (and in
this I agree with Western Buddhists who resist "code" or rule-oriented
moralizing as a dominant approach to self- or community-discipline).
Nevertheless, while secondary, they are not dispensable.
The primary focus on
persons, character, and virtuous practices in Buddhist ethics cannot be
sustained without community, places where we know each other well enough
to call each other into the intimacies of an ethics of intention and
practice, as in a family. This means that Buddhist communities must ever
be small, small enough that people intimately know each other and the
other sentient beings sharing their life and death . I propose that they
can be too small, in that a group of four or six can hardly challenge
and support the full range of self-cultivation practices necessary to
awakened virtue. The problem of size for many Buddhists in the West lies
at the "too small" end of the spectrum. But that's better than to be at
the "too large" end. I cannot identify a practicing community that has
become too large (say, more than 200 active members), unless one looks
at the large metropolitan communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles,
which are arguably too large, too complex, and too absorbed in the
entropic tasks of organization maintenance of buildings, mortgages, and
so on.
We know from reading
Aristotle and MacIntyre that an ethics focused in virtue does not
picture the way to the good life in abstract or individual or universal
terms. The paths of virtue are marked by lived practices special to each
community. Virtue-oriented groups and communities, if we are to believe
MacIntyre and Hauerwas, depend more on their traditional "narrative"
reality- frames, their memories and stories of good persons practicing
the good life, than on their laws or universal principles.[38] But, we
also know that Western Buddhists today live in a post-Nietzschean world,
where the "stories" are many and "memory" is tattered. It is not at all
clear to many Western people that their chosen or inherited stories
invoke human reality in a coherent and compelling way.
In the postmodern West,
the Buddha's story or the life of awakened virtue can be told and tested
only in small, marginalized zones appropriately distanced from the
dominant power and value structures. The criteria of testing are two: 1)
the plausibility of the story of a person who, through specific
practices in a certain kind of community, "awakened, by and through
virtuous practices, in wisdom and compassion;" and 2) the evident
goodness in the people and communities now engaged in practices of the
Dharma. These people are the Buddha. Their story is the Buddha's story.
Acceptance of the
virtues approach in ethics presents specific challenges and advantages
to Buddhist thinkers and other scholars. For example, we need to develop
a more historical scholarship of the pāramitās dimension in Buddhism.
But, hopefully, we can also help people in today's Buddhist communities
to think through the tensions among the pāramitās, the problems of
priorities, the meanings of practicing in lay life, and a host of other
on-the-ground issues. We need to help Western Buddhists distinguish
among therapeutic, aesthetic, moral, economic, political, and spiritual
practices and choices. What is the optimum balance of attention and
consideration between self and others? What is Buddhist friendship? Does
it include mosquitoes? How and why do Buddhists fail morally after years
of practice? How does a virtues orientation link up with social justice
issues and the development of a Buddhist social ethics? Far more moral
and ethical questions buzz in Western Buddhists' lives, awaiting
creative, practical inquiry by philosophers, new generation
Buddhologists, and others.
I have been
recommending the virtues approach. It needs a fuller development, in
order to carry Buddhist morality into an inevitable, serious and
mutually constructive dialogue with Western philosophers and
theologians. My recommendations may appear too straitlaced, or even
atavistically Victorian, but what seems clear to me so far is this. The
most constructive future of Buddhism in the West rests on its
manifestation in the characters of people, not in eloquent prose,
fundraising efforts, temple-building, or incomplete life modeling.
Hopefully, a new generation will increasingly take the path of balancing
samādhi-exercise with pāramitās-practices. Put simply, the future
depends on a few good women and men who reveal a balanced, integrative
life -- of "awakened virtue" practices, in families, jobs, and
communities. It is through good lives that the Buddha's Dharma can fully
flower in the West, transforming our sufferings and awakening in us,
each and all, that which is best, inch by inch, moment by moment, breath
by breath.
Notes
[1] Alasdair MacIntyre,
After Virtue 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1984; Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Return
[2] For my judgment
that Buddhism will fail to bear fruit in the United States unless it
develops moral practices and ethical reflection more in concert with
American realities, see James Whitehill, Enter the Quiet (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980), 60-74, and Whitehill, "Is There a Zen
Ethic?," The Eastern Buddhist (New Series) 20 (Spring 1987), 9- 33.
Return
[3] A promising and
brief sketch of the philosophical roots of Buddhist ethics in the
doctrine of "dependent co-arising" (paṭicca-samuppāda),
with a good discussion of "moral agency", is Joanna Macy's "Dependent
Co-arising: The Distinctiveness of Buddhist Ethics," The Journal of
Religious Ethics, Vol. 7 No. 1 (Spring 1979), 38-52. But Macy did not
explicitly acknowledge the commensurability of Buddhist ethics with
virtue ethics, in terms of key similarities with respect to the nature
of the self, dispositions (kamma, sankhāras, etc.), and freedom. Return
[4] I think here first
of the San Francisco Renaissance figures of Jack Kerouac and Gary
Snyder, but also of Erich Fromm, William Barrett, Alan Watts, Thomas
Merton, and other writers who probed parallels between Zen and their own
home-grown existential concerns. Return
[5] Relevant sources
include: (on feminism) Rita Gross, "Buddhism and Feminism: Toward their
Mutual Transformation," The Eastern Buddhist 19 (Autumn 1986), 62-74;
Sandy Boucher, Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New
Buddhism (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988); (on
environmentalism) Allan H. Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia (Berkeley: Parallax
Press, 1990); J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames, eds., Nature in
Asian Traditions of Thought (Albany: S.UṆ.Y.
Press, 1989); James Whitehill, "Ecological Consciousness and Values:
Japanese Perspectives," Ecological Consciousness, eds. J. Donald Hughes
and George Schultz (New York: University Press of America, 1980),
165-182; (on the peace movement) Fred Eppsteiner, ed., The Path of
Compassion: Writings on Socially Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley: Parallax
Press, 1988). Return
[6] See David J.
Kalupahana, "The Buddhist Conceptions of "Subject" and "Object" and
their Moral Implications," Philosophy East and West 33 (July 1988),
290-304; Christopher A. Ives, "A Zen Buddhist Social Ethic,"
(Unpublished PhḌ. dissertation,
Claremont Graduate School, 1988) and Zen Awakening and Society
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992); Robert A. Thurman,
"Guidelines for Buddhist Social Activism Based on Nāgārjuna's Jewel
Garland of Royal Counsels," The Eastern Buddhist (New Series) 16 (Spring
1983), 19-51. For a Kantian approach, see Philip Olson, The Discipline
of Freedom: A Kantian View of the Role of Moral Precepts in Zen Practice
(Albany: State University of New York, Press, 1993). Return
[7] See Winston L.
King, "Buddhist Self-World Theory and Buddhist Ethics," The Eastern
Buddhist (New Series) 22 (Autumn 1989), 14- 26; "A Buddhist Ethic for
the West?" (unpublished manuscript, 1990). Return
[8] A large
bibliography of contemporary writings in virtues theory is in Robert B.
Kruschwitz and Robert C. Roberts, ed., The Virtues: Contemporary Essays
on Moral Character (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company,
1987), 237-63. For a discussion of the translatability and
commensurability of one ethical tradition (e.g., Buddhist) with another
(e.g., Western virtues tradition), see Stephen E. Fowl, "Could Horace
Talk with the Hebrews? Translatability and Moral Disagreement in
MacIntrye and Stout," The Journal of Religious Ethics Vol. 19 No.1
(Spring, 1991), 1- 20. Return
[9]Damien Keown, The
Nature of Buddhist Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). See
especially Chap. 1, "The Study of Buddhist Ethics," and Chap. 8,
"Buddhism and Aristotle." Return
[10] Robert N. Bellah,
"The Meaning of Dogen Today," Dogen Studies, ed. William R. LaFleur
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1985), 157-8. Return
[11] "Soul and soil"
because a complete virtue ethics not only refers to the capacities of
"human beings in general," but also the particular limitations for
expressing those capacities in terms of the "soil," literally and
metaphorically, in which those capacities for "humanity at its best" are
grown. Virtue is formed by "place," and a change of place or soil
requires appropriate transformation of the virtues. Ivan Illich and
others have called for a "philosophy of soil," because "our generation
has lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, we mean that
shape, order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by
place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the
actor; we mean practice mutually recognized as being good within a
shared local culture which enhances the memory of a place." See,
"Declaration of Soil," Whole Earth Review, No. 71 (Summer, 1991), 75.
Return
[12] By "awakened," I
mean the process and state of an empowering liberation of the self, by
means of ego-transforming praxis. By "virtue," I mean the ideal
cultivated set of rational discernments, personal skills, and
dispositions of character regarded as ideal and relevant to relations
with self and others in a known and shared community, in this case the
Buddhist community. In Buddhism as I understand it, moral virtue and
spiritual awakening are coordinate and mutually necessary; neither alone
is sufficient for attaining Buddhahood. Return
[13] "Sīla, "custom or
manner," but usually referring to the Five Precepts, avoidance dicta,
such as, "Avoid harming living beings," etc. Pāramitā, "high,"
"complete," or "perfect," but usually in the context of a list of
"perfections," akin to the virtues, characterizing the praxis and
character of those pursuing the Buddhist goals of selflessness, insight,
compassion, and liberation or "salvation." Return
[14] Several works can
provide historical and textual framework for Buddhist ethics, including
H. Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethics (New York: George Braziller, 1970, and
Gunapala Dharmasiri, Fundamentals of Buddhist Ethics (Antioch, Calif.:
Golden Leaves Publishing Company, 1989). Lopez's recent discussion of
virtues and sainthood from the Mahāyāna bodhisattva perspective, with
comparisons to Roman Catholic tradition, is detailed enough to be
helpful; Donald S. Lopez, Jr., "Sanctification on the Bodhisattva Path,"
Sainthood, eds. Richard Kieckhefer and George S. Bond (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988). Return
[15] For a classic
discussion of the pāramitās, "Sāntideva, The Path of Light, trans. LḌ. Barnett (AMS Press, 1990). A more recent translation of
"Sāntideva's Bodhicārya-avatāra is Marion Matics' Entering the Path of
Enlightenment (London: Macmillan Company, 1970). Return
[16] Robert Aitken, The
Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics (San Francisco: North
Point Press, 1984), 158. Return
[17] Aitken, The Mind
of Clover, 159. Return
[18] See Whitehill, "Is
There a Zen Ethic?" Return
[19] Gerta Ital, On the
Way to Satori: A Women's Experience of Enlightenment, trans. Timothy
Green (Dorset, England: Element Books, Ltd., 1990), 276. Return
[20] Ken Jones, The
Social Face of Buddhism: An Approach to Political and Social Activism
(London: Wisdom Publications, 1989). Return
[21] Dharmasiri,
interestingly, argues that Buddhist ethics is best understood as a
peculiar, non-hedonic form of act utilitarianism; Fundamentals of
Buddhist Ethics, 26-27. Return
[22] Much confusion in
thinking about Buddhism in the West results because the Asian cultures
from which it comes focus morality in the "roles" people play in
hierarchical, organic relationships, while modern Westerners who have
taken up Buddhism are often urged by their traditions to view morality
from the perspective of the autonomous, isolated self, understood as an
expressive "personality." This cross-cultural difference needs to be
more carefully used and understood by Buddhist interpreters. On the
contemporary American shift of interest from "character" to
"personality," see Anthony Quinton, "Character and Culture," in Vice and
Virtue in Everyday Life, ed. Christina & Fred Sommers (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, Publishers, 1989), 613-22. Return
[23] Jones, The Social
Face of Buddhism, 157. Return
[24] Robert H. Scharf,
"Being Buddha: A Performative Approach to Ch'an Enlightenment"
(unpublished manuscript, 1989). Hee-jin Kim, Dogen Kigen: Mystic Realist
(Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1987), 172-3. Martin Southwold
argues, in the instance of Sinhalese Buddhism, that ethical behavior is
the focus and vehicle of the "ritual impulse" for Buddhist laypeople in
Sri Lanka. Absent a transcendent focus of religious worship and ritual
reference, Buddhists have made of ethics and the Dharma the object of
ritual activity. Of course, the form of ethics most congenial to
ritualization is, of course, virtue ethics. See Southwold, Buddhism in
life: the anthropological study of religion and the Sinhalese practice
of Buddhism (Dover, NḤ.:
Manchester University Peress, 1983), 162-80. Return
[25] Nicomachean
Ethics, Book I I, Chap. 4. See M.F. Burnyeat, "Aristotle on Learning to
Be Good," Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 69-92. Return
[26] I am taking a
rather casual approach to the spelling of these terms, choosing between
the Pali and the Sanskrit renderings on the basis of which seems easiest
to pronounce and remember in English. I am casual with an excuse
however, for I think it must soon be necessary to coin English phonetic
neologues for these terms, and I am merely choosing those I like (e.g.,
I think paññā is weak-sounding in English when referring to a powerfully
transforming insight, or prajñā-insight.Return
[27] I hope someone
with perseverance can attempt an analysis of the pāramitās, in
comparative light, akin to Lee Yearley's arduous study of the theories
of virtue in Mencius and Aquinas. Yearley takes the study of virtue deep
into comparative terrain, marking assiduously more distinctions between
Aquinas and Mencius than I care to know, because I can't see readily
what difference they make. Lee Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of
Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1990). Return
[28] Vijay Nath, Dāna:
Gift System in Ancient India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal
Publishers, 1987). Return
[29] See Melford Spiro,
Buddhism and Society (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970); Winston
L. King, In the Hope of Nibbana (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1964). Spiro
and King, while admiring many of the personal qualities of Buddhist
laypeople, tend to diminish their moral achievements as self-regarding,
because lay Buddhists link good deeds and good character with favorable
rebirths. Scholars from Christian cultures that have given the highest
moral value to self-sacrificing altruism, agape, are not likely to
regard the Buddha's injunction, to avoid the extremes of self-indulgence
and self-mortification, as the most heroic spiritual advice. Return
[30] Some scholars
believe King and Spiro make too sharp a distinction between layperson
and monk, between kamma-motives and Nibbāna-motives, in Theravāda
Buddhism. See, Harvey B. Aronson, "The Relationship of the Karmic to the
Nirvanic in Theravada Buddhism," The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 7
No. 1 (Spring 1979), 28-36; Donald K. Swearer, "Bhikkhu Buddhadasa on
Ethics and Society," The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 7 No. 1
(Spring 1979), 54-64. Southwold makes his argument against this
"elitist" and "modernist" interpretation of a dualistic Buddhism the
center of his work, Buddhism in Life. See also, Damien Keown, The Nature
of Buddhist Ethics, 83-105. Return
[31] Robert A. Thurman,
trans., The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti (London: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1976). Return
[32] This self-concept
gives trouble to ethical systems, like Kant's, and social-political
traditions, like Western liberalism (of progressive or conservative
varieties), that function in terms of rights-claims, human rights, etc.
Buddhist ethics, insofar as it is grounded in the processional,
ecological self-in-community, and articulated teleologically in terms of
the specific pāramitās and their cultivation, must be in tension with
Western tradition on this issue, so long as Western ethics and legal
structures are primarily designed to serve individual and corporate
property interests. This is not to claim that Buddhist ethics overlooks
or radically discounts individual human rights. The origins of Buddhism
clearly reflect a vision of human life that is prejudiced toward
individual release from social, as well as psychic, oppression of the
human spirit. Buddhist ethics supports democracy and human rights
protection as a preferable arrangement of social, legal, and religious
tolerance. However, Buddhist ethics views such tolerance and protection
as only two of the conditions for a good human life. Return
[33] See Joanna Macy,
"The Ecological Self: Postmodern Ground for Right Action," Sacred
Interconnections, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany: State University Press
of New York, 1990), 35-48. Return
[34] David E. Shaner
develops the Japanese Buddhist connection between cultivation of
character and a "biophilic" experience of nature in an excellent
article, "The Japanese Experience of Nature," Nature in Asian Traditions
of Thought, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1989),163-82. Return
[35] See Shaner's
review of recent biographies of the Buddha, in which he discusses the
nature and limits of Buddhist hagiography; David E. Shaner, "Biographies
of the Buddha" Philosophy East and West 37 (July 1987), 306-22. Return
[36] Helen Tworkov's
Zen in America: Profiles of Five Teachers discusses moral concerns in
connection with the behavior of some American Zen teachers, but avoids
using the words "moral" and "ethical" and makes little use of Buddhist
moral tradition to clarify the concerns discussed. Tworkov, Zen in
America (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989). Sandy Boucher reports
moral concerns of many American women growing out of their experiences
in American Buddhist centers; Boucher, Turning the Wheel: American Women
Creating the New Buddhism. Return
[37] Frank Kirkpatrick
and I have ventured a comparative philosophical discussion of Buddhist
and Christian models of community in our "Mutual/Personal Community:
Buddhist and Christian Models" (unpublished manuscript, 1990). See
Kirkpatrick's Together Bound: God, History, and the Religious Community
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Return
[38] See, for example,
Alasdair MacIntyre's much referred to chapter, "The Virtues, The Unity
of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition," in After Virtue. His
emphasis on the "narrative" quality of life is not common to all virtue
theorists. The Buddhist notion of "narrative" is, I presume,
sufficiently different from the Christian notion to offer a useful test
of MacIntyre's claims. For example, is the story of Jesus' life, death
and resurrection more "plausible" MacIntyre's criterion) than the story
of Siddhārtha Gautama? Return, Copyright 1994, http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/index.html
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Source: http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/
Update: 01-12-2004
