Madhyamaka Ethics

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Madhyamaka Ethics

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

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Madhyamaka is one of two major philosophical schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism, alongside Yogācāra.[1] It is best known for its philosophy of emptiness (śūnyavāda) as articulated by Nāgārjuna in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and has an illustrious lineage of eminent exponents in India, Tibet, and China. While Mādhyamikas are primarily concerned with metaphysical and semantic issues, central figures also address ethical matters. Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra (BCA), in particular, provides the most extensive treatment of ethics within the Madhyamaka tradition. So influential is this text that the current Dalai Lama represents it as the epitome of Buddhist ethical thought (Gyatso 2004, 2009).
There is a growing body of philosophical literature focused on critically examining how the Madhyamaka analysis of emptiness (śūnyatā) bears on the ethical claims and commitments that were held and asserted by historical Mādhyamikas. There are two main loci of contemporary debate. The first concerns the general issue of whether Madhyamaka emptiness is consistent with a commitment to systematic ethical distinctions. The second queries whether the metaphysical analysis of no-self (anātman) presented by Śāntideva in BCA entails or provides good reasons for the compassion or altruism of a bodhisattva. This second issue was galvanized by Paul Williams (1998), who powerfully argued that these ontological considerations not only fail to provide a rational basis for altruism but that Śāntideva’s argument for this claim, if followed to its logical conclusion, actually undermined the bodhisattva path. Given the importance placed on this text within the Buddhist tradition, Williams's argument has unsurprisingly provoked a growing body of literature aimed at rationally reconstructing a positive account of Śāntideva's views and, thereby, a positive account of the relationship between a Madhyamaka metaphysical analysis and the Mahāyāna bodhisattva ideal of acting out of great compassion for the suffering of all sentient beings.
While many aim to rationally reconstruct Madhyamaka ethics in positive terms, there is considerable disagreement about what this should be. This chapter will critically examine this literature and will demonstrate that much disagreement turns on competing interpretations of the doctrine of the two truths from the perspective of Madhyamaka: in particular, competing accounts of conventional truth or reality (saṃvṛtisatya) as well as the forms of reasoning admissible for differentiating conventional truth from falsity and conventional good from bad. To draw this out, this chapter will begin by providing a general introduction to Madhyamaka śūnyavāda and outlining a range of positions on the nature of conventional reality that have been advanced and disputed by historical Madhyamaka thinkers in India and Tibet. It will then use these different conceptions to navigate the above two loci of contemporary debate. (Finnigan, introduction, 162–63)

Notes

Many thanks to Sara McClintock, Tom Tillemans, and the editors of this collection for helpful comments on a previous draft of this chapter.

Citation

Finnigan, Bronwyn. "Madhyamaka Ethics." In The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, edited by Daniel Cozort and James Mark Shields, 162–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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