Tag Archives: Bodhisattva

Volume 30 2023

A Tibetan Approach to Moral Phenomenological Praxis

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Volume 30, 2023

Lta sgom spyod gsum: A Tibetan Approach to Moral Phenomenological Praxis

Colin H. Simonds
Queen’s University at Kingston

This article unpacks the Tibetan framework of lta sgom spyod gsum, or view, meditation, action, and relates it to the Buddhist ethical project of moral phenomenology. It first investigates how the framework has been defined and used both descriptively and practically in Tibetan primary texts. It then nuances this usage by identifying key aspects of its deployment in Tibetan contexts, including how view is prioritized among the three limbs, how the unity of view and action is the intended fruition of practice, and how there is a specific order of operations in its implementation. This article then relates lta sgom spyod gsum directly to the ethical project of moral phenomenology and demonstrates how it can be mobilized as the practical arm of this unique¬ly Buddhist ethical theory. Thus, this article presents a robust reading of lta sgom spyod gsum in Tibetan Buddhist contexts, contributes to the ongoing development of the ethical theory of moral phenomenology, and provides further avenues for engaging the Tibetan Buddhist ethical tradition with the moral issues facing us today.

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Volume 30 2023

Review: Buddhist Visions of the Good Life for All

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Volume 30, 2023

Buddhist Visions of the Good Life for All. Edited by Sallie B. King. Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2021, xvi + 256 pages, ISBN 978-0-367-56181-9 (hardback), $160, 978-1-00-310045-4 (e-book), $44.05.

Reviewed by Timothy Loftus

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Volume 29 2022

Ethos of the Great Perfection

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Volume 29, 2022

Ethos of the Great Perfection: Continual Mindfulness According to Patrul’s Foundational Manual

Marc-Henri Deroche
Kyoto University

This article investigates the role of mindfulness in the so-called foundational practices exposed in Dza Patrul Orgyan Jigme Chökyi Wangpo’s (1808–1887) famous manual, Words of My Perfect Teacher, which belongs to the Dzogchen lineage of the Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse within the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. It argues that, according to these spiritual instructions, the continual exercise of mindfulness, meta-awareness, and carefulness forms the “ethos of the Great Perfection”—the constant ethical base and the consistent way of life that supports the path of Dzogchen. Sources of Words of My Perfect Teacher (including Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra) and selected passages are analyzed in order to elucidate Patrul’s moral philosophy of mindful awareness and self-examination. The mnemonic, reflective, and attentional facets of the cultivation of mindfulness all work to internalize the ethical principles that govern the conduct of life, shaping new habits, exercising free will, and forming moral agency. They define the very ethos that articulates the value system and the re-orientation of attention. Such deliberate moment-by-moment mindfulness paves the way for discovering “instantaneous awareness,” the distinctive feature of Dzogchen, and for resting in its uninterrupted flow, from within to respond compassionately to other individuals and various circumstances.

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Volume 29 2022

Review: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakīrti Sūtra

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Volume 29, 2022

Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakīrti Sūtra. By Dale S. Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, 176 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-758735-5 (hard-back), $29.95/ 978-0-19-758737-9 (e-book), $19.99.

Reviewed by Christopher W. Gowans

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Volume 29 2022

Review: A Philosophical Exploration of Buddhist Ethics

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Volume 29, 2022

Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration. By Jay L. Garfield. Buddhist Philosophy for Philosophers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, xiv + 231 pages, ISBN 978-0-19-090763-1 (hardback), $99/978-0-19-090764-8 (paperback), $24.95/978-0-19-090766-2 (e-book), $16.99.

Reviewed by Amod Lele

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Volume 29 2022

Shabkar’s Narrative Argument for Vegetarianism and the Ethical Treatment of Animals

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Volume 29, 2022

Taking Animals Seriously: Shabkar’s Narrative Argument for Vegetarianism and the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Rachel H. Pang
Davidson College

Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol’s (1781-1851) collected works present one of the most sustained treatments of vegetarianism and animal ethics in Tibetan literature. His arguments for vegetarianism adopt two main formats: philosophical prose and narrative. In this essay, I analyze Shabkar’s implicit argument for vegetarianism and the ethical treatment of animals in the narrative passages of his autobiography that describe his interactions with animals. By including animals as significant interlocutors in his autobiography, Shabkar reframes the relationship between animals and humans to be less anthropocentric and more based on the ideal of impartiality (phyogs ris med pa). In turn, this serves as an implicit narrative argument for the adoption of a vegetarian diet. This mode of argumentation differs from the majority of arguments for vegetarianism in Tibetan Buddhist literature which tend to be more philosophical in nature. Shabkar’s narrative mode of argument is an example of the “act of social imagination” first identified by Charles Hallisey and Anne Hansen in South and Southeast Asian Buddhist narratives. These types of narratives cultivate an ethical ideal in an audience by prompting the audience into an “act of social imagination” that in turn forms the foundation for moral agency.

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Volume 28 2021

Buddhist Ethics as Moral Phenomenology

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Volume 28, 2021

Buddhist Ethics as Moral Phenomenology: A Defense and Development of the Theory

Colin Simonds
Queen’s University at Kingston

This article defends and develops the categorization of Buddhist ethics as moral phenomenology. It first examines the use of the term in Western philosophical settings and compares it to how the term is employed in Buddhist settings. After concluding that Western ethical comportment and Buddhist moral phenomenology are commensurate terms, it explores how moral phenomenology has been understood in Buddhist contexts and considers the evidence scholars have used to make this interpretation. The article then looks to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for further evidence of a moral phenomenological approach to Buddhist ethics and analyzes further proof of this interpretation. Finally, issues that emerge from a moral phenomenological approach to ethics are addressed from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective to strengthen this interpretation and offer moral phenomenology as a viable alternative ethical system.

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Volume 27 2020

Bodhisattva Relations with Machines?

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Volume 27, 2020

True Love for the Artificial? Toward the Possibility of Bodhisattva Relations with Machines

Thomas H. Doctor
Kathmandu University Centre for Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute

Given our increasing interaction with artificial intelligence and immersion in virtual reality, which epistemic and moral attitudes towards virtual beings might we think proper, relevant, and fulfilling? That is the basic question that this article wishes to raise. For the main part, it presents a descriptive analysis of our current situation, which is meant to expose features of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) that seem both salient and easily aligned with central Buddhist concerns. Developed without any requirement for, or expectation of, the existence of real subjects and selves, Buddhist views and practices clearly resonate with the assumptions of unreal mind and mere appearance that are associated with AI and VR. Yet Buddhists famously also declare that the illusion-like nature of things does not negate, but in fact entails, universal care and deep meaning. I conclude by suggesting that such doctrinal claims may be tested for practical relevance in the present and emerging world of interconnectivity and illusion.

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Volume 27 2020

Review: Readings of Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice

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Volume 27, 2020

Readings of Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice. Edited by Jonathan C. Gold and Douglas S. Duckworth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-231-19267-5 (Paperback), $30.00.

Reviewed by Stephen Harris

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Volume 26 2019

Disengaged Buddhism

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Volume 26, 2019

Disengaged Buddhism

Amod Lele
Boston University

Contemporary engaged Buddhist scholars typically claim either that Buddhism always endorsed social activism, or that its non-endorsement of such activism represented an unwitting lack of progress. This article examines several classical South Asian Buddhist texts that explicitly reject social and political activism. These texts argue for this rejection on the grounds that the most important sources of suffering are not something that activism can fix, and that political involvement interferes with the tranquility required for liberation. The article then examines the history of engaged Buddhism in order to identify why this rejection of activism has not yet been taken sufficiently seriously. Read article

Volume 25 2018

Primordial Wisdom and the Buddhist Free Will Controversy

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Volume 25, 2018

A Role for Primordial Wisdom in the Buddhist Free Will Controversy

Marie Friquegnon
William Paterson University

In Buddhist Perspectives on Free Will (Repetti), I set forth my position on Buddhism and free will in terms of three ways of understanding the issue of freedom in Buddhism. Here I first offer a sketch of that threefold analysis, and then I analyze certain key passages in some of the other essays in that collection through that lens. Each of these three ways of understanding Buddhist conceptions of freedom harmonizes with some of the essays. I then analyze Śāntideva’s view on the acceptability of the action of the bodhisattva who shot a pirate to save 500 people; I contrast that with Śāntarakṣita’s view; and I try to dissolve an apparent contradiction. I then take Śāntideva’s use of upāya (skillful means) in the pirate case and apply it to his position on free will. Lastly, I conclude by suggesting that the way out of some of the discrepancies in the analysis of free will in Buddhism may be resolved by appealing to primordial wisdom as a hypothetical construct, making reference to what appears to be an analogous use of the concept of a hypothetical construct that may be found in Aquinas.
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Volume 25 2018

Heroic Willpower (Virya)

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Volume 25, 2018

Freedom through Cumulative Moral Cultivation: Heroic Willpower (Vīrya)

Jonathan C. Gold
Princeton University

Although abstract speculation on “freedom of the will” is hard to find in premodern Buddhist writings, this is not for Buddhists’ lack of attention to responsibility and effortful moral acts. This paper studies early teachings on the dharmas called “effort” (vyāyāma) and “heroic will-power” (vīrya), which are key to such quintessential Buddhist lists as the Eightfold Path, the Four Right Endeavors, and the Perfections cultivated by a bodhisattva. A look at effortful action as treated in traditional Buddhist texts helps to show why the western philosophical preoccupation with “free will” is not self-evidently worthwhile from a practical or moral perspective. Effort on the Buddhist path accumulates into moral strength through numerous and different kinds of enactments at the level of individual mental events. The goal of this model of practice is that one arrives at the ability to transcend the busy, messy work of having to decide to act morally—one’s virtue becomes spontaneous. This structure suggests that not only is the capacity for moral choice not a necessary precondition of effective practice or moral significance; it may get in the way.
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Volume 25 2018

Self-immolations, Human Security, and the Violence of Nonviolence in Tibet

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Volume 25, 2018

Burning for a Cause: Self-immolations, Human Security, and the Violence of Nonviolence in Tibet

Antonio Terrone
American Theological Library Association

In Tibetan areas of the People’s Republic of China, more than 150 Tibetans have immolated themselves in the past decade to protest what they perceive as limited religious, cultural, and civil rights. Revered as national heroes in exile and compassionate human rights fighters among Euro-American audiences, Tibetan self-immolators are considered mere terrorists in China. This article brings studies in terrorism into its analysis of the Tibetan self-immolation crisis, examining the ways in which both are heightened by modern communication technology and media. Rejecting any interpretation that aligns self-immolation with suicide terrorism, I argue that although Tibetan self-immolators uphold Buddhist scriptural principles of bodhisattvic self-sacrifice, their martyrdom is nevertheless a form of violence with far ranging causes, both political and religious.
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Volume 24 2017

Review: Gods of Medieval Japan

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Volume 24, 2017

Gods of Medieval Japan, Volume 1: The Fluid Pantheon by Bernard Faure. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015, xii + 496 pages, ISBN 978-0-8248-3933-8 (hardback), $55.00.
Gods of Medieval Japan, Volume 2: Protectors and Predators by Bernard Faure. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015, x + 512 pages, ISBN 978-0-8248-3931-4 (hardback), $55.00.
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Reviewed by Joseph P. Elacqua

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Volume 23 2016

Is Compassionate Killing Psychologically Impossible?

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Volume 23, 2016

On Compassionate Killing and the Abhidhamma’s “Psychological Ethics”

Damien Keown
University of London Goldsmiths

Is compassionate killing really psychologically impossible, as the Abhidhamma claims? Previously I discussed a Vinaya case that seemed to show the contrary. Reviewing my conclusions in the light of commentarial literature, Rupert Gethin disagreed and restated the Abhidhamma position that killing can never be motivated by compassion. This paper supports my original conclusions and argues further that the Vinaya case reveals underlying problems with the Abhidhamma’s “psychological ethics.”

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Volume 22 2015

Predictions of Women to Buddhahood in Middle-Period Literature

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Volume 22, 2015

Predictions of Women to Buddhahood in Middle-Period Literature

Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā
Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts

This article studies narratives related to the topic of women receiving a prediction or declaration (vyākaraṇa) for Buddhahood. The texts in question—in their received form—have their place in the Indian Buddhist traditions of the Middle Period. The first episode taken up is the story of Princess Munī who receives the prediction of becoming the present Buddha Śākyamuni; this is found in the so-called “Scripture on the Wise and the Fool.” The second episode is the story of Yaśomatī who receives the prediction that she will become the Buddha Ratnamati; this is found in the Avadānaśataka. When evaluating these comparatively rare instances of predictions received by women, two aspects come up for special consideration: (a) the textual significance of variations regarding the presence or absence of a change of sex, and (b) the epistemological and soteriological consequences for female audiences of women’s narratives constructed by the third-person perspective of male monastic text transmitters. The variations document that the transmitters did not always perceive the transformation of sex into a male as a categorical necessity. This transformation may not have been integral to these narratives of the bodhisattva path as articulated by the textual communities in which these texts originated and circulated.

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Volume 22 2015

The Four Realities True for Noble Ones

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Volume 22, 2015

The Four Realities True for Noble Ones: A New Approach to the Ariyasaccas

Ven. Pandita (Burma)
University of Kelaniya

Peter Harvey recently argued that the term sacca of ariyasacca should be interpreted as “reality” rather than as “truth,” the common rendition. In this paper, although I basically agree with him, I see quite different implications and come to a wholly new interpretation of the four ariyasaccas.

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Volume 22 2015

Holistic Eco-Buddhism and the Problem of Universal Identity

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Volume 22, 2015

Nature’s No-Thingness: Holistic Eco-Buddhism and the Problem of Universal Identity

Marek Sullivan
University of Oxford

“Holistic eco-Buddhism” has been roundly criticized for its heterodoxy and philosophical incoherence: the Buddha never claimed we should protect an “eco-self” and there are serious philosophical problems attendant on “identifying with things.” Yet this essay finds inadequate attention has been paid to East Asian sources. Metaphysical issues surrounding eco-Buddhism, i.e., problems of identity and difference, universalism and particularity, have a long history in Chinese Buddhism. In particular, I examine the notion of “merging with things” in pre-Huayan and Huayan Buddhism, suggesting these offer unexplored possibilities for a coherent holistic eco-Buddhism based on the differentiating effects of activity and functionality.

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Volume 21 2014

Compassion in Schopenhauer and Śāntideva

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Volume 21, 2014

Compassion in Schopenhauer and Śāntideva

Kenneth Hutton
University of Glasgow

Although it is well known that Schopenhauer claimed that Buddhism closely reflected his own philosophy, this claim was largely ignored until the mid-late Twentieth century. Most commentators on Schopenhauer (with some recent exceptions) since then have mentioned his Buddhist affinities but have been quite broad and general in their treatment. I feel that any general comparison of Schopenhauer’s philosophy with “general” Buddhism would most likely lead to general conclusions. In this article I have attempted to offer a more specific comparison of what is central to Schopenhauer’s philosophy with what is central to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and that is the concept of compassion.

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Volume 21 2014

Dōgen’s Primer on the Nonmoral Virtues of the Good Person

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Volume 21, 2014

Dōgen’s Primer on the Nonmoral Virtues of the Good Person

Douglas K. Mikkelson
University of Hawai’i at Hilo

The Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki provides a good introduction to Dōgen’s ideas about the virtues possessed by “the good person.” His depiction includes, but extends beyond, the conception of a “morally good” human being. This is evident by the number of “nonmoral” virtues that are manifest in the text. Edmund Pincoffs presents a schematization of numerous virtues based on his conception of virtues and vices as dispositional properties that provide ground for preference or avoidance of persons. This schematization seems especially well suited for an exploration and description of the nonmoral virtues that appear in the Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki.

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Volume 21 2014

Buddhist Self-immolation and Mahāyānist Absolute Altruism, Part Two

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Volume 21, 2014

Thresholds of Transcendence: Buddhist Self-immolation and Mahāyānist Absolute Altruism, Part Two

Martin Kovan
University of Melbourne

In China and Tibet, and under the gaze of the global media, the five-year period from February 2009 to February 2014 saw the self-immolations of at least 127 Tibetan Buddhist monks, nuns, and lay-people. An English Tibetan Buddhist monk, then resident in France, joined this number in November 2012, though his self-immolation has been excluded from all accounts of the exile Tibetan and other documenters of the ongoing Tibetan crisis. Underlying the phenomenon of Buddhist self-immolation is a real and interpretive ambiguity between personal, religious (or ritual-transcendental), altruistic, and political suicide, as well as political suicide within the Buddhist sangha specifically. These theoretical distinctions appear opaque not only to (aligned and non-aligned, Tibetan and non-Tibetan) observers, but potentially also to self-immolators themselves, despite their deeply motivated conviction.

Such ambiguity is reflected in the varying historical and current assessments of the practice, also represented by globally significant Buddhist leaders such as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese monk and activist Thích Nhất Hạnh. This essay analyses the symbolic ontology of suicide in these Tibetan Buddhist cases, and offers metaethical and normative accounts of self-immolation as an altruistic-political act in the “global repertoire of contention” in order to clarify its claims for what is a critically urgent issue in Buddhist ethics.

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Volume 20 2013

Buddhist Self-immolation and Mahāyānist Absolute Altruism

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Volume 20, 2013

Thresholds of Transcendence: Buddhist Self-immolation and Mahāyānist Absolute Altruism, Part One

Martin Kovan
University of Melbourne

In China and Tibet, and under the gaze of the global media, the four-year period from February 2009 to February 2013 saw the self-immolations of at least 110 Tibetan Buddhist monks, nuns and lay-people. Underlying the phenomenon of Buddhist self-immolation is a real and interpretive ambiguity between personal, religious, altruistic and political suicide, and political suicide within the Buddhist saṅgha specifically, itself reflected in the varying historical assessments of the practice and currently given by global Buddhist leaders such as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese monk and activist Thích Nhất Hạnh.

Part One of this essay surveys the textual and theoretical background to the canonical record and commentarial reception of suicide in Pāli Buddhist texts, and the background to self-immolation in the Mahāyāna, and considers how the current Tibetan Buddhist self-immolations relate ethically to that textual tradition. This forms the basis for, in Part Two, understanding them as altruistic-political acts in the global repertoire of contention.

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Volume 20 2013

Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty

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Volume 20, 2013

The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty

Amod Lele
Boston University

The Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva tells his audience to give out alcohol, weapons and sex for reasons of Buddhist compassion, though he repeatedly warns of the dangers of all these three. The article shows how Śāntideva resolves this issue: these gifts, and gifts in general, attract their recipients to the virtuous giver, in a way that helps the recipients to become more virtuous in the long run. As a consequence, Śāntideva does recommend the alleviation of poverty, but assigns it a much smaller significance than is usually supposed. His views run counter to many engaged Buddhist discussions of political action, and lend support to the “modernist” interpretation of engaged Buddhist practice.

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Volume 20 2013

Consequentialism, Agent-Neutrality, and Mahāyāna Ethics

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Volume 20, 2013

Consequentialism, Agent-Neutrality, and Mahāyāna Ethics

Charles Goodman
Binghamton University

Several Indian Mahāyāna texts express an ethical perspective that has many features in common with Western forms of universalist consequentialism. Śāntideva, in particular, endorses a strong version of agent-neutrality, claims that compassionate agents should violate Buddhist moral commitments when doing so would produce good results, praises radical altruism, uses a critique of the self to support his ethical views, and even offers a reasonably clear general formulation of what we call act-consequentialism. Meanwhile, Asaṅga’s discussions of the motivation behind rules of moral discipline and the permissible reasons for breaking those rules suggests an interesting and complex version of rule-consequentialism. Evidence for features of consequentialism can be found in several Mahāyāna sūtras as well. In reading these sources, interpretations that draw on virtue ethics may not be as helpful as those that understand the texts as committed to various versions of consequentialism.

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Volume 20 2013

Mahāyāna Ethics and American Buddhism

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Volume 20, 2013

Mahāyāna Ethics and American Buddhism: Subtle Solutions or Creative Perversions?

Charles S. Prebish
Pennsylvania State University & Utah State University (Emeritus)

“Mahāyāna Ethics and American Buddhism: Subtle Solutions or Creative Perversions?” initially explores the notion of two distinctly different forms of upāya, first presented by Damien Keown in his 1992 volume The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, in which one form of skill-in-means is available only to bodhisattvas prior to stage seven of the bodhisattva’s path and requires adherence to all proper ethical guidelines, while the second form of upāya is applicable to bodhisattvas at stage seven and beyond, and allows them to ignore any and all ethical guidelines in their attempts to alleviate suffering. This distinctly Mahāyāna interpretation of upāya is used to examine the presumably scandalous behavior of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche and Richard Baker, Rōshi, two of the most popular and controversial figures in American Buddhism. The article concludes that we can at least infer that applied in the proper fashion, by accomplished teachers, the activities allowed by upāya do present possibly subtle explanations of seemingly inappropriate behaviors. On the other hand, if abused by less realized beings, we must recognize these acts as merely creative perversions of a noble ethical heritage.

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Volume 19 2012

Tsongkhapa on Choice and Emotions

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Volume 19, 2012

Emotions, Ethics, and Choice: Lessons from Tsongkhapa

Emily McRae
University of Oklahoma

This paper explores the degree to which we can exercise choice over our emotional experiences and emotional dispositions. I argue that we can choose our emotions in the sense that we can intentionally intervene in them. To show this, I draw on the mind training practices advocated by the 14th century Tibetan Buddhist yogin and philosopher Tsongkhapa (tsong kha pa blo bzang grags pa). I argue that his analysis shows that successful intervention in a negative emotional experience depends on at least four factors: the intensity of the emotional experience, one’s ability to pay attention to the workings of one’s mind and body, knowledge of intervention practices, and insight into the nature of emotions. I argue that this makes sense of Tsongkhapa’s seemingly contradictory claims that the meditator can and should control (and eventually abandon) her anger and desire to harm others and that harmdoers are “servants to their afflictions.”

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Volume 18 2011

Review: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics

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Volume 18, 2011

Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics. By Charles Goodman. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, viii + 250 pages, ISBN 978–0–19–537519–0 (cloth), $74.00.

Reviewed by Richard Hayes

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Volume 18 2011

Review: Forest Bodhisattvas and the Formation of the Mahāyāna

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Volume 18, 2011

Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna: A Study and Translation of the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchā-sūtra. By Daniel Boucher. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008, xxiii + 287 pages, ISBN 978-0-8248-2881-3 (cloth), US$54.00.

Reviewed by Alexander Wynne

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Volume 18 2011

Does Anātman Rationally Entail Altruism?

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Volume 18, 2011

Does Anātman Rationally Entail Altruism? On Bodhicaryāvatāra 8:101-103

Stephen Harris
University of New Mexico

In the eighth chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva has often been interpreted as offering an argument that accepting the ultimate nonexistence of the self (anātman) rationally entails a commitment to altruism, the view that one should care equally for self and others. In this essay, I consider reconstructions of Śāntideva’s argument by contemporary scholars Paul Williams, Mark Siderits and John Pettit. I argue that all of these various reconfigurations of the argument fail to be convincing. This suggests that, for Madhyamaka Buddhists, an understanding of anātman does not entail acceptance of the Bodhisattva path, but rather is instrumental to achieving it. Second, it suggests the possibility that in these verses, Śāntideva was offering meditational techniques, rather than making an argument for altruism from the premise of anātman.

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Volume 09 2002

Śāntideva and the Bodhisattva Path

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Volume 9 2002

Did Śāntideva Destroy the Bodhisattva Path?

Jon Wetlesen
University of Oslo

The question in the title has recently been answered in the affirmative by Paul Williams in his book on Altruism and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. Williams assumes that Śāntideva attempted to justify the bodhisattva’s universal altruism on the basis of a reductive conception of a person, and that this entails a number of absurd consequences that are destructive of the bodhisattva path. Williams concedes that Śāntideva might have avoided these consequences if he had adopted a non-reductive conception of the person as a conventional truth, but Williams seems to assume that this would have to be an individualistic conception, and in that case it would have prevented Śāntideva from reaching his desired conclusion.

I argue that there may be a way out of this dilemma if we interpret Śāntideva’s conception of the person in the direction of an interpersonal holism. In this view, others are perceived not only as more or less similar to oneself, but as parts of oneself. The bodhisattva path is understood as a transformation from the small to the big self within the framework of conventional truth, and eventually to non-self within the highest truth. I believe that this approach takes better care of those few verses in chapter eight of Śāntideva’s book, on which Williams has based his interpretation, and that it is supported by a number of other verses in this context, to which Williams has not paid much attention.

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Volume 07 2000

A Buddhist Vision of Social Justice

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Volume 7, 2000

Selflessness: Toward a Buddhist Vision of Social Justice

Sungtaek Cho
State University of New York at Stony Brook

The difficulty of developing a theoretical framework for Buddhism’s engagement with contemporary social issues is rooted in the very nature of Buddhism as an ontological discourse aiming at individual salvation through inner transformation. It is my contention, however, that the concept of “selflessness” can become the basis of a Buddhist theory of social justice without endangering Buddhism’s primary focus on individual salvation. In this article, I show how the key concept of selflessness can provide a viable ground for Buddhist social justice by comparing it with one of the most influential contemporary Western theories of social justice, that of the American philosopher John Rawls. Drawing on the bodhisattva ideal and the Buddhist concepts of “sickness” and “cure,” I then demonstrate how selflessness can serve as a link that allows Buddhists to be socially engaged even while pursuing the goal of individual salvation.

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