Ethics of Gautama Buddha can best be interpreted as a virtue
ethics.
Confucius' view of the moral person as an artistic creation
resonates well with Plato's view of the unity of reality, the good, and the
beautiful.
Agreeing with his Greek contemporaries, the Buddha also
established an essential link between
goodness and truth on the one hand and evil and untruth on the other. Buddha however, would have asked for two major changes in
Greek virtue ethics.
In Buddhism pride is a vice, so the humble soul is to be preferred
over Aristotle's "great soul" (megalopsychia). (Aristotle's megalopsychia may
even be too close to megalomania for the comfort of most contemporary
persons.)
Buddha would also not accept Aristotle's nor Confucius'
elitism.
- For Aristotle
only a certain class of people (free-born Greek males, to be exact) could
establish the virtues and attain the good life. (Greek eudaimonism has
been called "an ethics of the fortunate.")
- For Buddhism we
will perhaps have to change the definition of virtue ethics from "the
art of making the soul great and noble (megalopsychia)" to
"the art of making the soul balanced and harmonious."
Like Greek virtue ethics, Buddhist ethics is also humanistic and
thoroughly personalist. The
Buddha started with individual people and the condition of their souls. Society
can set the rule "kill not" and threaten punishment as a deterrent,
but people, said the Buddha, will not stop killing until they learn to
"hate not." The Buddha focused on hate and other disturbances of the
soul more than any ancient philosopher. The Buddha
believed that most people do evil out of fear; in other words, evil is
primarily done defensively, not offensively. Such a personalist ethics
concludes that external peace will not happen unless there is internal peace.
The Buddha's virtue ethics is also as flexible as Aristotle's. If
David J. Kalupahana is correct in describing early Buddhist ethics as a
contextual pragmatism, then the traditional translation of the moral
imperatives of the eight-fold path is wrong.
Translating the Sanskrit stem samyak- that
appears in each of the words as the "right" thing to do makes them
sound like eight commands of duty ethics. Instead
of eight universal rules for living, they should be seen as virtues, i.e.,
disposition to act in certain ways under certain conditions.
- A translation
of samyag- more appropriate to Buddhist pragmatism would
be "suitable" or "fitting."
- So we would have
"suitable or fitting" view (samyagdristi), "suitable
or fitting" conception (samyaksankalpa), "suitable or
fitting" speech (samyagvak), "suitable or fitting"
action (samyakkarmanta), "suitable or fitting" livelihood
(samyagajiva), "suitable or fitting" effort (samyagvyayama),
"suitable or fitting" mindfulness (samyaksmriti), and
"suitable or fitting" concentration (samyaksamadhi).
- It is only
fitting, for example, that a warrior eat more and more often than a monk,
or it is suitable that the warrior express courage in a different way than
a monk would. Both are equally virtuous, because they have personally
chosen the virtues as means, means relative to them.
A. J. Bahm's more literal translation of samyag- as
"middle-wayed" view, "middle-wayed" conception, etc. brings
out the parallel with Aristotle's doctrine of the mean even better.
Bahm observes that the Buddha's mean "is not a mere, narrow,
or exclusive middle [limited by strict rules or an arithmetic mean], but a
broad, ambiguous, inclusive middle."
Therefore, the virtues of the eight-fold path are seen as
dispositions developed over a long time, and they are constantly adjusted with
a view to changing conditions and different extremes. Bahm acknowledges that
the translation of "right" is acceptable if, as it is in both
Buddhist and Greek ethics, it means
that which is intended to result in the best [i.e., the summum
bonum]. . . . However, right, in Western thought, tends to be rigorously
opposed to wrong, and rectitude has a stiff-backed, resolute, insistent quality
about it; right and wrong too often are conceived as divided by the law of
excluded middle. But in samyag- the principle of excluded
middle is, if not entirely missing, subordinated to the principle of the middle
way."
Neither the Buddha nor Aristotle give up objective moral values.
They both agree, for example, that is always wrong to eat too much, although
"too much" will be different for each individual. It is also impossible to find a mean between being faithful and
committing adultery or killing and refraining from doing so. But even with this
commitment to moral objectivity, we must always be aware that the search for
absolute rightness and wrongness involves craving and attachment. Besides,
developing the proper virtues will make such a search misdirected and
unnecessary.
- The Buddha's
famous statement "a person who sees causation, sees the Dharma"
implies that we know how to act, not because of abstract rules, but
because of our causal past and circumstances.
- The "mirror
of dharma" is not a common one that we all look into together, but it
is actually a myriad of mirrors reflecting individual histories.
- Maintaining the
essential link between fact and value, just as Greek virtue ethics did,
the Buddha demonstrated that the truth about our causal relations dictates
the good that we ought to do.
- As Kalupahana
states: "Thus, for the Buddha, truth values are not distinguishable
from moral values or ethical values; both are values that participate in
nature." This is the same ethical naturalism that we find in
contemporary virtue ethicists such as Philippa Foot.
Bahm also draws on the meanings of samyag- as
"evenness," "equilibrium," "balance," and
"equipose" to emphasize another Buddhist insight: viz., the Middle
Way will always bring equanimity to the virtuous soul. This allows us to
correct a common understanding of Nirvana as complete emptiness or
quiescence.
Buddhist Nirvana, however, is more like the contentment of
Aristotle's eudaimonia, the inner peace of
Epicurus' ataraxia (lit. "unperturbedness"), and Stoic
indifference. The cessation of craving
does not mean extinguishing all wants and desires. Good Buddhists can still
desire all that can be attained. Craving is a desire for things that cannot be
attained: unlimited power, wealth, and sexual conquest of all those whom we find
attractive.
Let us look at some issues regarding "right" speech.
The Buddha explained that "suitable" speech means not to lie or
slander, but this is not to be taken as an absolute prohibition. Obsession with
lying in Judeo-Christian ethics culminated in Kant's moral absolutism, in which
even white lies were not allowed. The concept of right speech as
"suitable" speech is found in Confucian ethics as well as in
Buddhism. Confucius once told his servant to get rid of an especially irritating
visitor by saying that he was not home. In Mahayana Buddhism the idea of
fitting or appropriate speech is found in the doctrine of "expedient
means." The loving father in the Lotus Sutra found that
he had to lie to his children in order to get them to leave a burning house,
symbolic of the fire of craving.
Those who insist on an absolute prohibition against lying are
those who are secretly craving that the world should be different from what it
is. As Bahm states: "Unwillingness to accept things as they are is the
basis of lying, and any expression of that unwillingness is wrong speech."
This is one of the subtlest forms of self-deception--lying to oneself about the
nature of the world--which is obviously a deeper and more profound lie than the
father's white lie in the Lotus Sutra. Acceptance of the world as
it is and not craving that it can be radically changed is fundamental for the
realism and pragmatism found in Buddhist ethics.
This is one way of understanding the Mahayanist's provocative
claim that Samsara is Nirvana and Nirvana is Samsara. Nirvana is not simply personal extinction at the end of life,
but full commitment to this world as the focus of the spiritual life.
