On Buddhist and Taoist Morality

Religions, 2024

Abstract: This paper illustrates how Hongzhou Chan Buddhism provides valuable resources for dealing with issues in contemporary moral philosophy. In particular, when philosophers adopt the Hongzhou Chan Buddhist’s non‑dualistic account of reality, we can see how their teachings pro‑ vide us with important resources needed for resolving philosophical problems that were originally undertaken by philosophers like the American Pragmatists John Dewey and Richard Rorty. When the pragmatists hoped to extirpate traditional metaphysics from moral philosophy, one of their fo‑ cuses was on providing an alternative to the morality/prudence distinction. As this study illustrates, by overcoming the metaphysical dualism between the “unconditioned” and the “conditioned”, the Hongzhou Chan Buddhist can provide an account of compassion that is unconditionally grounded. Their account of compassion can then be understood as bridging the divide between “morality” and “prudence”.

The paper attempts to set a guideline to contemporary common morality debate. The author points out what he sees as two common problems that occur in the field of comparative cultural studies related to a common morality debate. The first problem is that the advocates and opponents of common morality, consciously or unconsciously, define the moral terms in question in a way that their respective meanings would naturally lead to the outcomes that each party desires. The second problem is that the examples each party chooses as the empirical evidences may not be as simple and clear-cut as the researchers think they are, mainly because the situational contexts where the examples are located between two different cultures vastly differ. To prevent these mistakes, the author emphasizes that we should pay attention to a subtle distinction between "thick" and "thin" construed from the levels of "theoretical status" and of "material content". With the conceptual distinctions in mind, the author shows how different cultures (i.e., Western individualist society and East Asian neo-Confucian society) see the moral principles like autonomy and beneficence in different lexical orders.

In this article, I present a neo-Confucian answer, by Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, to the question, “Why should I be moral?” I argue that this answer is better than some representative answers in the Western philosophical tradition. According to the Chengs, one should be moral because it is a joy to perform moral actions. Sometimes one finds it a pain, instead of a joy, to perform moral actions only because one lacks the necessary genuine moral knowledge—knowledge that is accessible to every common person as long as one makes the effort to learn. One should make the effort to learn such knowledge—to seek joy in performing moral actions—because to be moral is a distinguishing mark of being human. This neo-Confucian answer seems to be egoistic, as its conception of motivation for morality is based on self-interest: to seek one’s own joy. However, since it emphasizes that one’s true self-interest is to seek joy in things uniquely human, which is to be moral, self-interest and morality become identical; the more a person seeks one’s self-interest, the more moral the person is, and vice versa.

Asian Philosophy, 1994

The theme of this paper is that while there are four seemingly contradictory classes of statements in the Dao de Jing regarding moral values and the Daoist sage, these statements can be interpreted to be consistent with each other. There are statements which seemingly state or imply that nothing at all can be said about the Dao; there are statements which seemingly state or imply that all value judgements are relative; there are statements which appear to attribute moral behaviour to the Daoist sage and there are statements which appear to attribute amoral or immoral behaviour to the Daoist sage. A consistent interpretation of these different statements can be found first by qualifying the assertion that the Dao is not capable of description to the less absolute assertion that nothing absolutely true can be said about the Dao; second, by arguing that the statements that appear to make all values relative refer to the correlativity of concepts, not the equality of values. Moreover, since the statements that appear to attribute moral behaviour to the sage are, by virtue of their predominance in the text, well justified and that by virtue of their paucity in the text, it is plausible to seek an alternate interpretation for the statements that seem to attribute amoral or immoral behaviour to the sage. Finally, the way in which the sage can be seen as good without attributing goodness to the Dao is by distinguishing between the way the sage appears to the observer who is outside of the Dao and the way in which the sage appears to himself. This latter distinction takes the form of the sage as appearing to display the quality of goodness in itself but not goodness for itself.

Journal of Religious Ethics, 2011

I argue that three recent studies (Imagining the Life Course, by Nancy Eberhardt; Sensory Biographies, by Robert Desjarlais; and How to Behave, by Anne Hansen) advance the field of Buddhist Ethics in the direction of the empirical study of morality. I situate their work within a larger context of moral anthropology, that is, the study of human nature in its limits and capacities for moral agency. Each of these books offers a finely grained account of particular and local Buddhist ways of interpreting human life and morality, and each explores complex conceptions of moral agency. I suggest that these three studies share similar interests in moral psychology, the human being across time, the intersubjective dimensions of moral experience, and what life within a karmic framework looks like. I propose that their contributions offer some of the most refreshing and interesting work generated in Buddhist ethics in the last decade.

Philosophy East and West, 2011

2012

This paper offers a new basis for assessing the nature of Buddhist moral thinking. Although consistent with Damien Keown's view that Buddhist ethics may be considered a form of virtue ethics, the account outlined here does not aim to determine which western ethical theory Buddhism most closely matches. It suggests instead that Buddhist discourse presupposes different kinds of moral agency, distinguishable on the basis of the spiritual status of the agent. The moral language characteristically employed in different texts of the Pāli Canon differs accordingly. This accounts for some of the difficulties experienced by modern authors attempting to make comparisons with western traditions. Apparent inconsistencies among the texts can be resolved if one takes careful note of the spiritual status of the moral agents under discussion. The argument is based upon an analysis of a particular conceptual schema found in the Pāli Canon, namely, the tetrad of four logical categories of action based upon the pair of the bright and the dark (sukka and kaṇha). This schema is employed in order to clarify the relationship of two more commonly discussed terms, puñña and kusala. Section 1: Sukka and Kaṇha One of the more fertile ongoing conversations in the field of Buddhist Studies revolves around the problem of correctly situating the principles of Buddhist