Description
The thought that compassion (karuṇā) is a central moral virtue, perhaps the central such virtue, of Buddhism, hardly needs argument.[1] The question that will concern us in this chapter is "why?" What is the ground for its being so?
Of course, compassion is a virtue, or at least valued, in most ethical traditions; and different answers to the question of what grounds it will be given in different traditions. A Christian might answer the question by saying that it is because God—at least, God
the Son—commanded it.[2] But in Buddhism, there is no deus, and so
no deus ex machina. If one is to find a ground for compassion, it has
to be something intra-machina.
The machinery, of course, must be of a kind that is acceptable to Buddhist theory. To illustrate: Aristotle provided a justification for many virtues. He holds to a certain notion of human flourishing (eudaimonia). The virtues (arete) are those human dispositions that are conducive to such flourishing (see, e.g., Kraut 2010). Thus, temperance is a virtue: intemperance inhibits rational reflection, a core part of human flourishing. But if Buddhism has a notion of flourishing, it is not Aristotle's; and in any case, compassion is not a virtue that features significantly in the Aristotelian catalogue.
The notion of a virtue does not feature at all in a Hobbesean account of morality; but his machinery does provide a framework which grounds moral notions. Why, for example, should one obey the Sovereign? Because of a compact made to establish their sovereignty (see, e.g., Lloyd and Shreedhar 2008). But the fiction of a social compact has no role in Buddhist thinking. And again, compassion is not something particularly significant in Hobbesean thought.
What kind of machinery does Buddhism have for answering our target question? Fairly obvious considerations will take us some way. The Four Noble Truths assure us that human life is one of disquietude (duḥkha), and that a major cause of this is an attachment to an illusory self. Compassion, the concern for the well-being of others, is a good policy for dissipating such
self-centeredness. This is fine as far as it goes. But it relegates compassion to a piece of practical advice—on a par with: don't have a heavy meal before you meditate; it makes you drowsy. This has to be missing something important. And in any case, it hardly grounds the role that compassion plays in Mahāyāna thought. In this, the bodhisattva takes a vow of compassion to all sentient creatures, and it cannot be just so that this takes them further down the path of enlightenment. At a certain stage they have achieved individual enlightenment, including the dissipation of the illusion of self and the corresponding attachment. But they voluntarily refuse to take the final step in the process, entry into parinirvāṇa, until all sentient creatures can do so as well.
The justification of compassion is, in fact, at its most difficult and crucial in Mahāyāna traditions. In this chapter, we will be concerned with the Madhyamaka tradition in particular, and those later Buddhist traditions that have endorsed its core metaphysical notion of emptiness (śūnyatā) (which is
most of them), a notion closely connected with conventional reality as it is conceived in these traditions, as we will see. I will argue that it is emptiness that grounds the virtue of compassion. The next section will provide enough background in metaphysical issues to make the ensuing discussion intelligible. We will then be in a position to look at the envisaged answer. Following that, we will look at an objection and some ramifications of the account. (Priest, introduction, 121–22)
Notes
- "Compassion" may not be the best translation of karuṇā, given its connotations of passiveness. "Beneficence" or "caring" may be closer to the mark; but I will stick with the standard translation here. For further discussion of karuṇā, see Chapters 4-7 of this volume.
- "[Y]ou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength ,.. [and you] shall love your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these." Mark 12:29-31.
