Buddhist Ethics in Western Context

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Contemporary Buddhism increasingly seeks to make itself understood in modern terms and to respond to contemporary conditi##被过滤##. Buddhism's legitimation in the West can be partially met by dem##被过滤##trating 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 "c##被过滤##truction" 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 temptati##被过滤## 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 c##被过滤##istent 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 assumpti##被过滤## 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 directi##被过滤## 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 protecti##被过滤## of expertise into the vulnerability of guesswork. My guesswork about Western Buddhism's future takes the form of two hypotheses for scholarly c##被过滤##ideration by interested philosophers and ethicists, Buddhist or not. The two hypotheses can also be viewed by Western Buddhists as recommendati##被过滤## on the future course of their Buddhist practices and communities.

The first hypothesis and recommendation is that Buddhism must begin to dem##被过滤##trate 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 comparis##被过滤## 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

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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' explorati##被过滤## 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 questi##被过滤## 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 spiri