Śāntideva on Roots and Resolutions of Violence

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:

In today's world, violence has become a universal phenomenon and interhuman relationship has become exceedingly fragile. Traditional values have been eroded and the practice of non-virtues constitute one's personality traits in one's social and political life, whereas one's virtuous actions are considered one's weakness, foolishness, and laughing-stock. Even then, I find that we have not abandoned condemning non-virtuous actions and violence in general. At least victims of violence and saner people of the society consider violence as an evil.
With this background in my mind, I have tried to find roots and resolutions of violence. In this respect, I have picked out some of the ideas from Santideva's magnum opus the Bodhicaryāvatāra (with its Pañjikā by Prajñākara) and applied them in the present context. Śāntideva's primary aim in this text is to evoke ethical and religious ideals which are born of deep philosophical insights and to emphasize the importance of their application in our behaviour.
But before we say that violence is an evil, it is necessary to make distinction between good and evil. Originally, any state of affair or fact is value-neutral. It is our conation which pre-conditions good and evil. Only then we say that something is good and something is bad. In other words, in its pre-philosophic stage a thing is a bare fact, neither good nor bad. A thing is good because it is desirable and pursued, and a thing is bad because it is undesirable and shunned.

The distinction between good and evil arises as a reflection of man's conative or appetitive nature, and solely as a reflection of this. If there existed no beings having desires, aims, and purposes, then nothing would be good and nothing evil; all things would be neutral with respect of their worth. (Taylor, p. 186).

Citation

Prasad, Hari Shankar. "Śāntideva on Roots and Resolutions of Violence." In Philosophy, Grammar, and Indology: Essays in Honour of Professor Gustav Roth, edited by Hari Shankar Prasad, 233–39. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1992.

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Bodhicaryāvatāra

An "Introduction to Bodhisattva Practice," the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra is a poem about the path of a bodhisattva, in ten chapters, written by the Indian Buddhist Śāntideva (fl. c. 685–763). One of the masterpieces of world literature, it is a core text of Mahāyāna Buddhism and continues to be taught, studied, and commented upon in many languages and by many traditions around the world. The main subject of the text is bodhicitta, the altruistic aspiration for enlightenment, and the path and practices of the bodhisattva, the six perfections (pāramitās). The text forms the basis of many contemporary discussions of Buddhist ethics and philosophy.

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