Contemporary Buddhist Ethics

Damien Keown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136118104
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative volume brings together the views of leading scholars on a range of controversial subjects including human rights, animal rights, ecology, abortion, euthanasia, and contemporary business practice.

CHAPTER ONE

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Buddhism and the Virtues¹

James Whitehill

My purpose in this chapter 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.² This second guess is more specific, tentative, and provocative, and, therefore, more interesting, so it will be my dominant theme.³

Viewing Buddhist morality and ethics in the light of virtue 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

-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 1980s, 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.⁴ 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 1960s, 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.⁵ 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.⁶

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

.⁷

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.⁸

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contemporary Buddhist Ethics
• General Editors
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter One Buddhism and the Virtues
• Chapter Two From Monastic Ethics to Modern Society
• Chapter Three Buddhism and Human Rights
• Chapter Four Buddhism and Animal Rights
• Chapter Five Buddhism and Ecology
• Chapter Six Buddhism and Abortion
• Chapter Seven To Save or Let Go: Thai Buddhist Perspectives on Euthanasia
• Chapter Eight Buddhism Returns to the Market-place
• Index