Buddhist Ethics and Meditation

Last updated on: April 13, 2009 at 7:08 am by Justin Whitaker

Buddhist Ethics and Meditation 2009-04-13T07:08:00-06:00 Justin Whitaker

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The following is the beginning of a paper I will present in just under 12 hours at U-Montana on “Buddhist Meditation as a Moral Activity.” Am I nervous? Of course. Has it been stressful? Of course. Have I loved it all? Of course! Some of the underlining and italics is just for to help me emphasize key points. I managed to sneak a tiny mention of Kant in there, but nothing more than that in this paper. As always, feedback, constructive and otherwise is heartily welcomed 🙂

INTRODUCTION

Today I am going to talk primarily about Buddhist ethics and the role that meditation plays in Buddhist ethics. Both of these, Buddhist ethics and Buddhist meditation, are difficult areas to talk about for very different reasons, which I will discuss in a moment. My purpose today will be to show the interplay of these two aspects of the Buddhist path through analysis of one of Theravāda Buddhism’s most popular texts, the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta (generally referred to simply as the Mettā Sutta), or “Discourse on Lovingkindness” and some discussion of the accompanying practice of mettā bhavana, or “cultivation of lovingkindness.” In doing so I hope to show that Buddhist ethics cannot be realistically discussed without appreciation for the associated meditation practices (or lack thereof) and that Buddhist meditation must always be understood an integral element of Buddhist ethics.

BUDDHIST ETHICS

Buddhist ethics is difficult to talk about because, strictly speaking, there is none. That is to say that there is no tradition of ethical deliberation and argumentation in Buddhist history comparable to what we have found in the West beginning with the Greeks. Buddhist ethics, as a clearly defined area of study and discussion, really only started about 30 years ago with the publication of these two books: Little and Twiss’ Comparative Religious Ethics, a New Method and Ronald M. Greene’s Religious Reason. Since that time there has been a growing body of work, mostly produced by European and North American scholars but with important contributions by East and South Asian scholars. However, the field is still very much in its early days with virtually no agreement amongst scholars regarding the starting points, key landmarks, or the scope of Buddhist ethics.

One thing that scholars are in general agreement about is how deeply moral Buddhists and Buddhist societies have been. Why is it that ethics was not developed as an area of study within Buddhism? It certainly isn’t due to a lack of philosophers and deeply philosophical debates. These occurred both amongst different “schools” of Buddhism throughout history and with neighboring systems of thought throughout Asia and beyond. But these debates have generally focused on ontological questions such as the possibility of an independent Creator God or of a similarly independent unchanging eternal soul or self, soteriological questions such as the nature and possibility of awakening, and so on – but no ethics per se.

BUDDHIST MEDITATION

Buddhist meditation is difficult for the opposite reason: there’s too much of it to possibly give even a basic survey in 20 or 30 minutes. The historical Buddha was raised in a society with numerous pre-existing forms of meditation and he developed his own unique methods to supplement them. Furthermore, in each new historical and geographical phase of Buddhist history, new emphases were introduced and other aspects neglected to the extent that today there are some “schools” of Buddhism such as Soto Zen that almost exclusively practice “just sitting” or zazen practice,[1] and other schools such as Shin that practice absolutely no sitting practice at all. Other schools fit somewhere between these two, but the variations are countless. Yet what all Buddhist schools will agree upon is the need for some transformative mental work for all those wishing to move from a life filled with dissatisfactoriness or suffering toward a life of mental peace and deep joy.

BUDDHIST COSMOLOGY AND THE TWO STANDPOINTS

This introduces us to the idea of a general Buddhist orientation in the world. Another word for this broad sense of orientation in the world is cosmology. It seems that what unites Buddhist throughout history and geography is this shared cosmology: a cosmology in which we find “an ethically oriented “samsaric” cosmology coexist[ing] with an ethically oriented “Buddhic” cosmos brought into being by the achievements and teachings of the Gautama Buddha.”[2] What that means is that the Buddhist, starting with the historical Buddha himself 2500 years ago, sees the cosmos from two standpoints (to borrow Kantian language). The first standpoint is normal everyday life, dominated by the eight worldly conditions (aṭṭha lokadhammā): gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. But the Buddha elucidated (we could say introduced but that would be incorrect) a path to freedom from all of these, or at least freedom from the “hedonic treadmill” that goes with the former and the mental anguish that tends to accompany the latter.

This “Buddhic” or awakened standpoint is said to be one of perfect mental clarity, understanding of the “true nature” of all things and thus freedom from getting upset with life’s natural ebb and flow. The Buddha and his awakened followers, the arahats, still ate, slept, and had illnesses and died. Yet the difference between them and the unawakened has often been described in terms of both what they lack, (greed, hatred, delusion) and what they had in terms of simple awareness along the lines of: “when they ate they were aware of themselves eating, when they slept they were aware of themselves sleeping, when they felt pain they were aware of feeling pain.”

[1] Shikantaza, “nothing but (shikan) precisely (ta) sitting (za).” The emerging trend of Vipassana-focused meditations has similar heavy emphasis on sitting meditation.

[2] Cosmology, Frank E. Reynolds & Jonathan W. Schofer in Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, (2005), p.121.

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