Buddhist Ethics (discipline)
Encyclopedia
Buddhist ethics as an academic discipline is relatively new, blossoming in the mid 1990s. Much like Critical Buddhism
Critical Buddhism
Critical Buddhism is a trend in Japanese Buddhist scholarship, associated primarily with the works of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō. According to Lin Chen-kuo, Hakamaya's view is that "Critical Buddhism sees methodical, rational critique as belonging to the very foundations of Buddhism...

 and Buddhist modernism
Buddhist modernism
Buddhist modernism consists of the "forms of Buddhism that have emerged out of an engagement with the dominant cultural and intellectual forces of modernity." While there can be no complete, essential definition of what constitutes a Buddhist Modernist tradition, most scholars agree that...

, it is a result of recent exchanges of Eastern and Western thought. While generally thought of as a sub-field of Buddhist studies
Buddhist Studies
Buddhist studies, also known as Buddhology , is the academic study of Buddhism. The term applies especially to the modern academic field, which is a subset of Religious Studies, and is distinct from Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist theology...

, the discipline of Buddhist ethics draws together history, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, and more in an attempt to understand what may be the fundamental question of Buddhism: how ought man live?

Specific work has been produced on Buddhist ethics dating back to the 1920s. Early descriptive accounts of Buddhist ethics include Tachibana’s Ethics of Buddhism (1926), focused on Theravādin
Theravada
Theravada ; literally, "the Teaching of the Elders" or "the Ancient Teaching", is the oldest surviving Buddhist school. It was founded in India...

 ethics, and Poussin’s La Morale Bouddhique (1927), based on Mahāyāna
Mahayana
Mahāyāna is one of the two main existing branches of Buddhism and a term for classification of Buddhist philosophies and practice...

 texts. Other early authors that expressed interest in Buddhist ethics include Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids
Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids
Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids was an English Pāli language scholar and translator, and from 1923-1942 president of the Pali Text Society which was founded by her husband T. W. Rhys Davids whom she married in 1894.-Early life and education:...

 and Isaline Blew Horner
Isaline Blew Horner
Dr. I.B. Horner was a leading scholar of Pali literature, late president of the Pali Text Society and recipient of the Order of the British Empire .-Cambridge years:...

. In 1979 the Journal of Religious Studies featured a section devoted to the study of Theravādin ethics. featuring four prominent scholars in Buddhist studies
Buddhist Studies
Buddhist studies, also known as Buddhology , is the academic study of Buddhism. The term applies especially to the modern academic field, which is a subset of Religious Studies, and is distinct from Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist theology...

.

History

Buddhist ethics emerged as an academic discipline in 1992, with the publication of Damien Keown's book The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. His subsequent co-founding of the Journal of Buddhist Ethics in 1994 further solidified the birth of a new field in the discipline of Buddhist studies. Prior to Keown's book, only a handful of books and articles existed that attempted to delve into the questions of a specifically Buddhist ethic. Even more daunting, however, has been the separation of 'ethics' from the rest of Buddhism. Buddhism has been called an eminently ethical religion. It has also been argued, by Keown and others, that the very question the Buddha sought to answer was a purely ethical one, namely, "the perennial problem of the best kind of life for man to lead."

In October 2011 Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 hosted the first conference dedicated solely to Buddhist ethics entitled Contemporary Perspectives on Buddhist Ethics.

Trends

Arguably the most fruitful attempt to define Buddhist Ethics has been in terms of Western theories from Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

 (virtue
Virtue
Virtue is moral excellence. A virtue is a positive trait or quality subjectively deemed to be morally excellent and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being....

), Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...

 (Deontological), and Bentham
Bentham
-People:* Billy Bentham, English rugby league footballer* Charles Bentham, English shipwright in Dutch service* Craig Bentham , English footballer* Ethel Bentham , Irish doctor, politician and suffragette...

 and James Mill
James Mill
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher. He was a founder of classical economics, together with David Ricardo, and the father of influential philosopher of classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill.-Life:Mill was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of...

 (utilitarian). However, others—mainly non-Western scholars—have sought to present Buddhist ethics in a more direct or traditional form.

Aristotle / virtue

In Buddhist Ethics as Virtue Ethics, Nick Gier compares Buddha's ethical teachings to Aristotle's: "Like Greek virtue ethics, Buddhist ethics is also humanistic and thoroughly personalist."

Damien Keown
Damien Keown
Damien Keown is a prominent bioethicist and authority on Buddhist bioethics. He currently teaches in the Department of History at the University of London...

 devotes a great deal of his work to debunking claims that Buddhism is utilitarian in nature. His work then goes on to examine the structure of Buddhist ethics, focusing specifically on morality (Pali: siila). His conclusion is that Buddhist ethics most closely resembles the ancient Greek virtue ethics found in Aristotle.

James Whitehill, in Buddhist Ethics in Western Context: The Virtues Approach, says: "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."

Kant / Deontological

A handful of pioneering works have sought to examine similarities between Kantian and Buddhist ethics. One such is Bradford Cokelet's "Reflections on Kant and Karma".

"I would argue that, given the recent popularity of claiming that Buddhist ethics is a type of virtue ethics, Buddhist ethicists should respond to criticisms that Kant and Kantians have made of western versions of virtue ethics and to claims that most virtue-ethical criticisms of Kantianism rest on misunderstandings of Kant and Kantianism. See for example, J.B. Schneewind, “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” in Ethics, Volume 101, 1990, p. 42-63, Barbara Herman, “Making Room for Character,” and Allen W. Wood, “Self-love, Self-benevolence, and Self-conceit,” both in Kant, Aristotle, and the Stoics, ed. Jennifer Whiting and Stephen Engstrom, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996, and Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996." fn. 20, p.13."

Bentham/Mill - utilitarian

Mark Siderits suggests that the doctrine of anatta
Anatta
In Buddhism, anattā or anātman refers to the notion of "not-self." In the early texts, the Buddha commonly uses the word in the context of teaching that all things perceived by the senses are not really "I" or "mine," and for this reason one should not cling to them.In the same vein, the Pali...

 provides the grounding for an "aretaic consequentialism" in which the goal is the alleviation of suffering for all beings (realizing that there is no "self" to be freed apart from others). He follows a long line of thinkers in Buddhist ethics.

Traditional Buddhist ethics

Two key teachers of traditional Buddhist ethics are Hammalawa Saddhatissa
Hammalawa Saddhatissa
The Ven. Prof. Hammalawa Saddhatissa Maha Thera was an ordained Buddhist monk and author from Sri Lanka, educated in Benares, London, and Edinburgh. He was a contemporary of and in many ways equal to Ven. Prof. Walpola Rahula, also of Sri Lanka....

 and Padmasiri De Silva. Saddhatissa was a Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...

n Buddhist monk who wrote Buddhist Ethics in 1970 (reprinted in 1987, 1997 & 2003). De Silva has a similar work, Buddhism, Ethics and Society: The Conflicts and Dilemmas of Our Times (2002). A third, and less notable work is The Way to Social Harmony (1989, available online) by Venerable U Pyinnyathiha.

These works can be invaluable as an introduction into key Buddhist canonical texts such as the Sigalovada Sutta
Sigalovada Sutta
Sigalovada Sutta is the 31st Sutta described in the Digha Nikaya . It is also known as the Sīgāla Sutta, the Sīgālaka Sutta, the Sigālovāda Sutta, and the Sigālovāda Suttanta ....

.

Further reading

  • Aitken, Robert. The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1984


  • Keown, Damien. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. Macmillan/Palgrave, 1992/2001 (a survey and Aristotelian interpretation)

  • Siderits, Mark. "Buddhist Reductionism and the Structure of Buddhist Ethics." Indian Ethics: Classical and Contemporary Challenges. Edited by P. Bilimoria, J. Prabhu and R. Sharma. Abingdon, UK: Ashgate, 2005. (a utilitarian interpretation)
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