[Buddha-l] Buddhist ethics in a contemporary world

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 19:18 -0700, Michael Rolig wrote:

> I led us down the tangent asking the question "Does the word ethics
> apply to Buddhism?"...

That may have been a tangent to one discussion, but it is a good
question in itself. It is one I have often thought about without coming
to a definitive answer. (It is not my wont to have answers. They
irritate the hell out of me.)

Like you, in your previous post, I have noted that nowhere in the Indian
tradition (that I am aware of) does one find the kind of casuistry that
is the lifeblood of European and Jewish discussions of the limits of
particular laws. In most Western ethical reasoning, there is a lot of
emphasis on discussing limiting cases through thought experiments and
musing about hypothetic situations. (We all know these "what if"
conundrums, such as "Telling the truth is the right thing to do. But
what if George W. Bush came knocking at your door, and you were
harboring someone named Mohammad whom you knew to be innocent but whom
the CIA was convinced was a terrorist. Would you lie to the the
president to save Mohammad from getting free room and board for an
indefinite period of time in Guantánamo?")

What is particularly surprising is that Indian thinkers were very
sophisticated in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology and logic. But
why not ethics? Why was there so little discussion of ethical problems
in a culture that loved to discuss all other kinds of problems to death?
This seems to have been the case in India in general, and Indian
Buddhism is not exception.

One of the exciting developments in Buddhism as it is evolving in what
is conventionally called the West is that a lot of sophisticated people
who expect good answers to good questions are asking all sorts of good
questions about Budhdist precepts, and the metaphysical assumptions on
which most of them are based.

> I think you already see that American Buddhism is already decreasing
> the import of rebirth, as it doesn't fit into established theories. 
> (Of course this is an interesting area, because Buddhist philosophers
> had a hard time explaining rebirth in the face of non-self).

Those who tried to defend rebirth in the face of hard questions asked by
various materialists in India, who believed that we have one life and
then die and simply cease to exist, usually had to content themselves
with saying that rebirth cannot be definitively proved to be impossible.
That's a very weak position. You can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt
that the entity typing this message is not a giant squid living in a vat
of liquid nitrogen on the dark side of the moon, so it is perfectly
legitimate to believe that you are reading the musings of a giant squid.

> One difficulty in reading Buddhism for legal/ethical guidance is that
> it is not particularly well suited.  You have one place "don't kill" 
> in another "no birth, no death"  Well, is there death and killing, or
> not?  If there's no such thing as death, what does it matter if I
> "kill".  My take, as a practicing Buddhist, is that once you get
> caught up in the doctrine you miss the real lesson.

What exactly IS the real lesson? I'm really not at all sure that one
misses anything of importance if one thinks carefully and critically
about difficult ethical questions. Indeed, I think it may be impossible
to practice if one does not do a certain amount of careful and critical
thinking.

> another example, I don't know the sources, is of a great buddhist
> teacher who, as you would expect, was vegetarian and didn't kill. 
> Yet, when his mother was dying and requested a meal of fish to be her
> last, he happily went to the market to bring her the fish.
> 
> With stories like that, it's hard to come up with a set of rules to
> express such an ethical system. Especially, a set of rules that makes
> sense to Western culture.

Coming up with absolute and invariable rules would be hard. And it
should be. Absolute and invariable rules are pretty much useless in a
conditioned and complex world. But one can usually find some underlying
principle underlying apparent contradictions in particular precepts. One
principle that is stated often enough is "avoid harm and do what is
beneficial," and that accounts remains pretty much intact everywhere you
look in Buddhist teachings. The details of what is harmful and what is
beneficial can never be fully spelled out, probably because nothing is
ever absolutely harmful to everyone or absolutely beneficial for
everyone. That is what makes life so difficult to master.

One of my favorite examples of the inherent ambiguity of the benefit of
actions is the story of the bodhisattva feeding himself to a tigress.
Every Buddhist knows that story and gets all misty eyed about it. But
not many people reflect on the whole story. After the tigress gobbles up
the bodhisattva, his parents come around and find his bones and throw
themselves on the ground wailing and sobbing and tearing out their hair.
What saves a tigress's life devastates the bodhisattva's mother. What
action of kindness is not like that? When we focus only on the good
results of our kindness and fail to see the hell our good intention
inadvertently causes for others, then we live in denial. And living in
forgetfulness is never recommended very highly by any Buddhist.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico